Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek (2025)

Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)

Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")

But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko

Published: 2025
Read: July 2025

I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.

Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?

His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.

I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently.  In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.

I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.

He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!

I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.

There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series. 

Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)

Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Wonderlands by Una McCormack

Published: 2021
Acquired: May 2021
Read: July 2021

Star Trek: Discovery: Wonderlands
by Una McCormack

This Discovery novel isn't a prequel per se, but it does plug a gap; there's one year between the first and second episodes of Discovery season three, where Michael Burnham is stranded on her own in the 32nd century, after "the Burn" caused the collapse of the Federation and much other interstellar civilization. She must acclimate herself to a new time and place, one where the ideals she adhered to might not quite apply anymore because no one else believes in them but her.

It's by Una McCormack, so it's better than the third season of Discovery really deserves. I enjoyed S3 at first, actually, but like a lot of seasons of Discovery it lost me somewhere in the middle (in fact, I would say the much-derided S1 is the one I thought worked well the longest), with its overreliance on unearned sappy emotional moments. McCormack focuses on what worked well in the early parts of the season: the idea that the Discovery crew were special because they remembered the Federation at its height, and thus lived its ideals in a way no others did. She works some of Burnham's history in as effective grace notes in her characterization, and also lays some groundwork as to how the Federation collapsed so easily: even before the Burn, things were strained, thanks to the Temporal Wars and then an unprecedented, rapid expansion of the Federation. Pleasingly, we get a lot more of Sahil, the guy who waited decades for a Starfleet officer, but was seemingly forgotten by Discovery S3 after its first episode until its very last.

It's a good book but it doesn't really stand on its own because it feels like the first act of a longer story; this is about how Burnham is rebuilt in preparation for something else-- but the something else is on the tv show, not here is this book. It might get away with this if the tv show went somewhere worth going, but in fact the strength of this novel made me more aware of how S3 fumbled its landing. There's a big emphasis here on how Burnham carries ideals everyone else has forgotten about, and that also pervaded the first several episodes of S3. So, one might expect that what allows Discovery to succeed in the end of the season is something to do with that. But in fact, when Burnham is made captain at season's end, the Admiral praises her for disobeying her orders... something she did not because of her classic Federation idealism. The Discovery as a whole doesn't succeed because they believe in the Federation, but just because they do better in the big action sequences than the bad guys. (And on top of that, they are mostly pretty dumb action sequences.) Oh, and because the Discovery crew comes up with such a good idea for tracking the source of the Burn it beggars belief that no one else thought of it in a century.

None of this is the novel's fault, of course. But reading it did make me realize we were robbed of a better story than the one we were told; it's a better ste-up novel than the season's poor pay-off warrants.

(Also: I did kinda wonder about the title going in, but it turned out to be a good choice. As we learned back in S1, one of Burnham's defining books was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and of course she's "through the rabbit hole" here, in a world all topsy-turvy and without logic. Additionally, Burnham remembers a piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry she once read about "a man walking through the ruins that the Romans left behind. This ruin is a wonder . . ." What bothers me here is that upon Googling, the only hit I can find for the poetry is Wonderlands itself. What is she quoting!?)

((Also also: I liked how a number of minor characters were named after early women Star Trek novelists.))

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part III: Television, 2017-Present

Continued from my discussion of The Next Generation tv show and films, plus Enterprise, three weeks ago...

After twelve years away, Star Trek finally returned to television (kind of) with the debut of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present). Discovery featured a new logo with a new typeface:

Peters over at FontShop identifies it as a customized version of "Redrail Superfast." Here's how the logo would look if rendered in the actual Redrail Superfast:

The main change I can identify is the removal of the more finicky serifs: in the base font, almost every letter has these points that go out and then down, but in the Discovery logo, they just go out, if they're there at all. It is somewhat reminiscent of the original Star Trek logo... but I am not a fan. I think it's two things: those Rs look off to me, imbalanced in some way, and only clearly Rs because of the surrounding context. The other is that its finickiness means it doesn't read well from a distance, unlike most other Star Trek logos. I think about this a lot because I shelve my Star Trek trade paperbacks in the dining room and often stare at my bookshelf while trying to get my son to slowly work his way through a meal:

Maybe the coloring is partially the issue, but I don't think the Disco logo stands out as well as the Deep Space Nine or Enterprise logos to either side of it; the novel titles are also in the customized Redrail Superfast, and similarly hard to make out, something the S&S cover designer seems to have admitted when they changed font for the sixth Disco novel.

As I mentioned in part I, the Picard (2020-present) promotional materials used the classic Star Trek font:

The subtitle font could be a number of different sans serifs, but I am pretty sure it is "DIN Condensed."

However, the logo that appeared on literally every piece of Picard tie-in material and advertising was not the logo used in the actual show! The actual show's logo looked like this:

It maintains the DIN Condensed for the subtitle (and in fact, the whole title sequence uses DIN Condensed for credits), but the "STAR TREK" is in Redrail Superfast. This was used in the show's title sequence and, as far as I can tell, literally nowhere else!

