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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for October 2017

[image error]Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, paranormal mysteries, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, crime thrillers, private eyes, lost girls, dead bodies, creepy stalkers, grim reapers, seaside hotels, haunted amusement parks and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

[image error] Class Conspiracy: A Hank Lancaster Mystery by Ace Beckett

Private Detective Hank Lancaster thinks his new client, local high school history teacher Stephen Bates is intelligent, rational and friendly, but also a conspiracy theorist. Bates believes three members of his high school graduating class have been murdered within the last two months. However, police in three states have ruled the cause of the deaths of the three graduates were accidents or suicide. Lancaster warns his client an additional investigation is probably a waste of time and money. But Bates is not deterred.

Then Lancaster detects disturbing hints of possible homicide in each death. He begins to think his client is correct. These were three carefully planned murders and possibly more to come.

But besides the fact they were in the same high school senior class, Lancaster knows of no link between the three graduates who have died. And no motive for their deaths.

As he digs even deeper into the past, he finds a blood-stained trail and a secret hidden for decades. Lancaster believes at the center of the tangled, confusing web of lies being spun are three of the oldest motives for murder in history – power, money and a dash of revenge.

Little Girl Lost by Alexandria Clarke:

When the seventeen-year-old star of the high school softball team vanishes from a small town, the victim’s estranged older sister, Bridget Dubois, returns home in order to find her. The only problem is that Bridget has a reputation, and the locals aren’t pleased by her reappearance. Without anyone to help her, Bridget must find a way to reconnect with her younger sister before time runs out.

 

 

 

[image error] Last Chance for Murder by Estelle Richards:

One last chance to get things right.

Too old for Hollywood at age 29, Lisa Chance leaves her failed acting career and a cheating boyfriend in LA and goes home to Moss Creek, Arizona.

The Folly, a stately 1870s mansion in the middle of her hometown, has always drawn Lisa like a magnet. She thought she was done with that place, but now she has the chance to turn it into the coffee shop of her dreams.

But when a dead body turns up on the property, she’s the prime suspect in the murder. Can Lisa figure out whodunit, or will she lose her last chance at happiness?

Last Chance for Murder is the first book in a new cozy mystery series.

[image error] Fortune’s Wheel by J.A. Whiting:

While working at the chocolate shop and clearing tables, Claire Rollins notices a story in a newspaper left behind by a customer about the cold case murder of a young graduate student. Odd details about the case draw Claire’s interest and when her boyfriend, a Boston detective, asks her to read over the old case notes, Claire knows she will be pulled into the decades old mystery. With the help of her “intuition” and with her friend, Nicole, by her side, will Claire find answers before the killer strikes again?

This is book 4 in the Claire Rollins mystery series. This story has mild paranormal elements.

 

[image error] Hibernian Charm by Dean F. Wilson:

A tense urban fantasy mystery with charm!

Melanie Rosen hasn’t settled for much, but her travels have brought her to Dublin, Ireland, where she works for the Occult Investigations Unit, exploring the strange and unknown.

Her fiery disposition and tendency to probe where she’s not wanted keep her in the office with the paperwork, or chasing cases that don’t seem to have an answer.

Then she gets a new case, where a killer slowly paralyses his victims, and leaves a calling card behind: a charm. Her Romani-Irish roots might come in useful, but the more she probes this case, the more she doesn’t like the answer. All the clues keep pointing back to her.

This is a standalone tale in the Hibernian Hollows universe.

The Evil One by Cyrus Winters:

Life is perfect. Officer Justin Hodge and his fiance Kellie have just moved into their new apartment and are looking forward to the rest of their sweet lives together. Unbeknownst to them, someone has been stalking the happy copule for an extended period of time – someone violent and jealous who wants to destroy them.

An email is forwarded to Justin’s online account, detailing as such. It’s from a person – a man or woman – who knows them. It’s from someone chilling and deranged. Someone completely, totally EVIL…

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The Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents

Last week, I came across a Tor.com post by Emily Asher-Perrin, in which she claimed that we can safely say that Sarek of Vulcan is science fiction’s worst dad.

Both the headline and the post left me baffled, for while Sarek is never going to win any “Father of the Year” awards, he’s definitely not the worst father in science fiction, far from it. How could he be, considering he shares a genre with the likes of Darth Vader, Thanos and Ego, the Living Planet? And indeed, during a discussion over at File 770, we came to a very similar conclusion. In a genre full of truly horrible parents, Sarek isn’t even a blip on the radar.

So what has Sarek done to cause Emily Asher-Perrin to make the sweeping statement that he is science fiction’s worst father, beating out the likes of Darth Vader, Thanos or Ego?

Well, as we know from his occasional appearances in various incarnations of Star Trek beginning with the original series episode “Journey to Babel” and ending with two episodes of Star Trek Discovery, Sarek, the Vulcan ambassador with an uncommon liking for humans, particularly human women, is estranged from his half-human son Spock. The reason for this estrangement is that Sarek was disappointed, when Spock opted to join Starfleet rather than the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, the Vulcan-only counterpart to Starfleet. Spock’s decision caused a rift between him and his father, which lasted for the rest of Sarek’s life. The fact that Sarek, being a Vulcan, had problems expressing affection for anybody, including his son, didn’t help either.

Nor is Spock the only child from which Sarek is estranged. There is also Sybok, Sarek’s pure-blood Vulcan son from his first marriage, who – as we learn in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (provided we could endure what has to be one of the most excreable Star Trek movies) – left Vulcan to become a fantical cult leader looking for god at the edge of the universe or some such thing – the film doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, to be honest.

Finally, as we learned in Star Trek Discovery, the latest addition to the Star Trek canon, Spock also had an human foster sister, Michael Burnham, who was adopted by Sarek and his human wife Amanda after her biological parents were killed by Klingons. Now the surpise addition of a never-before-seen sister to Spock’s family might have raised some eyebrows (and to be fair, I rolled my eyes when I learned that Michael was supposed to be Spock’s sister), however, it’s not entirely inconceivable that Spock might have a sister he just happened to have never mentioned before, because Spock never mentions his family, until they suddenly show up in the lives of the Enterprise crew. After all, Spock never mentioned his parents before “Journey to Babel”, he never mentioned his fiancée T’Pring before “Amok Time”, he never mentioned his brother Sybok before Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. So it’s not inconceivable that he never found a reason to mention his adoptive sister Michael (and besides, would you introduce your sister to Kirk or even mention her in his presence?), because not talking about his family is just something that Spock does.

As seen in Star Trek Discovery (and discusses extensively here, here, here and here), Michael Burnham doesn’t fare all that well either. Vulcans, no matter how well meaning, really aren’t the ideal foster parents for a traumatised and grieving child, since telling her to repress her emotions doesn’t actually help her cope at all. And once things go spectacularly wrong for Michael and she first ends up in prison as the most hated person in the Federation (without cause) and is then forcibly conscripted into the crew of the starship Discovery under the command of the flat-out monstrous Captain Lorca, Sarek is absolutely nowhere to be seen. So yes, he is a crappy father.

Warning! Spoilers for Star Trek Discovery behind the cut:

After putting in a cameo in the pilot, Sarek showed up again in the most recent episode (number 6, I think) of Star Trek Discovery. This time around, Sarek is attacked by a Vulcan suicide bomber (“It is very logical to blow you and myself up”), is injured and gets lost on his way to peace talks with the Klingons. Coincidentally, in the space of two episodes, the Federation loses three extremely important officials to attacks on the small, unarmed shuttles transporting said officials. So Starfleet and the Federation as portrayed in Star Trek Discovery are not just a prisoner exploiting dystopia, they are also completely incompetent. You’d think they’d have learned after Lorca was captured by Klingons in the previous episode and give bigger escorts to their important officials, but no – they almost lose Sarek and actually lose Admiral Cornwall in exactly the same way at the end of the episode. Because they’re fucking idiots.

Coincidentally, Captain Lorca has something of a B-plot in this episode, which mainly serves to highlight the fact (for everybody who hasn’t already noticed) that Lorca is insane and quite possibly a psychopath. Admiral Cornwall, an old acquaintance (and lover, it turns out) of Lorca’s shows up aboard the Discovery to tell Lorca that she no longer recognises him and that she believes him unfit for command. Now Admiral Cornwall is absolutely right; Lorca is unfit for command (and so is Saru, who still hasn’t gotten himself eaten). However, what precisely is it that persuades Admiral Cornwall that Lorca is unfit for command? Is it the fact that he blew up his previous ship and killed his crew? Is it the fact that he just survived Klingon torture and that he deliberately abandoned a Federation citizens to certain death (okay, so Mudd survives, but that’s not Lorca’s doing) at the hands of the Klingons? Is it that he idiotically got himself captured in the first place? Is it that he experiments on alien lifeforms and clearly violates the prime directive? Is it because Lorca has a PTSD-induced freakout, while in bed with Admiral Cornwall (and how nice is it that both actors are similar in age?) and almost shoots her? No, of all the many awful and inexcusable things Lorca has done what sets off Admiral Cornwall is that he brought Michael Burnham aboard and so deprived the Federation’s prison mines of a slave worker. Because everybody in Star Trek Discovery believes that Michael Burnham is the worst person in the universe, including Admiral Cornwall who should know better (come on, with her rank, she really should know that the story about Michael singlehandedly starting the war is just propaganda bunk). In the end, Lorca gets to keep his command for now, because Admiral Cornwall manages to get herself kidnapped by Klingons. And for once, Lorca is strangely uninterested in rescuing her and instead wants to wait for instructions.

