So this is ... very, very very late. Ooops. Sorry. I'd give excuses, but there's really no excuse for me being as late as all this, is there?

If anyone remembers, the last book up for discussion was:

Doctor's Orders

Pocket Books #57 by Diane Duane.

This books is, of course, the book of McCoy love! We should all love McCoy.

( So, anybody remember what this book was about? )

The next book on the list is MY ENEMY, MY ALLY

Yay, Ael at last! This is the first of the Rihannsu books, which introduces us both to the best Romulan Empire ever, and Ensign Naraht the space cadet Horta.

You know where to go if you need the e-book! And I promise I won't leave you hanging in the middle of Rihannsu saga: we're going to go through them in five weeks neat if I have to injure myself doing it.

PS: You all saw where wintercreek posted an amazing mp3 of Enterprise, Starship, right? And said she wanted a bunch more voices to do a singalong version? I posted my voices with hers. You should all try it, too, so I'm not alone out there and feeling silly.

Hi all! Sorry if you've been feeling a bit ignored lately: my e-mail has been dumping most of my comment notifications for this community into my spam folder, so if I didn't reply to you in a timely manner, I apologize, and it wasn't intentional.

There's a bunch of new stuff up on the source post, by the way, due to the diligent work of you guys! There are some more archive files, and some tie-in comics and some worldbuilding resources from c. 1980. (I'll also mention here that if you have a particular book you want to jump to the front of the queue for re-read, sending me a clean copy is a great way to up your chances...)

We're still on for a Spock's World discussion later this week; I've got a ton on my plate, so it probably won't be up till the weekend, so if you haven't yet, you'll have time to read the e-book that just went up on the source post (which you have to be a member of the community to see.)

This is, alas, not a clean copy: it's missing nearly all of its quotation marks and apostrophes, but it is otherwise correct. Every download I found of it seemed to be from the same original file, and they were all missing the quotes, and going in and adding the quotes back is tedious and time-consuming, so I finally decided to just put up what I had instead of waiting until it was clean. It doesn't take that long to get used to, I promise! (If people wanted to work together to get a clean copy - even taking it a chapter at a time - I would be for that! I've got, um, chapter one finished.)

For bonus reading this month I linked to a translation of the Tao te Ching, which informs a fair amount of the philosophy of Spock's World - it's not exactly the same version Llarion was quoting on Enterprise's BBS, but Google seemed to think it was the closest. (If anyone knows if Llarion's quoting a published translation, let me know! The exact quote showed up in a variety of web pages, but none of them sourced a translator, so I suspect they were all quoting Spock's World!)

And finally ... prompt submission for treknovelfest starts tomorrow! You can suggest fanfic ideas even if you can't write for the fest.

Okay, by popular demand, for the second book in our re-read we're going to skip right to the Good Stuff and start on the Diane Duane universe, with Pocket Books #13,

The Wounded Sky

Featuring the forest of Lórien, a starship named Lookfar, a somewhat extravagant number of supernovae, the discovery that the Message At The End of the Universe is "dn ǝpıs sıɥʇ", Captain Kirk mind-melding with his entire ship and helping a spun-glass spider make a baby, a landshark attack, and a whole lotta love.

Source will be up on the source post shortly (eta: is up), as soon as I've done copyediting the file. (You may need to join the community to see the source post.)

In approximately a week, I will post a discussion post where we can all share our thoughts on this book! (...you will note that the time-posts are already getting vaguer and vaguer...)

I have discovered, while training my spell-check on the file, that Star Trek books use a whole lot of jargon and technobabble, and it's become so much a part of my language that I forget it's not plain English. And that beyond that, Duane just has a ton of *fun* playing with language - switching between American and English spellings on a whim, and making new words willy-nilly as if she thinks the language is agglutinative or something. And it works, and I think I imprinted on it, because I do the same thing (though probably not as well.)

ETA: It's up on the source post now. Also, does anybody have access to JSTOR/etc. who'd be will to find & share these two articles from the bibilography? That would be *awesome*:

De Witt, B. S. "Spacetime as a sheaf of geodesics in superspace." In Carmeli et al, Relativity, NY.: Plenum Press, 1970.

Gott II, J. Richard. "Creation of Open Universes from de Sitter Space." Nature, Vol. 295, January 28, 1982, pp. 304-307 Got it! Thanks, sineala!

Hello everybody! What have you been up to? I have been creating a bookverse/TOS/Pundit RPS crossover universe and eating cake, among other things. And reading fic - it's interesting how much of the old Kirk/Spock stuff takes book-Vulcan as canon, and even some of the reboot fic is much richer if you get the book references. I strongly encourage this trend.

In order to do so, I would like to start a group read! So here's how it's going to work: On Tuesday (more or less), I'll post the book that we're going to be reading over the next week (or longer, for long books), and then the next Tuesday, I'll put up a discussion post for it.

If you don't have a copy of the book we're discussing, you can go to the source post, and we can fix that problem! The source post is locked - if you can't see it, make sure you're actually a member of the community. (Membership is open.)

This week's book:

Pocket Books #47: The Kobayashi Maru, by Julia Ecklar.

In this book, we get first-hand accounts of Kirk, Chekov, Sulu and Scotty's tests, plus several other Starfleet Academy scenarios, and a RL no-win situation as a framing device. There are also supplementary chapters featuring Ensign Piper from Dreadnaught and Peter Kirk from Sarek available on the source post - I believe those are the only other tests we ever get to see in full, at least in TOS-era.

I will be ready to talk about no-win situations of all kinds next week - same time, same channel. If you don't have time to re-read the whole book, please join us anyway!

If you have suggestions for what we should read in upcoming weeks, comment here (or in any re-read post) and let me know!