They are.. if it's a short one (with, say 5 to 8 entries) you can review each, but that gets cumbersome in a bigger collection.   It really ends up being just what was impressionable.

Yesterday's Son (Star Trek #11
by AC Crispin



I was surprised to find this is a Boris Valejo cover.... seems too... plain for him, but according to Memory Alpha he did a bunch of them.

I'd call this one good, not great. I love that it piggy backs of actual episodes of the show, and FEELS like it could definitely be an episode in the series. The author definitely nailed Kirk, Spock and McCoy as characters, but definitely portrays their relationship as a closer than I picture it. Such things, of course, are always subject to interpretation.

As many Trek novels do, the author creates a character, then the book makes it so we'll never see them again.. leaving the property the way they found it. I was a bit disappointed (but not surprised) by that. It's a perfectly logical way to keep continuity intact (if you never change anything), but some things are always a bit weird about it. It seems like the Enterprise gets serviced or re-fitted in every one of these books.. the '5 year mission' must be at least 15 by now .

I also though the relative power of the ships were off... I feel like in most episodes of TOS, a Warbird was close to on part with the Enterprise (certainly 2 would be) where is here the crew were unfazed at 3-1 odds, and fought pretty successful with a squadron of 10 against the Enterprise and one other ship. Again, though, such things are difficult, and it wasn't explicited stated WHAT sort of ships anything were (definitely the space battle was incidental to the story), just felt odd.

That's certainly not the author's fault though, just the foibles of a shared universe. She's definitely a good writer.. .I'm intrigued at what the sequel will contain.

At some point I really want to re-visit Moorcock's work.  It's been every by of 30 years for most of it (except Behold The Man).  But then I fear it will not hold up to the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia.  

The Purple Cloud
M.P. Shiel, 1930 (revised text; originally published in 1901)


This is an example of very early science fiction, or perhaps ‘weird fiction’ as it was called at the time of its original publication, so it’s kind of historically significant. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale, in which all human life, and much other life, on the planet is destroyed by an immense purple cloud, that emits an odd almond-like aroma, that moves around the atmosphere. The sole survivor is a young English physician named Adam Jeffson, who was at the time also the sole surviving member of an expedition to reach the North Pole. As he travels back down from the Pole, he observes the devastation wrought by the cloud and much of the book is just him wandering around the globe as he contemplates his plight and – as wildfire2099 noted in his own review – he starts blowing up and/or setting fire to all of the cities he visits (which includes this passage that doesn't land quite right: "(...) I went to Nagasaki, and destroyed it"). That takes up the bulk of the book. Eventually, well over two thirds of the way through, he meets another unlikely survivor and the story becomes marginally more interesting at that point - if for no other reason than there's actually some dialogue and not just the narrator's interminable monologue. I suppose the most interesting aspect of this story is the idea that the last survivor of the human race is a mentally ill individual – because there is every indication well before the big catastrophe that he is suffering from some form of schizophrenia and his mental health, of course, deteriorates even more afterward. Another interesting detail as that the entire story is actually supposed to be the transcribed narrative of a clairvoyant woman in the present (i.e., the turn of the 19th into the 20th century) who can read texts from the future.
In any case, don’t be fooled by the cover blurbs: contrary to Mr. Wells, I did not find it ‘brilliant’; and it may be ‘mad’ but ‘dazzling’ it isn’t. It’s in fact a really tough slog and I can’t say I’d recommend reading it unless you’re really into the antecedents for later (much better) SF.

I've never read any Trek prose until very recently, like in the last 2-3 years. I honestly didn't like Blish's original story, Spock Must Die, very much. On the other hand, I'd highly recommend Vulcan's Glory by Dorothy Fontana and Diane Duane's Romulan (Rihannsu) cycle.
Take my recommendations for what they're worth, though; given the vast ocean of Star Trek prose books, even describing the sum total of what I've read here as dipping my toe into it would be generous.

The Gods Themselves
Isaac Asimov, 1972


This book has already been reviewed here before, so I’ll just add a few of my own thoughts – and add that I apparently enjoyed it quite a bit more than the previous reviewer.
Yes, much of the book is people talking to each other, but they’re mostly talking about very interesting things. Generally this is some really well-written high-concept SF – and the scientific concepts are explained so that even a compleat idiot like me could mostly grasp them. Asimov’s description of the world in the second section – set in the ‘para-universe’ that is exchanging matter with ours, where slightly different laws of physics apply – is quite impressive. There are two types of intelligent life forms, one called the ‘Hard Ones’ and the other ‘Soft Ones’. It’s mainly told from the standpoint of the latter, who are basically some kind of amorphous gaseous entities with three genders. Similarly, the description (in the third section) of humans permanently settled on the Moon and their society, both in terms of their biology and psychology, is really well thought out. I’d definitely highly recommend this one.

currently reading these books

Wheel of Time Lord of Chaos
the first book of the Directive 51 Trilogy. Its not that great in my opinion