I think what happened here is an attempt at branding cohesion that someone changed their minds on at the last minute, because when the cartoon Lower Decks debuted later in 2020, this was its logo:

We have the classic "Star Trek" font for the series title, combined with a unique font for the subtitle. I couldn't find anyone on the Internet stating what the subtitle font is, nor could I figure it out myself; I suspect it's a heavily customized version of something preexisting, if not bespoke. It's definitely going for a comedy vibe, but it's also a little reminiscent of the classic TNG font, I think, with the gaps in the R and the D. (Here's a good post at the TrekBBS where a poster imagines what the logo would look like if it used the actual TNG font.) I should note that for its credits and episode titles, Lower Decks uses the exact font TNG used for those things, "Crillee Italic."

So we have a bit of a pattern emerging in the CBS All Access era, with classic "Star Trek" title and unique subtitle. This would be confirmed when Discovery returned for its third season in late 2020, debuting an all-new logo:

Aha, it all fits together! "Star Trek" for the title; "Eurostile" for the subtitle. Eurostile is one of the fonts used for the livery of Starfleet vessels; it's pretty close to what was used for the Enterprise logo, in fact. Interestingly, though, when the season three premiere debuted on CBSAA, it still used Redrail Superfast for the "Star Trek" part, but later they went back and changed it. So it seems like someone decided they wanted a consistent logo, but late in the game, it was decided that the "Star Trek" font was a better choice for this than Redrail Superfast.

I agree, though there's something indelibly original series about that logo that makes it an odd fit for a universal Star Trek brand. Maybe if it had been used all along, but as I discussed in part I, it has pretty much been contained to the original show and things meant to evoke it. It just seems wrong having it attached to a show about Picard! Surely it should have been something like this:

(forgive my crude mock-up)

The next Star Trek show we know anything concrete about is Prodigy, the Nickelodeon cartoon, which will air in 2021. It keeps the theme going:

There's also the Captain Pike spin-off, Strange New Worlds, but no logo has been released for that yet. Based on the current conformity of the CBSAA era, though, I think we can guess pretty safely what font will be used for the "Star Trek" part of the title, at least!

Continue on to next month's discussion of the fonts of the books...

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Dead Endless by Dave Galanter

Trade paperback, 342 pages
Published 2019
Acquired December 2019
Read February 2020

Star Trek: Discovery: Dead Endless
by Dave Galanter

This is the first Discovery book to substantively take place on Discovery, though not all is as it seems at first. I enjoyed the puzzle of trying to figure out where this book takes place, but the real delight of the book is Galanter's keen grasp of the characters, particularly Stamets and Culber, for whom this is an important turning point in their relationship. We get real insight into what brings them together. It's also a neat adventure of the Star Trekkian ship's-crew-prevents-a-crisis-through-diplomacy-and-openness type, with a convincing streak of optimism. I really enjoyed it-- probably my favorite Discovery novel thus far aside from The Way to the Stars and maybe The Enterprise War.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 at the SFRA Review

Last year, I was able to snag Star Trek: Discovery Season 1 for the "Media Reviews" section of the SFRA Review, the quarterly publication of the Science Fiction Research Association. I enjoyed the experience-- reviews for it are supposed to be less "good/bad" and more "why would this be interesting to scholars"-- so as soon as season 2 finished airing, I e-mailed the Media Reviews editor to stake my claim on it.

The issue is out as of a couple weeks ago. Here's how my review begins (with an embarrassing typo you can read in the published version silently corrected):

ALMOST every television program’s second season embodies a course correction: a discarding or alteration of what did not work the first time, a greater emphasis on what did. Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, broadcast in fourteen episodes from January to April 2019, is perhaps a sharper course correction than many. Discovery has had a tumultuous behind-the-scenes journey: the original showrunner quit partway through season 1, and his replacements were, in turn, fired partway through season 2, replaced by series co-creator Alex Kurtzman. Even without this behind-the-scenes knowledge, the transformation is visible on screen. A greater emphasis on traditional Star Trek optimism has replaced the first season’s grimness, even if a strong focus on action remains. Constant affirmations of camaraderie have replaced the antagonism within the main cast. Fans often criticized the first season for its lack of adherence to earlier continuity, especially visually; the second season is replete with references, especially to the original Star Trek (1966–69) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99), and it massages or eliminates many of season 1’s discontinuities.
     Like season 1, season 2 is noteworthy for its attempts to balance the “new” and the “old” of a long-running franchise. Significantly, season 2 makes heavy use of continuity elements from the original Star Trek series. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the USS Enterprise’s captain from the original unaired pilot (“The Cage”), assumes command of the Discovery. Spock (Ethan Peck) also joins the main cast; other characters from the original pilot also appear. The Enterprise characters wear the bright, primary-color uniforms associated with the original Star Trek, rather than the drab blue ones introduced in Discovery.

You can read the rest here (the link should take you right to it, but if not, it begins on page 70).

Issue #329 is a soft relaunch for the Review, featuring a new visual design, a new logo, color, and more. It also includes news of who won the SFRA's 2019 awards, and reviews of recent sf films and sf criticism, including critical studies of Madeleine L'Engle and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Check it out!

