|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0553565079
| 9780553565072
| 0553565079
| 4.16
| 57,462
| Apr 1993
| Feb 01, 1994
|
did not like it
|
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #16. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So here as we reach not the last of the '80s and '90s "bridging" novels that Asimov wrote at the end of his life to bring together his famous '50s trilogies "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," but indeed the very last book Asimov himself wrote from start to finish before dying in 1993, I thought it'd be worth taking a little time and really asking ourselves if these bridging novels were even worth the effort, given that they've turned out even just 40 years later to be such lackluster reading experiences (and spoiler alert, that was indeed the same case here, such a disappointing read that it almost is not even worth recapping). To understand why Asimov did this, you have to understand the similarly titled "Future History" series by his friend and peer Robert Heinlein, who wrote an entire series of short stories and novels primarily in the '60s and '70s that were all set along a single persistent 300-year storyline, just that he wrote the actual stories out of chronological order; they've lost a lot of name recognition over the decades in a way that Asimov's "Foundation" books never have, but it's important to remember that in 1966, when the attendees of that year's World Science Fiction Convention decided to name an honorary Hugo Award after "Greatest Sci-Fi Series of All Time," Heinlein's Future History came in second, beaten only by Asimov's own Foundation series. If you look at these three unrelated '50s series of Asimov while squinting and sort of half-frowning, you can sort of squeeze them together into one unified storyline, spanning not Heinlein's 300 years of the future but instead an entire 22,000, to an eventual populated Milky Way galaxy containing thousands of inhabited planets, where Earth has become the stuff of myth and legend, and where the main crisis is that the all-encompassing empire that has run the entire galaxy for the last ten thousand years is on its last gasp, and the only person who knows is an eccentric history professor who comes up with an intellectually clever way to help humanity prevent its own destruction despite itself. But that takes bending some roads in really curvy ways to get all the details to line up, including the fact that the "Empire" trilogy envisions an expanded humanity where not a robot is in sight, while the "Robot" trilogy (taking place thousands of years previously, in a day-after-tomorrow Earth) features tens of thousands of robots everywhere; and that in the "Empire" books, Earth is now supposed to be a radioactive wasteland, while no such indication is given in the "Robot" books. That's where these eight books from the '80s and '90s came from, a desire to write all the twisty, exposition-heavy roads that lead from one trilogy to the next, and then attempts no less at taking the very last book and somehow trying to tie it back to the first book set 22,000 years previous. That's ballsy, to be sure, and it officially brings Asimov's timeline to an inarguable "megaseries" status, a great thing to leave behind for all of us in the future to think of as a single, monumental work from this genre pioneer and once massively popular author. It's impressive to be able to say "Asimov's Future History," and he deserves credit for devoting the last decade of his life and the last of his physical health to accomplishing this busy feat. But, as my almost exclusively disappointed reactions to the books have made clear, they've all been profound letdowns as actual reading experiences, franchise-propping scaffolding that exists for almost no other reason than to pass along story beats, and that really feel like the work of a worn-out old man who had nothing left of interest to say. That by itself is tragic enough, but another bad thing these bridging novels deliver, that wouldn't have existed at all without these books existing, is Asimov's increasingly adamant refusal as an old man to ever look back at his old behavior or writing, or to ever think that an apology or at least a rethinking was in order. In fact, Asimov expressly used these last novels of his career to defiantly still engage in the exact behavior that his increasingly younger critics excoriated in his books, such as the subsumed racism of '50s-style "PG-rated" slurs like "boy," and the out-and-out sexism and sexual objectifiction of every female character. He didn't need to do that -- even if he wasn't going to be progressive enough to acknowledge his critics and change those references, he could've easily just stayed neutral on the subject -- so to purposely put them in is a legitimate "fuck you" from Asimov at the end of his life to the people who eventually became the "woke crowd," and who would eat him alive if he happened to be alive and in his nineties and still trying to publish now, like poor old creepy Woody Allen. So where do we place these books? As the excuse that brings you and I together in this megareview of his megaseries? As a real mistake that left a bitter aftertaste to Asimov's career right when he should've been getting lionized? Good for several more awards and another several million into the Asimov estate checking account before the check-writer finally croaked? All of the above? For me, I like to think about how complex and interesting someone like Asimov's career was that we should still be caring about the arguments 30 years later; flawed to be sure, and sometimes very deliberately and not just a "sign of his times," but also impressive and prodigious, and that laid such important groundwork in the legitimizing of science-fiction that he simply cannot be ignored. Hell, there was a brand-new adaptation of "Foundation" on Apple+ just this last spring; I mean, a shitty and unwatchable adaptation, make no mistake, but there's something amazing to be said that people are still willing to gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on his stories. So if the bridging novels are what's needed to tie together the historical importance and lasting power of these three original '50s trilogies, then I suppose that's not necessarily the worst thing, especially since after you read them all for the first time, you never have to reapproach the bridging tales ever again for as long as you live. And that finally brings us to the reason I started this megareview in the first place -- because Asimov's original '50s "Foundation" trilogy was the first adult science-fiction I ever read, some of the first adult fiction that I had ever read at all, tied in closely to my nostalgic memories of being in my grandparents' house in the '70s and '80s and peering through my dad and uncle's old '40 through '60s sci-fi collection on the musty back shelves of the guest bedroom. I started reviewing the first Robot novel two and a half years ago precisely because I wanted to get to the point that I'm at right this moment, entering the original "Foundation" trilogy I loved so much as a teen and seeing how it now not only stacks up against the rest of the "Future History" megaseries, but also how it stacks up against time. We'll be talking a lot more about that in the next review, for 1951's Foundation which started them all, so I hope you'll have a chance to join me again next month for that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062409166
| 9780062409164
| 0062409166
| 3.86
| 32,605
| Jun 13, 2017
| Jun 13, 2017
|
2022 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. So after spending most of my adult life considering Neal Stephenson to be one of our era's greatest living authors, I'
2022 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. So after spending most of my adult life considering Neal Stephenson to be one of our era's greatest living authors, I've now had the displeasure of intensely disliking all three of the latest books in a row by him I've now read (but for more, see my reviews of 2019's
Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell
, and 2021's
Termination Shock
), and in fact this is the second one in a row I disliked so much that I didn't even end up finishing the whole thing. Co-written in this case with cross-genre author Nicole Galland, the subject matter itself is actually right up my alley; a rousing 800-page urban fantasy adventure, it posits as its central premise that "magic" used to be real, that in actuality it was the ability of certain people to be able to perform multiverse quantum mechanics in their heads, that the proliferation of technology in the Industrial Age blocked this ability to visit alternative universes, and that our modern age has figured out how to build hermetically sealed "black boxes" that entirely shut out the influence of contemporary technology (think of the Schrodinger's Cat theory built in real life), in which contemporary "witches" can once again perform this magic, leading quickly to a temporal cold war among the various past, present and future nation-state secret police forces and other intelligence agencies. But alas, I still ended up giving up around page 200, and that's because both the characters and the dialogue are so fucking twee and Joss Whedon-like that I just couldn't stand another page of it, not even one more goddamn page, despite not having nearly gotten to the point yet where the story seems like it really takes off, according to the plot synopsis I read at Wikipedia afterwards. In fact, I think it's fair to say that this isn't actually a book for grown-ups at all, but instead in the tradition of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is actually a Young Adult novel being sneakily marketed towards adults without fully disclosing the smoochie-woochie-poochie-doochie unbearably precious nature of its actual prose, the kind of writing that can only be loved by either 13-year-old girls or the middle-aged "Bookstagram" women they grow up to be. Those books deserve to exist, don't get me wrong, and more power to you if you like that kind of stuff; but these kinds of books deserve to have a warning label on them, cautioning the reader about what they're about to get into (which at the very least should include a "Young Adult" designation on the back cover), especially in a case like this where it's coming from an author who's usually associated with incredibly dense, intellectual, high-concept kind of mindblowing novels expressly for adults. I know I'm being extra-harsh here, but I'm just getting so sick and tired of getting a full 200 pages into books like these and only then having the rug pulled out from under me; I could've read an entire other short novel from start to finish in that time, for example like these little Italo Calvino books from the public library that have been sitting on my TBR shelf the entire winter now, still untouched. Poor little Italo deserves better than that, and so do I; so I think at least for the present time, I'm done with Stephenson for good for a while. Or, well, actually that's a lie; at the same time I checked this book out of the library, I re-checked one of my favorite Stephenson novels of all time, 2008's Anathem, which is just so crazily unique and like nothing else you've ever read that it will literally make your head pop right off your neck. I've gotten really depressed by having his latest three books in a row be so crappy, so much so that I've actually started questioning my own memories and wondering if his earlier books are actually as good as I remember them; so simply for my own edification, I'm re-reading that one to remind myself that, yes, Stephenson really does blow most other genre authors straight out of the water whenever he's at the top of his game. I look forward to revisiting that book with all of you next month; but for now, take a wide pass on this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Mar 15, 2022
|
Mar 15, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 9187222213
| 9789187222214
| 9187222213
| 4.33
| 3,590
| Sep 25, 2014
| 2015
|
it was amazing
|
2022 reads, #3. Like millions of others, I've been captivated over the years by the occasional random sightings online of the work of Swedish speculat
2022 reads, #3. Like millions of others, I've been captivated over the years by the occasional random sightings online of the work of Swedish speculative visual artist Simon Stålenhag, whose photorealistic depictions of abandoned robots and other "future trash" always hint at a grander story without ever making the story explicit; and like millions of others, I was intensely and bitterly disappointed by that Amazon Prime Video adaptation of his work a couple of years ago, when this hinted grandeur behind the images actually was made explicit, to the detriment of everyone involved. That recently inspired me to check out all of Stålenhag's books from my local library, beginning with his first and most famous, 2015's Tales from the Loop, where I discovered a remarkable thing; that the story Stålenhag wrote to accompany and explain these images isn't a futuristic one at all, but rather we're supposed to be looking at the discarded remains of a former governmental project that experienced its height during the Mid-Century Modernist Cold War years of the 1960s, and that our story is actually a fictional memoir by someone who supposedly grew up in the area of this abandoned project in the 1990s, looking back at how all this future trash became an indelible background to the kinds of backwoods explorations and playground shenanigans that mark most people's innocent childhoods. That makes this book even more interesting than I thought it was going to be, because it's not a science-fiction story at all, but rather a tender childhood nostalgia tale in the spirit of his fellow Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgård's immensely popular My Struggle (whose final volume, it should be pointed out, was published just a year or two before Stålenhag started work on his own book); and it's not an ode to the wonder and majesty of science-fictiony technology, but rather a bittersweet elegy for a society that can no longer afford this technology, either from a financial or emotional standpoint, making it a fascinating reflection of our actual post-Industrial, post-Cold War times. Jeez, Amazon, why couldn't you have made an adaptation like this?! Ultimately, Tales from the Loop reminds me of another one of my all-time favorite books of visual art, Chris Van Allsburg's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, in that both are less about presenting a finished story and more about inspiring you to come up with your own story (not to mention that both Stålenhag and Van Allsburg have extremely similar visual styles); and I have to say, this has become one of those rare times that I actually want to buy the book now, despite now having already read it, just so I can have those gorgeous oversized paintings around and be able to flip through them casually again whenever I want. In that spirit, I'll be jumping right away into Stålenhag's next book after this one, 2017's The Electric State, so keep your eye out for that review soon. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jan 29, 2022
not set
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0063028050
| 9780063028050
| 0063028050
| 3.83
| 17,918
| Oct 27, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
|
2022 reads, #6. DID NOT FINISH. So after somewhat guiltily trashing Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, 2019's unreadably tedious virtual-reality mor
