Kirk... you didn't ask Spock to be your first officer for space date part two...?

What's a bit of hand-touching between pals, buddies even? (A lot. It's a lot.)

Bonus: The Woman Of The Week sees right through Kirk's gay thoughts, even if Kirk doesn't

Mindshadow by J.M. Dillard

Make It So Friday

This is the final book in the four book series that takes place after the original series ends, but before the first Star Trek movie. I recommended the first book in the series, The Lost Years. And, the second and third books, A Flag Full of Stars and Traitor Winds were good books too, but, this one, that like the first one was by J.M. Dillard, was my favourite of the series.

The still Admiral Kirk is just done with sitting behind a desk. And, when he decides to get back on a ship, boy does he do it right and fully. He’s invited to observe a new automated rescue ship. Except, suddenly he’s in command of that ship, oh, and that ship is full of quite a few cadets. And, he needs to stop the rescue ship before it (as well as the very very bearded McCoy) sails right into Tholian space (remember the interesting web from the original series?).

As well as a almost thriller like sort of story, it was cool to sort of see some of the ‘new’ computer things that would wind up in Star Trek The Next Generation (after all, this book was being written long after The Next Generation premiered), like the being able to find anyone on the ship at any time from a panel in the hall. I know that I’m an easy mark when it comes to whether I like a Star Trek novel or not, but, this one was a really great read.

You may like this book If you Liked: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward, Captain to Captain by Greg Cox, or The Body Electric by David Mack

Recovery by JM Dillard

Just feeling very normal about this dialogue in the Star Trek V novelisation

Surak’s Soul by J.M Dillard

I love T’Pol. I love Vulcans. Are you really a Star Trek fan if you don’t like the Vulcans? With T’Pol on the cover, I was hoping we would get a deep dive into her POV. Sadly I think this one falls a little short on that front

The Author: 

J.M. Dillard is a seasoned Star Trek writer who we will meet again some day, but it seems as though most of her novels are novelizations of movies or episodes which I have decided not to read in this quest (because I have already seen them on screen!).  It also seems she has written a vampire series? Which I never would have guessed.

The Summary:

This novel reads much like an episode. The Enterprise lands on a planet where everyone is either dead or dying. They meet many of the aliens as they explore the planet looking for survivors. One of the surviving aliens attacks Hoshi and T’Pol hits it with a phaser blast that is set to stun. The blast kills the last survivor even though it wasn’t supposed to. This really hits home for T’Pol and affects her deeply. She feels that she effectively committed genocide. She commits herself to non violence from that moment on. They get back to the ship and an amorphous energy entity introduced itself to T’Pol as “Wanderer”. The rest of the plot is them figuring out that The Wanderer basically fed off that planet and saw those beings as lesser and fine to kill. The Wanderer thinks that humans are fine to feed off of too because they are lesser. T’Pol has problems with this logic. It starts feeding off of and possessing the crew and T’Pol comes to the conclusion that self defense is okay.

My Thoughts:

I wish we stayed a little more in T’Pol’s POV for this novel. I think it was the majority but we also cut to Archer frequently. This novel is a shorter one which I think was to its benefit. It has an episode’s worth of plot and therefore benefitted from feeling like a short episode. Honestly most of it was rather forgettable, but none of it super offensive. It felt weird that T’Pol was just going through these thoughts and feelings about violence after time already spent on the Enterprise and it is not like the Vulcan’s do not display their fair share of violence. I honestly read this a few months ago now and the fact that I don’t have a lot to say about it I think speaks for itself.

5/10, inoffensive and a light read! Next up for novels is Daedalus, and I think I am going to to combine that review with its sequel Daedalus’s Children because it is a direct continuation of the story.

J.M. Dillard's "The Lost Years" is SO FUCKING GOOD SO FAR

Look at these dumbasses. Look at them.

The line break was necessary, that's how you know it's platonic /s

[J.M. Dillard, Recovery, 1995]

When you spend so much time together that you take on each other's mannerisms.

Tomorrow Is Yesterday / The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard

I’m currently reading the German translation of "Star Trek V: The final frontier" by J.M. Dillard and guess what? Soup ads soup ads!

Yeah … for some reason, the publishing company (Heyne Verlag) decided to insert ads for Maggi soup into quite a few of its books – in a way that’s apparently meant to give the impression that the ads are part of the text. This, for example, says something like "Sybok promises the concerned Scott a source of strength. However, since that is of a purely spiritual nature, it can’t strengthen the reader, who needs something else – something like Maggi instant soup ..."

So far, I’d only seen these ads in books by Diane Duane, but she clearly wasn’t the only "vicitm".

The mental count of my Star Trek books has been off for a while. It's not off by a few, either. I thought I had approximately 320 Star Trek books in my library. The updated count is a bigger number than I thought, and a much smaller gap to 400 than was originally assumed.

I have 379. That is nearly 40% of the general definition of a library...

I also recently found out one of my books is signed by J.M. Dillard!

(Other options available at the bottom of the poll!)

If it was a Film, Novel, or Fanwork, go to the Poll Masterpost and click on your poll.

"Is this the work of your talented Dr. Crusher?" She stroked his arm. "You see, I learned many things from you when you were last Locutus. I knew you loved her, even then, though you would not admit it even to yourself."

-The Borg Queen to Picard

From the book "Resistance" by J.M. Dillard

Bloodthirst by J.M. Dillard has the absolut best McCoy&Chapel dynamic I've read so far. :)

Make It So Friday

This wasn't one of the surprising Star Trek novels. But, it was definitely one that made me think.

The Enterprise finds a dying race of people. The crew tries to save them, but can't. In that process T'Pol accidentally kills someone, and so she decides to not carry a weapon any longer. Then an entity contacts them, T'Pol specifically, saying that it will help them figure out why the aliens died. But, not everyone trusts the entity. And then the people on the Enterprise start falling ill.

As, I said, though it didn’t have a lot (or any) twists and turns that I didn’t see coming. It was still a really fun read, my favorite part was that we got to see Hoshi as she was trying to decipher the alien language. I'm not sure if I can put into words just how much I loved those scenes. So awesome.

You may like this book If you Liked: Desperate Hours by David Mack, Broken Bow by Diane Carey, or The Left Hand of Destiny: Book One by J.G. Hertzler

Surak's Soul by J.M Dillard

If you just tripped over a stack of cash, this Keith Birdsong cover painting for Gene Roddenberry & Susan Sackett’s never-released Star Trek: The First 25 Years is going for $6,600 on eBay.

Or, you know, you could buy it for me. I’m a pretty nice guy.

The book is an interesting lost media item for the franchise; copyright for some of the art couldn’t be obtained so Pocket Books and Paramount decided to scrap the whole thing. Chunks of it would later appear in the (frankly inconsequential) coffee table book Star Trek: Where No One Has Gone Before, credited to J.M. Dillard with a “thank you” to Sackett.

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: Generations Audiobook Cassettes Based on Star Trek Generations by J.M. Dillard S.