Meanwhile, Michael Burnham wants to rescue Sarek and uses the mental link between them (due to a mind meld and due to Sarek reviving a nigh dead Michael as a kid) to locate him. Captain Lorca actually lets her go – apparently, he’s eaten chalk that day. So Michael, her roommate Tilly and the Discovery‘s new security chief Ash Tyler (whom Lorca rescued from Klingon captivity in the previous episode) set off to rescue Sarek. Coincidentally, Ash Tyler is the only person aboard the Discovery with the possible exception of Tilly who treats Michael like a human being rather than the worst person in the Federation, which is pretty much a guarantee that this fan theory regarding the character of Ash Tyler will turn out to be correct.

When Michael and friends finally locate Sarek, he’s dying (don’t worry, he gets better and will go on to live a long time). Through their mind link, Michael keeps seeing a painful memory from the past, a memory of the day she graduated from the Vulcan Science Academy and was denied a spot in the Vulcan Expeditionary Group. Michael always assumed that Sarek was disappointed in her. However, the truth is worse, because it turns out that the bigotted Vulcan establishment told Sarek point-blank that they would only accept one of his weird, non-Vulcan children into the Vulcan Expeditionary Group, but not both of them. They asked Sarek to choose, whereupon Sarek chose his biological son Spock over his adopted daughter Michael. Of course, Sarek never tells anybody about this (I guess we know where Spock got his uncommunicativeness from), let alone discusses the issue with Michael and Spock and lets them make the decision, especially since we know that Spock doesn’t actually want to join the Vulcan Expeditionary Group anyway (and of course, his fateful decision may well have been influenced by the fact that the Vulcan Expeditionary Group rejected his sister a few years before. So Sarek becomes estranged from his son and thoroughly manages to screw up not just his own, but both of his kids’ lives, too, since Michael would never have ended up a life sentence prisoner forcibly conscripted by an insane captain, if she had joined the Vulcan Expeditionary Group in the first place.

All right, so he is a crappy father.

Some people had issues with the way the Vulcans were portrayed in this episode of Star Trek Discovery, but personnally I find that Star Trek Discovery‘s portrayal of Vulcans not related to Sarek matches what we’ve seen of Vulcans before a lot better than Star Trek Discovery‘s portrayal of Klingons and the Federation matches what we’ve seen of those groups in previous iterations of Star Trek. Because let’s face it, Vulcans have always been snotty and superior. They may be publicly committed to “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”, but they don’t actually like non-Vulcans very much, merely tolerate them at most. As for the Vulcan extremists, I have zero problems imagining that there are groups in Vulcan society who want to keep Vulcan “pure” (though why must every race in Star Trek Discovery suddenly mirror all the bad tendencies in our own world?), though I don’t really find it believable that Vulcan extremists would resort to suicide bombing, because suicide bombing is highly illogical. Not that I cannot imagine Vulcan terrorists, I just don’t think that this is a tactic they’d choose.

What is more, the vast majority of Vulcans we’ve encountered in the various iterations of Star Trek – Spock, Sarek, Tuvok, T’Pol, Savik, Sybok – are all uncommonly open-minded by Vulcan standards, because they chose to join Starfleet/become Federation diplomats/leave Vulcan to found a religious cult. Meanwhile, the less open-minded Vulcans are still sitting at home on Vulcan or serving in the Vulcan Expeditionary Group. As for Sarek, his obvious fascination with humans as well as his tendency to marry human women and adopt human children must seem positively eccentric to his fellow Vulcans at the best and kind of perverted at the worst. It’s no wonder Sarek is experiencing blowback on Vulcan. In fact, he has probably experienced blowback from mainstream Vulcan society all his life. And indeed, Sarek’s many decades of work as an ambassador as well as his clear preference for human women suggest that Sarek doesn’t actually feel all that at home in Vulcan society. As a matter of fact, I wonder why Sarek keeps surrounding himself with humans and even marries two human women. Of course, Sarek seems to treat both his marriages as well as fathering Spock and adopting Michael as science experiments, but I suspect that he likes the higher degree of emotional support he receives from his human partners. He probably also doesn’t mind that with a human partner, he gets to have sex more often than once every seven years. Coincidentally, considering Sarek’s preference for human partners, I wonder why he chose to adopt Michael. Charity, science experiment or did he intend her as a potential partner for one of his sons? After all, Sarek would probably consider Michael partnering up with one of his sons (Sybok mostly likely, since Spock is already betrothed to T’Pring) logical.

Actually, all this makes Sarek more of a tragic figure – the uncommonly open-minded Vulcan who actually likes humans enough to keep marrying and adopting them and who clearly craves support and emotional connection, yet who still manages to become estranged from all three of his children. He’s still a crappy father and a crappy husband, though. But is he the very worst father in science fiction or even in the top ten? No, he isn’t. Because, as I’ve said above, science fiction is full of horrible fathers.

This is probably the time to introduce you to the prestigious Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents. If you’ve never heard of this highly prestigious award before, that’s no surprise. Because the Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents is given out by a jury of one, namely me.

Let’s have some background: I noticed a long time ago that the popular media (and not just SF either, the Darth Vader Parenthood Award is for all genres) is absolutely filled with truly horrible parents. And whenever I came across such a truly horrible parent in a book or a comic, in a movie or on TV, I’d often say something along the line of, “And here is this year’s winner of the Darth Vader Parenthood Award.” So eventually, the Darth Vader Parenthood Award became a thing, a list of annual winners backdated to the inaugural winner Anakin Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader in 1980. The first version of this list dates back sometime to the late 1980s/early 1990s. It has migrated from a handwritten list scrawled in a notebook to a computer file and from there to other computers and other formats. I still update it every single year.

The list is an interesting record of what I was reading and watching at the time. In the early years, there are a lot of soap opera characters and German TV characters, because I watched those with my Mom. Literary and comic book characters start showing up with increasing frequency in the late 1980s, while the TV and movie characters shift away from soap operas towards science fiction and fantasy as well as crime and action shows. Coincidentally, the list also provides a record of what media touched me and which characters really pissed me off once upon a time. A few of the choices make me wonder just what precisely that character did to piss me off so badly at the time. Hans Beimer from the German soap opera Lindenstraße seems an odd choice as early as 1986. Sure, I can’t stand the character and have disliked him for more than thirty years, but most of what pissed me off happened much later. I suspect he won for being mean to three of his eventually eight on-screen kids.

There are 56 names on the list, including joint awards and honourable mentions (because sometimes, there are just too many horrible parents for one year). 14 of those or 25% are women, because yes, there are also truly horrible mothers in the media. 27 characters are from science fiction works, including borderline stuff like superhero comics and movies as well as 1990s mystery/conspiracy fare like Twin Peaks or the X-Files. A further ten are from fantasy works. Four characters won more than once. In the lead is Tywin Lannister with three wins, followed by Anakin Skywalker a.k.a. Darth Vader and Victor Creed a.k.a. Sabretooth with two wins each as well as Howard Stark with two honourable mentions.

Not all fictional parents on the list are monsters on the scale of Darth Vader or Tywin Lannister, let alone Ego or Thanos. Many are a more mundane kind of unpleasant people, the likes of Blake Carrington, Betty Draper or the unnamed adoptive parents from the Schimanski Tatort episode “Kuscheltiere” (I checked IMDB. The characters really were not named). Quite a few characters are actually pretty likeable, they just happen to be really crappy parents. Some are not actively evil, but merely completely incompetent, the likes of Howard Stark or Eli David. Sarek would fall into this category, too.

The full list to date (in PDF form) is here, for your information. And look who earned himself an honourable mention this year. Yes, it’s Sarek. Cause he certainly fits in with this company, even if he’s far from the worst parent on the list.

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More Griping about Star Trek Discovery and Some Surprising Parallels to Raumpatrouille Orion

Yeah, to a certain degree another post about Star Trek Discovery. For previous installments in the loose series “Let me tell you of all the ways in which Star Trek Discovery sucks”, see here, here and here.

Interestingly, by now even those who had previously viewed Star Trek Discovery positively to cautiously optimistic are beginning to have issues with the show. At The Daily Dot, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw wonders whether Star Trek Discovery has gone too far in the latest episode. Meanwhile, over at io9, Katharine Trendacosta has entitled her review of the latest episode “And Now Star Trek: Discovery Has Lost Its Soul.” As I read that headline, my initial reaction was “That would presume the show ever had a soul in the first place.”

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

What has these and other reviewers so riled up is that reliable old standby for pissing off audiences, namely cruelty towards animals. The animal in this case is the so-called tardigrade a.k.a. Ripper, the alien creature the Discovery crew found rampaging aboard a crippled Starfleet ship and brought aboard the Discovery two episodes ago. Last episode, Michael Burnham figured out that Ripper is a) neither evil nor a threat, even though it kills Klingons and redshirts b) the missing component that can make the magic mushroom drive function and c) that plugging it into the magic mushroom drive actually hurts the creature. The tardigrade plot is actually the most Trek-like thing about Star Trek Discovery, since this is exactly the sort of story Star Trek used to tell. As I mentioned in my last post, this story is not exactly original, since it mixes elements of the original series episode “The Devil in the Dark” and the Voyager episode “Equinox”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, since the Star Trek franchise has something of a tradition of reusing and recombining plot elements. However, due to the annoying serialised structure (which Katharine Trendacosta also criticises at io9), Star Trek Discovery needs two and a half episodes to tell a story that older Trek series would have told in one episode, two at most.

