star trek

Trek has been part of my life since I was an infant. I have bookcases full of Trek books. One of my tattoos is the Vulcan calligraphy for “kol-ut-shan” (IDIC). This is my home fandom.

Living Memory by Christopher L. Bennett

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69/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A mysterious and dangerous astral phenomenon threatens the Earth, and Spock, Uhura, and Chekov must try to solve a mystery that ends up being tied to Uhura’s forgotten past. Meanwhile, Kirk, overseeing Starfleet Academy, has to deal with some problematic new cadets. The Kirk-centric B-blot is okay, mostly interesting for fleshing out more of Kirk’s time between the films. The primary plot is more interesting, especially as it picks up the thread of how Uhura was affected by her loss of memory during the Nomad incident, something never (or very rarely) explored. That part of the story I very much enjoyed.

Me holding Living Memory

A Contest of Principles by Greg Cox

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67/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one was a particularly interesting and on-the-nose bit of “exploring today’s issues through SF”. Published in 2020 (and so, assumedly, written in 2019), the Enterprise is called into to observe the voting process for a planet having its first democratic elections. The contest is between a hardline conservative near-fascist military general whose followers use intimidation and assault, and a liberal reformist challenger who (minor spoiler) eventually steps down after a controversy and turns their candidacy over to a younger candidate. There’s a separate, more standard Trek adventure where Spock has to try to rescue McCoy and Chapel from other planets in the system, but reading the primary political plot just over a week before our election (between a hardline conservative fascist and a more liberal challenger who took over from the prior candidate) was an interesting experience. I can only hope we handle our election as successfully as this fictional planet does.

Me holding A Contest of Principles

No Man’s Land by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

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64/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Somehow I missed the bit in the blurb telling me this was a script for an audio play, so that was a bit of a surprise, though not a bad one. Short and quick, this follows Seven and Raffi just after season one of Picard as they deal with saving artifacts and a senile historian from a Romulan…though it’s really more about the first steps of their relationship. Fun to read, and I’m somewhat tempted to find the audio production to see how some of the more visual elements of the script translate.

Me holding No Man’s Land

The Higher Frontier by Christopher L. Bennett

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57/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set between TMP and TWoK, this adventure primarily ties together three threads: The Medusans as introduced in TOS, the Aenar as introduced in ENT, and the New Humans as introduced in Roddenberry’s novelization of TMP. Those three threads are woven together with elements, references, and in-jokes from throughout the Star Trek screen and literary universes, as Bennett so often does in his books. It’s also interesting when reading these more recently written books that are able to find ways to drop in references to the newer shows. All in all, another good adventure with some really neat approaches to tying together previously unrelated parts of Trek history in unexpected ways.

Me holding The Higher Frontier

The Captain’s Oath by Christopher L. Bennett

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45/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set over the course of a few years, just before and after Kirk takes command of the Enterprise. An interesting take on Kirk, not quite the captain he will become, still somewhat finding his footing. Plus some good pointed commentary on refugees and the assumptions that get made when they arrive in a new place.

Me holding The Captain's Oath

Star Trek Discovery Technobabble Time

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Okay, now that Discovery is done, I have some questions for the technobabble Trek geeks out there.

Brief background: The plausible tech is a large part of what has always drawn me to Trek. I’m the kid who was buying blueprints and memorizing technical manuals.

And I have to admit, this is one of the areas where Discovery has been a little shaky for me, particularly in the final three seasons after the jump to the far future.

I get that it was a jump from already futuristic tech to really futuristic tech, and it wouldn’t have been very interesting if everything just worked essentially the same way. But so much of it just ends up toeing or actually crossing the line from science fiction to Star Wars-style space fantasy magic that it kept bugging me.

So what I’m hoping for is some good old-fashioned technobabble “but make it plausible” speculation on some of the new tech.

  1. How do the transporters know where people want to go? They just tap the badge and “poof” they’re there, but there is never (that I’m remembering) any sort of direct instruction given to the system. The best I can come up with right now is that the badges must be constantly monitoring and processing every bit of audio (and possibly video? and more?) around so that they can infer from the immediately preceding conversation where the user wants to go and how many other nearby people should be transported with them. And that’s not creepy or a privacy concern at all! ;)

    (Yes, from a real-world storytelling perspective, tap-and-poof is much simpler than constantly having to say “beam me to [here]”; it’s basically the same reason nobody in films or TV says “goodbye” at the end of a phone conversation, and instead both parties just know when they’re done and hang up. But it bothers me!)

  2. What’s the rationale/advantage to ships that consist of multiple pieces floating near each other, presumably held together with force fields? I can see the idea as an extension of Voyager’s nacelle reconfiguration (which, to be honest, I don’t remember if that was ever explained officially or unofficially; did that change the warp bubble shape or something for greater efficiency?). But I’m unsure if the practicality, especially when it comes to critical pieces of the ship like, oh, the engines. Not only is there now no easy way to physically get to those sections of the ship through Jefferies tubes for maintenance or emergency repairs (though tap-and-poof I suppose accounts for that…as long as you’re not having any problems with the transporters, at least, and we all know how reliable they are), but how does the warp propulsion system even work with disconnected nacelles? Since pre- and post-Burn warp technology still used dilithium crystals, I assume the basics are still more or less the same (matter/antimatter streams combined within the dilithium crystal to create the power stream that’s split and sent to the engines to create the warp field bubble, with actual propulsion through both warp and normal space handled by the impulse engine), so how does the post-dilithium power stream get to nacelles that are physically disconnected from the ship?

There may be other bits, but those are the two that have really stood out to me. They just feel too much like the writers/producers saying “if we do this it’s neat and futuristic and cool” without putting much thought into any in-universe rationale. It moves Star Trek from science fiction to space fantasy, and that’s just not quite as interesting for me…but I also believe that we’re a big ol’ bunch’a nerds who have spent decades proving that we can retcon and explain anything if we really want to, so I’m sure these are no exceptions. :)

Elusive Salvation by Dayton Ward

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40/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A fun standalone-but-sequel-of-sorts to Ward’s earlier From History’s Shadow, with time travel, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, and lots of fun nods to Trek timeline shenanigans, both canon and literary, including Greg Cox’s Rise and Fall of Khan Noonian Singh books. Kirk just can’t keep away from the 20th century….

Me holding Elusive Salvation