Season Two is generally considered to be the worst of all the TNG seasons, and with good reason: there were some truly atrocious episodes. Of course, the Borg were introduced in Season Two, so it can’t be totally discounted.
Every time I read a YA novel, I wonder why all novels don’t move at the same pace. I’m not missing anything in the YA genre — the characters are just as developed, the action is just as action-y, and the story is just as engrossing. I just don’t have to slog through hundreds of extra pages of tangential plotlines and lovingly-rendered character descriptions to get to the good stuff.
And I think that adequately describes Allen Steele’s new YA sci-fi adventure, Apollo’s Outcasts, which will be published this November by Prometheus Books: for the most part, everything extraneous has been trimmed away, leaving a tightly-written, fast-paced novel that I quite enjoyed.
Yesterday, we looked at the exterior, engine room, and bridge of the new Enterprise. But the bridge wasn’t the only part of the ship where we spent a lot of time, even just on Deck One. Two other rooms were extremely important — although neither was the bathroom*.
One thing that we as Star Trek fans had to deal with was the idea that there was going to be an entirely new Enterprise on our screens. While the pause between the original series and the first film allowed the production designers and model-makers to put together an upgraded version of the Enterprise, after all this time — almost 100 years since TOS was supposed to occur — we were expecting something different.
Well, we got it.
Given how underwhelming most of the first ten episodes of TNG were, it’s a wonder the show didn’t get cancelled. Had it aired last year (instead of 25 years ago), it wouldn’t even have gotten past three airings. We’re lucky it started in 1987.
I find it hard to even remember how I felt, 25 years ago, sitting in the living room with my parents and waiting for Star Trek: The Next Generation to premiere. I’d seen some clips from the first episode courtesy of our VHS copy of The Voyage Home, but that was all I knew.
The day finally came. We tuned in WCIX. We waited for the news-at-eleven tease. And then…
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her continuing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Stretch. Snap. Zoom. Flash. And an era began.
I was exposed to Star Trek a lot as a child. It was something my father was into, and being a kid, I wanted to like the same cool stuff as my dad. So I got into wrestling, and The A-Team, and Knight Rider, and this old TV show that seemed to be on Channel 6 a lot called Star Trek. In it, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock traveled the galaxy, learning about stuff and getting into fights in their giant spaceship. It was cool, and even if it made me a bit of an outcast at school, so what? I still liked it.
And then, in 1987, my dad came home with the VHS tape of Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, which we’d seen in theaters the previous fall. Attached to the beginning was a trailer for a new version of the show called Star Trek: the Next Generation.
The following contains spoilers for Geist and Spectyr, the first two books in the series.
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Well, I finished reading Wrayth, the new novel by Philippa Ballantine.
I tried several different thematic ways to approach this review, but I had a lot of difficulty doing that. There’s a lot going on in this book, and I couldn’t really find any singular thing to tie it together because, the moment I thought I was on that path, things changed.
Let me explain.
I’ve only seen a few episodes of Sliders, and it’s been a while, but as far as I can remember the premise of the show was quasi-similar to Quantum Leap: a team of scientists slides sideways into an alternate version of Earth, does something that can be resolved in a 42-minute episode, and slides on. A quick check of Wikipedia tells me that I’m more or less on the money there.
And that kind of explains to me why parts of The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, felt vaguely familiar.
It’s not easy to come up with a new way to look at the zombie apocalypse. I mean, the topic’s pretty well mined at this point. Now, I’m not going to say that I’ve seen every single zombie apocalypse show, film, story, or musical, but I’ve heard about enough of them.
And I hadn’t heard of anything like Play Dead.
Play Dead is the story of the survivors of a zombie apocalypse in Miami, Florida. A short film made on-location, it follows this unlikely group of survivors as they escape the zombies, band together, and seek out a place where they can ride out the chaos until it ends.
Oh, yeah, and these survivors? They’re all dogs.