In spite of its obvious suffering, poor Ripper continues to be pressed into service as the navigation system for the magic mushroom drive, because it is just so damned useful and besides, there is a war going on. The Federation also wants to acquire more tardigrades, because hey, there is a war going on, and anyway, it’s just a dumb alien beast. Apparently, everybody in the Federation and Starfleet has forgotten the existence of the Prime Directive and their other laws and codes. Or they just conveniently ignore those laws and codes, because hey, there is a war going on and war requires extreme measures, don’t you know?

Even though everybody treats her as if she were the literally most horrible person in the entire Federation, Michael Burnham is not happy with the way Ripper is being treated, since she can tell it is suffering. After a while, even jerky scientist guy (apparently, the character’s name is Paul Stamets, named after this real life mykologist) comes around and begins to object to Ripper’s treatment. However, their objections come up against the brick wall that is – no, not Captain Lorca for once, cause he managed to get himself captured by Klingons – but his first officer Saru a.k.a. Commander Rubberhead.

Now the character of Saru seems to be something of a fan favourite, which is baffling to me, because I find him awful, both as a Starfleet officer and a person. I suspect the sniping between Saru and Michael Burnham is supposed to evoke the banter between Dr. McCoy and Michael’s foster brother Spock in the original series. However, this backfires badly. For starters, upon rewatching the original series today, the banter between Spock and McCoy isn’t all that funny and some of McCoy’s remarks come across as flat-out racist these days (and come to think of it, McCoy has always been my least favourite original series character along with Kirk). And Saru is no McCoy, he’s just a jerk.

Saru has been at odds with Michael Burnham from the very first episode on, where she was his superior aboard the Shenzhou. Now the tables have turned and Saru is first officer aboard the Discovery (Why? He’s about as qualified for the job as Bernd the Bread), while Michael Burnham is the convict everybody despises. And Saru is not going to let her forget that. Now I have seen several rationalisations for why Saru dislikes Michael so much and has disliked her since before she nerve-pinched Captain Georgiou, many of which involve that Michael triggers Saru’s physiological danger responses. Apparently, Saru’s species are prey animals – and considering how unpleasant he is, I hope that whatever used to prey on Saru’s people shows up and eats him. Besides, to me – and to many other female viewers as well, I suspect – it was always blindingly obvious why Saru dislikes Michael so much. He’s jealous, plain and simple, jealous that Michael nabbed the job he wanted and felt entitled to. He even says as much to Michael in the latest episode, that’s he’s angry and jealous, because Michael robbed him of the opportunity to be Captain Georgiou’s first officer and learn from her. In short, Saru is every mediocre white dude (hidden behind a rubberhead) who has ever felt threatened by a more qualified woman (a woman of colour in this case) getting the job he feels entitled to.

As a result, Saru suddenly finding himself in the position of acting captain, when Lorca manages to get himself captured, is about as disastrous as you’d expect, because Saru is flat out unqualified for anything but a desk job. In order to prepare himself for the position he fell into, he asks the computer for a list of the most highly decorated captains in Starfleet history, a list that’s pure fan service BTW and includes Jonathan Archer from Star Trek Enterprise, Christopher Pike, who preceded Kirk as captain of the Enterprise and can be seen in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie”, Matt Decker from “The Doomsday Machine”, Robert April, who appeared in one episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and – because there should be a woman and/or person of colour somewhere on that list – Philippa Georgiou. Saru then orders the computer to grade his performance against those legendary figures. Uhm, Saru, I can spare you that effort and tell you right away that you don’t measure up. You not just don’t measure up, no, you’re probably the least qualified person aboard the Discovery. Even Lorca’s pet tribble would make a better captain than you (actually, the tribble would make a better captain than Lorca as well). Coincidentally, Saru never gets his answer, because he withdraws the order, probably because he knew he wouldn’t measure up.

Also, why would you call a new character Saru in a franchise that already has two established characters named Sulu and Sarek, one of whom turned up in this very series? Now I’m not a proponent of the “never have two characters whose names start with the same letter of the alphabet” dictum, but those names are way too similar. And since we’ve never seen Saru’s species before, there is no established naming pattern for them.

When Captain Lorca gets himself captured by the Klingons (which is in itself a moment of incredible idiocy – why would he fly alone in an unarmed shuttle through hostile territory, when he has a fully armed starship with an experimental magic mushroom drive at his disposal?), Saru suddenly becomes extremely eager to get him back. Of course, Saru doesn’t even like Lorca (he said as much to Michael), so I have no idea why he or anybody else aboard the Discovery would be so eager to rescue him. In fact, considering what a horrible person Lorca is (and he becomes even more horrible in this episode, if that’s even possible), I would have understood if the entire crew of the Discovery had quietly agreed to totally fail at rescuing Lorca. But for some reason, Saru is very intent on rescuing Lorca and therefore overrides Michael’s and everybody else’s concerns regarding the health of Ripper the tardigrade and orders the creature plugged into the magic mushroom drive again and again, even after the creature goes into some kind of catatonic state. In fact, Saru clearly orders that they should plug Ripper into the drive, even if the effort kills it. Yes, Starfleet’s second-worst officer orders the crew to kill a clearly sentient and likely intelligent alien lifeform in order to rescue Starfleet’s worst officer. Honestly, it’s as if everybody up to and including the writers has completely forgotten the prime directive and the other codes and laws of the Federation.

Though it’s telling that the screenwriters and the characters suddenly remember that the Federation in general and Earth in particular have laws, when one of those laws is needed as a plot obstacle. And so Stamets figures out that injecting Ripper’s DNA into a crew member capable of consenting to being used as a navigator for the magic mushroom drives will solve the problem of exploiting a non-consenting and clearly suffering creature. The tardigrade DNA must be injected into a human because of reasons. However, altering human DNA is strictly forbidden because of the eugenics wars of the 1990s (I must have missed that bit of real world history), which gave the universe Khan Noonian Singh. So the Federation is willing to ignore its own laws regarding the exploitation of a non-humanoid, but clearly sentient alien lifeform, but is willing to uphold a law arising out of a conflict that took place on one planet approx. 250 years before the time where Star Trek Discovery is set. That’s as if the modern EU would care about laws passed in revolutionary France.

I fully expected that Michael would inject herself with the tardigrade DNA, since she is biologically human but identifies as Vulcan rather than an Earth person, so the law does not apply to her. But in the end, Stamets is willing to ignore the law and injects himself with tardigrade DNA. He suffers no immediately notable ill effects and can now send the Discovery to where it’s supposed to go just like Ripper could. The Discovery rescues Lorca, Michael Burnham sets Ripper free (by spacing it, but apparently that’s just what Ripper needed). She also apologises to Saru (why?) and even gives him the telescope (why, for goodness’ sake?) that Captain Georgiou has explicitly willed to her. And all ends well? Or does it?

Now I have to admit that I really hated Stamets in the first two episodes we saw him, but by this episode I’m beginning to tolerate him. Hell, I’m even making a effort to remember his name rather than calling him “jerky scientist dude”. Coincidentally, I was also wrong in declaring that Stamets was gay in the way that Steven Carrington from Dynasty and Doug Savant’s character from Melrose Place were gay 25 to 30 years ago, namely nominally gay man who never had a relationship with another man on screen or if they did, it was doomed anyway. Because as the latest episode reveals, Stamets actually is in a relationship with the cute ship’s doctor (and coincidentally, both actors are gay in real life, though not a couple). The reveal is nicely done, when we see them casually brushing their teeth in matching pyjamas. Okay, so the true point of the scene is that Stamets reflection now lingers in the mirror, after he leaves the bathroom, which is a really cliched signpost (and copied from Twin Peaks of all things) that something ominous is happening and that injecting himself with the tardigrade DNA will come back to bite him at some point. Nonetheless, it’s a nice scene and coincidentally, also the first indication that not all people aboard the Discovery dislike each other and that there are actually relationships on board that are not antagonistic.

The plot aboard the Discovery, however, makes up only half of the episode. The rest is devoted to Captain’s Lorca’s “adventures” among the Klingons. And since this is a gritty and grimdark take on Star Trek, these adventures consist mostly of Lorca and his fellow prisoners, a Starfleet officer named Ash Tyler and Harry Mudd, last seen in two episodes of the original series, getting tortured. That is, Tyler and Lorca get tortured (and Tyler apparently is raped by the female Klingon captain as well) , because the Klingons let their prisoners decide which one of them will get tortured and Harry Mudd keeps voting for Tyler and Lorca. Which is exactly the sort of behaviour you’d expect from a self-serving narcissist like Mudd. Though Mudd does tell off Lorca and the arrogance of Starfleet in general, which was a nice touch. Never thought I’d ever agree with Harry Mudd on anything.

Now Lorca (and Tyler) are far from the first Starfleet officers to get themselves tortured. Picard famously spent a whole episode getting tortured in “Chain of Command” (an episode I hate, as I’ve said before) and even Kirk and Spock got themselved stripped and whipped – to the joy of slashers and shippers everywhere – in “Patterns of Force”. Outside the franchise, Commander Sheridan spent a whole episode getting tortured in Babylon 5, which may or may not have been inspired by “Chain of Command”, but was as unwatchable, at any rate. And shows like the travesty that is the new Battlestar Galactica thrived on extensive torture sequences, including one where the victim was a visibly pregnant actress. So there is absolutely nothing here that we haven’t seen before.

