January 2021: This cover is bad (like so many Star Trek books for some reason), but The Lives of Dax is a rad anthology. It’s fans-only for sure and the insight into each of Dax’s lives is a cool idea.
S.D. Perry knocked her two stories out of the park. (“Rad” and “cool” surely capture the essence of these authors’ work.)
February 2021: Left Hand of Destiny is an epic on the scale of Lord of the Rings featuring Martok, my favorite Klingon (sorry, Worf). For that reason alone it’s worth reading, but the authors do good work in further poking the bear that is Klingon politics.
April 2021: And A Stitch in Time is a Godfather-like exploration of the devout man’s fall from grace. It removes the vale that is central to Garak but it’s worth exploring after watching the TV show.
July 2021: Taking a side road through short fiction (my favorite trips) with Prophecy and Change. I like that these books open the tracks for more philosophical and metaphysical exploration of these characters.
January 2022: The Avatar duology from S.D. Perry is phenomenal! I love the focus on Kira as commander of the station and that Bajoran faith and religion continue to play a vital role.
As a post-war trauma narrative, it’s also fascinating to see them deal with their feelings in the aftermath.
March 2022: Millennium:
The Fall of Terok Nor – Classic setting aboard DS9, I’m with you.
The War of the Prophets – Holy shit, that’s dark.
Inferno – Fun time travel shenanigans. Wraps up too neatly after traumatic events but these characters do have to get back to season 6 of the show.
June 2022: This cover for a collection of short stories makes me deeply uncomfortable. Beyond that, I really have to look at the publication year of 2004 to try and understand why they thought this would be a good idea. It may be intriguing to see what various characters were doing during the Dominion War arc of Deep Space Nine, but this book’s jingoism is rough.
August 2022: The Nexus is a fascinating artifact of 90s Star Trek, written by actors of a TV show and performed as their characters from that show, but not official in any way. But I liked it, a kind of resolution to unresolved moments from the TV show.
August 2022: A neat little adventure, although it’s part of a series and many characters lack development that I’m sure is doled out over the course of several of these short novels. Focusing on a crew of mostly engineers gives this that lower decks vibe, a definite plus.
November 2022: Okay not a Deep Space Nine-branded book, but I read all of these Myriad Universes collections because some of them are centered around Deep Space Nine and I couldn’t just skip over some stories. They’re all worth the read even if the first thirds of most stories are weirdly consistent at dragging before the pace picks up. The DS9 story in this book is the third and final novella, Seeds of Dissent. All of these books present “what if?” scenarios and this one focuses on an alternate history in which Khan creates his own version of the mirror universe with genetically augmented humans ruling the alpha quadrant with an iron fist. It’s centered on Bashir and Dax (Ezri), but they bring in elements from ENT, TOS, and even a flashback character from Voyager. It’s also funny to see someone like O’Brien as a meathead augment. I don’t know if I buy Bashir’s turn in the story but it was a nice romp where the good guys put on their evil goatees for a while.
December 2022: DeCandido’s story, A Gutted World, is the only reason I started reading these books, because it presents the most compelling question: "What if the Cardassians discovered the Bajoran Wormhole?“ And let me tell ya, it gets rough. Expect copious death. I didn’t appreciate jamming Picard and crew in as the central figures when you had a perfectly good Sisko in the mix as well, but still an interesting look at how all the factions of the Dominion war might’ve gone about things if the Cardassians had lucked upon the wormhole first.
January 2023: Honor in the Night is the final story in this book and of all of the Myriad Universes series. It starts out with TOS events centered around the “The Trouble With Tribbles” episode, but unlike most stories in this series, you’re not following one of the captains around. Instead, it plays like a century-long mystery, dipping in and out of an alternate history that explores how a change in that TOS episode could elevate minor characters to critical players in galactic politics. (Imagine Citizen Kane but Star Trek.) The early bits can get confusing as the story skips around between different dates and characters, but it eventually gets very intriguing and does wind its way onto DS9 and Bajor. This may actually be my favorite of the Myriad Universes stories, precisely because we get to hang out with characters who aren’t one of the main cast of the TV show. But as much as I enjoyed all these alternate histories, I’m glad to wrap it up and get back to the DS9 relaunch books.
It takes its time to get to the meat until there’s more to chew on in the latter half. Most of these TOS alternate histories were mildly interesting but this one is a cut above.
“What if the Cardassians discovered the Bajoran Wormhole?” This is the question that got me reading all these Myriad Universes novellas in the first place, but because I’m me and a completionist, I couldn’t just skip past the others in the series to get here. I come to Star Trek expanded universe stuff with a DS9 first approach so I was keen to read how the author spun out this alternate history in which the Dominion gets their foothold in the alpha quadrant if they met the Cardassians first. It had a little too much TNG cast for my taste (especially since those characters dominate so many of these stories), but it’s a worthy DS9 tale.
