Star Trek

📚 Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonnano

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26/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Saavik-centric story, mostly set after the events of Star Trek IV, but with flashbacks to her youth. The first half of the book is mostly planetary exploration with a dash of mystery surrounding Saavik’s past; the latter half takes that mystery and becomes a somewhat odd spy story, with various disguised motivations. I found the latter half far less engaging than the first, but overall, I liked diving more into Saavik’s character and fleshing out some of the wider consequences of the Star Trek II/III/IV trilogy. Also, though not a comedic adventure, one brief mention of a character “stepping over a Thermian’s tentacles” in a bar did make me laugh out loud.

Me holding Unspoken Truth

📚 Cast No Shadow by James Swallow

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24/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set seven years after the events of Star Trek VI, this does a good job of fleshing out Valeris and exploring the motivations and rationale behind her actions. It also follows up on some of the practical and political fallout for the Klingon empire of the events in the film. Definitely one of the stronger Trek novels I’ve read.

Me holding Cast No Shadow

📚 Allegiance in Exile by David R. George III

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19/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Not quite what I expected. There’s a pretty standard Trek adventure as a framing story (with a surprising connection to post-TOS Trek that I’m curious about), but it’s really more focused on Sulu and his having to deal with a tragic event. Not bad, just be aware the back cover blurb is a very small part of the actual plot.

Michael holding Allegiance in Exile

📚 The High Country by John Jackson Miller

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16/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A fun, light romp of an adventure, rather perfect for the first Strange New Worlds book. Several Enterprise crew are stranded on a world where electronics don’t work and technology is tightly controlled. This results in a mishmash of the Wild West, mountainside castles, tall ships, mysterious aurora, and steampunk-ish clockwork creations. All with a welcome dash of humor throughout. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Michael holding The High Country

The Enstickering

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A couple months ago, I replaced my old hand-me-down laptop (a 10-year old MacBook Pro) with a shiny new M2 MacBook Air — my first brand-new laptop. And while it is very pretty, and it was tempting to leave it as-is…after a couple months of dithering, I decided to go ahead and personalize it with some of the stickers I’ve had sitting in a drawer for ages.

After all, what’s the point of keeping stickers in a drawer? There’s always the “I’ll put these on something…someday…” thought, and finally, “someday” is here.

A black Apple MacBook Air with seven stickers applied.

  • In pride of place, dead center, covering the embedded shiny Apple logo, is a vintage rainbow Apple sticker. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ve been hanging on to this, but it has got to be close to a couple decades since Apple went all monochrome. I have one of these left, too.

  • Top left: “I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed.” From R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties. I have the t-shirt, too. And it’s true!

  • Center left: Gothic Pride Seattle, repping the local SeaGoth community.

  • Bottom left: “Computer, end program.” How do you turn this damn holodeck off, anyway? Don’t remember the source.

  • Top center: “Creepy but Careful” by AmberStone, received as a bonus goodie when I got some of their vaccine-supporting enamel pins early in the pandemic.

  • Center right: “Highly illogical.” Yes, Spock, we know. Don’t remember the source.

  • Bottom right: Doom! Didn’t initially remember the source, but it has a URL for Chance of Doom, a webcomic by Robert Tritthardt, also part of the local SeaGoth community, so I probably got it from him at one point or another, possibly along with a Mercury shirt or hoodie or with one of the Writhe and Shine books I have.

📚 Line of Fire by Peter David

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4/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A short, YA story following Worf at Starfleet Academy. It feels like the first three books (of which this is the middle book) were written as a full-length (~300 page) book and then split into thirds; it references events from its predecessor, and ends with a “To be continued…”. This is the first of this series of Trek books I’d come across, and while not being a full story, it’s fine for what it is.

Really, the weirdest part is that the primary Starfleet Academy instructor is a Professor Trump. Rather unfortunate choice of character name, that one.

Michael holding LIne of Fire

📚 The Children of Kings by David Stern

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3/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A pre-TOS adventure with Captain Pike just a few months into his captaincy of the Enterprise with Spock and Number One under his command. A Klingon/Orion/Starfleet dustup gets a little confusing trying to keep track of the players and motivations, with a somewhat out-of-left-field twist at the end that seemed a little too convenient for my tastes.

One amusing bit: The author’s endnote indicates that he thought of this as something of a prequel to the 2009 Star Trek rebook (so still in the Prime universe), though he still pictured Jeffrey Hunter as Pike rather than Bruce Greenwood; meanwhile, having recently enjoyed the first season of Strange New Worlds, I found myself more often picturing Anson Mount as Pike. The more actors we have inhabiting key roles, the more the mental visualizations start to shift as you read, I guess.

Michael holding The Children of Kings

Nic Cage is a Trekkie

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Here’s a fun snippet of an interview between Nic Cage and Kevin Polowy, where Nic definitively declares himself a Trekkie:

Video originally posted to Twitter by Kevin; I downloaded it to add subtitles. Transcript below as well.

…speaking of Massive Weight, the last time I talked to Pedro, he said he wanted to recruit you into the Star Wars fold. How do you feel about this? Has there been any movement on this?

I’m — No, is the answer, and I’m, I’m not really down. I’m a Trekkie, man, I’m on the Star Trek, I’m on the Enterprise, that’s where I roll.

Oh! Okay — I didn’t know this about you.

Yeah, well, this is the first interview of the new year, you might at well get something that no one knows.

But that’s a fact. I grew up watching Shatner, I thought Pine was terrific in the movies, I think the movies are outstanding, and I like the political and the sociological —

To me what science fiction is really all about, and why it’s such an important genre, is that is really where you can say whatever you want, however you feel, you put it on a different planet, you put it in a different time, in the future, and you can, without people just jumping on you. You can really express your thoughts, like Orwell, or whomever, in the science fiction format. And Star Trek really embraced that, I thought they got into some serious stuff.

This is a great nugget of information, and now we have to make that happen, we’re gonna put this out to the internet: Nic Cage for Star Trek, 2023. It’s gotta happen.

But I’m not, I’m not in the Star Wars family, I’m in the Star Trek family.

Got it, got it. We’ll put it in the record. I’ll break the news to Pedro for you.

Okay, thank you.