However, what distinguishes the torture of Captain Lorca and Ash Tyler from the torture that Picard, Kirk and Spock, Commander Sheridan in Babylon 5 and Grace Park’s and Tricia Helfer’s characters and others in the new Battlestar Galactica experienced is that by the time they were extensively tortured on screen, the viewer was attached to these characters and cared what happened to them (I never liked Picard all that much, always found him stiff, but I didn’t want to see him hurt). However, I find that I cannot bring myself to give a fuck about what happens to Gabriel Lorca, because we’ve only known the character for three episodes and he’s been a horrible person and outright arsehole for those three episodes. As for Ash Tyler, he’s a brand-new character, so we’re not attached to him at all. So the torture scenes come across as both gratuitous* and meaningless. Indeed, when I saw an animated GIF online of Lorca getting punched in the face by the Klingon captain over and over again, while strapped into some Clockwork Orange like torture chair (they also did something to his damaged eyes), I found the sight strangely satisfying, just like the animated GIFs of Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face over and over again. Because Lorca is so unpleasant, I don’t give a fuck what happens to him.

And while this episode was an excellent opportunity to make us care about Lorca by showing us another side of the man rather than the Machiavellian arsehole we’ve all come to loathe, the episode squanders that opportunity by offering up even more evidence that Lorca is a monster. For while he’s in prison and being tortured, we also learn what happened to Lorca’s previous ship, courtesy of Harry Mudd of all people. Turns out that Lorca blew up his previous ship along with the crew to prevent the Klingons from capturing the ship and torturing and/or publiucly executing the crew. Yes, Lorca killed his own crew and somehow managed to escape (rather than kill himself – and coincidentally, he fails to kill himself again, when captured by the Klingons, even though being taken prisoner by them is supposedly worse than death), though he received his eye condition in the process. Amazingly, Lorca is still captain after what he did and was even given another ship to command, while Michael Burnham was given a life sentence in a labour camp for the much lesser sin of nerve-pinching Captain Georgiou, from which Georgiou promptly recovered. I guess being a white man (or a white rubberhead) has its advantages even in the post-sexist future of Star Trek.

Also, does Starfleet not have any psych evaluations for its personnel at all? Because if they did, Lorca, Saru and even Michael Burnham should not be in Starfleet at all, let alone in high command positions. Lorca is a ruthless monster, Saru is useless and completed unsuited to command and Michael is badly traumatised due to her childhood experiences. Being raised by emotionally distant Vulcans didn’t help either. Is the reason why Starfleet has counsellors aboard ever starship during the Next Generation era because they used to recruit all sorts of unsuitable people during the original series era and just before?

In the end, Lorca manages to escape from the Klingon ship and takes Ash Tyler along. They leave Harry Mudd behind, because Lorca believes Mudd is a Klingon spy. Of course, he has no real evidence that Mudd really is a spy and indeed Ash Tyler is just as likely a suspect, considering he is still in remarkably good shape after six months in Klingon captivity and has sex with the Klingon captain. There is even a fan theory that Ash Tyler might be a Klingon surgically altered to pass as human (in which case I suspect Lorca’s poor little abused Tribble will get a chance to shine). I hope that theory is not true BTW, because it would mean that another actor of colour in an already very white cast is either killed or revealed as a villain.

The Klingons, coincidentally, still don’t look or act even remotely like the Klingons we’ve seen between 1966 and 2005. Instead, they’re used as all-purpose metaphors for whatever real world evil the writers want to tackle this week, ranging from Trump voters to ISIS. Not that Star Trek has ever been shy about using alien races as a metaphor for whatever, but they usually came up with new aliens rather than using an established species with an established history and culture. All right, so most of what we do know about Klingons comes from Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, i.e. more than a hundred years after Discovery, but nonetheless nothing shown in Discovery fits the Klingons we know. I can accept isolationist and racial purity obsessed Klingons, but Klingons do not perform some bizarre cult around the dead bodies of their fallen, they are not cannibalistic and while they might torture prisoners (though I don’t recall ever seeing any evidence for that), they are not into public torture and execution, since we’ve seen the Klingon justice system in action in The Undiscovered Country, which is set maybe thirty to forty years after Discovery. Oh yes, Klingons and humans are also sexually compatible, since we’ve seen Klingon-human hybrids (Belana Torres most notably, but also the mother of Whorf’s son). Because there is a throwaway line in this episode suggesting that Klingons might have two sex organs. Yes, Doctor Who made the same joke ten years ago, but the implications are still interesting. Looks like Deanna Troi and Jadzia Dax have been keeping secrets from us.

As for leaving Harry Mudd behind to be tortured and possibly killed (okay, so we know he survives, but Lorca has no way of knowing that), it’s not out of character for Captain Lorca, but it’s very much out of character for Starfleet as they used to be portrayed. Criminal and jerk or not, Harry Mudd is still a Federation citizen and Lorca more or less condemns him to torture and very likely death. This is not something the contemporary US would do (since “Don’t leave anybody behind” is a very important rule in the US and not just there) and it’s certainly not what the supposedly so highly evolved Federation would do. And yes, Kirk did leave Harry Mudd behind on a planet full of androids together with umpteen android replicas of his wife Stella, but Mudd was not in immediate risk of death on the planet of the androids and indeed the androids would take good care of him. He did not abandon Mudd in a prison full of torture happy aliens. Coincidentally, considering we’ve seen Lorca abuse a Tribble, a Gorn and now Mudd, I wonder whether all the characters who bothered Kirk and co in the original series only did so, because they’d previously run into Lorca and were therefore justifiably pissed off at Starfleet and the Federation.

The many call-backs to other Star Treks, most notably the original series, but also the animated series and Enterprise (Sarek, the Tribble, the Gorn skeleton, the list of captains, Harry Mudd), only serve to heighten the impression that Discovery has nothing whatsoever in common philosophically with anything that used to be called Star Trek. As for Harry Mudd, this is a character who should never have been brought back in the first place. Okay, so Mudd is one of the most recognisable villains of the original series along with Khan Noonian Singh. And Khan’s infamy is mainly due to The Wrath of Khan. My copy of the Starlog Photo Guidebook of Science Fiction Villains, published in 1980 (i.e. before Wrath of Khan came out) lists only Gorn, the Romulan commander from “Balance of Terror” and Harry Mudd as notable Star Trek villains with only a single paragraph devoted to the Klingons (and a photo of a ridged forehead Klingon, which had only been seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture at that point).

However, though he is recognisable, Harry Mudd is also one of the most dated characters in the original series. Harry, the boasting, lying, unscrupulous cad, and his permanently nagging wife Stella (namechecked in Discovery) are 1960s sitcom stereotypes that really haven’t aged well. I don’t think we were ever supposed to like Mudd, but to modern audiences he looks a lot more despicable than he was probably supposed to be, as Emily Asher-Perrin explains here. Mudd basically engages in human trafficking, he’s grossly misogynist and an all around slimeball. I actually liked the Discovery version of Harry Mudd better than I ever liked the original series version (which isn’t saying much, since Mudd is scum), but his inclusion still feels like pointless fan service, especially since any other civilian Federation citizen of questionable morals would have done just as well.

Oh yes, and the word “fucking” was uttered in Star Trek Discovery, when Michael’s roommate remarks “That’s so fucking cool” about the magic mushroom drive. I have to admit that I barely noticed the line and took it as “Hey, she’s enthusiastic about science. Now that at least feels like Star Trek“. But apparently, this was the first time a variation of the word “fuck” was uttered in any Star Trek show. And this single line including the word “fucking” as a modifier for “cool” is apparently highly controversial, because – well, I honestly have no idea, but it has something to do with Star Trek no longer being family-friendly. Of all the many reasons to be upset about Star Trek Discovery, it’s telling that certain people pick the fact that someone said “fucking” and that there are gay people doing something as shocking as brushing teeth to be angry about. Never mind torture, cannibalism, graphic physical violence, sexual violence, prisoner abuse, slave labour, mutilated corpses in close-up, abuse of alien lifeforms – someone said “fuck” and a gay couple engages in dental hygiene, now that is shocking.

In many ways, the uproar about Michael’s roommate saying “fuck” reminds me of the uproar in the early 1980s about Götz George as Horst Schimanski frequently swearing in the German crime drama Tatort. There was a lot of “Won’t someone think of the children?” handwringing back then, which was utterly baffling to me – who was after all a child myself – since everybody I knew at school knew those words and sometimes used them. Coincidentally, contrary to popular assumption, Horst Schimanski’s debut in the Tatort episode “Duisburg Ruhrort” in 1981 was not the first time the word “Scheiße” was uttered on German TV to the shrieks of the sensitive, though it’s probably the best remembered, because it’s literally the first line Schimanski ever says on screen (see it here – still brilliant 36 years later). However, the first time that the word “Scheiße” was uttered on German TV (that I know of) was fifteen years earlier in 1966, when Commander Cliff Allister MacLane said it in an episode of Raumpatrouille Orion, the German SF show which premiered within a few weeks of Star Trek. So Star Trek Discovery is finally boldly going where Raumpatrouille Orion already was fifty-one years ago.