2022 reads, #6. DID NOT FINISH. So after somewhat guiltily trashing Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, 2019's unreadably tedious virtual-reality morality tale Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, then feeling even more guilty when it eventually became the most popular book review I've ever posted here, out of the 1,532 of them I've now written, I was excited to learn last autumn that the author finally had another new book coming out soon, which I had hoped would give me a chance to finally redeem myself as the slobbering fanboy I am. After all, I usually love Stephenson's heady, conceptually dense speculative tomes -- whether that's his early pioneering cyberpunk novels from the 1990s, his shift into historical fiction with the three-volume "Baroque Cycle," the mind-blowingly unique concepts of such mature work as Anathem and Seveneves, or even the pure caper glee of such clever action-adventures as Reamde -- and I had really been hoping that the newest book would get us back on the kind of firm footing that has consistently made Stephenson one of the world's greatest living authors during the vast majority of my adult life. (His first big breakthrough, 1992's Snow Crash, came out when I was 23, if that gives you a sense of how his timeline relates to mine.) But alas, 2021's Termination Shock was not it; and while I didn't find myself passionately hating it like I did Fall, I had a perhaps even worse reaction this time, which was to find the whole thing so incredibly boring and flat that I eventually gave up right around page 200 and returned it to the library unfinished. There's a complex series of reasons for why that is, starting with the fact that its main subject, climate change and how to possibly fix it, is simply one I don't find interesting; and in fact it's fair to say that I have yet to read any book in the rapidly expanding new genre known as "ecothrillers" that I've actually liked, in that the combination of wonky earth science lectures and self-righteous Greta Thunberg-style sermons that typically marks this genre leaves me both cold and with a bad taste in my mouth. I also have to confess that I simply didn't like having this book set in the deeply rural American South, an admittedly personal bias that comes with the times we live in; and so having the main protagonist be a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of an eccentric Texas billionaire, who literally does everything short of growing a Yosemite Sam mustache and firing pistols in the air to remind you of that fact, just didn't sit well with me at all, nor did having the entire first hundred pages be a loving ode to how great and industrious all those hard-working far-right Trump fans in the Deep South actually are, once you get to know them and all, which seems to be Stephenson's act of atonement for having these exact same people be the instigators of a Christian Republic violent coup of the US government in Fall. The main problem here, though, is that the patented Stephenson Storytelling Machine simply seems to be breaking down a little these days from age and overuse, leading to a book whose complicated clockwork of moving parts is just a little more noticeable than it's been before, a little more stale, a little stiffer and less well-oiled. For example, one thing Stephenson has become known for is setting aside large amounts of space in his book for fascinating digressions, whether that's to deeply examine the backstory of a minor character or to really explain a complicated scientific concept with the kind of care and attention it deserves; but while that's effortless and delightful in a book like Anathem, which is essentially an entire string of these digressions tacked together for a thousand pages, here the sausage-making just calls a lot more attention to itself, with entire sections early on (and I'm assuming also later in the book) that feel like Stephenson's not really into the spirit of it all, but is just delivering the overexplained text because he knows that that's what his fans are expecting from him. That's perhaps the most damning criticism I can make of this book, that it often feels like one of those technothrillers from an only mediocre author (which, let's face it, most technothriller authors are), where they get this one simple idea stuck in their head ("What if this Guardian article I recently read about a theoretical end to climate change could actually be enacted in the real world?"), then stuffs a thousand pages of filler around the hundred pages needed to actually tell that story, so to cement their reputation as a Big Important Writer who's discussing Big Important Ideas. That may perhaps be the most heartbreaking thing about Termination Shock, when all is said and done; that while I at least found Fall so terrible that it made me actively angry, this one elicited only a bored shrug before giving up a third of the way through, thinking to myself, "So I guess the rumors are true -- Michael Crichton didn't actually die, and is continuing to pound out subpar speculative thrillers every year from a secret bunker somewhere near Seattle." Your reaction might be much different, depending on how you in particular react to the various story elements mentioned above; but for sure, everyone should approach this book with their expectations as low as possible, and with a fair amount of nostalgia for the days when Stephenson could do no wrong, an age that now seems to be permanently over. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0356510395
| 9780356510392
| 0356510395
| 4.54
| 57,412
| Nov 30, 2021
| Mar 02, 2022
|
2022 reads, #2. DID NOT FINISH. And so do my four years with "The Expanse" series of science-fiction novels end; as the saying goes, not with a bang b
2022 reads, #2. DID NOT FINISH. And so do my four years with "The Expanse" series of science-fiction novels end; as the saying goes, not with a bang but with a whimper. And that's because I was legitimately thrilled and excited when reading the first three volumes of this nine-book series and discovering one of the more complex and fascinating genre universes and alt-history storylines I've ever seen; set 300 years in the future when humanity has finally colonized the entire solar system, it creates a whole new series of mashup cultures for each planet and moon that interact and play with each other in these interesting, delightful ways, all of it made even more complicated by the first-ever discovery of proof of alien life, which sets all of these established cultures on even greater paths of conflict and change. Not for nothing did the initial work on this mythos by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (writing together here under the pseudonym "James SA Corey") actually start out as background exposition for a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game they had originally been planning on making; that's exactly the kind of expansive mindset (see what I did there?) that this exposition hints at, that each fictional group needs to be interesting and complex enough to sustain a group of real people who want to play as them for $7.99 a month, no matter which group that is which appeals to them most. My enthusiasm for the Expanse novels, though, started slipping downwards slowly but regularly during the so-called "second trilogy" comprising books 4, 5 and 6, in which the main mystery of the first trilogy is now solved and we switch gears into a much more traditional space-opera tale, with much more traditional goodies and baddies; then it plummeted straight to zero with the "third trilogy" of books 7, 8 and 9, in which the authors hamfistedly just shove in these giant, nonsensical changes to the story's structure because it's clear they had an end goal in mind, and by God, they were going to get to that end goal, no matter how much ridiculous nonsense they had to add to make it there. So that's why, just to name one of dozens of examples, we suddenly jump forward in time 30 years for these books, despite none of the characters emotionally changing or growing even a single bit, and not a single one of our existing story threads fundamentally changing besides having someone hold up a silent-film placard that says, "And then they all treaded water for three decades;" it's because Abraham and Franck decided that they needed a big bad unstoppable enemy to bring about a final showdown for these warring groups, and the only way to justify the big bad enemy having had the time and resources to build their cartoonishly massive unstoppable military ships is to say, "Oh, and did we mention that thirty years have passed? Yeah, I know, it doesn't look in any way whatsoever like any time has passed at all; but trust us, it's thirty years later, and that's how the new baddies seem to miraculously have all these amazing new warships that the rest of the human race can't even begin to stop." The whole third trilogy is like this -- entire fascinating storylines from the first six books just thrown out the window wholesale, so the authors can instead spend the entirety of their time obsessing over a puerile, Sunday-school lesson of a story about how COLONIALISM! IS! BAD! and EMPIRES! ARE! BAD! and HUMAN! RIGHTS! ARE! GOOD! Jeez, Greta Thunberg, take it down a notch already, will you? Meanwhile, the entire alien "protomolecule" artifact that's been driving the overall storyline since page 1 of book 1 just sputters out here to an ignoble end, when Abraham and Franck eventually just throw their hands in the air and say, (view spoiler)["Yeah, the aliens are, like, evil supernatural dudes who want to kill everyone they meet, or something like that, whatever, can't you see how busy we are trying to inform you that COLONIALISM! IS! BAD!!!!??!!!1!!" (hide spoiler)] That's not what I signed up for when I first began the initial book four years ago, which like a lot of people was prompted for me by the accompanying TV show switching that year from cable's SyFy Channel to Amazon Prime Video; and by the time I finished book 7, I realized that my heart just wasn't into finishing books 8 and 9 if they were going to be as godawful as that one, which they indeed turned out to be. So I read like 50 pages of each, then went on Wikipedia to read the story recaps and at least learn how everything ends, and then came over here to do this writeup and read all the inexplicable 5-star reviews from friends of mine who I had assumed would know better. What's with you people? This book was freaking terrible, and I can't for the life of me understand what all of you saw in it that I clearly couldn't. Whatever the case, at least the saga is now officially at an end, and I can move on to some other sci-fi series I've had on the back burner for a while now (I'm looking at you, Isaac Asimov; and you, Philip K. Dick; and you too, William Gibson!); it's just too bad it all has to end with such a disappointed shrug for me, after initially thinking it to be one of the better sci-fi series of all time. If you're anything like me, you should stick to just the first three books only, then watch the TV series that wraps up the entire thing more succinctly at the end of season 6. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jan 28, 2022
|
Jan 28, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 0316332828
| 9780316332828
| B071KZ2DPB
| 4.37
| 74,412
| Dec 05, 2017
| Dec 05, 2017
|
did not like it
|
2022 reads, #1. Friends know that I've been reading the nine-book sci-fi series known as "The Expanse," by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who p
2022 reads, #1. Friends know that I've been reading the nine-book sci-fi series known as "The Expanse," by authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who publish together under the pseudonym "James SA Corey") at the same time that I've been watching the TV adaptation on Amazon Prime, one book a year to coincide with that year's particular season (after initially reading the first three books in a row to catch up with where I first discovered the show); but with Amazon deciding to end their adaptation at the end of book 6 in the novel series, this has now given me permission to quickly finish up the last three books at my own pace. Unfortunately, however, what I discovered here in book 7, set a full thirty years after the events of the first six books, is that this novel is pretty much worthless; for after getting me hooked in the first third of the series through an ultra-complex mythos that guides and informs each of the individual titles' plots (in which 300 years from now, humanity has now colonized the entire solar system, including a century-long cold war between a now unified Earth and a militaristic Mars, both of them antagonistic towards the loose collection of blue-collar libertarian miners known as the "outer planetary alliance," and all of them reacting in various ways to the recent discovery of extraterrestrial life), in book 7 the authors flatten out and chip away at this complexity until finally arriving at a dishwater-dull single conflict which engulfs the entire universe, which for simplicity's sake can be described as, "The Bush administration invades Iraq...IN SPAAAAAAACCCEEE!!!!!!1!!!" That's not why I became such a big fan of this series, and I feel frustrated that I'm going to have to wade through such morally simplistic crap if I want to say that I finally finished the entire nine books; I feel so cheated, in fact, that I originally stopped at this point, went online, and read the plot recaps of the last two books, to see if they actually do finally reveal the origin and aims of the alien "protomolecule" that drives the core storyline of this series (which, to be clear, isn't touched on or expanded in even the tiniest way here in book 7, other than a reveal we readers already know, that there's something more nefarious behind it than our characters realize). Sadly, this doesn't seem to be the case with book 8, which seems to be entirely dedicated to finishing out this boring and hamfisted American Empire metaphor the authors set up here; but thankfully, it looks like book 9, the final volume that was just recently released, does in fact finally return to the protomolecule and gives us some definitive answers behind who is behind it and what they want. So that's why I'm going to be skipping book 8 altogether, and finishing up my now four-year journey with this series with the last title; and while this may change after the whole thing is over, is also why I'll be recommending to others in the future that they read only the first three books of this series, then skip straight to book 9 after reading the other titles' plot recaps online. I suppose in a way this is to be expected -- genre series that last this long almost always tend to peter out at a certain point into water-treading nonsense -- but it was particularly disappointing here, after the series starting out so strongly and interestingly. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the final book next week; but for now, I discourage people from reading this seventh book at all, but rather read up on its super-simplistic, go-nowhere plot online and then skip straight ahead to what (fingers crossed) will hopefully be a satisfying bang of a finale. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Jan 08, 2022
not set
|
Jan 08, 2022
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0356504263
| 9780356504261
| 0356504263
| 4.25
| 85,329
| Dec 06, 2016
| Dec 06, 2016
|
it was ok
|
2021 reads, #104. Wow, has it really been a year since my last "Expanse" novel? Friends know that I actually came to this nine-book series originally
