Day 286: Just lounging around between the end of the workday and dinner. Got lots done today, but as with many workdays, it wasn’t terribly photogenic.
Photos
Photos, usually taken by me. May be mirrored or imported from other services.
Year 50 Day 285
Day 285: Y’all can have your superb owl. We woke up, had breakfast, went back to sleep for a while, and then after some minor home chores, made ourselves some treats by dipping things in chocolate (Ritz crackers and pretzels, to be specific). Now we’re going to find something non-superb owl-ish to doze in front of for a while.
📚 Clarkesworld Issue 209 edited by Neil Clarke
13/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Standouts this month are “The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin” by Zohar Jacobs, “Kardashev’s Palimpsest” by David Goodman, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim, and “Lonely Ghosts” by Meghan Feldman.
Year 50 Day 284
Day 284: Back at the DoubleTree for today’s Norwescon planning meeting. In addition to much better weather than last month, we had heat in the meeting room as well! Much more comfortable all around. And since we usually meet on the top floor of the hotel’s tower, the elevators have a really nice view of the hotel property.
Year 50 Day 283
Day 283: Just an uneventful work day, so I’ll show off a piece of art I got from Shari a number of years ago.
Year 50 Day 282
Day 282: After much of the day had a lot of noise from an event going on in the conference room on this floor, the quiet of the afternoon after they left was almost eerie.
📚 The Prisoner of Vega by Sharon Lerner and Christopher Cerf
12/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
Another late-70s children’s book. The Enterprise arrives at a planet to sign a trade treaty, only to find the planet captured by Klingons! Only apparently the illustrator had never watched Star Trek; the main character likenesses are shaky, and the Klingons look hilariously unlike Klingons (and much more like 1950s Sci-Fi villains).
📚 The Truth Machine by Sharon Lerner and Christopher Cerf
11/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
A late-70s children’s Star Trek adventure. The Enterprise receives an SOS from a lifeless planet, only to find a crowded city being attacked by dinosaurs – or is something more sinister afoot? All the early-reader excitement you can fit in 41 illustrated pages. ;)
Year 50 Day 281
Day 281: Just a little light reading before going to sleep. Read both of the two Star Trek children’s books (exclusively produced for libraries in 1977) in my Christmas haul tonight; they were just as good as you’d expect. As long as your expectations weren’t very high, at least. One of them at least had decent artwork; I’m not sure the illustrator of the other had ever actually seen Star Trek.
📚 Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds
10/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
This is not a good Star Trek book. The Enterprise, with a crew at risk of what’s essentially violent cabin fever, is dispatched to the Horatius system to investigate a distress call. There, they find three planets: one with a stereotypical Native American civilization (“backward savages”, of course), one with a mid-20th century American civilization, and one with space Nazis. Oh, and there’s a “B story” involving a plague-infested rat loose on the ship. So, no, as a Star Trek adventure, there’s not much to recommend it.
However: It’s the first officially licensed Star Trek novel, and therefore gets a bit of leeway…or at least recognition that the treklit landscape was far different (nonexistent, actually) in 1968 than it is today. Not really recommended unless you’re a collector, but if you are and can track it down (especially if you can find an original rather than the 1999 reprint), it’s a quick read and kind of fun to see where the print side of Trek began.