I’ve sometimes said that early exposure to Raumpatrouille Orion (it was literally one of the first works of science fiction I encountered along with the original Star Trek, Time Tunnel and Space 1999) has permanently ruined me for military science fiction. However, I’m beginning to realise that Raumpatrouille Orion is actually the yardstick against which I measure all other science fiction TV, particularly televised space opera. Whenever a character in another TV space opera series does something inexcusable, my first thought is not, “Kirk would never do that” or “Picard would never do that” or “Apollo would never do that” or “Commander Adama would never do that”, but “Commander MacLane would never do that”. Indeed, some of the awful things Lorca did in Discovery prompted that very reaction from me, “Commander MacLane would never do that and neither would any Star Trek captain, not even Sisko who did some horrible things of his own.”

And come to think of it, Star Trek Discovery is a lot closer in concept to Raumpatrouille Orion than it is to anything that was ever labeled Star Trek. Both shows are set in an utopia with cracks (and coincidentally, one of the cracks in Orion‘s utopia is the way they deal with criminals and dissidents) and feature a generally pacifistic society suddenly thrown into a war with a very alien enemy. Both deal with conflicts between following orders and doing the right thing. Both have a senior female commander and both feature a maverick captain who interprets the rules very losely and has the tendency to lose his ship (though MacLane would never endanger his crew) and give him an awesome logic-driven woman as a foil. Star Trek Discovery is actually Star Trek trying to do Raumpatrouille Orion, while The Orville is Seth MacFarlane trying to do Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Now Raumpatrouille Orion has often been called Germany’s answer to Star Trek, which is wrong, because both shows debuted within eight days of each other in September 1966, much too close together for them to have influenced each other. Nor do I have any evidence that the production team behind Star Trek Discovery is even aware that Raumpatrouille Orion exists, let alone that they have seen it. Instead, both the original Star Trek and Raumpatrouille Orion draw on the same mid 1960s zeitgeist mixed with pulp science fiction of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, which explains why they seem superficially similar. However, Raumpatrouille Orion has always been more military-oriented (though the show did not glorify the military, as some contemporary critics claimed, but is indeed quite critical of the military), whereas the original Star Trek focussed more on space exploration. So it’s probably no surprised that a new TV show that tries to portray the original series era Federation at war would end up being a little reminiscent of Raumpatrouille Orion

However, noticing the parallels – intentional or not – between Star Trek Discovery and Raumpatrouille Orion makes the shortcomings of Discovery even more notable, since Raumpatrouille Orion did much of what Star Trek Discovery tries to do today fifty years ago and they did it better, too.

If anything, it makes me mourn even more what Star Trek Discovery could have been.

*Yes, I know that’s strange coming from me, considering I have written some pretty extensive torture scenes. However, I don’t cross the line into gratuitousness and I make the readers care about the characters first.

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Among the Stars – Big Science Fiction Romance Cross Promo

Of all the various speculative hybrid genres, I have always had a soft spot for science fiction romance. After all, what’s not to love? Ideally, you get all sorts of science fiction goodness – space battles, aliens, genetic engineering, larger than life characters – combined with the emotional punch of romance fiction, an emotional punch that “pure” science fiction is all too often lacking.

Now Rinelle Grey, author of science fiction and fantasy romance, has organised a huge sale of science fiction romance. The sale runs from October 19 to October 21st. More than fifty books are available, most for either 99 cents or free. You can find a full list of participating books here.

And if you’ve ever wanted to try out my own stab at the science fiction romance genre, the In Love and War series, two books are included in the sale.

So what are you waiting for? Get yourself some science fiction books with all the emotional punch of romance fiction!

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Cannibalizing Star Trek: Yet More Star Trek Discovery Complaints

Yes, I know that I already wrote one long post and then a second to detail my issues with Star Trek Discovery, but I’m still not done. In fact, I haven’t been so angry about a TV show ever since the new Battlestar Galactica ruined a childhood favourite and Torchwood followed a flawed, but promising first season with three seasons of bad relationships, child murder and pointless character deaths. In fact, I’d thought that by now I’d become so used to pointless sequels and bad reboots of franchises I used to like that I no longer complain, I just roll my eyes and quit watching. Star Trek Discovery, however, makes me actively angry, so here is another post about why.

The fourth episode of Star Trek Discovery has been made available by now (IMO you cannot say “aired”, since Star Trek Discovery is a streaming video show) and it tells a story that actually looks vaguely like a Star Trek plot. All right, so it’s not an original Star Trek plot, but instead borrows elements from various previous Star Trek episodes, most notably the original series episode “The Devil in the Dark” and the Voyager episode “Equinox”. But then, the Star Trek franchise has been recycling story ideas and entire plots for a long time now and still managed to make some pretty good episodes from less than original ideas.

However, even though Star Trek Discovery has finally managed to find a Trek-like plot, the show still doesn’t look and feel like Star Trek. Instead, it feels as if the new Battlestar Galactica had accidentally happened upon a Star Trek plot. Except that even the characters of the new Battlestar Galactica were never quite that stupid.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Captain Lorca seems determined to earn the nickname “Captain Tribble Abuser” that I gave him in my last post, since he engages in some more abuse of non-humanoid aliens, in this case the “monster” that ate a Discovery redshirt, the crew of the Discovery‘s sister ship and a Klingon landing party in the previous episode. Since the “monster” also happens to be impervious to phasers and to Klingon weaponry, Lorca orders Michael Burnham and the Discovery‘s security chief to examine the creature – nicknamed Ripper by the crew – and see if it can be weaponised somehow. Or rather, he orders Michael Burnham to examine the creature, since I’m pretty sure the security chief is only there to keep an eye on Burnham and keep her in her place, since this is the noxious woman who referred to Michael and her fellow prisoners as “garbage” and “animals” in the previous episode. Never mind that experimenting on a sentient alien lifeform to exploit it is so not what the Federation would do, if this were an actual Star Trek show.

At least, Michael Burnham still acts like a Star Trek character and theorises that maybe Ripper isn’t some kind of space monster after all, but that it only attacked because it was scared. The security chief, however, won’t hear any of it. And since Michael is working too slowly for her, she insists on letting Ripper out of its cage and sedating it (never mind that they know that Ripper is impervious to phasers and Klingon weapons). Michael Burnham even tries to warn her – though I honestly wonder why she’d help a woman who clearly despises her – but the security chief doesn’t listen, chops off a claw and is promptly killed by Ripper. Good riddance, since she was a horrible person, but I can’t help but notice that this is the second of three women of colour in the main cast killed. And unlike Michelle Yeoh’s character, the security chief doesn’t even get to die heroically. Instead she dies of terminal stupidity, literally.

After killing the security chief, Ripper escapes and rampages around the ship. Unfortunately, it does not proceed to kill the rest of the unpleasant jerks that make up the crew of the Discovery, because Michael Burnham figures out that Ripper is scared of bright lights and finally turns the lights aboard the Discovery up. A bonus is that this probably hurts Captain Lorca’s eyes – after all, he requires dim lighting. The ploy works, too, and Ripper returns to its cage. Unfortunately, it does not retreat to Lorca’s ready room and eat him, but I guess the security chief gave it indigestion. Besides, Burnham eventually figures out that Ripper is a herbivore and only kills in self-defence.

Meanwhile, a Federation outpost is under attack by Klingons. Since this outpost also happens to be an important dilithium mine and one that apparently does not double as a prison camp (because if it did, I doubt anybody would have cared), Captain Lorca yells a lot at his bridge crew to get the Discovery there, since Starfleet apparently doesn’t have any other ships. Unfortunately, the magic mushroom drive doesn’t work without a supercomputer and the Discovery doesn’t have one of those (uhm, it’s a top secret research vessel and the Federation can’t even spare a supercomputer?). The jerky scientist guy argues with Lorca that they can’t make the jump, Lorca orders them to jump anyway and things promptly go wrong. The Discovery nearly ends up inside a star, some consoles explode and the jerky scientist guy bumps his head (oh, so satisfying to see unpleasant things happen to the jerks aboard the Discovery, too bad Rubberhead was spared), whereupon jerky scientist guy has to go to the sickbay and engages in a bit of verbal sparring with the Discovery‘s doctor. The jerky scientist guy insists that it doesn’t matter if his frontal lobe was injured, because frontal lobes are only for memory and emotions and both are useless. Never mind that it’s wrong, human frontal lobes do quite a bit more than that, it’s also a perfect illustration of the stereotype of the emotionally stunted male science fiction character.

However, jerky scientist guy’s frontal lobes still work well enough that he can point out that the Discovery‘s destroyed sister ship somehow managed to make the magic mushroom drive work without a supercomputer. Meanwhile, Michael Burnham has noticed that Ripper reacts to the magic mushrooms (no, not that way). So they connect Ripper to the magic mushroom drive and – voila! – it works. Ripper doesn’t look too happy about this, but no one except for Michael even seems to care.

The episode ends with Michael opening a box that had been delivered for her from her late captain and mentor Philippa Georgiou. The box contains a vintage telescope as well as a holographic message from Captain Georgiou, in which she tells Michael that she was always like a daughter to her and that she’s proud of her. Now it’s good to see that at least one person in Star Trek Discovery doesn’t treat Michael like dirt, even if that person is a hologram of the dead captain who might actually have a reason to be angry at Michael. Nonetheless, the whole thing makes little sense, because a) how did anybody know to deliver the box to the Discovery, when Michael Burnham’s presence there is supposed to be secret, cause she’s officially either dead or in prison? and b) how did the telescope end up in the box, when it was last seen in Captain Georgiou’s ready room aboard the Shenzhou, which was supposedly blown up along with the rest of the vessel?

