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Jul. 27th, 2009 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLast time I was up in Boston was shortly after Star Trek came out, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
genarti handed me two of Diane Duane's Star Trek tie-in novels, My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way, and told me they were very interesting and I should read them.
For the record: I saw and enjoyed the new Trek movie - twice, actually, once with each parent - and I have vague knowledge of the various series' due to them all being on in the background all the time when I was growing up, but no more than vague. For one thing, I spent many years of my childhood completely convinced that Spock and Data were the same character. This caused a lot of confusion when they showed us The One With Whales in my fourth-grade class and there was a scene with Amanda Grayson -
TINY BECCA: What! What! ROBOTS ARE NOT HALF-HUMAN, THEY DO NOT HAVE MOMS. (Obviously at this point I had not yet seen Battlestar Galactica. Has anyone written Hera-Spock fic yet? If not, WHY NOT?)
Around the same era, Tiny Becca also got into a long argument with her mother about why the hell elves were coming out of a spaceship in that one Trek movie.
BECCA'S MOM: POINTY EARS DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN ELVES, CHILD. Aliens can have pointy ears too! Is that so hard to understand!
But I am getting off topic here, and anyway, my point is that I do not have vast or extensive knowledge at all of Original Trek, but that does not mean that I enjoyed any less Diane Duane thoroughly getting her geek on and desperately trying to make the Romulans make sense. I accidentally read The Romulan Way first, which is out of order (and got thoroughly chewed out bybatyatoon and fire_and_a_rose for doing so, too) but I am actually kind of glad I did. Half of The Romulan Way is Diane Duane building Romulan culture and history from the ground up, which is very cool to see. The whole plot with A Deep Cover Spy and McCoy Among The Romulans is kind of secondary, although she is also an interesting character.
My Enemy, My Ally is more plot-related, but just as full of hilarious dorkery - it really does not get geekier than the bit where Kirk and Uhura watch Doctor Who. It is also very, very endearingly earnest and all about ~learning to understand the enemy~ and ~working together~, and features an extremely badass Romulan lady captain making Difficult Moral Choices! Also, 4-D chess. I mean it as a compliment when I say it reads like very good fanfic, with a well put-together plot, some metaphors about chess as character exploration, a lot of fanwanking to make the universe make sense, and ton of references that are clearly thrown in just because the author is having fun with it. It is very easy for the reader to get caught up in that fun, too, and I totally did, even knowing that half the references were passing me by.
genarti handed me two of Diane Duane's Star Trek tie-in novels, My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way, and told me they were very interesting and I should read them.For the record: I saw and enjoyed the new Trek movie - twice, actually, once with each parent - and I have vague knowledge of the various series' due to them all being on in the background all the time when I was growing up, but no more than vague. For one thing, I spent many years of my childhood completely convinced that Spock and Data were the same character. This caused a lot of confusion when they showed us The One With Whales in my fourth-grade class and there was a scene with Amanda Grayson -
TINY BECCA: What! What! ROBOTS ARE NOT HALF-HUMAN, THEY DO NOT HAVE MOMS. (Obviously at this point I had not yet seen Battlestar Galactica. Has anyone written Hera-Spock fic yet? If not, WHY NOT?)
Around the same era, Tiny Becca also got into a long argument with her mother about why the hell elves were coming out of a spaceship in that one Trek movie.
BECCA'S MOM: POINTY EARS DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN ELVES, CHILD. Aliens can have pointy ears too! Is that so hard to understand!
But I am getting off topic here, and anyway, my point is that I do not have vast or extensive knowledge at all of Original Trek, but that does not mean that I enjoyed any less Diane Duane thoroughly getting her geek on and desperately trying to make the Romulans make sense. I accidentally read The Romulan Way first, which is out of order (and got thoroughly chewed out by
batyatoon and fire_and_a_rose for doing so, too) but I am actually kind of glad I did. Half of The Romulan Way is Diane Duane building Romulan culture and history from the ground up, which is very cool to see. The whole plot with A Deep Cover Spy and McCoy Among The Romulans is kind of secondary, although she is also an interesting character.My Enemy, My Ally is more plot-related, but just as full of hilarious dorkery - it really does not get geekier than the bit where Kirk and Uhura watch Doctor Who. It is also very, very endearingly earnest and all about ~learning to understand the enemy~ and ~working together~, and features an extremely badass Romulan lady captain making Difficult Moral Choices! Also, 4-D chess. I mean it as a compliment when I say it reads like very good fanfic, with a well put-together plot, some metaphors about chess as character exploration, a lot of fanwanking to make the universe make sense, and ton of references that are clearly thrown in just because the author is having fun with it. It is very easy for the reader to get caught up in that fun, too, and I totally did, even knowing that half the references were passing me by.
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Date: 2009-07-29 12:45 am (UTC)*grins*
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Date: 2009-07-29 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-29 02:43 am (UTC)*cheerful* Shall I tell you what it is?
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Date: 2009-07-29 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-29 03:04 am (UTC)And they're singing filksongs.
:D
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Date: 2009-07-29 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-29 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-29 02:00 pm (UTC)And some filksongs.
It and My Enemy, My Ally are the novels usually trotted out for Why Diane Duane Writes Awesome Star Trek.
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Date: 2009-07-29 03:14 pm (UTC)(I also totally want to read the one that Laurence Yep wrote, which I know is about Sulu but do not know anything else about. But: Laurence Yep! Sulu! How cna this be a bad combination?)
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Date: 2009-07-29 03:36 pm (UTC)It is a very Diane Duane novel, and I am quite fond of it.
(!!! I did not know he'd written a Sulu-centric novel! Or had forgotten if I did. DO WANT.)
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Date: 2009-07-29 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-29 04:11 pm (UTC)DO WANT TIMES INFINITY)