To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

I wish I could tell you I was reading Proust. Shaw. Hemingway … Azimov, Clark, Anderson. But the fact is, I've plowed my way through just about everything from Robert Graves to Greg Bear, Islands in the Stream to The Caves of Steel. And I'm still so bored, I'm ready to read “My Trip to Mars by Flash Gordon (age 5)”, which was written in crayons of various colors.

I've read every single page of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. And the entire Inkheart trilogy (and most of you probably didn't even know it was a trilogy, right? Just a movie with Brandan Fraser and Paul Bettany. Well, you're not wrong there, either). I read Ken Follett's World Without End. And Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. And Poul Anderson's entire Technic Civilization series, The Van Rijn Method – David Falkayn: Star Trader – Rise of the Terran Empire.

And it was reading The Van Rijn Method, and remembering how Harry Mudd was based on the utterly inimitable Nicholas van Rijn, made me turn to the shelves of Star Trek paperbacks I haven't opened in more years than I care to even think about. The last time the cover was lifted on one of those books, I think Bill Clinton was still unpacking his bags on the way into the White House. Ouch.

Well now … spoiled for choice … where would one begin? I decided to zero-in on books I'd never even read, and wound up bouncing from classic Trek to Next Gen, reading one here, one there. They're mostly quick reads and, reading with perhaps a more critical eye since I've drifted apart from my rosy-spectacled youth, I'm … more than a little surprised. I honestly don't remember some of these novels being quite poorly written -- being careful not to tar them all with the same brush, because others of these novels are beautifully done.

But if you bounce all over the shelf, reading with a blissful paucity of discrimination, you eventually have to scratch your head in perplexity, because these books range from one end of the spectrum to the other, without warning.

Prime Directive was the best classic Trek I read, and I'd readily recommend it, with 4.5 stars. It has an intriguing plot, the authors got the characters pretty close to “true,” and aside from some reservations I have about the story, and a few nits to pick regarding narrative line, the book flies. 

It's quite the page-turner, and if your house was burning down and you could only save 10 of your favorite Trek books on your dive out the door, you'd very likely grab this one. Gotta love the way the book begins: Jim and crew have “Kirked” another planet, and this time Starfleet has busted them for it -- right back to civilian. Hell of a neat gambit.

Reading this one early in the proceedings probably spoiled me... 

The next I picked up was Mudd in Your Eye, a Harry Mudd-centric comedy thriller which I'd expected to be fluff, and which turned out to be very fluffy indeed. Flyaway entertainment. The plot is okay; the writing is okay; the characterizations are okay. 

What can you say? A solid 3 stars, I guess; not quite “meh”, but not the kind of rolling on the floor, breaking ribs laughing one might have hoped for. The plot was certainly bulked out here and there to squeeze more mileage out of it, and at times it did seem the joke had either worn thin -- or I was missing it. It's not often a miss a joke, but it has happened. Anyway, it's always enjoyable to return to Harry Mudd, so -- what the hell? 3 stars it is.

Next came Sanctuary. And here, I really did scratch my head. It's the oddest mismatch of material: an adult plot (the storyline isn't at fault -- it's a good “driver” for a novel) paired with a sometimes painfully juvenile narrative line. As if the book were crafted for very young readers, though its thematic material is mature. The characterizations are frequently also miles off-beam, with a thoroughly wishy-washy Kirk, who far too frequently asks other people what they think his group ought to be doing. He spends most of the book just going with the flow. 

Hmm. For me -- two stars on this one; though to be conscientious as a reviewer I did go look at the reviews it scores on Goodreads and was extremely surprised to see four and five stars and glowing referrals. Other readers either don't see the problems I perceive, or don't care. Go figure: live and let live.

Here, I switched gears to Next Gen, and returned to a book I'd liked a great deal many years ago: 

Immortal Coil. Phew. It's not me, losing what little remains of my mind. This one is a very good book indeed. It doesn't hurt that it focuses on Data, who was always my favorite character; and you have to love the way it reaches into every nook and cranny of Trek lore, weaving together a story spanning centuries and a technology spanning the whole arm of the galaxy.  If it has one fault, it's that there's so much plot it must race along, at times barely touching down on story elements that might have been explored in much greater depth. 

However, the author would certainly have working to length constraints, and I can imagine the job involved in covering “this” much story in “that” many pages. A writer can't always write what she or he wants and needs to; he writes to the publisher's specifications. Highly recommended: five stars.

Many years after Immortal Coil was written, another writer picked up the ideas it had touched on, and ran with them to produce The Persistence of Memory, and this one … is gobsmacking. It really is something very special indeed, not merely well written but also intricately plotted and with a rather courageous twist: decentralizing the series characters to frame the story through, and around, others for much of the book's running length. 

The experiment could have killed the book at market, and in fact if you look at the reviews on Goodreads, not everyone likes it: many of those who don't cite this departure as their main reason for being dissatisfied. There are as many opinions as there are readers, and for me it worked, so -- five stars here, and a strong recommendation.

The Persistence of Memory kicked off a threesome of books which were marketed as a trilogy and shouldn't have been. In fact, they're three loosely connected stories that have little in common and certainly don't tell a contiguous story. These tales are wildly different; you'll either like them or you won't. All are uniformly well written, but Silent Weapons and The Body Electric...

...took off in directions which were, alas, directions I hadn't actually wanted to go. I went along for the ride, and it was never boring; but I do wish these novels hadn't been marketed as a trilogy: they're not. It would be mean spirited to mark them down to three stars for this reason: not fair to the writer or to the books, because each one, in and of itself, is fine … save that (to my mind) author David Mack missed some utterly platinum opportunities. A direction existed in which this story could have gone, that (for me) would have been as gobsmacking as the first book. He didn't go there -- and that's fair enough too. I'm just the reader, sighing over where I'd have gone instead.

Possibly inspired by The Persistence of Memory, the original author of Immortal Coil came back many years later to continue the story along his own lines, with The Light Fantastic. Hmm. Well, it was interesting; well written; the plot is airtight; but … 

The truth is, bratty teenagers are not my favorite reading, and this story could have been (one cringes to fall back on the threadbare cliché but here we go) "so much more" if it hadn't focused on the bratty teen aspect of Lal. It's … okay; but it's like Part Two of a trilogy, and there's no next bit that I know of. Like most books, you'll either like it ... or you won't. 

It would be true to say, perhaps because I liked Immortal Coil so much, The Light Fantastic didn't go in the directions I'd wanted it to go … like buying a ticket for Melbourne and being taken to Canberra instead. Both interesting places, but if you wanted to go to Melbourne you'd be made keenly aware of the gentle art of compromise.

So, what am I reading next? After a rather odd book, The Songlines, which I'll talk about later, I went right back to classic SF with Halcyon Drift. Might even go back further and read A Princess of Mars again. I'm fascinated by Mars. 

Fortunately, we own a lot of books...