Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Star Trek: New Earth — Rough Trails
{4.5/5} “They’re made at God, or fate, or Evan Pardonett for not protecting them from what everybody in Starfleet already knows — that the frontier isn’t romantic or poetic or glamorous. It’s just hard. Starfleet is just the easiest place to aim that anger, since they don’t want to aim it on themselves.” Star Trek: […]
Star Trek: New Earth — Belle Terre
{4.5/5} “But he couldn’t imagine spending his life here, either, no matter how beautiful it was. Space was too big, with too many mysteries to explore. He didn’t mind guarding this colony for a while, as long as they needed him and the Enterprise. It was a challenge unlike any he had had before. But […]
Star Trek: Wagon Train to the Stars
{4.5/5} “Only with great bitterness did he cling to the tiny thread that this is what he counted on McCoy to do, this kind of seething honesty that burned every decision down to its core. Kirk depended on the doctor’s natural dissent to read the handwriting on every wall.” Star Trek: New Earth — Wagon […]
Ancillary Mercy
{5/5} “Anaander Mianaai is at war with herself… That war may reach Athoek, or it may not. Either way… We must see to the safety of the citizens here ourselves. All the citizens here, not just the ones with the right accents, or the proper religious beliefs.” Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie, published in 2015 […]
Ancillary Sword
{4.5/5} “The poet had been executed fifteen hundred years ago — her version of the event had cast Anaander as the villain and ended with the promise that the dead Nakaaia would return to revenge herself. It had been almost utterly forgotten inside Radch space, because singing it, possibly even knowing it existed, could easily […]
Star Trek: Double, Double
{4.5/5} “He required food, oxygen, insulation from the cold of space. He could be stricken by disease, irreparably damaged through the use of force. And in time, he would simply die of old age. Androids, of course, had no such liabilities.” Star Trek: Double, Double by Michael Jan Friedman, published in 1989 Captain Kirk thought […]
Ancillary Justice
{5/5} “I had no reason to think badly of her. On the contrary, her manners were those of an educated, well-bred person of good family. Not toward me, of course — I wasn’t a person, I was a piece of equipment, a part of the ship. But I had never particularly cared for her.” Ancillary […]
Star Trek: Ishmael
{5/5} “Aaron had accepted him as an alien, a stranger trying to blend into his surroundings, to the point where he found himself forgetting that Ish was not of this world. But there were times when Ishmael would not and did not blend, and his calmly critical observations had a way of making Aaron wonder […]
Star Trek: The Shocks of Adversity
{4.5/5} “Satrav did not misunderstand Sulu and Chekov; he refused to listen to them, or to accept their input as valid. This incident, as well as others, illustrate the Domain’s propensity for unilateral action, and an unwillingness to engage in the type of cooperative effort we had agreed to.” Star Trek: The Shocks of Adversity […]
Star Trek: Time for Yesterday
{4.5/5} “He was linked with an awareness that made all of Vejur’s knowledge and logic seem infantile. And yet that awareness, while it was fundamentally artificial in nature, was not passionless. The Guardian loved, it hungered, it was lonely — all on a level that made Spock feel that, by comparison, he had always been […]