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: The Enterprise War by John Jackson Miller

Trade paperback, 420 pages
Published 2019
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

Star Trek: Discovery: The Enterprise War

by John Jackson Miller

The most recent Star Trek: Discovery novel once again has no scenes aboard the title ship. Instead, this book follows a year in the life of the USS Enterprise, showing what it was doing during Discovery's first season, leading up to its appearance in the season one finale, and retro-foreshadowing some of season 2.

I've always been a fan of Captain Pike's Enterprise-- I used to have a website on a shitty free hosting platform devoted to it-- and I was disappointed that the first Discovery novel, Desperate Hours, didn't quite lean into its Pikeness more. So of course I enjoyed this. At first it's a pretty action-y novel, as the Enterprise explores a dangerous region of space and ends up beset by aliens who kidnap a big chunk of the crew. Fun but disposable. But about halfway through, something dramatic happens, and the novel gets contemplative and atmospheric. I loved the difficult situation everyone ends up in, and I loved how they all handled it, and how it reveals so much about these people. Great big set pieces, awesome visuals of things I surprisingly can't remember being doing in Star Trek before. But also nice little touches, such as Nurse Carlotti's problem, or the role of shipwreck narratives. There are also some nice moments where the book joins

Miller also does a good job with the characters. His Captain Pike captures everything I liked about Anson Mount's portrayal, his Spock is excellent, and he does a strong job with other mainstays like Number One, Yeoman Colt, Nhan, and Doctor Boyce. I also really enjoyed the original character of Galadjian (I hope we see more of him somewhere, but I know by Discovery season 2 he's not around), and I was surprised by he journey Miller took Connolly on. At first the guy annoyed me just as he did in the season 2 premiere, but by novel's end, I understood and liked him and felt bad about how he was depicted in "Brother." Which, I guess, is what a good prequel does!

I'm not totally convinced by every aspect of the joining up, and some of the continuity-smoothing moments are groaners, but overall I really enjoyed this. I've been reading John Jackson Miller's Star Wars comics for over a decade, but this is the first prose fiction and the first Star Trek work I've read from him. He nails it in this universe as much as he did in that one.

Federation Standard Becomes Standard

There are things that you just know as a fan of something, things you picked up from fan cultural osmosis: Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, Uhura's first name is Nyota, transwarp drive failed after The Search for Spock, Captain Pike commanded two five-year missions on the Enterprise. I don't know where I picked these things up from, but somehow I knew them.

People call these things fanon: "fan canon." Though given the adjective form of canon is canonical, surely they should call them fanonical... no? Okay.

Fanon is often contradicted, and then people get mad about it. Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet was contradicted by the appearance of T'Pol 110 years earlier on Enterprise, though she only joined Starfleet in season four. But you can squint and argue that she only joined the Earth Starfleet, not the Federation one that came later. But what you should really note is that:

1. No one on the original series ever actually described Spock as the first Vulcan in Starfleet.
2. Circumstantial evidence is against it. In "The Immunity Syndrome," we learn of (though we do not see) the USS Intrepid, a starship with an entirely Vulcan crew, numbering 400. It seems somewhat unlikely that all 400 Vulcans could have joined Starfleet after Spock, especially given at least one would need to be of higher rank.

Sometime, though, fanon is confirmed. Uhura's first name was given as Nyota in a 1982 book, and used in most books since then. However, it was not used on screen until 2009, in the first reboot film!

Recently this happened again, and I was surprised to realize that the thing to become canon was not in fact already canon. Season 2, episode of Star Trek: Discovery, "New Eden," mentions "Federation Standard" as the language the main characters are speaking. Something I did not realize until logging onto the Internet after watching was that it was the first canonical reference to Federation Standard. But I just knew-- had always known-- that the language was called Federation Standard.

A little bit of research, and I'm still not exactly sure where the term came from. It was being used in novels in the 1980s, which is probably how come I assimilated it.

What I wonder, though, is if the writers of Discovery actually knew what they were doing when they used the term. Did they know they were "canonizing" a long-standing piece of fanon at long last? Or did writers Vaun Wilmott and Sean Cochran think, like me, that the term already was canon, and thus inadvertently made it so?

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: The Way to the Stars by Una McCormack

Trade paperback, 276 pages
Published 2019
Acquired and read January 2019

Star Trek: Discovery: The Way to the Stars

by Una McCormack

The Way to the Stars is the backstory novel for Sylvia Tilly, chronicling Tilly's life at age 16. This means it kind of reads like a young adult novel, but that's no complaint. It might be more accurate, though, to say that this is a bildungsroman, or at least part of one; this is how Sylvia Tilly struggles to fit herself into society but then discovers the place where she belongs. Tilly is harangued by her mother, goes to space boarding school, tries to succeed in academics and extracurriculars, struggles to make friends, and eventually makes a momentous decision. That's the point where the book-- which had always been good-- becomes great. The Way to the Stars takes Tilly further than she's ever gone before, as she meets a variety of people who accept her and shape her and help her to grow. It's really heart-warming without being saccharine, optimistic without being blinkered. It's just a really good book about growing up and finding your place.