2021 reads, #104. Wow, has it really been a year since my last "Expanse" novel? Friends know that I actually came to this nine-book series originally through the Amazon Prime television adaptation, and so I have been only reading each new book in the series right before that particular season is about to get released to streaming, although of course that plan is ending after this particular book, in that Amazon has announced that they will not be adapting the last three books but rather will be ending the show at the end of this one. Unfortunately, this book turned out to be the biggest disappointment so far of the entire run, because there's really not too much to it at all; for after the literal earth-shaking events of book 5 (which I'll allow to remain a surprise here, for those of you peeking ahead in the series as a way of determining whether you want to read the books at all), the entire 550 pages of book 6 seem to be nothing but an elongated coda and denouement to the previous book's outsized events, basically one long unending action scene that provides a pat and unsatisfying resolution to the "war" declared in the previous book by the IRA-like "Outer Planetary Alliance Free Navy" against the combined forces of Earth and a long-colonized Mars. There are literally no new mythos-related plot developments here, no new character developments, and one and only one new thing learned about the alien "proto-molecule" that's been at the center of our series' overarching uber-plot (and that one new thing only being that the proto-molecule is more nefarious than our characters realize, which is something readers already know). Already a disappointment under any circumstances, it's extra deflating here, precisely because the previous volume Nemesis Games was so chock-full of exciting new developments, with stakes so high you can barely believe co-authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (collectively publishing here under the pen-name "James SA Corey") actually got away with it; and that plus the worsening state of the actual prose quality of the writing* made for a wasted week of my life around here, and a coming season 6 of the TV show that I'm feeling seriously ambivalent about. I'm going to go ahead and finish the last three books of the series, which apparently take place a full 30 years after the events of these first six books; but given the ping-ponging of quality between books 4 through 6 (which you can consider a second trilogy unto itself as well, with the events of books 1 through 3 providing their own standalone story too), needless to say that I'll be going into them with my wariness up and my bullshit detector set to "high." That's kind of a shame, given that the overall quality of the entire six-book experience so far has been a net-positive; so here's hoping that the authors pull this out of the fire with the next one, and that we end this nine-book saga with a bang instead of a whimper. *And seriously, I just do not understand the sheer preponderance of grammatically horrific incomplete sentences found in this book. Tacked onto the ends of related complete sentences. Calling too much attention to themselves. For no particular reason I could see. It makes me curious whether the authors had already been writing this way in previous books, and had an astute editor who changed them all but is no longer working with them; or if they picked up the habit for the first time here, under the misguided belief that such incomplete sentences somehow make the story feel more exciting and "actiony." Which they don't. Because they're just gimmicks. That call too much attention to themselves. And feel like lazy writing. That smart readers shouldn't have to put up with. We'll see what happens in book 7, I guess! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Dec 18, 2021
not set
|
Dec 18, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743445600
| 9780743445603
| 0743445600
| 3.87
| 990
| Sep 2002
| Sep 2002
|
really liked it
|
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport
It's summer, which means I'm tearing through a bunch of summer reads these days, purposely easier reads that are often also called "beach and airport novels," which I've been deliberately doing for the last several years now as a nostalgic homage to my '70s childhood, when I would participate in my public library's summer reading challenge and tear through a bunch of easy reads in exactly this same spirit. And man, it doesn't get much more summery and easy than Star Trek novels, which longtime readers will remember is something fairly new to my life that I've gone back and forth about many times, regarding their relative cheesiness versus the relative enjoyment I get out of their cheesiness. Thankfully I've had a chance to steer towards the higher end of these 800+ books, by concentrating on an astounding 100-book series called the "Relaunch Novels" that one can realistically call "semi-canon" books, in that soon after the end of the television run of the highly serialized Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Simon & Schuster asked for and remarkably received from Paramount permission to do a series of DS9 books that actually maintain a consistency to character and plot developments from one book to the next. This allows major characters to die and never come back, or new complications to be added to their milieu that are still there 20 books later, essentially turning these books into an unofficial "eighth season" of the show (or I suppose more like an unofficial eighth through twelfth seasons by this point, although the run was officially finally ended in 2021 with the three-book "Coda," so that the running storyline wouldn't clash with the just-released new TV show Star Trek: Picard). That's amazing, because usually non-canon genre novels (no matter what TV or movie series you're talking about, whether Star Trek or Star Wars, Buffy or Supernatural) are deliberately meant to be disposable, meaning that they have to be written in a way so that you can pick up any random one at any random time at any random yard sale without needing to know even a single thing about what came before in the book series and what came after; that essentially traps most non-canon genre novels in amber like a fossil, where nothing of importance or permanence ever happens to the characters or their situations, which is a huge aspect of why so many people look at non-canon genre novels with disdain. So I'm glad to be reading these Relaunch novels, and was especially excited to get to the books I just recently completed, the four-book miniseries "Mission Gamma" that tells one big unified story over the course of 1,600 freaking pages, which I read right in a freaking row over the last six freaking weeks of my life without taking even a slight freaking pause between each of them, aaaaahhhhhhhh yiiiiiiiiisssss. That's the best way to approach these four novels, to just read them all in a row without stopping, because they're all thematically connected through a fascinating turn of events: basically, now that the Dominion War is over, Starfleet decides to convert the DS9 warship Defiant into a science and exploration vehicle like the Enterprise, and then sends a collection of our cast members out through the wormhole and into the Gamma Quadrant to do the Federation's first-ever outreach to "new civilizations" and "strange new worlds" in this vastly distant section of the Milky Way Galaxy, one that's suddenly now within a moment's reach because of this cosmic hiccup known as the wormhole that played such a large role on the original television show. And that's basically why I wanted to do one long write-up for all four of these novels as well, because they're essentially like watching four episodes in a row of the TV show, with a familiar formula that doesn't really change from one to the next (basically -- discover new civilization, something about new civilization gets all fucked up, crew spends the rest of the book trying to fix the fuckup). There isn't a lot to say about each individual "crisis of the week" here, but collectively they were exactly what I wanted from a summer reading project like this -- something exciting yet intelligent, something well-written but not too complex, something I can read on my front porch on a summer Sunday and perhaps fall asleep in the middle of but don't need to feel guilty about doing. That said, easily the most interesting crisis of the week here is in book #3, Cathedral, in which the Defiant crew stumbles across a doomsday weapon from a highly advanced civilization that destroyed itself more than half a billion years ago, basically a "quantum bomb" that takes any living creature that gets close to it and then tries to mesh that creature with the untold trillions of other versions of that creature that exist in the infinite alternative realities of the quantum multiverse, essentially the entire climax of Everything Everywhere All At Once but compressed down into a millisecond. But don't worry, we still keep checking in on things back at the station during these four novels too! Among those developments is one of the more intriguing ones I've seen so far in these Relaunch novels, which is basically that it's looking more and more likely that there's going to be a Protestant Reformation soon on the deeply religious planet Bajor which serves as the space station's "home base" both on the show and in these books. In an earlier novel, series regular Kira Nerys had an opportunity to release a recently discovered holy book to the general population of her home planet, after their religious elite tried to hide the book's existence because of it seemingly teaching moral lessons that don't jibe with the traditional ethical rules their religion teaches. That essentially has started turning Nerys in the last couple of books into a sort of Martin Luther figure among her people; and one of the major "domestic" developments of this four-book series is a growing amount of Bajorans actually starting a brand-new sect of their religion, which may or may not eventually turn into a bloody civil war just like the real Protestant Reformation did in Europe back in the 1500s. I have to admit, I've been eating this stuff up with a spoon, along with such other developments as the growing unlikely romance between slimy bar owner Quark and tough-as-fuck Bajoran security specialist Ro Lauren (an interesting addition to the novel series, in that in real life, Michelle Forbes' Ro from The Next Generation was actually meant to fill the role Kira eventually did on Deep Space Nine, but then the actress got cold feet right before making the seven-year commitment), or the growing embrace of humanity by the rogue Jem'Hadar named Taran'atar who now lives on the station, a race that was barely explored during the original TV run (they were essentially the Dominion's hired muscle) and that the novel authors are doing a great job expanding and complexifying here in the books. I'm finding this all very satisfying, and right now these books continue to deliver exactly what I want from them; so I'm looking highly forward to launching myself into yet more of them later this year, starting next with SD Perry's Rising Son, in which we FINALLY learn what Ben Sisko's son Jake has been doing the entire time he's been plunged into the wormhole in an attempt to track down his missing, ethereal father, which happened way back like six books ago. This is actually considered by many to be in the top 10 Star Trek novels in quality out of all 800 of them, so I suspect I'll be getting to this one soon! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Nov 29, 2021
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0553293419
| 9780553293418
| 0553293419
| 3.85
| 20,124
| 1952
| Dec 01, 1991
|
it was ok
|
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse 2021 reads, #97. I mentioned this at the very start of my Isaac Asimov "Future History" completist run, but today in particular I think it bears repeating, that instead of reading these 15 books in the order they were first written and published, I'm reading them in the chronological order of the fictional timeline involved, since the entire "megaseries" (comprising the former smaller 1950s series "Robot," "Empire" and "Foundation," plus a series of bridging novels in the 1980s that thematically linked them all together) is supposed to cover roughly a 22,000-year persistent, paradox-free history, and I thought it'd be worth reading them in the order of the events covered if for nothing else than to see how the '80s titles clash or complement the '50s ones they're interspersed with under this kind of reading order. So even though the three novels known as the "Empire" series were published in the order of first Pebble in the Sky in 1950, then The Stars, Like Dust in '51 and The Currents of Space in '52, I'm reviewing them here in the order of Stars then Currents then Pebble, in that this order shows us the slow rise and eventual domination of the Galactic Empire the series is named after. As I've talked about previously, all three of these books are from the very start of Asimov's career, back in the 1940s when people like him and such other eventual Silver Age pioneers as Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury were all in their twenties, and therefore had to adhere to the genre standards of the now middle-aged editors and agents that at the time ran the sci-fi publishing industry. And those guys all grew up on proto-sci-fi from the late Victorian Age and early 20th century, back when the genre was essentially "Tarzan in space," the books that give us the now hoary term "space opera" which was ironically invented precisely by people like Asimov later in his career, to dismissively categorize the type of stuff he was forced to write back when he was young and unknown; and so that's why the other smaller series from the larger Future History megaseries, including the "Robot" books (set in a "day after tomorrow" universe, which for him was the late 20th century) and the "Foundation" books (set thousands of years after the Empire books) are so much better known, because Asimov worked very hard during his lifetime to have those two other series much better known, and to downplay these early, frustration-filled Empire novels and never revisit them again. And indeed, just like I was saying during my review of Stars, Asimov was correct to do this; these play now like the worn-out, badly outdated radio-serial-style screenplays that he himself could already see them to be back in the '40s, when he was forced to write them in order to get published at all, and which prompted him to write next the much more heady and startlingly unique "Foundation" stories, as well as going in the opposite direction and trying to bring a Michael Crichton-style, grounded-in-today's-science approach to his "Robot" stories. In contrast, these Empire novels are way more in the vein of Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars, Tom Swift, and the "Radium Age" books of EE "Doc" Smith, in which the focus is much more on empty spectacle, melodramatic derring-do, and strict adherence to traditional gender roles, the "science" involved being just whatever random made-up nonsense needed to be invented in order to push along its childlike plot, in which we are introduced to a humanity-settled galaxy that's ruled with an iron fist by an all-powerful evil empire, and follow along with some plucky heroes as they try to rage against the machine. If this all sounds familiar, that's because the original Star Wars in 1977 was intended by George Lucas to be a loving homage to these creaky old space operas he grew up on in the '40s, books exactly like today's under question, which were unceremoniously killed off by the rise of Silver Age authors precisely like Asimov in his more well-known books, just the moment they became famous and powerful enough that they could. But the reason Star Wars was such a phenomenon was because it was so much insanely better than anyone expected a Flash Gordon homage to be, so don't expect Asimov's Flash Gordon ripoffs here to even hold a candle to them, or to be nearly as entertaining a reading experience. All three of these are instead real clunkers of melodramas, paycheck-generating pulp serial stuff (indeed, the very medium that first published these three novels, originally in 15 monthly installments throughout the late '40s); and if you think you're missing some sort of hidden gems because of Asimov himself downplaying these books for the entire rest of his career, rest assured that you're not. Thankfully, though, this finally gets us over and done with the Empire books for good; and that means we're ready to move on to the most famous books of Asimov's career, the paradigm-expanding "Foundation" series (first a trilogy in the '50s, then with two sequels in the early '80s, then with two prequels in the late '80s and early '90s). Since we're taking these in the timeline's chronological order, that means our next read will be 1988's Prelude to Foundation, another of these "bridging" novels that shows how series patriarch Hari Seldon first invented the field known as psychohistory as a young man, which in Asimov's retconned history is largely through the help of the robot hero of this megaseries' very first books, now 20,000 years old and hiding in plain sight among the far-future humans of the Empire's home planet of Trantor. As always, I hope you'll have a chance to join me again here soon for my look at that. Isaac Asimov books being reviewed for this series: I, Robot (1950) | The Caves of Steel (1954) | The Naked Sun (1957) | The Robots of Dawn (1983) | Robots and Empire (1985) | The Stars, Like Dust (1951) | The Currents of Space (1952) | Pebble in the Sky (1950) | Prelude to Foundation (1988) | Forward the Foundation (1993) | Foundation (1951) | Foundation and Empire (1952) | Second Foundation (1953) | Foundation's Edge (1982) | Foundation and Earth (1986) ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0962344729
| 9780962344725
| 0962344729
| 4.16
| 3,520
| 1977
| Jan 01, 1993
|
it was amazing
|
(2021 reads, #104.)