This is just one of the many moments in Star Trek Discovery that make no sense whatsoever. Now I don’t expect one hundred percent accurate science from my science fiction, especially not from a space opera like Star Trek. However, there is a difference between handwavium and complete and utter nonsense and the magic mushroom drive complete with space monster controller falls into the latter category. What is more, I expect different levels of scientific accuracy from different franchises. I’m fairly lenient with regard to “complete and utter nonsense, but cool” in something like Guardians of the Galaxy or even Star Wars and I wouldn’t have blinked at a magic mushroom spacedrive with a plugged in space monster serving as the control unit, if this were a novel by China Miéville or Jeff VanderMeer, but Star Trek has always sat on the harder end of the space opera spectrum. Yes, we know by now that matter teleportation and FTL travel is not possible, but most of the tech we see in the various Star Trek franchises over the years was plausible by 1960s to 1980s standards and quite a bit of Star Trek tech actually is reality now, e.g. Star Trek predicted tablets and smartphones (and automatic sliding doors, for that matter). In a franchise like Star Trek, the magic mushroom drive complete with monster controller sticks out like a sore thumb.

But the main problem with Star Trek Discovery is not that the plot makes no real sense and that the science is nonsense. After all, Star Trek has had nonsense science and silly plots before and I’ve still been able to forgive the franchise. However, Star Trek Discovery just doesn’t feel like Star Trek and considering that the first season is already approximately one third over (Star Trek seasons are shorter these days), I suspect it won’t start feeling like Star Trek before the end of the season, if ever (especially if the show doesn’t get more than one season). I’m not the only one who feels that way – even people who initially viewed Star Trek Discovery a lot more positively than I did are noting the same issues by now. See this post by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, in which she points out that Star Trek Discovery should quickly find its moral heart and maybe show us the crew bonding and having some downtime, while they’re at it.

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw is right, because Star Trek in any incarnation has always been a character-focussed show and so far, I want to chuck everybody aboard the Discovery except for Michael, her room mate, the Tribble, Ripper and maybe the doctor (at any rate, he’s easy on the eyes) out of the nearest airlock. Honestly, these people are horrible, easily some of the most unlikable characters in the history of Star Trek. Now I suspect that Lorca and jerky scientist guy are supposed to be unlikable (which is risky in itself, because people generally don’t like watching complete and utter jerks, unless they are extraordinarily smart – see Sherlock and House M.D.), but I doubt that goes for everybody aboard the Discovery.

Interestingly, quite a few people seem to like Rubberhead (apparently, the character’s name is Saru, but I can never remember it), but I find him just as awful as Lorca, jerky scientist guy and the terminally stupid security chief. Now Rubberhead has history with Michael Burnham, since they know each other from the Shenzhou, where she was his superior officer (and you can bet, Rubberhead resented her for it, because alien or not, he’s still a man). Now Michael Burnham is the despised convict and prisoner, while Rubberhead is first officer and boy, he’s not going to let her forget it. Of course, Rubberhead despises Lorca (well, who in his right mind wouldn’t?) and gleefully tells Michael that since she mutinied against a good captain, she deserves a bad one. Okay, so Michael is mean to Rubberhead and tries to use his biological danger response to determine if Ripper really is a threat, but considering how unpleasant Rubberhead is, I can’t feel sorry for him. It’s a pity, because Star Trek has always been good at humanising the Other and the non-human characters were usually among the most memorable, from Spock via Data and Whorf, Odo and Quark, Neelix, the Doctor and Seven of Nine to Doctor Phlox. Rubberhead could have stood in that tradition, but he doesn’t. Instead, he comes across as an unlikeable passive aggressive backstabber, because he’s too scared to confront Michael or Lorca or Captain Georgiou head-on. Also, considering the most notable characteristic of his species seems to be “scared of everything”, I wonder what this dude is doing in Starfleet at all. Weren’t there any nice and safe desk jobs available on the planet of the Rubberheads? Or are we literally seeing the most adventurous Rubberhead who ever lived? Which could actually be interesting, except that the show doesn’t do anything with it.

I’m increasingly convinced that Gene Roddenberry’s famous dictum that the members of a Star Trek crew should not portrayed negatively and that they shouldn’t be in conflict with each other beyond disagreements that are resolved in the course of an episode was absolutely right. This guideline was one of the first things the people behind Star Trek Discovery ditched, because it was supposedly too limiting, and what’s the result? A ship full of unpleasant characters squabbling among each other. That’s not what I want to see (in fact, the constant squabbling and angsting and guilt trips on The Flash are fast souring me on a show I used to like a whole lot) and it’s definitely not what I want from a Star Trek show.

On Twitter I came across the clickbaity headline “Star Trek Discovery cast wants President Trump to watch the show” and my first thought was, “So they made a bad Star Trek show just to punish Trump?” Not that I can’t understand the sentiment, but I never took Trump for a Trekkie and besides, I have the sneaking suspicion that Trump would actually like the dystopian Federation portrayed in Star Trek Discovery and he definitely would like the new Klingons. What is more, a lot of fans could use some hope for the future right now because of the mess Trump and his administration as well as similar politicians in other countries have made. In fact, I wonder if part of the reason why I’m reacting so very strongly to Star Trek Discovery is because the two-part pilot aired on the night of the German election, when I could really have used a bit of hope.

But of course, the article is not actually about the shocking reveal that Star Trek Discovery was specifically created to torture Donald Trump. Instead, it’s a report about a con panel where the cast and some of the crew of Star Trek Discovery talk about the show. The executive producer and the showrunner praise the diversity of the show and proclaim that the core message of Star Trek needs to be amplified after the 2016 US presidential election. Jason Isaacs, who plays Captain Lorca, hopes that Trump will watch, because he might learn something (How to abuse tribbles? Alternate uses of magic mushrooms?) and Sonequa Martin-Green who plays Michael Burnham declares that Star Trek Discovery offers a picture of hope and a representation of what is possible.

Now these would be lovely sentiments – and mind you, I’m not blaming the cast here, though I am blaming the showrunners – if that was actually the show we got. However, the actual Star Trek Discovery offers neither hope nor escape. Instead, it gives us a dystopian Federation, which hands out life sentences for comparatively minor offenses, has labour camps and tolerates prisoner abuse, as well as a crew that largely consists of a collection of arseholes and jerks. As for diversity, look at that cast photo at the top of the article. Now that must be the whitest Star Trek cast I’ve ever seen. Except for Michelle Yeoh (who’s dead and was eaten by Klingons, though she reappears as a hologram) and Sonequa Martin-Green (who’s a constantly abused prisoner) and the guy in the back (Is that the doctor? Cause he looked different in this episode), every person in the photo is white. Well, there is Rubberhead whose race cannot be determined, but I’m tending towards white based on the general skintone (and googling the actor reveals that he is indeed white). Honestly, the original series and Next Generation has more diverse casts fifty or respectively thirty years ago, let alone Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise.

Okay, so apparently there are gay people in Star Trek now, which is long overdue. Jerky scientist guy, who is apparently gay, is gay in the way that Steven Carrington in Dynasty or Doug Savant’s character in Melrose Place were gay 25 to 30 years ago, characters who were supposedly gay, even though you’d never know it, because they didn’t have relationships with men (and in the case of Steven actually had more sex with Heather Locklear than with any male character). In short, Star Trek had finally reached the point regarding LGBT representation that mainstream soaps like Dynasty and Melrose Place had reached while Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air, which is not something to celebrate. Coincidentally, the other Star Trek show currently on the air (even if it doesn’t have the official stamp of approval) The Orville recently tackled the issue of forced sex-assignment surgery performed on non-consenting babies (and coincidentally, they have a same-sex couple among the regular cast, too), so even the supposed Star Trek parody The Orville is ahead of Star Trek proper on LGBT representation, which is frankly shameful. Okay, so it’s possible that jerky scientist dude is asexual, but given what we’ve seen of him so far, I doubt it. And Star Trek Discovery doing what The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine should have done 25 years ago is not actually a win for diversity.

To be fair, the Discovery‘s bridge crew is highly diverse and includes several women, people of colour and even aliens, but these characters have hardly any lines and their roles mostly seem to consist of looking scared when Lorca yells at them (and Lorca yells a lot). The various redshirts in the background are a diverse bunch as well, but they’re redshirts for a reason. In general, Star Trek Discovery still feels like a terrible bait and switch, where fans were promised two strong women of colour in command positions, only to have one of them killed in the pilot and her remains eaten by Klingons (Yes, Star Trek Discovery is the show that had Michelle Yeoh eaten by Klingons), while the other is first given a life sentence in a labour camp and then abused by a bunch of mostly white people aboard a rogue Federation starship. Then another actress of colour who played the Discovery‘s security chief dies of terminal stupidity in the fourth episode. Okay, she was a really unpleasant character and I suspect no one is sad to see her go, but it’s still another actress of colour unceremoniously killed off. This is not diversity, it’s a slap in the face.

Let’s repeat this: Star Trek Discovery is the show that thought it was a good idea to cast Michelle Yeoh as a starship captain, only to kill her off at the end of the pilot and have her body eaten by Klingons.

