Author: Brian J. Noggle

This book is a bit unlike most genre fiction, where you have an obvious sort of plot problem that, once it’s overcome, the book is done. Instead, we have a character (Friday), an elite “courier” who happens to be an Artificial Person looking for an identity in a world of humans who don’t view AP or the lesser petri dish Living Artifacts as human, and we have her situation: in a post-breakup world run by batteries and without internal combustion engines, intrigue amid the nation-states, and a wave of assassinations. When Friday is rejected by an open family and is cut off from her corporate benefactors, she has to rely on her wits and her augmented reflexes to survive and find her way home.

The book is a later Heinlein; I have only the barest memory of reading anything but Stranger in a Strange Land in high school (the other stuff came in middle school) and Farnham’s Freehold last year. This book is more like the former, with its reliance on free-and-breezy sexuality, than the latter, a more straight ahead science fiction story. I mean, the Heinlein moral code is there in both, but not so vigorous in the earlier work. I’m not going to spend a lot of time pooh-poohing it because I’m not a prude, but I am a family guy. So I prefer the old school Heinlein.

The book doesn’t answer many questions the reader will have about what’s happened between now and the time the book takes place to break up the US, for one thing, and eliminate internal combustion engines. Nor does it really draw to a close the questions it brings up nor conclude the macro-background big deals and big events in which the story is set; instead, we have Friday removing herself from the situation as a resolution.

Perhaps consistent, perhaps on message, but ultimately it weakens the book.

On the plus side, this book is fairly common at book fairs, so you can get yours cheaply if you don’t want the ease and convenience of enriching me by clicking the link below.

Books mentioned in this review:

All right, I think this author took slightly more liberty with this novelization than “Gene Roddenberry” did with the first one; a lot of the scenes that I don’t remember from the movie are a little disparate (but nobody got implants that disappear). Given what I’ve seen of the novelization of The Search for Spock, though, this one is relatively bang-on the novelization.

To recap: While the Enterprise is on a training mission, it investigates a scientific lab outpost that sends a garbled message to Kirk. Meanwhile, an enemy from Kirk’s past has put events in motion to steal that lab’s discovery and to kill Kirk in revenge.

These books clock in under 200 pages, even with the additional emoting scenes and scientific mumbo-jumbo added. If you’re into Star Trek, you will probably get a kick out of them.

Books mentioned in this review:

As you might know, gentle reader, I picked up a number of Star Trek movie novelizations last autumn along with a copy of My Enemy, My Ally. I also later bought VHS copies of all of the movies but The Voyage Home. So I’ll be able to do a comparison of the films to the novels as well, once I get around to watching the movies.

The book follows the movie, mostly, with some variations (as I recall). For example, I don’t remember an implant that gives Kirk direct access to the Starfleet emergency channel. But it’s in the book and, as I know of the Star Trek universe, nowhere else. However, my reading in the canon is a little light, but that’s changing.

The book also looks at some of the behind-the-scenes politicking that made Kirk an admiral and some of the history of the Enterprise era, but it looks as though this, too, never made official canon. I have to wonder if they really paid attention to the books when building the movies and other series. Actually, I don’t have to wonder; I can infer by what Ms. Duane said when she commented on her book.

A quick enough read, and it was fun enough. If it doesn’t line completely up, I won’t notice in most places and won’t mind too much when it does. Which is why Paramount can do it so sloppily.

Oh, yeah, the plot: A big probe comes to earth to destroy it. No, not because of the whales, because it’s Voyager coming to meet its creator and disinfect the planet of the irrational carbon units. Then, a hot bald chick acts as its emissary and the dad from 7th Heaven unites with the hot bald chick and the machine. Credits roll.

Sure, it’s thin, but audiences waited through the whole 1970s, almost, to get that, and they were ecstatic. Once the geeks were happy again, the fog of the 1970s lifted, the moribund economy rebounded, and we’re still seeing the effects of that national optimism today. Reagan revolution? No, the Roddenberry Revolution.

Books mentioned in this review:

As I move the books and the MfBJN home office, I’ve shuffled through my to-read shelves and have found a couple of books that I would have surely read by now if I’d known they were present. This book is one of them. The Lucas Davenport novels are pretty good genre reads.

This book, from the middle 1990s, details Davenport’s search for a madman who has kidnapped a shrink and her two daughters and keeps them hidden in a root cellar in the country. Davenport marshals his team (sorry, Deputy Chiefs his team) to find the perp and to hopefully rescue as many as possible.

Davenport novels have a good sense of the upper Midwest, but like in Mortal Prey, someone in the know will find a jarring inaccuracy. In that book, it was little things about St. Louis; in this book, it’s when discussing GenCon (whose t-shirt the bad guy was seen wearing). Davenport explains it off-handedly that it’s a gaming convention in Lake Geneva. Although the name comes from Lake Geneva, the convention was held in Milwaukee at the time. Take my word for it. Before I was living in St. Louis to prepare my John Sandford fact-checking abilities, I lived in Milwaukee and attended GenCon to hone my John Sandford fact-checking abilities.

Regardless of those occasional devil chords of obvious problems (which probably include things about which I don’t know, so I don’t hear the krang!), the books remain readable and enjoyable, and I’ll get around to the one remaining Sandford on my shelves (Dead Watch) one of these days.

Books mentioned in this review: