This week, I take my first step into what became known as the Shatner-verse, a series of Star Trek novels written by Captain Kirk himself, with the aid of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Set some months after the events of The Undiscovered Country but before the opening of Generations, Kirk isn’t doing to well with…
Category: The Book Shelf
Cold (1996) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s final 007 novel, Cold aka Cold Fall, his sixteenth, feels a little bit more like the James Bond we know, a balance between Ian Fleming’s literary creation, and his cinematic iteration. Far more enjoyable than his adaptation of GoldenEye, the novel is split into two parts, taking place before, and then after, his…
Battlestar Galactica 5: Galactica Discovers Earth (1980) – Micheal Resnick and Glen A. Larson
The Battlestar Galactica jumps forward a ways, passing over a number of episodes (that will be visited in later books) to give us an adaptation of the three hour series opener for the ill-fated, Galactica 1980, which just didn’t have the oomph, mythos, production value or stories of the original, equally ill-fated, series, though it…
The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930) – Agatha Christie
Long before DC introduced us to Harley Quinn, a variation of the traditional harlequin character, Agatha Christie created her own Harley Quin, and introduced him to the world in a collection of short stories first published in 1930. This Harley Quinn is a tall mysterious man who appears at prime opportunities in the story, and…
Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (1994) – Dave Wolverton
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Set four years after the events of The Return of the Jedi, this story just never sat well with me. I picked up a lot of the original Expanded Universe novels as they came out, and I can remember bits and pieces of them, and…
GoldenEye (1995) – John Gardner
John Gardner’s penultimate 007 novel is a short, uninspired adaptation of the 1995 film, GoldenEye which saw Pierce Brosnan finally step into the shoes of James Bond. I’m not sure if Gardner was simply tired of writing Bond books at this point, or if he was less than impressed with the film’s script and was…
The Sniper (2021) – Chang Kuo-Li
Taiwanese author Chang Kou-Li delivers an action thriller this week. With its North American debut, The Sniper, is available now from House of Anansi Press, features a translation by Roddy Flagg and reads like the best of Hong Kong cinema. There are action beats, police investigations, involving characters and a weaving story that takes you…
Star Trek: The Fearful Summons (1995) – Denny Martin Flinn
Space, the final frontier… I take up the journey with Kirk and company again this week, and was delighted in how most of The Fearful Summons read. It’s a fast read, and has the pacing of a screenplay, and even reading it, you can tell what things would be edited out of the film, or…
Battlestar Galactica 4: The Young Warriors (1980) – Robert Thurston and Glen A. Larson
Robert Thurston delivers a full length novel based on a single episode of Battlestar Galactica. His previous novels had encompassed double episodes, but despite that, Thurston delivers a strong story, that takes the episode The Young Lords, and layers out and tells almost a completely different story, while still giving us the same basic tale….
Partners in Crime (1929) – Agatha Christie
Tommy and Tuppence, who quickly became one of my favourite creations of Agatha Christie, first introduced in The Secret Adversary, are back in this collection of short stories, that are interconnected, as the married couple take on a number of cases. A Fairy in the Flat opens the book and reveals that Tommy is working…
The Mind Reels 