I enjoyed every page of it, zipping through it in just over a day. There's a lot of nice side characters, like Tilly's grandmother and her grandmother's husband, plus a crotchety space mechanic, even just random bureaucrats. I particularly enjoyed the USS Dorothy Garrod and its captain. It's cool to see a dedicated science vessel in Star Trek in something other the role of victim. (Do we think it's Oberth-class? I think it would fit what we're told. One thing I didn't buy was that the engineers were the only non-scientists aboard; what about helm and security?)

Una McCormack totally gets Tilly (who is a favorite in our household), the awkward overachiever who wants to be a space captain, and the character at her best is on display here. McCormack has always been one of my favorite Star Trek writers because she understands character, and how to represent it on the page. It's not just capturing the dialogue of the actors, but embodying a way of thinking in the action of the story. Tilly makes some wrongheaded choices here, but the reader understands exactly why she does it even as they know she shouldn't be.

It's also successful as a prequel. I mean, there are obvious ways for it to be so: Tilly mentions her mother on screen in one Discovery episode, and she appears briefly in Short Treks, and Tilly's mother is a good extrapolation of those bits. But there's a deeper, better way for a prequel to work, which is when you're watching the original again, you experience resonances in things that worked fine on their own the first time around. Like, Tilly's father tells her there's something of her mother Siobhan in her, in the way Siobhan can command a room. Tilly doesn't believe him. But she must have realized he was right when she had to pretend to be her mirror counterpart. After reading The Way to the Stars, it's easy to imagine that she's drawing on her mother in those scenes, even if she herself doesn't realize. It's moments like that that make a good prequel into a great one, and this is the most enjoyable Discovery novel thus far.

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself by James Swallow

Trade paperback, 292 pages
Published 2018
Acquired June 2018
Read August 2018

Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself

by James Swallow

Prequels are the thing of Star Trek: Discovery novels-- there will be no Discovery in Discovery. This one gives us some backstory for Lieutenant Saru, probably my favorite character in the main cast. Not backstory in the sense of showing his origins (I believe one of the upcoming Short Treks will do this), but it's an adventure for the USS Shenzhou set about two years before the Battle of the Binary Stars, showcasing Saru during his time as a junior science officer.

The actual story is kind of like, eh, whatever. I didn't really care about what happened to the Peliars or the Gorlans. Not that it was poorly done per se, but it did seem to run afoul of "Planet Zog" syndrome (from Doctor Who): a lot of people with strange alien names that were hard to grab onto at characters. Though I'm making it sound worse than it was, as they and their society did have their moments.

Anyway, the real highlight of the book is the thought and care it puts into its central character, Saru. Saru is, of course, a coward, but justifiably so in his own mind, and Swallow does a great job of keeping us inside Saru's mind throughout the novel. He's fearful, of course, but Swallow marries this with a sense of determination and obstinacy that the character also possesses, along with the occasional plausible instance of recklessness. I liked that Saru's most un-fearful moments came when he was able to empathize with someone else's fear, and then help them move beyond it. It's not something we've seen on screen, but it makes perfect sense with the screen portrayal of the character thus far.

Saru also gets thrust into command of a boarding party, and flounders at first but eventually shows some aptitude for it, culminating in a decent speech that I could see and hear Doug Jones performing (coinciding with his arc in chapter 2 of Discovery's first season). Additionally, there's a great scene that gives insight into Saru without him being present, where Michael Burnham explores his quarters, and starts to see the universe from his perspective. And finally, the novel's last chapter, where Saru and Captain Georgiou reflect on what he's learned from the experience, was very effective in showing Saru's slow growth, as well as Georgiou's strengths as a commanding officer. I felt Swallow had a better handle on the Burnham/Saru rivalry and Georgiou's tolerance of it than David Mack did in Desperate Hours, where it came across as unprofessional.

Overall, another solid Discovery novel. Between these three books and the 2018 Star Trek Annual, we're racking up backstories for the crew at a fair clip. Sylvia Tilly is next, and with Una McCormack writing, I can't wait!

(Fun bonuses: 1) the cover is the best in the series thus far, with the background making it look less like a generic stock photo, and 2) the writing on the cover is embossed! I don't know the last time a Star Trek book did that. It made me nostalgic for the 1990s when it happened all the time.)

Star Trek: Discovery Season 1 at the SFRA Review

I've been trying to publish more recently, including in venues that aren't "scholarly" per se. The first of those publications is out, my review of Star Trek: Discovery's first season for the Science Fiction Research Association Review, the quarterly newsletter of, well, the Science Fiction Research Association, the world's nicest scholarly association dedicated to the study of science fiction. (Obviously this is scholarly in a sense, but it's not a peer-reviewed journal article; the SFRA Review is supposed to communicate to sf scholars where an item fits into the history and concerns of the genre and what kind of potential it has.)