|
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250163307
| 9781250163301
| 1250163307
| 3.89
| 6,545
| Oct 31, 2017
| Oct 31, 2017
|
did not like it
|
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might wan
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might want to do this for a living, we don't yet have the experiences or portfolio to show off our own artistic sensibilities yet, so we tend to obsessively latch on to already successful artists who have similar sensibilities as ours. In my case, for example, that was David Lynch, whose mindfuck classic Blue Velvet came out my senior year of high school, which is pretty much the exact most perfect time to watch a movie like that. That made the airing of his notorious TV show Twin Peaks while I was in college not just popular but a legitimate phenomenon among me and my snotty little Generation X art-school buddies; and I've never rewatched the show since, for fear of diminishing returns ruining the purity of my enjoyment of it back when it was originally on the air, and we used to hold giant watching parties each week complete with multiple pies and pots of coffee. But I recently decided to drop my subscription to the streaming service Hulu, and Hulu is the current home of Twin Peaks, so I decided to finally watch the entire two-season run again before I lost access to it, which for those who are curious was pretty much the experience I was expecting -- it was okay, and I can see why we all went so nuts for it at the time, but Lord was it filled with a whole bunch of pointless filler, in Lynch's attempt to make what he considered a nighttime soap opera, which is what he always saw Twin Peaks as first and foremost. That then got me thinking about the companion books again for the first time in a long time, early examples of the kind of cross-media marketing and publicity we now take for granted, in which a series of three themed volumes gave gentle and not very important clues about the bizarro mythology driving the only storyline of the series anyone actually gave a damn about -- the death of Laura Palmer, that is, at the hands of what turned out to be an evil supernatural being, governed by a byzantine set of rules and laws these supernatural creatures have among the places along the magical veil where they dwell, the unique details of which were invented by Lynch during the open thinking stages within his lifelong habit of transcendental meditation. And that finally gets us to today's books, when I learned during my research of this rewatch that the show's co-creator Mark Frost actually published two more tie-in books decades after I and the rest of the world stopped being obsessed by the show, 2016's much bigger The Secret History of Twin Peaks and 2017's much smaller Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both of which seem to have been greenlit because of the coming third season of the show, which debuted just a few months after these books came out. The "lore" of the franchise's Hollywood history often leaves out Frost, who although has the kind of sensibility to appreciate and produce Twin Peaks, nonetheless comes from a much more traditional background, having been a veteran already of more pedestrian fare like Hill Street Blues, The Equalizer and The Six Million Dollar Man, which I guess doesn't really fit the "brilliant weirdo genius comes out of nowhere" shtick that continues to drive the cult status of Lynch. Frost has had a middling career since -- he was co-writer of a couple of those "Fantastic Four" films from the early 2000s, produced half a dozen failed pilots, and seems to have spent more time than anything else on penning a series of Young Adult fantasy novels known as "The Paladin Prophecy" -- but it's clear with hindsight that he was the one sort of holding the original Twin Peaks together as any kind of watchable show at all, especially now that we have the evidence of a third season that was largely made without him, which is so viewer-hostile and obtuse that it might as well not even exist. Lynch may have been pulling random shit out of his meditation sessions and waking dreams for such details as the dancing dwarves and Log Ladies, but it's clear in Secret History that Frost was getting his inspiration for the mythos' details from much more mundane and trackable sources; for this book actually has very little to do with the show itself, but is rather an impressively researched look at all the actual bizarre little true stories over the centuries that would sound like Twin Peaks if they weren't in fact completely real, and which Frost quite methodically shows provided the inspiration behind such franchise details as the Black and White Lodges, owls as spirit animals, characters who talk backwards, even why the show was set in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. Turns out there's all kinds of bizarre stories from real life that sound like an episode of Twin Peaks: such as the fact that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was co-founded by two friends of occultist Alastair Crowley who regularly enacted his strange, sex-filled Satanist rituals (one of whom was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard); or that 1950s entertainer Jackie Gleason was obsessed with UFOs, owning one of the largest libraries in the world on the subject and actually buying a mansion in the shape of a flying saucer that he called the "Mothership;" or that Gleason's widow after his death sincerely swore that he told her about his friend Richard Nixon getting drunk one night and showing him crashed UFO wreckage from Roswell; or that Merriweather Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame supposedly committed suicide under mysterious and suspicious circumstances, not very long after returning from a trouble-filled exploratory trip to the Pacific Northwest where they were spooked by Native American stories about evil ghosts in the woods. All of these stories are absolutely, 100 percent true; so in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Discordian classic "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," here Frost takes all these stories and weaves them into one giant uber-conspiracy theory of which the events in Twin Peaks, Washington in 1989 plays just a small part. That's actually kind of brilliant, in this '80s indie Church Of The Subgenius kind of way (after all, the '50s-born Frost is the exact right age to love all these crazy old '70s and '80s underground occult-conspiracy "Hail Discordia" projects); and the book should be read in this spirit for full enjoyment, as an extremely clever and well-written way to present a broad overview of the most famous bizarro conspiracy theories over the course of US history, from Majestic-12 to the Kennedy assassination, completely bonkers '50s sci-fi author Richard Shaver, Project Blue Book, the Freemasons, and a lot, lot, lot more. And I suppose we'll forgive Frost for the short follow-up volume a year later, which seems to only and exclusively exist to provide tie-in promotion to the third season of the show, which was released the exact same month this book was released, and contains nothing else but hastily assembled overviews of all the show's main characters, and Frost's half-assed look at the general highlights of each person's life in the 25 years since. It's become known by now that Frost's main involvement with this third season was to throw together a bunch of ideas beforehand but not be involved with the day-to-day production, while Lynch then proceeded to get to the production stage and throw out a bunch of Frost's ideas at the spur of a moment while on set, because a fucking bee flew in his face that morning or whatever and suddenly now they're all going to go to the Black Lodge and see a giant thirty-foot-high CGI beehive floating in the sky, shedding blood or whatever, and that this is why the third season turned out to be so head-scratchingly awful. So this book written beforehand, frankly, doesn't do a whole lot to explain all the on-set turns towards the explainably bizarre that now marks the edited and finished episodes, and only provides the kinds of background details you'll quickly learn yourself over the first couple of episodes. It's kind of a shame that Lynch didn't have the boundaries of a nervous network or a TV vet like Frost this time, to rein him in and deliver a much tighter and more interesting third act to this beloved series (the Lynch projects with the most boundaries over the years have always turned out to be the best Lynch projects, whether that's Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive); but in the meanwhile, we have this "Transgressive's History of the United States" as a gift from the show's other creator, not really vital for learning about the show itself, but certainly an invaluable look at the kind of world that would greenlight a show like Twin Peaks to begin with. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250075580
| 9781250075581
| 1250075580
| 3.96
| 11,100
| Oct 18, 2016
| Oct 18, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might wan
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might want to do this for a living, we don't yet have the experiences or portfolio to show off our own artistic sensibilities yet, so we tend to obsessively latch on to already successful artists who have similar sensibilities as ours. In my case, for example, that was David Lynch, whose mindfuck classic Blue Velvet came out my senior year of high school, which is pretty much the exact most perfect time to watch a movie like that. That made the airing of his notorious TV show Twin Peaks while I was in college not just popular but a legitimate phenomenon among me and my snotty little Generation X art-school buddies; and I've never rewatched the show since, for fear of diminishing returns ruining the purity of my enjoyment of it back when it was originally on the air, and we used to hold giant watching parties each week complete with multiple pies and pots of coffee. But I recently decided to drop my subscription to the streaming service Hulu, and Hulu is the current home of Twin Peaks, so I decided to finally watch the entire two-season run again before I lost access to it, which for those who are curious was pretty much the experience I was expecting -- it was okay, and I can see why we all went so nuts for it at the time, but Lord was it filled with a whole bunch of pointless filler, in Lynch's attempt to make what he considered a nighttime soap opera, which is what he always saw Twin Peaks as first and foremost. That then got me thinking about the companion books again for the first time in a long time, early examples of the kind of cross-media marketing and publicity we now take for granted, in which a series of three themed volumes gave gentle and not very important clues about the bizarro mythology driving the only storyline of the series anyone actually gave a damn about -- the death of Laura Palmer, that is, at the hands of what turned out to be an evil supernatural being, governed by a byzantine set of rules and laws these supernatural creatures have among the places along the magical veil where they dwell, the unique details of which were invented by Lynch during the open thinking stages within his lifelong habit of transcendental meditation. And that finally gets us to today's books, when I learned during my research of this rewatch that the show's co-creator Mark Frost actually published two more tie-in books decades after I and the rest of the world stopped being obsessed by the show, 2016's much bigger The Secret History of Twin Peaks and 2017's much smaller Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both of which seem to have been greenlit because of the coming third season of the show, which debuted just a few months after these books came out. The "lore" of the franchise's Hollywood history often leaves out Frost, who although has the kind of sensibility to appreciate and produce Twin Peaks, nonetheless comes from a much more traditional background, having been a veteran already of more pedestrian fare like Hill Street Blues, The Equalizer and The Six Million Dollar Man, which I guess doesn't really fit the "brilliant weirdo genius comes out of nowhere" shtick that continues to drive the cult status of Lynch. Frost has had a middling career since -- he was co-writer of a couple of those "Fantastic Four" films from the early 2000s, produced half a dozen failed pilots, and seems to have spent more time than anything else on penning a series of Young Adult fantasy novels known as "The Paladin Prophecy" -- but it's clear with hindsight that he was the one sort of holding the original Twin Peaks together as any kind of watchable show at all, especially now that we have the evidence of a third season that was largely made without him, which is so viewer-hostile and obtuse that it might as well not even exist. Lynch may have been pulling random shit out of his meditation sessions and waking dreams for such details as the dancing dwarves and Log Ladies, but it's clear in Secret History that Frost was getting his inspiration for the mythos' details from much more mundane and trackable sources; for this book actually has very little to do with the show itself, but is rather an impressively researched look at all the actual bizarre little true stories over the centuries that would sound like Twin Peaks if they weren't in fact completely real, and which Frost quite methodically shows provided the inspiration behind such franchise details as the Black and White Lodges, owls as spirit animals, characters who talk backwards, even why the show was set in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. Turns out there's all kinds of bizarre stories from real life that sound like an episode of Twin Peaks: such as the fact that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was co-founded by two friends of occultist Alastair Crowley who regularly enacted his strange, sex-filled Satanist rituals (one of whom was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard); or that 1950s entertainer Jackie Gleason was obsessed with UFOs, owning one of the largest libraries in the world on the subject and actually buying a mansion in the shape of a flying saucer that he called the "Mothership;" or that Gleason's widow after his death sincerely swore that he told her about his friend Richard Nixon getting drunk one night and showing him crashed UFO wreckage from Roswell; or that Merriweather Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame supposedly committed suicide under mysterious and suspicious circumstances, not very long after returning from a trouble-filled exploratory trip to the Pacific Northwest where they were spooked by Native American stories about evil ghosts in the woods. All of these stories are absolutely, 100 percent true; so in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Discordian classic "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," here Frost takes all these stories and weaves them into one giant uber-conspiracy theory of which the events in Twin Peaks, Washington in 1989 plays just a small part. That's actually kind of brilliant, in this '80s indie Church Of The Subgenius kind of way (after all, the '50s-born Frost is the exact right age to love all these crazy old '70s and '80s underground occult-conspiracy "Hail Discordia" projects); and the book should be read in this spirit for full enjoyment, as an extremely clever and well-written way to present a broad overview of the most famous bizarro conspiracy theories over the course of US history, from Majestic-12 to the Kennedy assassination, completely bonkers '50s sci-fi author Richard Shaver, Project Blue Book, the Freemasons, and a lot, lot, lot more. And I suppose we'll forgive Frost for the short follow-up volume a year later, which seems to only and exclusively exist to provide tie-in promotion to the third season of the show, which was released the exact same month this book was released, and contains nothing else but hastily assembled overviews of all the show's main characters, and Frost's half-assed look at the general highlights of each person's life in the 25 years since. It's become known by now that Frost's main involvement with this third season was to throw together a bunch of ideas beforehand but not be involved with the day-to-day production, while Lynch then proceeded to get to the production stage and throw out a bunch of Frost's ideas at the spur of a moment while on set, because a fucking bee flew in his face that morning or whatever and suddenly now they're all going to go to the Black Lodge and see a giant thirty-foot-high CGI beehive floating in the sky, shedding blood or whatever, and that this is why the third season turned out to be so head-scratchingly awful. So this book written beforehand, frankly, doesn't do a whole lot to explain all the on-set turns towards the explainably bizarre that now marks the edited and finished episodes, and only provides the kinds of background details you'll quickly learn yourself over the first couple of episodes. It's kind of a shame that Lynch didn't have the boundaries of a nervous network or a TV vet like Frost this time, to rein him in and deliver a much tighter and more interesting third act to this beloved series (the Lynch projects with the most boundaries over the years have always turned out to be the best Lynch projects, whether that's Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive); but in the meanwhile, we have this "Transgressive's History of the United States" as a gift from the show's other creator, not really vital for learning about the show itself, but certainly an invaluable look at the kind of world that would greenlight a show like Twin Peaks to begin with. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 074343112X
