320 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: September 29, 2026 by Atria Books
Full Review on the way!
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Book Review: Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
Book Review: Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler
384 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: May 19, 2026 by MCD
Full review coming...
Book Review: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon
293 pages, Hardcover
Published October, 2025 by Penguin Press
Full review on the way...
Book Review: Philip K Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern by Christopher Palmer
272 pages, Hardcover
Published January 7, 2003 by Liverpool University Press
Full review on the way...
Book Review: Headlights by CJ Leede (Review coming)
400 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication: June 9, 2026 by Tor Nightfire
Full review on the way...
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Book Review: The World According to Philip K. Dick edited by Alexander Dunst and S. Schlensag
246 pages, Hardcover
Published April, 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan
Full review on the way...
Book(s) Review: Star Trek: New Frontier by Peter David (Concept co-created w/ John J Ordover)
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Published July 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
Book 2: 151 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Book 3: 152 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published August 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
Book: 184 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published August 1, 1997 by Pocket Books
We need to get back into the wayback machine to talk about these books and why I wanted to re-read them. I didn't live through the golden age of science fiction, but I did experience the golden age of Star Trek fiction. On TV, we can look back at the 90s as a great era of ST, but in print, it was truly under the editorship of John J Ordover. I am a fan of John, whom I interviewed a couple of times on podcasts, and, best of all, he showed up in his robe to do a panel about Picard Season 3 -> Watch it here...
Under his editorship, Star Trek hardcovers were often bestsellers, and organized as tie-ins for the TV shows, several as big events during the year. At the same time, Pocket Books was releasing two paperbacks a month based on various shows in the franchise, and sometimes series like Day of Honor, which featured a story set in each show (TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) on the Klingon holiday. Voyager even did a Tie-in episode.
I was one of the Trek fans who bought the new paperbacks each month, sometimes skipping authors or concepts that I didn’t like, but those were rare. LA Graf was the pen name for two authors whose Trek novels I found dense, for example. Still, I might as well have had a subscription. I set aside money for the books. I went to the Borders at the Carousel Center in Syracuse every month to pick up the new books; they were my bus and break at work reads, as at home I was reading for school and activism.
The one problem these books had was that the stakes for the main characters couldn't be threatened outside the show's canon. So often ST novels like Diane Careyś Dreadnought worked because it created original characters that were engaging. One of the smartest moves an editor (at the time)John J.Ordover did was to put the year's titles inside the cover of the paperbacks. You saw all the titles for the year, it would build anticipation, and give a collect them all feeling.
In 1997, I was excited for months about a new title, Star Trek New Frontiers. What was that? Basically a Star Trek show, built in books instead of TV. Ordover got Paramount to okay this idea, but they wanted a few characters from TNG, assuming that readers needed an anchor. Smartly, the first book brought in Spock and the Enterprise-D itself. Picard in many ways, chooses our new Captain for the mission.
ST had a deep bench at the time of the authors, including Greg Cox, who is the only still active Trek author from that era. Peter David was a great choice; he got his start writing comics, but by this point, he had many, many Star Trek novels. He was one of the most popular who was very smart at typing TOS and TNG together. Peter David was the first to suggest (in Qpid) that Trelane from the Squire of Gothos was a Q (made canon by Strange New Worlds), and in the novel Vendetta, played with the notion that Spinrad’s Doomsday Machine was built as a weapon to fight the Borg.
Peter David played with the canon, was a great storyteller, and a solid writer, so he was perfect to create his own series. The first novel was serialized (like Stephen King’s The Green Mile) over two months. June and July of 1997. While serious Trek fans were digging DS9’s growth into the final seasons, getting used to Voyager, and enjoying the TNG movies, we got a new series.
Spock and Picard assigning this mission to the Captain was a similar hand-off we got in the TV series, and a smart way to bridge the gap. New Frontier was the story of a volatile region of space left in chaos as an empire falls. Starfleet is worried about this region that borders Federation space.
They want to send a ship, but who will command. Riker and Lt. Commander Shelby renewed their rivalry from the classic TNG episode Best of Both Worlds, but Picard thinks it should be a local. Mackenzie Cahloun (a humanized name he took), on the surface, is a disgraced officer, but has been acting as a spy. The rough around the edges captain grew up a revolutionary on his home world, but Starfleet only smoothed some of his edges.
Shelby was a character who was in two very important episodes of TNG. We get a crew member, Robin Lefler (who was in two episodes played by a pre-stardom Ashley Judd), but mostly a new crew. This makes the stakes higher off the bat. We learn that Shelby (who is the first officer) on the new ship is the Excalibur. The crew and the setting is perfect for expanding the ST universe.
I wanted to re-read this one because I was thinking about what a cool thing was to have a ST series that was originally created for prose. This is something I would like to see the franchise do again, maybe with a writers' room (SW High Republic style). I mean, give me a call S and S.
ST: NF holds up nicely, with excellent characters and settings. The serial style made each book fly by and feel like an episode. Each of the four holds up and feels like the Berman era, I mean that as a compliment (although I am a fan of most of Kurtzman era Trek)
I will have to slowly make my way through the ST NF books, which I didn’t keep up with. I admit I burned out on ST novels a bit at the end of the 90s. Thanks to excellent new novels by Greg Cox, Dayton Ward, and David Mack, I am back. I really enjoyed revisiting this classic.
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