Here's how it begins:

Star Trek: Discovery marks the return of the Star Trek franchise to its small screen roots for the first time since Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005. Though drawing on the visual aesthetics of the J.J. Abrams-spearheaded big screen reboot of the franchise (2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and 2016’s Star Trek Beyond), Discovery is set in the so-called “Prime timeline” home to the previous six Star Trek television shows and the first ten films. Set about ten years before the original Star Trek (1966–1969), the show focuses on the character of Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), a Starfleet officer on the USS Shenzhou and the human foster daughter of Spock’s father Sarek (James Frain). The first two-part story, “The Vulcan Hello” and “Battle at the Binary Stars,” chronicles Burnham’s involvement in the instigation of a Federation-Klingon war; the remaining thirteen episodes detail Burnham’s adventures on the USS Discovery under Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) during the war.
     The main story arc of Discovery is about the war, and like much Star Trek, it is a none-too-subtle mirror for our own times. The faction of the Klingons that instigates the war is led by T’Kuvma (Chris Obi), who employs nationalist rhetoric about the cultural, not military, threat of the Federation, arguing the Federation’s multiculturalism will assimilate and gradually eliminate traditional Klingon values. He sees “we come in peace” as more of a threat than physical attack. On the other side, the Federation in general, and Michael Burnham in particular, struggle with the ethics of wartime: Burnham initially proposes a violent course of action that her captain, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) dismisses as conflicting with Federation values; later Burnham becomes the proponent of Federation values butting heads with the ends-justify-the-means attitudes of Captain Lorca. While at first Discovery seems like a “grim and gritty” wartime take on Star Trek, especially during its third and fourth episodes, which focus on Lorca’s dubious actions, the story arc’s trajectory ultimately serves as a refutation of Burnham’s initial impulses as well as Lorca’s utilitarian morality.

If you want to read the rest of the review, which focuses on how the show plays with traditional Star Trek tropes and the joys of franchises, it begins on page 23 of this PDF. There are some spoilers, though I tried to not go too far.

It turns out that 750-1000 words is not a lot of words to discuss a fifteen-episode entry in the television franchise about which I have the most feelings, so there's a lot that had to go to the side because of the focus I selected. I may ruminate on that here some day (I have a lot of opinions about sound design in Discovery), but I may not.

Issue #324 also contains reviews of N. K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky, Nnedi Okorafor's Binti: The Night Masquerade, the film version of Annihilation, and Gothic Science Fiction, 1818 to the Present, a particularly dreadful monograph I reviewed for Science Fiction Studies a couple years ago (the SFRA Review reviewer agrees with me). Read it!

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Drastic Measures by Dayton Ward

Trade paperback, 391 pages
Published 2018
Acquired February 2018
Read March 2018

Star Trek: Discovery: Drastic Measures

by Dayton Ward

The second Discovery tie-in novel is also a prequel, set ten years before the series proper, and featuring slightly younger versions of Philippa Georgiou and Gabriel Lorca-- importantly, this is a Lorca we haven't actually seen before, so to speak. The novel is set during the Tarsus IV massacre, which forms the backstory to the original series episode "The Conscience of the King." Lorca is stationed on Tarsus IV, while Georgiou is on one of the relief vessels. The tying in of the new to the old seems to be a staple of these Discovery novels, and here it works well.

Dayton Ward weaves the various (sometime hard to understand) hints about the massacre into a coherent whole. The book especially shines in its depiction of Kodos himself; I expected the book to cheat on him, to depict him as a hypocrite as stories like this often do. That is, after all, the easy way out. Make a monster into a hypocrite, and you can reject him with ease. But Ward makes Kodos into a patriot and a true believer, a man who really does think he's doing the right thing in a time of crisis. I found the glimpses into his mind and into his followers, fascinating.

Lorca is the novel's real focus, and the man who emerges is the man who might guess Lorca was based on the first season of Discovery. He's tough when the situation calls for it, but Ward uses one of those fortune cookies he occasionally dispensed on the show to anchor the moral core of the character, one that we didn't see on screen. Georgiou comes across as more generic, unfortunately; the show makes her into a woman who sticks to her principles even when that might be risky, and one who fervently believes in the values of the Federation. Putting a personality like that into a situation like Tarsus might resonate, but she's just kind of a typical leader character most of the time.

Sometimes Ward can be a slow writer, and there are signs of that here (I think the backstory of migration to Tarsus IV is explained to us three times in the first fifty pages), but most of the book moves at a fair clip, and it was an enjoyable read.

(dat epilog tho!)

Two Things I Was Wrong about When It Came to Star Trek: Discovery

Just over two years ago now, I reacted to the news about the new Star Trek tv show in development by writing a post informing you (yes, you) of six things you were wrong about. But now that the first "chapter" (half a season) is over, it turns out that I was wrong about a couple things, so I'm going to revisit that old post and eat my hat.

Things I claimed:

1. It Was Going to Be Set in the "Abramsverse." While I was correct that the new show would not follow up any of the myriad things fans remembered from latter-day Deep Space Nine and Voyager episodes (it actually was not Captain Worf), I went on to claim, "New Star Trek should take advantage of the relatively blank canvas offered by a reality with only six hours of content to do something bold, new, and interesting that still feels like Star Trek. [...] Sure, in theory you could do this in the old universe, but there's a perception of baggage that the show is just better off without." Well, it turns out that the show was set in the old "Prime" universe after all! How did it deal with the baggage? Well, just by ignoring it! The aesthetics of Discovery hew pretty closely to those of what we now call the "Kelvin timeline" films (we did not have that convenient term in 2015, reader), and they certainly haven't felt restricted by small bits of canon: Klingon cloaking devices in 2255, why not!? I remain a little surprised by this. Other than the fact that the planet Vulcan still exists, I feel like this show hasn't done anything that wouldn't have fit in the Kelvin timeline, yet here we are.
   
