StillPaisleyCat

I found the Voyager books when they return to the Alpha Quadrant very frustrating and disappointing. I DNFd the second one.

It seems like the tie-in auto Christie Golden was required (by the IP holder) to break the Voyager crew up and make them experience a great deal of unhappiness.

In the main series of post Voyager 24th century relaunch timeline novels post Nemesis, longstanding author Peter David was obliged to kill Katherine Janeway off in one of the crossover events!

That said, I did really enjoy Kirsten Beyer’s Full Circle Voyager novels. Beyer was eventually given permission to get the Voyager crew back together for a new exploratory mission to the Delta Quadrant with a group of slipstream ships.

Vanguard is darker even than DS9, so not everyone’s taste.

What it does have is not only Starfleet on-station but also 4 ships that are based there from a scout explorer to a Constitution class. It’s a lot of characters. Plus Tholians and Klingons. The mystery takes a bit to come together but it’s excellent.

The Enterprise and her crew show up occasionally but aren’t the primary characters. There is one Vanguard novel recently add that is Enterprise-focused and is one of the best books since Destiny.

Directors, actors and art directors seem to be very happy to tread the ground of adaptations.

What we really have is some writers that want to tell their own Star Trek stories but aren’t doing a good job of serialization and studio executives who think that rehashing existing stories and characters will buy success.

And yes we have egos like Patrick Stewart’s holding his character hostage to his own reinterpretation of his character to be a reflection of himself.

But as we have seen with the character of Jim Kirk, there can be other actors to carry on the legacy.

That’s not really the point though.

While Slow Horses, Reached or Silo had their print audiences, they are not adapted solely because they are reaching enormous audiences as books. They have become successful shows because someone made the case for adaptation to the studios.

Star Trek has been struggling to make serialized live action shows successfully. Why not go with what works and adapt that?

Tie-in writers are writers for hire.

They don’t own any of the IP for their creations. All the IP is owned by Paramount.

Star Trek television has directly taken concepts from Treklit for Discovery and Picard without any credit whatsoever to the print authors who created them.

Screenwriters who created guest characters like Locarno are owed some credit and residuals but these are very modest.

There was a good recent thread on this. Much depends on your own preferences.

I posted the image of the first book of the TOS era series Vanguard because I think it would be excellent to adapt to television. It’s about Starbase 47 serving Starfleet in a region of Federation expansion and colonization. It’s somewhat dark and there’s a mystery at the core. Tholians get extensive treatment which is rare.

If you’re looking for the Alpha and Omega of the Borg, the Destiny trilogy is excellent. It’s basically the best Borg content out there.

If you’re into time travel, Christopher L. Bennett has a series of books about the Bureau of Temporal Investigations.

There was also a great anthology of novellas focused on the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.

There are numerous great standalones too.

Frankly, we saw more in Pike’s face and heard more in his tone of voice — grim and determined - than any debates might have given us.

We were shown rather than told, and that’s a good thing.

This was arguably Anson Mount’s best, most sincere, performance as Pike since Discovery season two. There’s been a glibness in Pike in SNW. Both episodes 5 and 6 this season have turned that around.

It was also another episode where Una showed that she really was Pike’s First Officer and principal advisor.

I don’t think we’re that far apart in views but we are very different in terms of who we think needs to lead the change.

I’m putting the onus on societal level changes in the built environment and acceptance of children and persons with disabilities.

You seem to be putting the onus on individuals to drive the change by personally overcoming barriers.

You are proudly talking about how you personally have overcome barriers but not everyone can. With 30% or the adult population identifying with at least one disability, it’s not a small or isolated issue.

As is said in the disability community, not everyone has the spoons and certainly not every day. Don’t shame others for what they may not be able to accomplish that you can.

The 15 minute journey problem is primarily evidence of a problem with where stores and services are located in relation to residences.

Affordability notwithstanding, bike and public transit as a person with visual, hearing or mobility limitations remain deeply challenging in most communities.

Wonderful that your children and grandchildren have been able to meet expectations or haven’t faced needs that couldn’t be accommodated. Most persons or families experiencing disabilities wouldn’t have your experience or might put their limited spoons to other priorities.

It’s not a small minority who cannot manage as pedestrians, with active or even better public transportation.

Easily said, for a healthy young adult who doesn’t have to support young children.

Having been entirely car free until we had young children, it was a true eye opener to have to confront how difficult it is to get kids to medical appointments and activities without a car.

Urban design doesn’t provide infrastructure for families in the core. It’s not just a transportation choice issue. Cities would need to be designed very differently and greater physical and social accommodations for children and persons with disabilities and neurodivergence would be needed.

When kids became part of our lives, we deliberately chose to live as close to the core and public transit as we could and still be near schools, community centres and hospitals. It still put us in a semi-suburban style older neighborhood where some reliance on a car became necessary.

Unreliability of public transit is much more problematic when you have to transport young children who chill quickly when not moving in deeply cold weather.

Also, many children cannot consistently meet the behavioural expectations adults on public transit or elsewhere.

Adults aren’t shy to tell parents that they shouldn’t bring their kids into public spaces when they can’t meet behavioural expectations, but getting a kid having a meltdown home or a sick kid to a physician or hospital without a car is nearly impossible.

We made the choice to be a single car family to limit our environmental impact but that in itself was very challenging.

By the time our kids were independent teens, we found our own physical limitations with ageing reduced the viability of active transportation as our main approach. We could choose to move to another area but not without pushing our kids out to find their own housing.

The Destiny trilogy by David Mack is my favourite. I liked it so much that I got a print copy of the omnibus.

Cold Equations is another popular trilogy by Mack.

Vanguard is TOS era series with books alternating in authorship by Mack and the writing duo of Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore. Vanguard, Starbase 47, is a somewhat mysterious Starfleet base of operations in a new region under colonization. While the Enterprise and her crew make a few appearances across the series, it’s primarily about Vanguard and the ships that are based there.

I liked all the Titan novels.

The Fall is a multibook ‘event’ in the Relaunch novelverse with each book by a different one of the regular authors.

It comes after Destiny and the Typhon Pact series of books.

While I like most of the books in all of these, there’s one author David R. George III whose books I find unbearably dull. He clearly knew his canon cold but his books are long on excessively detailed exposition, and short on dialogue or action. By the time I got to The Fall, I had learned to skip his books and just count on the recaps provided by the other authors.