Before Star Trek V: The Final Frontier came along four years later with the concept of the Planet of Galactic Peace, Margaret Wander Bonanno presented a similar idea in her non-canon Star Trek novel, Dwellers in the Crucible, which finds its way onto the Book Shelf this week. Set before the events of Star Trek…
Category: The Book Shelf
Star Trek: Killing Time (1985) – Della Van Hise
Hey look, it’s another non-canon Trek novel that features villains altering the timeline to change history, and allowing the author to play with established characters in their own way, with heavy slash tendencies (in this case, a Kirk/Spock romance… again). If you can get your hands on an ultra-rare first edition, there is actually more…
Star Trek: Ishmael (1985) – Barbara Hambly
My journey with the non-canon Star Trek Pocket Books continues. And this novel from 1985 demonstrates what was happening in Trek pages before Paramount took a stronger stance on what the novels could be about. Previous to this we’ve encountered Trek novels with slash overtones between James T. Kirk and his science officer, the Vulcan…
The Book of the Dead (2007) – Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Pendergast is back! Picking up where the previous novel Dance of Death ended, Preston and Child plunge us back into the world of Aloysius, D’Agosta, Smithback, Kelly, Hayward, Constance and Pendergast’s villainous and genius brother, Diogenes. This novel serves as a climax of the previous two books, wrapping up the storyline of the two brothers,…
Marvel: Year by Year – A Visual History (2017) – Tom Brevoort, Tom DeFalco, Matthew K. Manning, Peter Sanderson, Stephen Wiacek and Dorling Kindersley
I loved the Star Wars: Year by Year book when it was released by DK Books, and delighted in the nostalgia the book recalled, as well as the incredible mass of information at my fingertips that I could dig into at a moment’s notice. So, when I got my hands on the Marvel Year by…
Fragile Things (2006) – Neil Gaiman
I love curling up with a Neil Gaiman book, be it a novel or a collection of short stories, for me he is literary comfort food – engaging, a joy to lose myself in, and a spark for my own imagination. His collection of short stories and poems gathered in this volume, some of which…
Star Trek: Shadow Lord (1985) – Laurence Yep
I dove into another non-canon Star Trek adventure from Pocket Books, and this one, I have to say, is a swing and a miss. It’s almost like it wants to be a bit of a fantasy tale in the vein of Dumas’ Musketeers, but it is actually just a big misstep, which doesn’t really fit…
Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy: The Ultimate Guide to the Cosmic Outlaws
Before 2014, most film fans, and even some comic fans would be hard pressed to talk about the Guardians of the Galaxy, let alone name any of them. But after Marvel brought them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, coupling them with a classic rock soundtrack, it was hard to find anyone who didn’t know Star-Lord,…
The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years (2016) -Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman
Space, the final frontier… These words have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. From my first introduction to the series I was a fan, watching the show, getting my hands on comics, the first Pocket Book novels when they started out, the other collectible, behind-the-scenes books, anything I…
Star Wars: The Visual Encyclopedia (2017) – Tricia Barr, Adam Bray and Cole Horton
Star Wars. Sometimes, I wish I could go back to visit six year old me, who had just had his life changed after seeing that film in late summer of ’77 and tell him that Star Wars would be with him for his entire life, and that he would see a time when there would…
The Mind Reels 