| 9780743431125
| 074343112X
| 3.57
| 500
| Nov 2001
| Nov 2001
|
did not like it
|
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels are and why they can be tricky to review, see my very first Star Trek write-up, for SD Perry's Section 31: Cloak; or see here for the master list of all Star Trek novels I've now reviewed.) 2021 reads, #85 and 86. This book comes at the intersection of two different mini-series I'm currently tracking here at Goodreads in the universe of Star Trek non-canon novels. It's at once book #3 in the "Deep Space Nine Relaunch" series, in which Paramount gave these Simon & Schuster authors permission to pretend they were writing an eighth, ninth, tenth season and more of the official TV show, so that permanent deaths could happen within a persistent universe of events that's carried over from one book to another (but see my review of the first book in the series, S.D. Perry's Avatar, for more); and it's also book #6 of the seven-book "Gateways" series, one of the gimmicky "Special Summer Reading Event" publicity stunts Simon & Schuster held in the early '00s, in which a subject from the Star Trek universe was picked (like Section 31, for example, or in this case the Iconian Gateways), and a different story concerning this subject was published simultaneously in all the various Star Trek ongoing series of novels (both TV-based ones like The Next Generation and the original Kirk/Spock series, and series invented exclusively for the novels, like the "Challenger" and "New Voyages" books), usually in May so that fans could slowly make their way through all four or six or eight of the books over the summer at various pools, beaches and airports. That's a lot of explanation for a beach read, so no wonder Simon & Schuster recently decided to bring an official end to this "Relaunch" storyline that's been persistently existing for the last twenty years, with the coming "Coda" trilogy at the end of this year that promises to wrap up every outstanding storyline in not only these 35-odd DS9 relaunch novels, but the dozen-plus relaunch books The Next Generation has been going through at the same time. After all, like I talked about in my last Star Trek review, the TNG and DS9 teams (both in the novels and the original TV shows) had a warmly collaborative relationship; the two storylines are supposed to be happening in the same fictional time period, in the same fictional part of the Milky Way galaxy, and there was even a fair amount of bleeding over between actors and staff writers of the two shows when they were first being produced. So it makes sense that, after Simon & Schuster lead editor Marco Palmieri got permission from Paramount to do this with their intellectual property rights for DS9 (already heavily serialized on television, which is why it made sense to do it in the books too), and it went well (i.e. fans were still willing to buy the books, even with the new rule that you must read them all and read them in order for them to make sense), it would be expanded to the TNG milieu as well. This "special relationship" became so strong, in fact, that even most of the book-exclusive brand-new series that were invented (like the popular "Corps of Engineers," for example) were set in the same time period and same section of the galaxy, so that they could ride the coattails of these two other series' bigger successes; and there were even attempts over these years to bring all the titles together "Avengers"-style into series-crossing mega-events, a good example being this exact "Iconian Gateways" seven-book series we're looking at today. Eventually, though, these kinds of persistent universes get so loaded down with their own history and exposition that they end up imploding; and you can see a good example of these "Relaunch" titles heading in that direction with these very books, in which six of the novel division's ongoing series all tried to get together for a massive mega-story, but ended up having to keep up with so many different people's machinations throughout all seven books that it sometimes became almost unreadable. I talk about that some in my review of the TNG part of the "Gateway" series, and you can see it here too, especially in sections like the giant meeting with Starfleet brass that all the people in these various titles have together at a certain point, in order to get everyone up to speed and on the same page, and is essentially repeated in all the titles so that it has to get through literally six books' worth of characters giving expository dialogue before it can finally be declared over. Author Keith R.A. DeCandido, a well-loved non-canon regular contributor (he's also written books for Supernatural, World of Warcraft, Firefly, Resident Evil, and a lot more), does the best he can here, putting in an admirable amount of effort at trying to advance the "DS9 Relaunch" series of events regardless of being forced to shoehorn in this ongoing story about the galaxy-wide Gateway openings, with some characters getting "crisis of the week" situations to take care of (such as Kira helping out a race of people who are threatened with extinction by the reverberations of these energy-sucking interplanetary gateways), and others whose minimal plot developments are more in service of deep character-building (such as Ro Laren's decision to pose as an accompanying dabo girl when Quark is hired to be the Orion Syndicate's spokesman for the gateway bidding war, and the funny and interesting way they interact as they blast their way out of trouble by the end of all the shenanigans). Then there's the last book of this series, What Lay Beyond, which is about as shameless a grab for money as I've ever seen a multinational corporation do; essentially, they withheld the last chapter of all six other novels from the rest of this series, making the last volume an anthology of all the other six last chapters, making it pointless as anything else but an excuse to pay Simon & Schuster another ten bucks to see how any of these other books actually end. That makes it rather useless to do a review of, which is why I'm just incorporating it into my review of the DS9 volume, and posting this at both the book pages; and here's hoping that S&S learned their lesson from what I bet was a big outcry when this first happened (at least if all the outraged reactions here at Goodreads are any indication), and that I won't have to deal with this regarding any of the other "special mega-series" I might wind up reading down the road. For next time, though, we go in the opposite direction -- another multi-book series regarding a special topic, but this time concerning only a small sliver of DS9's regular cast, as mysterious new character Elias Vaughn leads a bunch of regulars on the fighting ship USS Defiant through the Bajoran wormhole and into the largely unknown Gamma Quadrant for a four-book uber-arc of a story. I hope you'll have a chance to join me again here next month for the start of that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Oct 17, 2021
not set
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743418530
| 9780743418539
| 0743418530
| 3.77
| 739
| Sep 2001
| Sep 01, 2001
|
really liked it
|
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels are and why they can be tricky to review, see my very first Star Trek write-up, for SD Perry's Section 31: Cloak; or see here for the master list of all Star Trek novels I've now reviewed.) 2021 reads, #85 and 86. This book comes at the intersection of two different mini-series I'm currently tracking here at Goodreads in the universe of Star Trek non-canon novels. It's at once book #3 in the "Deep Space Nine Relaunch" series, in which Paramount gave these Simon & Schuster authors permission to pretend they were writing an eighth, ninth, tenth season and more of the official TV show, so that permanent deaths could happen within a persistent universe of events that's carried over from one book to another (but see my review of the first book in the series, S.D. Perry's Avatar, for more); and it's also book #6 of the seven-book "Gateways" series, one of the gimmicky "Special Summer Reading Event" publicity stunts Simon & Schuster held in the early '00s, in which a subject from the Star Trek universe was picked (like Section 31, for example, or in this case the Iconian Gateways), and a different story concerning this subject was published simultaneously in all the various Star Trek ongoing series of novels (both TV-based ones like The Next Generation and the original Kirk/Spock series, and series invented exclusively for the novels, like the "Challenger" and "New Voyages" books), usually in May so that fans could slowly make their way through all four or six or eight of the books over the summer at various pools, beaches and airports. That's a lot of explanation for a beach read, so no wonder Simon & Schuster recently decided to bring an official end to this "Relaunch" storyline that's been persistently existing for the last twenty years, with the coming "Coda" trilogy at the end of this year that promises to wrap up every outstanding storyline in not only these 35-odd DS9 relaunch novels, but the dozen-plus relaunch books The Next Generation has been going through at the same time. After all, like I talked about in my last Star Trek review, the TNG and DS9 teams (both in the novels and the original TV shows) had a warmly collaborative relationship; the two storylines are supposed to be happening in the same fictional time period, in the same fictional part of the Milky Way galaxy, and there was even a fair amount of bleeding over between actors and staff writers of the two shows when they were first being produced. So it makes sense that, after Simon & Schuster lead editor Marco Palmieri got permission from Paramount to do this with their intellectual property rights for DS9 (already heavily serialized on television, which is why it made sense to do it in the books too), and it went well (i.e. fans were still willing to buy the books, even with the new rule that you must read them all and read them in order for them to make sense), it would be expanded to the TNG milieu as well. This "special relationship" became so strong, in fact, that even most of the book-exclusive brand-new series that were invented (like the popular "Corps of Engineers," for example) were set in the same time period and same section of the galaxy, so that they could ride the coattails of these two other series' bigger successes; and there were even attempts over these years to bring all the titles together "Avengers"-style into series-crossing mega-events, a good example being this exact "Iconian Gateways" seven-book series we're looking at today. Eventually, though, these kinds of persistent universes get so loaded down with their own history and exposition that they end up imploding; and you can see a good example of these "Relaunch" titles heading in that direction with these very books, in which six of the novel division's ongoing series all tried to get together for a massive mega-story, but ended up having to keep up with so many different people's machinations throughout all seven books that it sometimes became almost unreadable. I talk about that some in my review of the TNG part of the "Gateway" series, and you can see it here too, especially in sections like the giant meeting with Starfleet brass that all the people in these various titles have together at a certain point, in order to get everyone up to speed and on the same page, and is essentially repeated in all the titles so that it has to get through literally six books' worth of characters giving expository dialogue before it can finally be declared over. Author Keith R.A. DeCandido, a well-loved non-canon regular contributor (he's also written books for Supernatural, World of Warcraft, Firefly, Resident Evil, and a lot more), does the best he can here, putting in an admirable amount of effort at trying to advance the "DS9 Relaunch" series of events regardless of being forced to shoehorn in this ongoing story about the galaxy-wide Gateway openings, with some characters getting "crisis of the week" situations to take care of (such as Kira helping out a race of people who are threatened with extinction by the reverberations of these energy-sucking interplanetary gateways), and others whose minimal plot developments are more in service of deep character-building (such as Ro Laren's decision to pose as an accompanying dabo girl when Quark is hired to be the Orion Syndicate's spokesman for the gateway bidding war, and the funny and interesting way they interact as they blast their way out of trouble by the end of all the shenanigans). Then there's the last book of this series, What Lay Beyond, which is about as shameless a grab for money as I've ever seen a multinational corporation do; essentially, they withheld the last chapter of all six other novels from the rest of this series, making the last volume an anthology of all the other six last chapters, making it pointless as anything else but an excuse to pay Simon & Schuster another ten bucks to see how any of these other books actually end. That makes it rather useless to do a review of, which is why I'm just incorporating it into my review of the DS9 volume, and posting this at both the book pages; and here's hoping that S&S learned their lesson from what I bet was a big outcry when this first happened (at least if all the outraged reactions here at Goodreads are any indication), and that I won't have to deal with this regarding any of the other "special mega-series" I might wind up reading down the road. For next time, though, we go in the opposite direction -- another multi-book series regarding a special topic, but this time concerning only a small sliver of DS9's regular cast, as mysterious new character Elias Vaughn leads a bunch of regulars on the fighting ship USS Defiant through the Bajoran wormhole and into the largely unknown Gamma Quadrant for a four-book uber-arc of a story. I hope you'll have a chance to join me again here next month for the start of that. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0743418565