Now we get to a whole lot of Data, so more of TNG. The courtroom stuff doesn’t hit the same way in these stories as it does in the TV episodes, and then all the implications of androids woven into the fabric of the galaxy is strangely not that compelling.
Another Data-heavy story. I think these novellas introduce interesting directions with how the Federation will absolutely exploit artificial beings if they have the slightest excuse, but this particular one needed to be its own novel. It ends just as things get interesting.
A TOS story that deviates from the prime universe thousands of years before the era we know. It revels in an alternate history in which the Andorians made first contact with Earth, and the Vulcans and Romulans never parted ways.
The Last Generation by Andrew Steven Harris, Gordon Purcell, Bob Almond, Terry Pallot, Mario Boon, John Hunt, Robbie Robbins, Chris Mowry, Neil Uyetake, Andy Schmidt, Scott Dunbier, Justin Eisinger, Mariah Huehner, Bill Tortolini (2009)
I could’ve done without Data and the TNG cast at the center of things (again), but it’s cool to see Sulu flying around being a badass in his Excelsior ship. All these TNG tales feels like the higher-ups asking “Ey, where’s my TNG (money)? I gotta have my TNG (money)!”
I was there for it all the way. Sometimes I remember I’m a normie-ass man but that part that feels like I’m a distant weirdo never goes away, and this movie’s for that guy.
I mean, of course it’s great. I haven’t read the original story and it sounds like this hews closer to that than the popular perception from Disney’s takes.
This could’ve been dry but instead it’s constantly running at full charge, and even when we slow down to the granular level of filmmaking commentary it’s still a high pressure romp.
Eh, I suppose the most impressive thing here is that Sandler sells the idea that’s he’s own twin sister to the point that you consider them separate people.
This had the potential to be bleak but instead it’s just genuinely hopeful. The performances come across a little too staged, as does the whole movie I suppose, so it’s no surprise to learn than this was originally a stage play.
Here we go! I’d been thinking about watching the entire 1995 reboot of The Outer Limits and it’s everything I could’ve hoped for. All the 90s actors I remember from Saturday afternoon sci-fi TV, dated effects and production techniques, stories about man’s reach exceeding his grasp. This first episode even features three generations of the Bridges acting clan. The thing about intelligent alien bugs isn’t so compelling, but the overall production makes up for it.
I was looking for an episode that features New Year’s Day and found this story about a man who time jumps forward by ten years every time he falls asleep. It’s a sci-fi sort of twist on It’s a Wonderful Life and very reminiscent of something you’d see on Star Trek.
Here’s a reminder not to fuck around with robots. Don’t do it! Especially not if they’re hot! There’ll more fucked up robot tales in the seasons ahead…
We get a few stories here about rich assholes trying to live forever. This one does also present an interesting idea: what if we could all be cured of all ailments and live twice as long in the process? What happens when no one’s dying and the population count explodes? In any case, that’s more thought than what goes into the episode’s story. It’s mostly about a rich guy jumping the gun on proper medical testing and getting screwed as he should.
Oh man, I was definitely on the paranoid side of this story as the events unfold. It was nice to get one of these where it isn’t a bleak or worst case ending.
I wanna love this because I loved the original web series, but binging a bunch of TV-length episodes just felt like too much of it. I liked them when they were shorter and spaced out more. Binger beware, I know.
I kinda snooze at the thought of TOS novels because that’s not really my era of Star Trek (as of this writing anyway), but I got sucked into these Myriad Universes stories in which various authors explore the “what if?” side of Star Trek. Each story focuses on a different era available to them in the late aughts, from ENT all the way to VOY.
The first entry in the “Echoes and Refractions” anthology, titled “The Chimes at Midnight,” is a TOS movie era novella that certainly had me snoozing at first. It was just kind of recounting what I already know from the movies, except it follows an alternate timeline established in TAS in which Spock died as a kid and an Andorian named Thelin fills the role of Kirk’s XO. It picks up the pace midway through where it diverges into an exploration of what the Genesis device from the second and third movies could really mean for galactic stability.
But the author of this article does a much better job of describing the story’s merits despite the lackluster opening. They point out the critical role Spock plays in Star Trek both in-universe and to the audience, as well as how the World War II memories and fears that the original creators brought with them left out the ultimate question of how far the Federation would go to end the carnage of war. (Something explored a little more in later shows like DS9.)