   It turns out, though... that I actually kind of like that it's in the "old" universe. When this show reintroduces Harry Mudd, it's the "same" Harry Mudd I grew up watching, and that makes me smile. Maybe you can go home again.
   
   MY PREDICTION: WRONG.
    
2. It Was Not Going to Be Terrible Despite Being Set In the Abramsverse. Basically this was a long argument about how being set in the same continuity as Abrams' films didn't mean it would have the same quality as them. (This was directed at Abrams haters.) So I guess technically this one ought to be rated "NOT APPLICABLE" since it wasn't set in that reality. If you read my full thing, though, it turns out that I was wrong anyway, because I said, "being set in the same continuity doesn't mean it'll have the same aesthetic, either. If you dislike the movies for being zippy action flicks, the television series is probably not going to be quite like that. (If nothing else, I bet they don't have the money.)"
   
   
   
   It turns out that 1) they weren't set in the same continuity but did have the same aesthetic, and 2) they did have the money because CBS is going all out on this thing. Thus arguably I still ended up wrong, but I refuse to ding up two misses already, so I'll stick with my technicality.
   
   MY PREDICTION: NOT APPLICABLE.
    
3. It Was Going to Not Be Like Your Favorite Fanfilm. Finally one I definitely got right. No fanfilm I have watched has managed to play with the classic tropes and ideas of Star Trek like Discovery has. It did initially seem like it was going to be a grimdark war show with the Whole Federation At Stake (like a lot of fanfilms), and it's even plumbing the depths of the Federation-Klingon War (like a certain fanfilm in particular), but though that's definitely a major part of the show's background, it soon established itself to be a lot more varied, and more inventive, and less fannish than any fanfilm I have watched.
   
   MY PREDICTION: RIGHT.
    
4. Alex Kurtzman Not Being a Star Trek Fan Was Not Terrible. Well, I stand by this one. He's the credited co-creator, but my impression is that his involvement isn't that big. He has a co-story credit on the pilot, and that's it. I mean, he's executive producer so I'm sure everything passes through him at some point, but is he even in the writers' room breaking episodes? If the show is terrible, it's not because of Kurtzman's lack of fan credentials. (And it's not terrible.)
   
   MY PREDICTION: RIGHT.
    

5. They Should Not Bring Back Someone Who Worked on Old, "Real" Star Trek. Okay, I don't know if they should have, but they did. They brought back Bryan Fuller, who was a story editor, later executive story editor, later later co-producer on Voyager back in the day; he has story or script credits on twenty-two various episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, including triumphs like "Spirit Folk" (a holosimulation of Irish stereotypes takes over the ship) and "Fury" (Kes comes back... and she's pissed!). So I guess I was wrong.
   
   But I actually was excited, because in the two decades (what the heck!) between Voyager and Discovery, he went on to create Wonderfalls, one of my favorite tv shows, and also Pushing Daisies is pretty good. He may have cut his teeth on 1990s Star Trek, but I knew he would produce something utterly unlike it.
   
   But but despite being co-creator, he quit after three episodes: he's credited with co-story and co-script on the pilot, story on the second episode, and co-story on the third, and that's it because he's busy doing wacky Gaiman shit on American Gods. He still left his mark, though. Mainly in that the main character is a woman with a male name.
   
   MY PREDICTION: WRONG.
    
6. You Would Be Able to Watch It Despite It Being on a Streaming Service. Um, okay, I'm technically wrong about this one too because there are good odds you aren't watching it because it's on a streaming service. And let's be honest, paying for ads is kind of dumb, but paying for that goddamn Xeljanz ad again and again is particularly dumb. (Xeljanz is an arthritis medication; I assume they're advertising it on Discovery because it sounds like a leftover Star Trek alien.) But the show has been good enough to be worth it, and let's be honest, my real reason for this entry in my original post was to go on a long rant about how watching Star Trek on CBS All Access couldn't be worse than watching Star Trek on UPN, and I was right about that, so I'm calling this one a win anyway.
   
   MY PREDICTION: RIGHT.

Also Discovery is actually pretty good and pretty clever, but that's a different blog post.

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Hours by David Mack

I have some reviews of the first three releases of 2017's Fourth Doctor Adventures up at USF: The Beast of Kravenos (the Doctor, Romana, and K9 meet Jago and Litefoot), The Eternal Battle (the Doctor, Romana and K9 meet the Sontarans), and The Silent Scream (the Doctor, Romana, and K9 meet a silent film star). One of them is good.

