29 Days of Star Trek Meme: Day 17
Feb. 22nd, 2012 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofeleven17 - Have you read any of the books? If so, which ones?
Well, as I said on an earlier question, I actually started reading the novels before I’d watched much of the actual show. The best ones – or at least the most interesting ones – are the early TOS novels, written before most of the canon had been set in stone, and, more importantly, during a period where Paramount really didn’t seem to be paying attention to what wacky stuff was being published.
Once TNG started coming out, the novels become a lot blander due to increasing publisher oversight and a refusal to allow anything that might even potentially contradict something in the show. More recent novels seemed to be breaking free of that straightjacket a bit, but unfortunately then took a wrong turn into increasingly convoluted internal continuity, endless crossovers and galaxy-threatening disasters, and utterly senselessly killing off major characters…
Worth picking up are Diane Duane’s novels; her Romulan series gets a lot of attention, and justifiably so, but my favourites books by her are actually her TNG novels. ‘Dark Mirror’ is great fun, featuring, among other things, an excerpt from the mirror-verse version of The Merchant of Venice (‘The quality of mercy must be earned…’), and presents a far more interesting take on the mirror universe than Ds9’s interpretation. ‘Intellivore’ is a wonderfully creepy horror story; both her TNG novels really emphasis the emptiness and hostility of space.
Barbara Hambly’s two TOS novels introduced me to one of my all-time favourite authors. ‘Ishmael’ is, of all things, a crossover with a short-lived western/comedy ‘Here Come the Brides’; the entire novel seems to exist purely due to Mark Lenard appearing in both shows. It features cameos from everyone from Han Solo to the Doctor (two different incarnations) to Paladin from ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’. In other words, it’s pure crack-fic; but Hambly writes it in a way that it’s entirely possible to miss the swarms of references to other series, and to let it work as an extremely well-written time travel story.
Her other Trek novel, ‘Ghost-Walker’ isn’t – to my knowledge – based on anything else, but it is an excellent story in its own right, with a well-developed alien culture at its heart and an extremely tense atmosphere. Interestingly, at one point Hambly has Kirk survive a telepathic attack by storing his consciousness in the Enterprise’s main computer – shades of Callista?
L.A. Graf’s novels are also some of my favourites, for giving more of the spotlight to Chekov, Sulu and Uhura. Their Ds9 novel ‘Time’s Enemy’ is also extremely good; the highlight of the ‘Invasion’ crossover series, despite – or perhaps because – it all but ignores the original premise of the series…
Ds9 also has the excellent “A Stitch in Time”, essentially Garak’s autobiography, written, appropriately enough, by Andrew Robinson. The Ds9 reboot novels that picked up from the end of the series were also fairly strong, at least for the first few until sudden changes in editors led to the schedule being increasingly erratic…
Well, as I said on an earlier question, I actually started reading the novels before I’d watched much of the actual show. The best ones – or at least the most interesting ones – are the early TOS novels, written before most of the canon had been set in stone, and, more importantly, during a period where Paramount really didn’t seem to be paying attention to what wacky stuff was being published.
Once TNG started coming out, the novels become a lot blander due to increasing publisher oversight and a refusal to allow anything that might even potentially contradict something in the show. More recent novels seemed to be breaking free of that straightjacket a bit, but unfortunately then took a wrong turn into increasingly convoluted internal continuity, endless crossovers and galaxy-threatening disasters, and utterly senselessly killing off major characters…
Worth picking up are Diane Duane’s novels; her Romulan series gets a lot of attention, and justifiably so, but my favourites books by her are actually her TNG novels. ‘Dark Mirror’ is great fun, featuring, among other things, an excerpt from the mirror-verse version of The Merchant of Venice (‘The quality of mercy must be earned…’), and presents a far more interesting take on the mirror universe than Ds9’s interpretation. ‘Intellivore’ is a wonderfully creepy horror story; both her TNG novels really emphasis the emptiness and hostility of space.
Barbara Hambly’s two TOS novels introduced me to one of my all-time favourite authors. ‘Ishmael’ is, of all things, a crossover with a short-lived western/comedy ‘Here Come the Brides’; the entire novel seems to exist purely due to Mark Lenard appearing in both shows. It features cameos from everyone from Han Solo to the Doctor (two different incarnations) to Paladin from ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’. In other words, it’s pure crack-fic; but Hambly writes it in a way that it’s entirely possible to miss the swarms of references to other series, and to let it work as an extremely well-written time travel story.
Her other Trek novel, ‘Ghost-Walker’ isn’t – to my knowledge – based on anything else, but it is an excellent story in its own right, with a well-developed alien culture at its heart and an extremely tense atmosphere. Interestingly, at one point Hambly has Kirk survive a telepathic attack by storing his consciousness in the Enterprise’s main computer – shades of Callista?
L.A. Graf’s novels are also some of my favourites, for giving more of the spotlight to Chekov, Sulu and Uhura. Their Ds9 novel ‘Time’s Enemy’ is also extremely good; the highlight of the ‘Invasion’ crossover series, despite – or perhaps because – it all but ignores the original premise of the series…
Ds9 also has the excellent “A Stitch in Time”, essentially Garak’s autobiography, written, appropriately enough, by Andrew Robinson. The Ds9 reboot novels that picked up from the end of the series were also fairly strong, at least for the first few until sudden changes in editors led to the schedule being increasingly erratic…