| 9780743418560
| 0743418565
| 3.70
| 346
| Sep 2001
| Sep 2001
|
it was ok
|
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels are and why they can be tricky to review, see my very first Star Trek write-up, for SD Perry's Section 31: Cloak; or see here for the master list of all Star Trek novels I've now reviewed.) 2021 reads, #82. One of the things I'm discovering as I make my way through more and more Star Trek novels this year is that, like anyone who tries to awkwardly mash together creativity and capitalism, Simon & Schuster has tried various publicity stunts over the decades in an attempt to generate as many sales of these Star Trek books as possible, including a series of "Special Summer Reading Events" in the early 2000s that took one specific topic and then set a story concerning this topic within each of their franchise series (The Original Series, The Next Generation, New Voyages, etc), as a way of getting readers loyal to just one of these series to try out and hopefully get hooked on the others. For example, this is how the "Section 31" quadrology that originally got me started reading Star Trek novels originally came about, all of them originally published in the same week in May 2001, with the idea being that contemporary readers at the time would spend the rest of that summer slowly reading all four books on the beach and in airports. Unfortunately, though, this clashes with my current goal of reading all the Deep Space Nine "relaunch" novels in a row right now (but for more on what exactly this is, see my review of book #1 in the series, SD Perry's Avatar); because right off the bat, two of the early novels in this series were also volumes in two of these special summer reading events, not just the Section 31 novel Abyss but then the one right after that too, part of a special crossover series regarding the Iconian gateways that originally showed up during the television run of The Next Generation back in the early '90s. They're basically like transporters except that they let people instantaneously travel from one planet to another, instead of short distances like the transporters are limited to, supposedly the invention of a long extinct alien race that hasn't been around for a quarter of a million years; so needless to say, it throws things into chaos in these novels when the Iconians suddenly show up out of the blue for the first time in 250,000 years, turn on all their gateways located in various random spots throughout the galaxy, and declare that they're willing to sell the technology to the highest bidder. There are actually seven novels in this series, and I realized quickly that I was going to have to read at least a couple other ones in order to fully understand what was going on in the one specifically set among the DS9 cast and locations. But as I learned during the Section 31 novels, you can effectively skip any of these kinds of series novels that are set among the original Kirk/Spock crew, since those stories take place a hundred years before the TNG/DS9 era, and so never talk about anything directly relevant to the DS9-specific volume; and you can also skip any of the Voyager-set novels in these kinds of series, since the whole deal with Voyager is that they were supposed to be stuck on the far ass-end of the galaxy from the rest of the Federation, so none of their stories are directly applicable to the DS9-specific ones either. Two other volumes from this series are set among the book-specific franchise series Challenger and New Frontier, so I thought it'd be safe to skip those too; and the last book in the series is very sneakily a compilation that does nothing but print the last chapter of every one of these six other books, forcing readers to buy that last one if they plan on ever finishing any of the other six books that came before, which I would be mad about if I didn't in fact torrent all of these for free illegally at The Pirate Bay. So that only leaves the TNG volume in this series, which I'm quickly realizing is a milieu that actually bleeds over with the DS9 milieu a lot in these Simon & Schuster books; they're both set at the exact same time, after all, and in the exact same quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy, and even in the original TV shows there was a certain amount of crossover between the two, so it makes sense that there would be this warm sibling relationship between these two series within these non-canon books. Only one problem in this particular case, though, which is that the TNG-set Gateways volume, Doors into Chaos, is the biggest freaking slog now out of the seven Star Trek novels I've so far read, so much so that it took me literally weeks to get through this one, when most of the others have only taken me a day or two, a title I found myself really dreading picking up again even by around the halfway mark, one of the reasons it took me so long to finally get through it. There are multiple problems going on here, which kind of layer themselves into the big mess the book eventually becomes. First, although I don't know if this is the fault of the original Simon & Schuster editors or this particular book's author, franchise regular Robert Greenberger (who I'm reading for the first time with this specific book), for some reason the decision was made that, to show how much these suddenly working gateways are screwing with the various alien worlds of the galaxy, little short stories would be inserted here and there through the whole book actually showing random alien worlds getting screwed up. It leads to this schizophrenic disaster of a reading experience, where you're paying all this attention to a bunch of brand-new characters who are suddenly having this brand-new adventure and you're trying to keep it all straight in your head, just to realize ten pages later that you've been caught in a Douglas Adams-style "And this book is NOT about these characters!" gotcha, which pissed me off to no end because it's just about the sloppiest way I've ever seen a three-act novel's storyline put together. And then speaking of too many random new characters, this is the other main problem, that in an attempt to hastily assemble a rag-tag all-star team of Federation ships to confront the Iconians and finally put an end to their highest-bidder nonsense, each regular senior officer of the Enterprise ends up getting assigned as a temporary captain to another starship besides the Enterprise; so suddenly you as the reader are being confronted with half a dozen new ships, each of which have a half a dozen senior officers of their own, all of whom Greenberger decides to introduce by name and race and character tics, which is just way, way too much information to throw at a person in a 300-page book and expect them to make any kind of heads-or-tails of the whole thing. Now add one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction, which is that an entire 20 percent of this book's page count (and thanks as always to the Kindle stats page for determining that for me) is a written-out account of the minute-by-minute minutia of a space battle between all these people involved; and if there's one thing I really can't stand in contemporary fiction, it's when someone writes out a scene from an action movie in prose, which to a plot-focused reader like me is the very definition of pointless. (Here's how such scenes work from a plot standpoint: "'All hands to battle stations!' cried a worried Picard." [flip 30 pages with my finger] "'I guess the Oobiedoobies learned the hard way not to mess with Starfleet anymore!' cried a triumphant Picard.") All of this added together led to an extremely unsatisfying reading experience, especially frustrating because I was only reading it in the first place so I'd be up to speed when I read the related DS9 volume right afterwards; and out of the seven Star Trek novels I've now read, it's so far the only one I would actively discourage people from reading at all. I've moved on at this point to that related DS9 title, Keith DeCandido's Demons of Air and Darkness (DS9 is sort of known as the one series in the franchise where you can get away with the most pretentious titles), and I'll of course let you know what I thought of that one as well; but for now, I recommend skipping the TNG title in this Gateways series, and might very well end up recommending skipping the entire Gateways series altogether, especially considering the reader-hostile bait-and-switch way they chose to end all of them, by shuttling off all their climaxes into an entirely separate book you have to buy just to find out how they turn out. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 13, 2021
not set
|
Sep 13, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B09DMMD7V6
| unknown
| 4.38
| 8
| unknown
| Aug 24, 2021
|
it was ok
|
2021 reads, #80. I really wanted to be a fan and supporter of MJ White's science-fiction actioner Faze: The City of Addicts, the very first release by
2021 reads, #80. I really wanted to be a fan and supporter of MJ White's science-fiction actioner Faze: The City of Addicts, the very first release by brand-new genre press Jillion Realms Publishing; but unfortunately now that I've read it, I'm forced to give it a rating somewhere between passably mediocre and not readable at all, because of a variety of small problems that eventually add up to a negative sum greater than its negative parts. The passable part is the storyline itself, nothing outstanding but at least landing in good solid genre territory, a "space fascism" tale in which a population of spunky underlings are kept in virtual slavery by a different population of violent thugs, in this case for the purpose of mining a drug that has made the majority of the planet's inhabitants into addicts; our young female hero at the center of the tale, then, finds herself drawn more and more into the convoluted politics and behind-the-scenes machinations of it all, leading us eventually into the kind of simplistic action-based plot that you might see from one of those European sci-fi B-pics that are always littering the front page of Netflix's original programming section. It's no great shakes, but it's solid enough that it would usually get three stars from me, a good enough book for a Tuesday afternoon for hardcore convention-goers who blaze through four or five sci-fi books every single week; but where it loses an entire additional star is that this doesn't seem to have been professionally edited in any way at all, other than maybe being run through Grammarly and a spell checker to catch the kinds of basic English 101 mistakes you might have to worry about in a teenager's school paper. As an editor myself, I'm always warning my authors that this kind of "editing by algorithm" simply isn't good enough when it comes to something notoriously computer-unfriendly like creative fiction, and this book is a perfect example why; for although it would get a passing grade from a high-school English teacher, this manuscript features literally hundreds of extra random commas found in places where commas shouldn't be, the kind of clunky sentence structure that makes you frown and mutter, "What, did this get translated from another language or something?", and wooden, stilted dialogue straight out of a Tommy Wiseau screenplay. I always applaud the start of a new small press, and I love to see people banding together to put out genre fiction on their own terms and in their own way; but JRP's going to have to do a lot better than this if they want to be a viable press with a solid fanbase, starting with getting their books into better shape than this before they ever start sending them out to early reviewers like me. I wish them a lot of luck, but unfortunately I'm giving this first book of theirs a thumbs-down, and do not recommend it to others. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
4
|
not set
not set
not set
not set
|
Sep 06, 2021
Sep 06, 2021
not set
not set
|
Sep 06, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 0743400518
| 9780743400510
| 0743400518
| 4.01
| 1,459
| May 2001
| May 2001
|
it was amazing
|
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels are and why they can be tricky to review, see my very first Star Trek write-up, for SD Perry's Section 31: Cloak; or see here for the master list of all Star Trek novels I've now reviewed.) 2021 reads, #73-74. Friends know that the entire reason I started reading Star Trek novels to begin with was because of a desire for more stories about Section 31, the CIA-type "dirty tricks" wing of the Federation that was originally invented by the clever nerds at the franchise's black sheep, the conceptually dark and deeply serialized Deep Space Nine, which originally ran on television from 1992 to 1999; and that after finishing the four-book series on the subject (all of them published in 2001 as a special "summer reading event" for fans), I then learned that an entire other trilogy was later written within the same milieu, including 2014's Disavowed, 2017's Control and 2019's Collateral Damage, all of them by David Mack, which I thought I would take on immediately after. But alas, just a chapter or two into Disavowed I realized that I had absolutely no freaking idea what was going on, the book referencing dozens of events and characters that I didn't remember in any way at all from the original TV show; and that's when I learned that there is actually a very specific series of books within Simon & Schuster's non-canon Star Trek literary universe that might for practical purposes be called "mini-canon," in that these roughly one hundred titles all follow a singular cohesive storyline that persistently exists from one book to the next, one overseen by Simon & Schuster executives so to make sure there are no plotline slip-ups, just that this storyline only "officially" begins on the day after the last day of the last episode of the TV show, and therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the "official canon" that the show itself represents. See, the issue of what is or isn't "canon" among creative franchises has become a particularly thorny one in our current age, in that we now finally exist in a world where a growing amount of such franchises (think Marvel and DC, Star Trek and Star Wars) have become so huge and unwieldy, with so many story bits introduced over the decades by hundreds upon hundreds of unrelated creators, that the "official" story of what exactly is going on has become too impossibly huge to handle, leading to a growing amount of schisms and paradoxes and outright clashing details within what's supposed to be one giant fictional universe that all these stories live inside. For one notorious example, think about how the Klingons of the original 1960s Star Trek TV show looked like little more than particularly swarthy humans, while the Klingons of the much higher-budgeted '80s motion pictures have the ridged foreheads and dog-like teeth that we now commonly think of when we think of these aliens, despite the fact that these Klingons are actually supposed to be newer than the ones seen in the original series. So what supposedly happened in Star Trek's fictional history to cause such a radical change in their appearance? Well, turns out that several Star Trek novel authors have tackled this question themselves over the years, positing everything from genetic engineering gone wrong to a natural virus on the Klingon homeworld; but since many of these explanations directly