wix@bergil.DEC (Jack Wickwire) (06/25/84)
Subj: Diane Duane's *My Enemy, My Ally*
This is a brief and disorganized review of the latest "Star Trek"
novel, Diane Duane's *My Enemy, My Ally*. It is not intentionally
a spoiler, but if you are picky you had probably better not read
it. (If you are picky, you had probably also better not read the
blurb on the back of the book, which ruins the tension of the first
few chapters.)
* * ** Slight Spoiler ** * *
Whee! This one is a lot of fun. This is not to say that it has
no serious content. I'm not sure the timing is right, but it seems
to have been inspired by John Ford's *The Final Reflection*. To a
lesser extent it does for the Romulans what Ford did for the Klingons.
One of the viewpoint characters is a Romulan Commander; she gets
roughly every other chapter. There's a fair amount of the Romulan
language (excuse me; the Rihannsu language) and some fascinating
glimpses of Romulan culture and philosophy. The writing is good,
the characterization dead right (for pre-STII, anyway), the suspense
considerable, the space battles remarkable, and most of the science
plausible, though I think Duane bases her biology on some experiments
the results of which have turned out not to be repeatable. There
are lots of cunning little references to the TV episodes and a few
oblique ones to things to come. Highly recommended.
(So you'll have some points of reference, let me add that I think the
best of the "Star Trek" novels are Vonda MacIntyre's *The Entropy
Effect*, Diane Duane's *The Wounded Sky*, and John M. Ford's *The
Final Reflection*. Then there are the competent and enjoyable, but
flawed ones like A.C. Crispin's *Yesterday's Son* or Joe Haldeman's
*Planet of Judgement*, the badly-written but interesting ones like
Sonni Cooper's *Black Fire*, the brilliant but deviant ones by
Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (*The Price of the Phoenix*,
*The Day of the Phoenix*, *The Prometheus Design*, and *Triangle*,
and the godawful ones like Robert Vardeman's *Mutiny on the Enterprise*
or Cogswell and Spanos's *Spock: Messiah!*. Oh, yes: and the science
fiction novels that just happen to have people with the same names
as the "Star Trek" characters: James Blish's *Spock Must Die!* and
David Gerrold's *The Galactic Whirlpool*. And predictable, trivial,
colorless ones like Vardeman's *The Klingon Gambit*. That ought to
suffice, if not surfeit.)
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PDDBappatel@kcl-cs.UUCP (ZNAC343) (06/26/85)
In article <268@dcl-cs.UUCP> david@dcl-cs.UUCP (David Coffield) writes: >Someone recently noted that the replacement of Eagle landers on Space 1999 was >not possible due to the fact that the base had very finite resources. He also >noted that the Enterprise could easily pop in to a starbase for repairs. What >puzzles me is that the 5 year mission of the Enterprise was "to boldy go .." etc >and therefore there shouldn't be a starbase in sight if they were chartering >unknown territory. Also, how come they knew the name of every planet they >visited? Surely they wouldn't have had a name if no-one had been there before. The 5 year mission refered to above is the length of the tour of duty of the Enterprise.The Enterprise was assigned a quadrant to patrol and explore as not all planets and star systems had been explored in Federation space.So when the Enterprise was not on a StarFleet assigned mission (eg:"A Taste Of Armagedon", "The Enterprise Incident","The Trouble With Tribbles") then its prime task was to explore and chart star systems that had not been visted before.(Remember that the galaxy has about 100,000 million stars, and if say federation space only covers 10%, then thats about 10,000 million stars to be explored and charted). Therefore even when in federation space they would be boldly chartering unknown territory and still be near a starbase (I think there were about 20 of them). The reason that they knew the name of every planet that they came to was that either the planet was a member of the federation or that the planet's name was derived from the names of the star and the position of the planet from the star,(Earth is SOL 3).If you look at a good star catalouge you will find that there are a lot of stars in it with name that were mentioned in Star Trek. ("TO BE OR NOT TO BE..THAT IS ILLOGICAL CAPTAIN"...SPOCK).
dturner@imagen.UUCP (10/05/86)
I was just wondreing if anyone has the sources to a good
startrek game to run on a mainframe (vax 11/70 runing unix bsd 4.2)
if so could you mail;swap tape;send carrier pigon;smoke singel;etc. etc.
and tell me where I can get a copy .
Thanks in advance.
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It's not my planet monkey-boy
Name: David R. Turner
Mail: Imagen Corp. 2650 San Tomas Expressway, P.O. Box 58101
Santa Clara, CA 95052-8101
AT&T: (408) 446-3412
UUCP: ...{decvax,ucbvax}!decwrl!imagen!dturner