Now cannibalism is not a strong trigger for me at all, nonetheless, I nearly puked when I first heard about the cannibalism thing. And yes, I will call it cannibalism, even though Philippa Georgiou and the Klingons aren’t the same species, because no earthly language that I know of has a word for eating a member of an intelligent, sentient species that is not human and besides, I would no more consider eating a Klingon, a Vulcan, a Romulan or even a Ferengi than I would consider eating a fellow human.

So why did the cannibalism thing upset me so much, even though it’s not a particularly strong trigger for me (and coincidentally, isn’t it strange being triggered by something you thought wouldn’t trigger you?)? Largely, because there is no reason at all for that throwaway line during the lengthy scenes of Klingons sitting around and monologuing on their crippled battleship (Apparently, the Klingon Empire was not that keen on being made pure again after all and just abandoned that bunch in space. Good riddance, too.). First of all, even though Klingons like their food still squirming, they don’t have a history of cannibalism. That is, apparently a Klingon threatens to cut out and eat an enemy’s heart in a Next Generation or Deep Space Nine episode, which either refers to a previously unseen ritual or might have been intended metaphorically. But apart from this one line, there has never been any indication that Klingons eat their fallen enemies. What is more, having the Klingons commit cannibalism only further adds to the unfortunate stereotypes of the Klingons as “savages” that the new show has already piled up. Of course, one could argue that the Klingons only resort to cannibalism, because they’re starving – indeed, the lack of food aboard the Klingon vessel is explicitly addressed in the dialogue. However, even if the Klingons are starving and have to resort to eating dead Starfleet personnel, there is still no reason to mention this in dialogue. Viewers have got imaginations, after all. For example, it’s widely assumed that the Ewoks are serving roasted Stormtroopers at the big feast at the end of Return of the Jedi, even though there isn’t a single line of dialogue about this in the actual movie. Because viewers have got imaginations.

No, there is only one reason that the line about the Klingons eating Captain Georgiou is in the episode at all and that’s for shock value. Indeed, a lot of the illogical bits of Star Trek Discovery that don’t make a whole lot of sense (Michael Burnham suddenly deciding to commit a completely futile mutiny, Captain Georgiou getting killed, Michael getting sentenced to life in prison, the security chief dying of terminal stupidity) are mainly intended for shock value. Star Trek Discovery isn’t trying to be Deep Space Nine 2.0. or even Battlestar Galactica 3.0. (and the original Battlestar Galactica is pretty much a master class in shocking the audience), it’s trying to be the next Game of Thrones. But unlike Game of Thrones, which offered a calculated series of steadily escalating shocks, at least in its first few seasons, and used them to forward the plot, Star Trek Discovery is just throwing out random shocks for their own sake. And by the time Game of Thrones resorted to cannibalism (in the form of the red-bearded Wildling gnawing on a human leg) the show was already losing its way. It’s probably no coincidence that I stopped watching for good a few episodes later.

What is more, even though Game of Thrones is currently the most successful TV show on the planet, not every TV show or even every speculative TV show needs to be Game of Thrones. And what I want from Game of Thrones is very different to what I want from The Handmaid’s Tale is very different to what I want from Supergirl or Legends of Tomorrow is very different to what I want from Doctor Who is very different to what I want from Star Trek.

One of the most harmful effects of the so-called “Golden Age of Television” (which I don’t consider golden at all, as I’ve repeatedly explained over the years) is the constant focus on dark and gritty stories full of unpleasant characters, because everybody is trying to emulate whatever the latest must-see quality drama is. Hence, you get “Like The Wire, but in space” or “Like Mad Men, but with serial killers” (actual description of a new Netflix drama), a copy of a copy of a copy. SFF TV was largely spared the HBO-fication of US television with the exception of the new Battlestar Galactica, which apparently wanted to be “The West Wing cum Band of Brothers, but in space”, and Lost, which was one of the many 24 wannabes that sprung up around 2004/05. But then HBO started to turn away from gazing at the navel of the white American middle class, turned towards speculative fiction instead and made first True Blood and then Game of Thrones. With the massive success of both shows (and a lot of people these days seem to have forgotten that True Blood was a huge success in its time), the floodgates opened and by now we’re being drowned in SFF versions of “Peak TV” quality drama. The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld, The Walking Dead, Sense8, The Man in the High Castle, American Gods, Outlander, The Expanse, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Orphan Black, Stranger Things, Mr. Robot – it’s an endless stream of well-produced big budget SFF drama. It should be TV heaven for me, peak TV indeed. And don’t get me wrong, I do like some of those shows (Outlander, Jessica Jones, The Handmaid’s Tale) a whole lot. Nonetheless, I find the SFF version of “peak TV” as frustrating as the white middle class version.

For starters, the most discussed and most highly acclaimed SFF TV shows of today – Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld and The Walking Dead – are all very dark. The only exception is Stranger Things, which mainly seems to appeal to the nostalgia of those of us who were kids during the 1980s. SFF television is practically a drowning in grimdark thanks to the HBO-fication of speculative television.

Let me quote something from this post I wrote in 2011 about my issues with US “quality television”:

However, this discussion […] highlights a trend I find troubling, namely the tendency to use a small number of highly acclaimed TV dramas broadcast on US pay-TV channels such as HBO as the benchmark of television quality. It’s good to see television productions finally gaining critical recognition, after decades of television having been dismissed as the Nullmedium (zero medium). However, critical discussions of television these days are determined by the following dichotomy: If it looks like West Wing/The Sopranos/The Wire/Six Feet Under/Mad Men/Breaking Bad/whatever the latest must-see show is, it is quality television. If it doesn’t emulate those shows, it’s trash entertainment for the masses.

This dichotomy completely disregards one important point, namely that there is more than one way of making good television. The HBO-style (for lack of a better term, since HBO seems to have become synonymous with that kind of show) of taking an unflinching look at the uglier sides of America, particularly the dark underbelly of the suburban middle class family, but also the social issues and hypocricies at the heart of American society in general, with a strong focus on crime, sex, violence, swearing and an odd obsession with psychotherapy and drugs*, is just one way of making good drama. It’s not the way.

The references might be a bit dated by now, but the point still stands. Even though some of the “peak TV” era grimdark SFF shows may be good, it’s not the only way of making good SFF drama. And while no one familiar with the source material expects Game of Thrones or The Handmaid’s Tale to be cheery escapism (and there is still more comraderie between the handmaids than between the crew of the Discovery), I expect something very different from Star Trek. Because at its core, Star Trek has always been about building a better future. And anybody who says that today’s world is dark and troubled, that the US has been steadily at war for sixteen years now, that racial tensions are on the rise, that there is a war on women, that the hard-won rights of LGBT people are under threat, that Neo-Nazis are marching in the streets, etc… should remember that the late 1960s, when Star Trek was first conceived, weren’t exactly a cheery time either. At the time, the original series first aired, there was also a war going on (a hot war in Vietnam and a cold war in general), there were also racial tensions, people of colour, women and LGBT people were fighting for their rights, there were widespread student protests, etc… Yet in spite of everything that was going on in the US and around the world at the time, Gene Roddenberry still managed to give us a vision for a better future, where many of the issues that so troubled the late 1960s have been resolved or where at least a solution seems possible. 1960s Star Trek gave us a a black woman, a Japanese man, a Russian man and an alien-human hybrid on the bridge of the Enterprise. In 2017, Star Trek Discovery gives us a villainous white Captain, a black woman convict, a gay man without any relationships, abused aliens and evil Klingons, it feeds one Asian woman to the Klingons and has the other die of terminal stupidity.

What makes the predominance of grimdark in US speculative television so frustrating is that the grimdark trend in written SFF has been fading for a while now and counter-movements like hopepunk and noblebright fantasy are on the rise. SFF television, however, remains mired in grimdark and it’s beginning to infact even programs that weren’t originally supposed to be grimdark.

Let’s return to the article about the comments made by the Star Trek Discovery cast that I linked to above and the comment by Sonequa Martin-Green that Star Trek can offer a much needed message of hope in troubled times.

In 1966, Star Trek delivered that message of hope. In 2017, Star Trek Discovery gives everybody looking for a bit of hope a slap in the face.

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Redemption Arcs and Yet More Complaints about Star Trek Discovery

Yes, I know that I already complained at length about Star Trek Discovery, but I’m not quite done yet.

In fact, I’m surprised how strongly I feel about about this, since until last week, I thought I was done with Star Trek for good. I’m still fond of the original series and The Next Generation, less fond of Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. But to me, Star Trek is a story that has been told. It’s done and in fact it had been done at least a couple of years before Enterprise went off the air in 2005.

However, like pretty much any pop culture franchise, no matter how played out, that good old workhorse Star Trek is not allowed its well deserved rest. Instead, it’s trotted out again and again, a shambling, decaying zombie, stitched together Frankenstein-like with bits of other stories, a mere shadow of its former self. Indeed, maybe we should call the J.J. Abrams movies and Discovery zombie-Trek. It’s certainly an apt description. Though “War Trek”, as Ethan Siegel suggests in this disappointed reaction to the pilot, would also work.

Of all the Star Trek shows, Deep Space Nine is the one that gets the most critical acclaim these days. To someone who watched every Star Trek except for the original series on first broadcast, this is baffling, because back in the day, no one liked Deep Space Nine. It was always the ugly step-sibling of the Star Trek franchise, watched when there was nothing else on, but never particularly liked, let alone loved, though it did manage a few really good episodes in its run (the Tribble episode and “Far Beyond the Stars”). What is more, Deep Space Nine also suffered in comparison to Babylon 5, which was broadcast at the same time and handled a similar concept (multi-species space station in a time of war) so much better. Of course, some twenty years later, Deep Space Nine is suddenly an immortal classic, while Babylon 5 is nigh forgotten. I strongly suspect that this is another result of the taste convergence due to the rise of the internet, when a few early US-based pop culture and geek websites imposed their taste on everybody else, whereas previously local fan communities had their own lingo and favourites, but that’s a topic for another post.