contradict each other, and thus would lead to heated debates at next year's Coniconicon, Paramount declared that none of them were the official answer, and that in fact we wouldn't get an official one until all the way in 2005, during the episodes "Affliction" and "Divergence" from the much-maligned 9/11-era Star Trek show Enterprise. (The official answer? Spoiler alert: KHAAAAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!1!!) These kinds of canon trip-ups can get diabolically convoluted at the mature stage of these kinds of ongoing franchises, and the companies in charge of them have tackled the problem in various ways. DC Comics, for example, famously did a complete reboot of their entire universe in 2011, declaring all former storylines null and void and allowing their creatives to build the company's iconic characters back up again from scratch, even if those stories sometimes clashed with what had gone on before; while Disney, after buying the Star Wars universe from George Lucas in 2012 for 6.3 gajillion dollars, simply killed the franchise's expanded universe altogether, especially apropos here since the studio was planning on enlarging their "official" universe to eventually be the size of most other franchises' non-canon universes. But Star Trek, as far as I can tell, has largely tried to find an uneasy balance between full embrace and full disavowal, greenlighting some series that don't have even a single thing to do with any of the original TV shows or movies (such as the popular Corps of Engineers titles, for example, in which a group of Indiana-Jones-type super-nerds fly around the universe helping with such thorny problems as boobytrapped alien space stations and pulling starships out of plasma clouds), while also churning out an endless series of stories that are all set within the initial runs of the various original television shows, as if we were watching an off-day adventure that happened on the starship on, like, a Tuesday in season 4 when the cameras weren't officially rolling. This is why nothing is usually ever allowed to happen in non-canon novels that would somehow permanently affect the characters, effectively returning the stories back to television's "you can watch these in any order during syndication, it doesn't matter" roots (especially important in these kinds of situations, where so many new readers are going to be finding their way into these books through completely random titles found out of order at yard sales and used bookstores); but this is also one of the most notoriously negative aspects of non-canon novels' sketchy reputation, that they essentially feel like fan-service time-killers and not "real" literature, pleasant and breezy stories in which nothing's at stake and nothing ever truly happens, the entire universe set back to zero the moment you finish the last page. So it's to their big credit, then (or perhaps the credit of former Simon & Schuster executive Marco Palmieri, who seems to have been in charge of this line while he was there, and is now over at the great science-fiction publisher Tor), that the company ended up greenlighting the concept of these "relaunch" novels, in which the books in this series pretty much pretend that they're the missing eighth, ninth, tenth seasons and beyond of the original TV series, picking up where the show left off but now with the opportunity to kill off characters, destroy major settings, and all the other fun stuff you can do in "official canon" projects. And destruction is indeed in mind here in this initial relaunch "duology" (which is Simon & Schuster's polite way of saying, "We don't want to release a 600-page Star Trek novel and scare everyone off, so here they are split into two"), by our old friend SD Perry of Section 31: Cloak, the very first Star Trek novel I ever read. Here Perry really relishes her role as the initial creator of a brand-new Star Trek status quo, giving us a story not just with the kind of sweeping scope of a full-length feature, but one that would literally take a six-part special streaming series at Netflix to fully tell in its entirety. It's an interesting set of choices she makes here, including leaving Odo back with his people at the Great Link (or at least for now), and unexpectedly filling his Chief of Security role back at the station with the Next Generation character Ro Laren, the first character to actually introduce the Bajoran race to Star Trek fans, way back in 1991, and who was initially supposed to play the Kira Nerys role when Paramount producers were first setting up the DS9 shooting schedule (an idea that was nixed after actor Michelle Forbes decided she didn't want to get bogged down by a seven-year commitment). Perry also introduces some fascinating new characters, including the franchise's first-ever regular Jem'Hadar, who were the villainous aliens' "muscle" in the original TV show and therefore never existed much beyond 2D sketchiness in that version, so makes them particularly ripe for conceptual expanding in these novels. She also embraces and stretches out some of the very last story developments that initially happened during the final episodes of the show, such as Dax's new host Ezri getting into a romantic relationship with the station's head doctor, Julian Bashir, or our favorite duplicitous Cardassian spy Elim Garak now officially being welcomed back to his homeworld as their new Federation ambassador. Plus she sets up lots of complicated problems that are sure to leave the characters busy for at least the next dozen books, including but not limited to the entire bottom half of the freaking space station essentially being rendered unusable, not to mention the "Avatar" religious prediction of the book's title, in which it's prophesied that the kid Ben Sisko had with Kasidy Yates, before entering the wormhole as the TV show's final climax, is destined to usher in a new golden age of peace and harmony on nearby Bajor, but only after ten thousand Bajorans are willing to commit suicide in order to bring about this new golden age. So all in all, an extremely satisfying start to this new relaunch series, which as far as I can tell encompasses some 40 to 50 novels when it all is said and done, and complexly ties in to yet other persistent plotlines from other series within the Simon & Schuster Star Trek non-canon novels, such as the franchise-spanning "Typhon Pact" event of 2011-12 and its follow-up "The Fall" series from 2013. (Also not clear is whether novels in this relaunch plotline are still being currently published or not; the Wikipedia page has no more of them listed after 2017, although that could always be because the Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since 2017, while what you would think would be an exhaustive section of the Simon & Schuster website devoted to this subject doesn't even include a full list of all the titles that already exist, much less any information about any of them or what future titles will bring. I've CC:ed author Perry to this review over at her Twitter page, so with any luck maybe she'll jump on here with a comment and get us up to speed on what exactly is going on with these relaunch novels, as well as correct any misinformation I might have here about how they came about. I think we'd all find it fascinating to know, for example, how much of these novel plots are determined by the editor at Simon & Schuster, and how much is made up by each author.) A lot of reading ahead of me over the next year; but given how pleasant I've found these books so far, it's a challenge I look forward to. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 2021
not set
|
Sep 01, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 074340050X
| 9780743400503
| 074340050X
| 3.94
| 1,711
| May 2001
| May 2001
|
it was amazing
|
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels
(This is part of my ongoing look at the 850+ novels comprising the "Star Trek Non-Canon Expanded Universe." For more on what exactly non-canon novels are and why they can be tricky to review, see my very first Star Trek write-up, for SD Perry's Section 31: Cloak; or see here for the master list of all Star Trek novels I've now reviewed.) 2021 reads, #73-74. Friends know that the entire reason I started reading Star Trek novels to begin with was because of a desire for more stories about Section 31, the CIA-type "dirty tricks" wing of the Federation that was originally invented by the clever nerds at the franchise's black sheep, the conceptually dark and deeply serialized Deep Space Nine, which originally ran on television from 1992 to 1999; and that after finishing the four-book series on the subject (all of them published in 2001 as a special "summer reading event" for fans), I then learned that an entire other trilogy was later written within the same milieu, including 2014's Disavowed, 2017's Control and 2019's Collateral Damage, all of them by David Mack, which I thought I would take on immediately after. But alas, just a chapter or two into Disavowed I realized that I had absolutely no freaking idea what was going on, the book referencing dozens of events and characters that I didn't remember in any way at all from the original TV show; and that's when I learned that there is actually a very specific series of books within Simon & Schuster's non-canon Star Trek literary universe that might for practical purposes be called "mini-canon," in that these roughly one hundred titles all follow a singular cohesive storyline that persistently exists from one book to the next, one overseen by Simon & Schuster executives so to make sure there are no plotline slip-ups, just that this storyline only "officially" begins on the day after the last day of the last episode of the TV show, and therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the "official canon" that the show itself represents. See, the issue of what is or isn't "canon" among creative franchises has become a particularly thorny one in our current age, in that we now finally exist in a world where a growing amount of such franchises (think Marvel and DC, Star Trek and Star Wars) have become so huge and unwieldy, with so many story bits introduced over the decades by hundreds upon hundreds of unrelated creators, that the "official" story of what exactly is going on has become too impossibly huge to handle, leading to a growing amount of schisms and paradoxes and outright clashing details within what's supposed to be one giant fictional universe that all these stories live inside. For one notorious example, think about how the Klingons of the original 1960s Star Trek TV show looked like little more than particularly swarthy humans, while the Klingons of the much higher-budgeted '80s motion pictures have the ridged foreheads and dog-like teeth that we now commonly think of when we think of these aliens, despite the fact that these Klingons are actually supposed to be newer than the ones seen in the original series. So what supposedly happened in Star Trek's fictional history to cause such a radical change in their appearance? Well, turns out that several Star Trek novel authors have tackled this question themselves over the years, positing everything from genetic engineering gone wrong to a natural virus on the Klingon homeworld; but since many of these explanations directly contradict each other, and thus would lead to heated debates at next year's Coniconicon, Paramount declared that none of them were the official answer, and that in fact we wouldn't get an official one until all the way in 2005, during the episodes "Affliction" and "Divergence" from the much-maligned 9/11-era Star Trek show Enterprise. (The official answer? Spoiler alert: KHAAAAAAAAAAANNN!!!!!1!!) These kinds of canon trip-ups can get diabolically convoluted at the mature stage of these kinds of ongoing franchises, and the companies in charge of them have tackled the problem in various ways. DC Comics, for example, famously did a complete reboot of their entire universe in 2011, declaring all former storylines null and void and allowing their creatives to build the company's iconic characters back up again from scratch, even if those stories sometimes clashed with what had gone on before; while Disney, after buying the Star Wars universe from George Lucas in 2012 for 6.3 gajillion dollars, simply killed the franchise's expanded universe altogether, especially apropos here since the studio was planning on enlarging their "official" universe to eventually be the size of most other franchises' non-canon universes. But Star Trek, as far as I can tell, has largely tried to find an uneasy balance between full embrace and full disavowal, greenlighting some series that don't have even a single thing to do with any of the original TV shows or movies (such as the popular Corps of Engineers titles, for example, in which a group of Indiana-Jones-type super-nerds fly around the universe helping with such thorny problems as boobytrapped alien space stations and pulling starships out of plasma clouds), while also churning out an endless series of stories that are all set within the initial runs of the various original television shows, as if we were watching an off-day adventure that happened on the starship on, like, a Tuesday in season 4 when the cameras weren't officially rolling. This is why nothing is usually ever allowed to happen in non-canon novels that would somehow permanently affect the characters, effectively returning the stories back to television's "you can watch these in any order during syndication, it doesn't matter" roots (especially important in these kinds of situations, where so many new readers are going to be finding their way into these books through completely random titles found out of order at yard sales and used bookstores); but this is also one of the most notoriously negative aspects of non-canon novels' sketchy reputation, that they essentially feel like fan-service time-killers and not "real" literature, pleasant and breezy stories in which nothing's at stake and nothing ever truly happens, the entire universe set back to zero the moment you finish the last page. So it's to their big credit, then (or perhaps the credit of former Simon & Schuster executive Marco Palmieri, who seems to have been in charge of this line while he was there, and is now over at the great science-fiction publisher Tor), that the company ended up greenlighting the concept of these "relaunch" novels, in which the books in this series pretty much pretend that they're the missing eighth, ninth, tenth seasons and beyond of the original TV series, picking up where the show left off but now with the opportunity to kill off characters, destroy major settings, and all the other fun stuff you can do in "official canon" projects. And destruction is indeed in mind here in this initial relaunch "duology" (which is Simon & Schuster's polite way of saying, "We don't want to release a 600-page Star Trek novel and scare everyone off, so here they are split into two"), by our old friend SD Perry of Section 31: Cloak, the very first Star Trek novel I ever read. Here Perry really relishes her role as the initial creator of a brand-new Star Trek status quo, giving us a story not just with the kind of sweeping scope of a full-length feature, but one that would literally take a six-part special streaming series at Netflix to fully tell in its entirety. It's an interesting set of choices she makes here, including leaving Odo back with his people at the Great Link (or at least for now), and unexpectedly filling his Chief of Security role back at the station with the Next Generation character Ro Laren, the first character to actually introduce the Bajoran race to Star Trek fans, way back in 1991, and who was initially supposed to play the Kira Nerys role when Paramount producers were first setting up