Trade paperback, 368 pages
Published 2017
Acquired September 2017
Read October 2017

Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Hours

by David Mack

The first Discovery tie-in novel is a prequel, set one year prior to the events of the Discovery pilot, "The Vulcan Hello." It has a neat concept courtesy of series co-creator Bryan Fuller, one which will probably never be done on screen: the Shenzhou meeting the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike, which means that Michael Burnham meets her foster brother, a young Lieutenant Spock.

The plot is honestly pretty perfunctory: a mysterious alien ship threatens a Federation colony, so the Shenzhou and the Enterprise are sent to stop it. Captain Pike is ready to follow orders to destroy the ship with minimal investigation, while Georgiou favors a more scientific and diplomatic approach. It's in its characterization of Pike where the book falters the most: I never felt like I was reading about the thoughtful man played on screen by either Jeffrey Hunter or Bruce Greenwood. Pike here is too violent and too by-the-book.

Better was the characterization of Burnham and Spock. A young Spock is tricky-- there are points where he's more Data-esque-- but I liked these two characters together: mirrors of one another, both human-Vulcan outcasts in their way. I didn't always exactly get where Burnham was coming from, but that's consistent with her characterization on the television program (I finished the book after watching episode four), where she's very rash but says she's logical and focused, and where her attitude towards ends and means fluctuates. Burnham and Spock solving puzzles together on an alien ship was okay, but the part near the end of the novel where each has to confront what it means to live as the other, was excellent, some really sharp character-based writing from David Mack. Alas that we will never get to see Sonequa Martin-Green and Zachary Quinto do this on screen.

The best part of the book is Saru. On screen he's probably my favorite character. I didn't like the implausibly unprofessional bickering he and Burnham participate in, but that's an accurate reflection of the television series, unfortunately. (I feel like you could write a rivalry that wasn't so immature-- its brazenness reflects poorly on both captain characters for not quashing it.) What Desperate Hours lets us do that Discovery itself has not yet done is let us see those parts of Saru that have nothing to do with Burnham; since the show is mostly told from her perspective, so far we've only seen Saru interacting with her. Here, we get Saru running his science lab on the Shenzhou, Saru contributing ideas that help save the day, Saru interacting with the Enterprise's Number One (who he kind of falls for, as she's the first human he's met who doesn't act like a predator), and Saru ruminating on his past (he was rescued from his planet, where his people lived in caves, by a Starfleet crew). I really liked the way the book handled Saru.

Number One was characterized well, though I was mildly grumpy that Mack calls her "Una"; however, I understand that originates from a Greg Cox novel. I know it's hard to work with an anonymous character like this in prose, but it just seems wrong, like translating Chewbacca's dialogue directly in print. I was a little sad to get almost none of the other Pike's Enterprise crew: Boyce has one scene, and Tyler, Garison, and Pitcairn make tiny contributions, but there's no Colt (who's my favorite), and the only "expanded universe" Pike crewmember I noticed was Caitlin Barry from the 1980s/90s novels by D. C. Fontana and Peter David. Give me some Mohindas or Burnstein or Dabisch or Nano or Moves-with-Burning-Grace or Carlotti! You shouldn't really take this complaint seriously, though, because ultimately this isn't a Pike's Enterprise novel, it's a Discovery (Shenzhou) one, and the focus is in the right place. I just really like Pike's crew.

I do wish we'd seen more of the various Shenzhou crew, though. Mack wrote biographies for them all, and named many of them (including Kayla Detmer, the only one to make the transition to the Discovery other than Burnham and Saru), but there's not much in the book to make you care about them: I want previous adventures for Danby Connor that make me even more sad when he bites it at the Battle of the Binary Stars!

Anyway, on the whole this was an enjoyable book. I like the way CBS and Simon & Schuster seem to be handling the Discovery novels: rather than so-so outings slotted in between television episodes like how Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise all started out in prose, they're being used to flesh out the universe of the new show and connect it to the world of the old ones.

Six Things You Are Wrong about When It Comes to the New Star Trek Television Series

You may have heard that there's a new Star Trek series on its way to our television screens.

New captain (and new everything).

I'm excited, in the sense that 1) I love Star Trek and 2) I don't know enough to be apprehensive about it. I mean, it might be terrible. But right now, it could also be amazing, and that's what I'm sitting here hoping for. At this point, I had my doubts that there would be a new Star Trek series on television any time soon, and though I don't want terrible Star Trek, I'm willing to chance that it will be terrible because there's also a chance it could be good. Or, you know, kind of all right.

That said, the Internet is filled with people who are wrong about New Star Trek (that's what I'm calling it for now), and I'm here to help you recognize that. These are the things you're wrong about:

1. It's Not Going to Be Set in the "Abramsverse" (or at least, It Ought Not to Be). You don't spend billions of dollars making a pair of new Star Trek movies set in a new, continuity-free universe that draw in tons of new fans, and then make your next television program about some obscure element from the old continuity. It's not going to be Captain Worf (no one cares), Admiral Riker and/or the Titan (no one cares), or What The Dominion Is Up To In The 26th Century Also With Captain Nog (really no one cares). New Star Trek should take advantage of the relatively blank canvas offered by a reality with only six hours of content to do something bold, new, and interesting that still feels like Star Trek. (I mean, maybe it won't... but it should still try.) Sure, in theory you could do this in the old universe, but there's a perception of baggage that the show is just better off without.
   
