When you consider how protective (some might say possessive) today’s entertainment companies get regarding their intellectual properties, decades that can be at least semi-reasonably described as “recent” may start to look like an untamed hinterland. For instance, part of me often looks back with fondness on that roughly 15-year window where no one gave two figs about anything anyone did with Star Wars. As more and more properties come under the purview of fewer and fewer owners, it seems decreasingly likely that we will see cross-media appearances that are not planned down to the minutest legal, financial, and social media details, much less the reckless abandon of a product like Ishmael, a novel that so gleefully mixes in cameos and references from other properties that any legal team today would tear it to shreds before the first copy came off the presses.
Tag: time travel
There are some episodes of Star Trek where Kirk rekindles a relationship with an old flame. There are other episodes where the crew meets a once-respected hero or mentor figure, only to realize that person has gone completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And there are still other episodes where they’re burdened with a civilian who snoops around and asks too many questions and throws their weight around and is totally overwhelming and annoying and in the way all the time.
The Entropy Effect contains all of those tropes, plus time travel.