the DS9 shooting schedule (an idea that was nixed after actor Michelle Forbes decided she didn't want to get bogged down by a seven-year commitment). Perry also introduces some fascinating new characters, including the franchise's first-ever regular Jem'Hadar, who were the villainous aliens' "muscle" in the original TV show and therefore never existed much beyond 2D sketchiness in that version, so makes them particularly ripe for conceptual expanding in these novels. She also embraces and stretches out some of the very last story developments that initially happened during the final episodes of the show, such as Dax's new host Ezri getting into a romantic relationship with the station's head doctor, Julian Bashir, or our favorite duplicitous Cardassian spy Elim Garak now officially being welcomed back to his homeworld as their new Federation ambassador. Plus she sets up lots of complicated problems that are sure to leave the characters busy for at least the next dozen books, including but not limited to the entire bottom half of the freaking space station essentially being rendered unusable, not to mention the "Avatar" religious prediction of the book's title, in which it's prophesied that the kid Ben Sisko had with Kasidy Yates, before entering the wormhole as the TV show's final climax, is destined to usher in a new golden age of peace and harmony on nearby Bajor, but only after ten thousand Bajorans are willing to commit suicide in order to bring about this new golden age. So all in all, an extremely satisfying start to this new relaunch series, which as far as I can tell encompasses some 40 to 50 novels when it all is said and done, and complexly ties in to yet other persistent plotlines from other series within the Simon & Schuster Star Trek non-canon novels, such as the franchise-spanning "Typhon Pact" event of 2011-12 and its follow-up "The Fall" series from 2013. (Also not clear is whether novels in this relaunch plotline are still being currently published or not; the Wikipedia page has no more of them listed after 2017, although that could always be because the Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since 2017, while what you would think would be an exhaustive section of the Simon & Schuster website devoted to this subject doesn't even include a full list of all the titles that already exist, much less any information about any of them or what future titles will bring. I've CC:ed author Perry to this review over at her Twitter page, so with any luck maybe she'll jump on here with a comment and get us up to speed on what exactly is going on with these relaunch novels, as well as correct any misinformation I might have here about how they came about. I think we'd all find it fascinating to know, for example, how much of these novel plots are determined by the editor at Simon & Schuster, and how much is made up by each author.) A lot of reading ahead of me over the next year; but given how pleasant I've found these books so far, it's a challenge I look forward to. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Sep 2021
not set
|
Sep 01, 2021
|
Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B000FC0U5I
| 3.85
| 846
| Jun 2001
| unknown
|
liked it
|
2021 reads, #57. This is book #4 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happ
2021 reads, #57. This is book #4 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happens to be my first-ever read in my life of any of the now 850 Star Trek non-canon novels that exist, which gave me an excuse to write in much more general terms on the subject in my review of book #1, S.D. Perry's TOS-set Cloak, for those who might be interested in getting a primer on the topic. Following chronologically by show, that made book #2 set during the Enterprise of The Next Generation, Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels' disappointing Rogue (my review); then book #3 set among the cast of Deep Space Nine, David Weddle and Jeffrey Lang's excellent Abyss (my review); and then today's concluding* book #4 set within the milieu of Voyager, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Shadow. Smith and Rusch, a longtime married couple, are busy and beloved veterans of genre publishing (between the two of them they've written over 300 novels at this point, as well as running their own small press, and collectively they've either won or been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Stoker, Endeavour, Sidewise, and World Fantasy awards), so I wasn't worried this time about whether the quality of the writing itself was going to be good, which it indeed was. But there were two big problems with this novel, one not really their fault but one very much their fault, which is what drops the score down to three stars today. First, as I mentioned during my write-up of Rogue, it disappoints me when authors in these circumstances have an opportunity to build out a scope for a story that's limited only by the imaginations of their readers, but choose instead to limit their stories to the same kinds of small, budget-conscious scopes that TV writers are forced to deal with, when confronted with the realities of actually having to adapt a script into a finished television episode; and that's exactly what Smith and Rusch do here, coming up with an admittedly interesting idea but then doing very little with it beyond what would normally fit within a 44-page television screenplay, which made me shrug my shoulders at the end of it and mutter, "Meh, whatever, I guess this was fine." And then the other problem, the much bigger one, is that the milieu of Voyager simply makes it difficult to shoehorn in a Section 31 plot; but since the original idea behind this four-book series was to set a Section 31 story within each of what at the time was the four Star Trek television shows that currently existed, Smith and Rusch are forced to work in one here in about the most awkward way I've ever seen a plot development get crammed into a setting that doesn't want to naturally accept it. See, for those who don't know, the big gimmick behind the original Voyager TV show was that it was an only average ship among the Federation fleet but that goes through an extraordinary experience, a MacGuffin-like magic-wand waving during the show's pilot that ends up sending them to the exact opposite edge of the Milky Way galaxy, where it would take them literally hundreds of years to get back to Earth even at light speed; so the seven-year show itself was about this admittedly so-so Starfleet crew that was forced to grow up and become a one-ship navy unto itself, since there was no Picard-led cavalry to swoop in and save the day if they found themselves in over their heads. That made for an interesting show, but it also makes it nearly impossible to inject a plot device like finding out suddenly that one of the crew members has been a member all along of a shadowy CIA-like "dirty tricks" wing of Starfleet that the general public doesn't even know exists, nor does it provide any justification for why said dirty-tricks agent might end up performing their dirty tricks way out on the ass-end opposite edge of the universe where it doesn't matter, which makes Smith and Rausch's noble but flawed attempt to do so here just a barely plausible one that never quite ends up working. That's not necessarily terrible, but it's not necessarily great either, resulting in a middle-of-the-road reading experience that is getting a middle-of-the-road score from me today. It should be kept in mind by any of you in the future who are thinking of taking on this four-book series yourself. *But of course, as I'm quickly discovering, there is no such thing as "over for good" within the money-printing world of franchise-based non-canon novels; so while these four Section 31 books I've been reviewing over the last several weeks were for many years the definitive start and end of all Star Trek novels on the subject, about 15 years later the powers-that-be decided to authorize yet two more books devoted to Section 31 machinations, 2014's Disavowed and 2017's Control, both by David Mack. I'll be tackling those next, so keep your eye out for those reviews next week. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 17, 2021
not set
|
Aug 17, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0671774832
| 9780671774837
| 0671774832
| 3.86
| 1,265
| Jul 2001
| Jul 2001
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #56. This is book #3 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happ
2021 reads, #56. This is book #3 of my four-book read this month of the "Section 31" series of Star Trek "non-canon" novels, which by coincidence happens to be my first-ever read in my life of any of the now 850 Star Trek non-canon novels that exist, which gave me an excuse to write in much more general terms on the subject in my review of book #1, S.D. Perry's TOS-set Cloak, for those who might be interested in getting a primer on the topic. Following chronologically by show, that made book #2 set during the Enterprise of The Next Generation, Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels' disappointing Rogue (my review); while this third book is set among the characters of Deep Space Nine, which happens to be my personal favorite among all the Star Trek shows that now exist, as well as the show that happened to invent the idea of Section 31 to begin with. And the great news here is that, after three books, I've finally hit upon one that is fully firing on all cylinders, a fantastic example of why people become fans of non-canon novels in the first place. For one basic thing, for example -- and I didn't realize how important this issue would be until I actually started reading franchise-related books -- this book assumes on page one that you wouldn't have bought it in the first place if you weren't already a fan of the franchise it expands; and so unlike the other two Star Trek novels I've read so far, this one doesn't bother pounding you over the head with simplistic reminders of the main characters' traits ("'As a robot, I fail to understand your point,' said Data robotically, because he's a robot and that's how robots act when something confuses a robot, which Data is"), but rather takes their characterizations as a given and then moves on to new territory right in the first chapter. Then for another example, the authors of this book understand that they're actually writing a novel, one that will never be adapted into a TV episode and so therefore doesn't have to worry about the budget and FX restraints that a TV show would have to contend with; and so unlike the previous two books, this one's storyline has a grand and sweeping scope that's more akin to a hundred-million-dollar full-length movie, which as a fan of the original TV series is an exciting and pleasurable thing to see, all of these characters and situations I already love so much but now reimagined as an entry from the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the like. Most importantly, though, the book is simply written with the quality and complexity of high-tier science-fiction, belying the "freelancer ghetto" reputation that non-canon franchise novels (somewhat justifiably) have, a book that could stand on its own just as a cracking story whether or not there was already a famous TV show associated with it. Abyss is as much a character study as it is a space-opera potboiler, taking the Trekkie concept of a "mini-Khan" to do a dark and meandering exploration of the ethics behind genetic engineering, how the subject might influence the relationship between those who have been genetically engineered and those who haven't, whether half-animals who have been specifically bred to be super-soldiers could ever develop a sense of humanity under such circumstances, the ramifications of a high-profile hero within a religious society who is suddenly shunned by that society's religious elite, and a lot more fascinating food for thought, a book I would've loved even if I had never watched an episode of Deep Space Nine in my life, high praise indeed for an entire book line that only exists in the first place precisely to sell to existing Star Trek fans and no one else. Of course, after finishing the book and doing a little research, I realized one of the big reasons that this turned out so excellently; and that's because one of its co-authors was David Weddle, who with his partner Bradley Thompson was not only on the writing staff of the original DS9 TV show (including writing the first-ever Section 31 script), but has gone on to pen episodes of the Peabody-winning Battlestar Galactica reboot, Apple+'s darkly complex alt-history show For All Mankind (where he also serves as one of the executive producers), Guillermo del Toro's The Strain, and a lot more. (For what it's worth, the other co-author is Jeffrey Lang, a seven-time Star Trek novelist who seems to be much more in the "freelancer ghetto" vein of typical non-canon authors, and who today officially enters my "Read More Of" list that apparently all Star Trek novel fans maintain while making their way through the more than 850 titles that now exist.) After starting these Star Trek books with some trepidation, it's exciting to finally confirm that some of these novels can actually be amazing, even if (I suspect) that's only going to be once in a blue moon; that's just enough to keep me motivated to reading more of them, starting later today with book #4 of this particular series, the Voyager-set Shadow by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. Keep an eye out for my review of that here sometime next week. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
2
|
not set
not set
|
Aug 13, 2021
not set
|
Aug 13, 2021
|
Paperback
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 4.16
|
did not like it
|
Apr 04, 2022
not set
|
Apr 04, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
Mar 15, 2022
|
Mar 15, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.33
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 29, 2022
not set
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.83
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.54
|
Jan 28, 2022
|
Jan 28, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.37
|
did not like it
|
Jan 08, 2022
not set
|
Jan 08, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
it was ok
|
Dec 18, 2021
not set
|
Dec 18, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.87
|
really liked it
|
Jul 06, 2023
|
Nov 29, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
it was ok
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.16
|
it was amazing
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
Nov 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.89
|
did not like it
|
Oct 18, 2021
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
it was amazing
|
Oct 18, 2021
not set
|
Oct 18, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.57
|
did not like it
|
Oct 17, 2021
not set
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.77
|
really liked it
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
Oct 17, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.70
|
it was ok
|
Sep 13, 2021
not set
|
Sep 13, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.38
|
it was ok
|
Sep 06, 2021
Sep 06, 2021
not set
not set
|
Sep 06, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.01
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 2021
not set
|
Sep 01, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.94
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 2021
not set
|
Sep 01, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.85
|
liked it
|
Aug 17, 2021
not set
|
Aug 17, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.86
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 13, 2021
not set
|
Aug 13, 2021
|
Loading...
