Happy Thursday, everyone! It's the first day of fall here in the Northern Hemisphere and last weekend we finally took a ride out to Charlottesville in western Virginia, almost to the mountains. An absolutely lovely drive from Richmond and my goodness, the shopping district of Charlottesville has a bunch of very nice bookstores. (2nd Act Books and Blue Whale, in particular, are very much worth your time if you're ever in the area.) So naturally, I went all highbrow and...bought a bunch of Star Trek paperbacks. So let's check them out in publication order.
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So back in the 1970s, after the end of Star Trek on TV, there was a whole small industry of ancillary novels mostly written by James Blish that started out as novelizations of episodes (some of them being photo books that also included still frames from the particular episode), all of them published by Bantam until about 1981. After a while, they started expanding the line to original novels written by other authors, like this early one by Theodore R. Cogswell and Charles A. Spano Jr from 1976. (It's a followup to the very first original Trek novel, Spock Must Die!, also by Blish.). It's apparently not very well-regarded, not being especially in tone with the series as people knew it at the time, so I'm kind of curious to see what it feels like now, 46 years and several series and movies later.
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Diane Duane is an Ireland-based American writer who has written for a ton of franchise paperback lines as well as her own Young Wizard series; I'm a huge fan of her Star Trek work, in which she has done some very nice character work over the decades and expanded a lot of the Trek universe in interesting directions. This one, where the Enterprise is hurled to another pocket dimension by a warp field test gone wrong, is one of her stronger works with all sorts of new characters and aliens used well. Duane is always dependable as hell as a novelist and I was happy to find Wounded Sky, as my copy from the '80s went missing a long time ago.
As you can tell, this is from a different series than Spock, Messiah! after Bantam lost the Star Trek license and it was picked up by Pocket Books, which would have a long and fruitful line of books covering the various series going forward (and to this day; Pocket Books through various acquisitions is now a part of the Viacom company so it's all one big Paramount family).
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I have, however, skipped the novels that were put out with this terrible logo instead of just using the Star Trek font; this seemed to be a thing for a while in the early '90s and it looks terrible. So why did I grab this one? Because I'm very curious about that Laurell K. Hamilton, now known much better for her Anita Blake and Marry fantasy/horror novels, did with Trek.
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Finally, we're back to Diane Duane, who has written a whole series of novels about the Romulan Empire (called the Rihannsu series, after their own name for themselves. I'm a huge fan of The Romulan Way, a novel where Dr. McCoy is kidnapped by the Romulans, put on trial for war crimes and proceeds to defend himself by filibustering for days, including an extended monologue about how to properly make a mint julep that gives the Universal Translator fits as it tries to translate the concept. That novel is a damn good piece of fun so finally I'm going to get to check out the sequel here.
Also, you can see they're back to the Star Trek font here, which is good to see.
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My recommendation for the week is that I finally caught up with The Northman, Robert Eggers followup to his fantastic The Lighthouse. It''s not quite the achievement that was, but it's still very worth your time on Peacock if you get that. If nothing else, it has Willem Dafoe dafoeing it all over the place before the real fighting starts.
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