Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Desperation Morale Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsAfter trying Congress of Vienna, Mark and I decided to try out Renegade Legion: Centurion. I’d been interested in it since it came out in ’89, and got a second edition copy around ’94; I had started priming the miniatures[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The third Picard novel finishes up the initial run of prequels of the series (the fifth novel is a fourth prequel…). And it is easily the best of the lot. Following in the trend of The Last Best Hope, I[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Book two of The Expanse has the same outline structure. Bad things happen, a man becomes very single-focused obsessed with finding a missing person, he runs into James Holden, mayhem ensues. Structurally, it is different. We do change viewpoint characters,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second Star Trek: Picard novel is more successful as a story, but this is at the price of it being less successful as a prequel. For those who kept up with post-series novels over the last twenty years (I[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Julia Ecklar wrote a number of short stories (in Analog, and a few anthologies), but no novels, which might explain why this Star Trek novel is more of a short story collection. However, she did later write other TOS novels[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the same length as the other New Frontiers books, but it feels just a bit meatier, and more than just a longer episode. Also, the subplots feel more natural to the overall plot this time. There’s still odd[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So, the New Frontiers series settles down into a series at this point. There’s some rough patches. It’s still a shorter novel, and feels more like an expanded episode than a novel. Part of that… I think is that it[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alexander Key definitely has a ‘type’, and this book is straight in his favored genre. Boy’s adventure with a super-powered (generally psionic) protagonist. Here we have a post-apocalyptic setting, where destructive weapons have reshaped the earth, drowning almost all the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The C plot of an early TNG episode has Picard practicing a formal greeting for the Jarada. They’re very touchy about protocol, very insular, and this is the first chance in a while for the Federation to try negotiating with[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is the first book in Ben Bova’s “Grand Tour” series—chronologically at least. I get the idea it was one of the later ones written, but I haven’t looked deeply into that. Each one was written about a particular location[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…