   

2. 

   The future's so bright, Sulu oughta wear shades.

   Being Set in the Abramsverse Means It's Going to Be Terrible. This doesn't even make sense. Even if you don't like the J. J. Abrams movies, being set in the same continuity as something terrible doesn't automatically make New Star Trek terrible. Is that like the transitive property of quality and continuity, or something? "In the Pale Moonlight" is set in the same reality as "And the Children Shall Lead," that didn't mean it automatically sucked. Continuity has its importance, but it doesn't determine quality. Even if you think the Abrams movies are terrible, being set in the same reality as them doesn't mean New Star Trek is magically going to absorb their quality.
   
   Also: being set in the same continuity doesn't mean it'll have the same aesthetic, either. If you dislike the movies for being zippy action flicks, the television series is probably not going to be quite like that. (If nothing else, I bet they don't have the money.) The films are like that not because they're set in a new continuity, but because that's the style of film J. J. Abrams wanted to make. Continuity also does not equal aesthetic. If it's terrible, it won't be because it's set the Universe of Lens Flares.
   
   
3. It Should Be Like My Favorite Fanfilm (e.g., Axanar or Renegades or Whatever). These fanfilms are made by hardcore fans for hardcore fans, and they have nothing to offer a casual audience. Who, you know, is the majority of people who watch Star Trek. "Find out what the career of Fleet Captain Garth of Izar from the 1968 episode 'Whom Gods Destroy' was like!" is not the pitch that's going to get people watching this. If you think this, you're a silly person.
   
   
4. Alex Kurtzman Is Not a Star Trek Fan, and This Is Terrible. Oh, c'mon. Do you know who else weren't Star Trek fans: Nicholas Meyer and Harve Bennett, the two-man team who gave us three of the best Star Trek films (The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, The Undiscovered Country). Robert Wise, who gave us the most Star Trekky of the Star Trek films, The Motion Picture. Do you know who was a Star Trek fan? Michael Piller who wrote Star Trek: Insurrection. John Logan, who wrote Star Trek Nemesis. Fans have given us great Star Trek and terrible Star Trek, and non-fans have given us great Star Trek and terrible Star Trek. There's no real correlation here.
   
   
5. They Should Bring Back Ronald Moore, or Rick Berman, or Someone Else Who Used to Work on the Show(s)/Film(s) That I Count as "Real" Star Trek. No, they shouldn't. This is New Star Trek, and it needs to do new things. Now, I love Deep Space Nine, but the solution to making the new show be awesome is not to round up some guys who worked on Star Trek for over a decade over two decades ago. Go boldly forward-- just as was done in 1966, 1979, 1982, 1986, and 2009.
   
   
6. I'm Not Going to Be Able to Watch It Because It's on a Streaming Service. Okay, you actually might be right about this. But, $6 per month for CBS All Access doesn't sound so bad to me. I don't pay for cable, and watch my TV entirely through the Internet or on DVD. I recently paid $23 to watch series 9 of Doctor Who on iTunes, and that seems worth it to me given how little I pay for televisual entertainment otherwise. If New Star Trek has thirteen-episode seasons like the Marvel Netflix shows and airs weekly, it will actually be cheaper than Doctor Who.
   
   
   
   But also: kids these days don't know how good they've got it with their Netflixes and their DVDs. Do you know how I watched Voyager and Enterprise? On UPN. And let me tell you, UPN is probably the worst way a television show was delivered to its viewers in the whole 20th century, except for those guys who had to bicycle episodes of Doctor Who around Africa in the late 1960s.
   
   The UPN affiliate in Cincinnati was kind of all right when Voyager started in 1996, but in 1998 it traded with the WB affiliate, Channel 25. Channel 25 was terrible. My parents' home was thirteen miles from the transmitter, and our signal was still covered in snow when we got every other Cincinnati channel just fine. I remembering my parents indulging me by trying to reorient our antenna to make the station come in better; I was looking at the tv, shouting "oh, that was better! no, go back!" to my mom, who was on the stairs relaying all this up to my dad in the attic, who was turning the antenna this way and that. (Yes, my parents kept their antenna in the attic for some reason.)
   
   There was a rumor in Cincinnati that the station was broadcast out of some guy's basement. It wasn't, but the rumor was so believable and so widespread, that Channel 25 actually specifically addressed it in an FAQ on their website. (Seriously, though, click on that link and boggle that a serious corporate venture thought that paranoid rantings was the thing to put on its official website.) For the first two years of Enterprise, I barely knew what the show looked like; watching it was like listening to an audio drama. When I went to college in 2003 and thus gained access to cable in the dorms, I was legitimately amazed at how good the special effects on Enterprise were, because I had never seen them before. No matter how unavailable New Star Trek is by virtue of being on CBS All Access, it's going to be more accessible than the two Star Trek series that aired on UPN.

I'm not saying you have to like it once you watch it. I'm not even saying you have to watch it if you don't want. But I am saying that your reasons for not liking it at this stage are objectively dumb.