But considering that today, Deep Space Nine, unarguably the darkest of the Star Trek shows with the most unpleasant characters, is the most highly acclaimed of all Star Trek shows and that the Next Generation two-parter “Chain of Command” (a.k.a. the one where Picard gets tortured, written by none other than Ron D. Moore who would later go on to ruin Battlestar Galactica) is considered one of the most highly acclaimed episodes in the entire history of the franchise, even though every Trekkie I knew back then hated it on first broadcast, and given the explosion of grimdark that happened since Enterprise went off the air twelve years ago (and Enterprise veered towards grimdarkness from season 3 on), it’s no surprise that Star Trek Discovery looks like it does, dark, dreary and unpleasant with nary a hint of the generally positive future portrayed in most versions of Star Trek. In short, it seems Discovery took what I always considered the some of the worst bits of Star Trek and amped it up to eleven.

And indeed most of the people who seem to like it are Deep Space Nine fans who actively sneer at the old-fashioned do-gooding and the largely self-contained episodes of the original series, Next Generation and Voyager, even though serialization is one of the biggest banes of modern television along with the tendency towards grimdarkness among most of the “prestige shows”. And Star Trek Discovery seems determined to embrace all that.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

So episode 3 of Star Trek Discovery aired last weekend and we have finally seen the titular ship. It’s a science vessel engaged in black ops research, not a battleship per se. So it seems my “Dirty Dozen in Space” suspicions were wrong, though Michael Burnham is forcibly recruited by the Discovery‘s captain, after he apparently engineers that the prisoner transport that is transporting Burnham and a couple of other convicts to work in a prison mine breaks down, while the Discovery just happens to be in the vicinity. Once again, I can’t help but wonder why a post-scarcity society like the Federation has prison camps and forced convict labour in the first place. Unless the post-scarcity society of the Federation is really based on previously unseen prison camps and convict labour. Given the dystopian Federation presented in Discovery so far, I wouldn’t even be surprised, if it was. And yes, I know that the Federation is one of the fairly few quasi-Socialist future worlds in science fiction, but you can have Socialism without gulags.

After being attacked by other convicts aboard the Discovery, Michael Burnham is taken to see the Discovery‘s captain, one Gabriel Lorca (I had to look up his name). The Captain is a shadowy man – quite literally – who hangs around in the dark, supposedly because of an eye condition. So Federation science will be able to compensate for Geordi LaForge’s blindness in the not too distant future, but they can’t cure this guy’s eye condition? And just in case the fact that this guy constantly hangs around in the dark wasn’t enough to tell us that he is a very shady figure, it’s also revealed that he has a menagerie of imprisoned aliens, some of them sentient, on which his crew apparently experiments (Yes, a Federation starship experiments on alien life, including sentient alien life). The Captain also has a tribble on his desk. No one is quite sure why it’s there, though theories range from Klingon detector to possible bioweapon. It’s notable that there is only one tribble (and we know at what speed they reproduce), which suggests that this one is either dead, not being fed or the victim of future bioengineering. But whatever that poor tribble is doing aboard the Discovery, it’s clearly being abused.

Yes, Captain Lorca is abusing a tribble. What sort of monster abuses tribbles?

What makes the fact that the Discovery‘s captain is such an awful person even worse is that fact that the actor who plays him, Jason Isaacs, is so likeable. Yes, I know he’s played his share of villains like all British actors trying to make it in Hollywood and American audiences will probably associate him most with playing Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. But I primarily associate Jason Isaacs with playing private detective Jackson Brodie in the British crime drama Case Histories, where he is incredibly likeable. So why couldn’t we have gotten Captain Jackson Brodie instead of Captain… – well, I’d refer to him as Captain Arsehole, but since I already refer to Benjamin Sisko by that monicker, I’ll simply go with “Captain Tribble Abuser”.

Michael Burnham might have escaped the prison mines for now, but Captain Tribble Abuser forces her to work for him, to help with the research done aboard the Discovery (some nonsense about fungus spores that allow for faster space travel – yes, really, the Discovery’s top secret research involves magic mushrooms). He also tells her that she is obliged to help him stop the war she started. Of course, Michael Burnham did not start the war – the Klingons did. But then this show should be called “Star Trek: Blame Michael Burnham for everything”. Because pretty much every person in this show, including Michael herself, seems to be convinced that Michael Burnham is the worst person in the whole universe. The other convicts despise and attack her and the entire Discovery crew (with the exception of a young female ensign) treats her like crap. The security chief calls Michael and the other convicts “garbage”, the scientist she’s supposed to work with despises her (and to be fair, the entire Discovery, so at least this dude is an equal opportunity despiser) and the Discovery‘s first officer, this show’s resident rubber-headed alien who also was aboard the Shenzhou and unfortunately survived its destruction, keeps telling Michael that she’s a horrible person and how much of a disappointment she is to everybody. What makes this even worse is that the vast majority of these characters are played by white actors, whereas the much despised Michael Burnham is a woman of colour. And coincidentally, I’ve also seen people point out that the negative aspects of Michael Burnham’s character, her violent tendencies, her anger, her impulsiveness and her lack of control, all fit nasty sterotypes about black people, though to be fair, those traits could also result from a traumatised human kid being raised by emotionally distant Vulcans. Nonetheless, absolutely no one aboard the Discovery with the possible exception of the young female ensign and the unnamed redshirts is likeable and if Kirk or Picard or Archer or Janeway or indeed anybody else had been in charge of the Discovery, they’d all have been fired and, considering the Federation is a dystopia now, they’d probably be toiling in the prison mines next to Michael Burnham.

It’s not that we haven’t seen shady or outright awful Starfleet officers or Federation officials before. Every Star Trek captain with the possible exception of Janeway (due to being stuck in the delta quadrant with no contact to Starfleet or the Federation) has tangled with shady Starfleet officers and Federation representatives such as the mysterious black ops Section 31, which is suspected to play a role in Discovery as well. However, up to now, these shady Starfleet officers and Federation politicians were antagonists, who showed up for an episode or two to allow Kirk or Picard or Sisko or Archer to make a moral point, only to crawl back to whatever dark hole they’d come from. Star Trek Discovery, however, gives us a whole ship full of shady and unpleasant Starfleet personnel.

Now there are a lot of TV shows I watch mainly for the characters and their interactions. Not that I don’t like to see them doing something interesting like solving crimes, catching serial killers, fighting evil or exploring space, but a lot of the time my main motivation for watching a show is that I want to spend time with these characters. And one of the great strengths of the Star Trek franchise was always giving us characters you wanted to spend time with. Yes, the fact that those characters had cool adventures in space helped a lot, but even a dull episode was made better by banter between Kirk, Spock and Bones or Data, Whorf and Geordi or Picard and Q or Odo and Quark or Janeway and the Doctor and so on. Indeed, one point that unites the IMO less successful Star Trek iterations (Deep Space Nine and Enterprise) is that they had too few memorable characters. Deep Space Nine at least had a few good characters, though most of them were imported from Next Generation. Meanwhile, the characters of Enterprise were so dull that I cannot recall their names without looking them up. In this house, we refer to the different Enterprises as Kirk’s Enterprise, Picard’s Enterprise and Porthos’ Enterprise, because the most memorable character in Star Trek Enterprise was literally the Captain’s dog.

So for a show that relies so much on the interplay between its cast like Star Trek to be saddled with so many unpleasant characters like Discovery is a huge problem. Now I wouldn’t have minded seeing more of Michelle Yeoh’s character Captain Georgiou and the Michael Burnham we saw in the very first episode before everything went to hell. But the Discovery crew are all unpleasant jerks to the point that I wouldn’t mind if the space monster from the third episode broke free and ate them all. As for Michael Burnham, the main reason I still have some sympathy for her is because she is the underdog here, since her guilt trip is pretty annoying.

For Michael Burnham believes that she deserves all the punishment and the abuse. She genuinely believes that she is the worst person in the universe and just wants to “serve her sentence”, either unaware or not caring that she will be shovelling shit for the Federation for the rest of her life. During a mission to a sister ship of the Discovery, she even leads the above-mentioned space monster away from the rest of the team – comprised of people who despise her and a redshirt, who probably despises her as well, because everybody aboard the Discovery and in the whole Federation hates Michael Burnham. Whereas I was screaming at the screen, “Let the monster eat them all, steal a shuttle and get the hell away from there!” In fact, I kept hoping throughout the episode that Michael Burnham would nerve-pinch the nearest person, steal a shuttle (maybe rescue the tribble first, because the poor little tribble does not deserve to be abused) and defect to the Romulans. Actually, I would have preferred the Klingons, but since the Klingons are back to being villains and nothing but villains now, the Romulans will have to do. Though the whole debate is academic, because Michael Burnham accepts all the abuse, since she believes she deserves to be punished.

In my last post, I wrote that Star Trek Discovery hits several of my personal hot buttons, which is why I was pretty much predisposed to dislike the show. I forgot one hot button, however, namely stories where a constant stream of abuse and humiliation is heaped on one character, supposedly to teach them a lesson about some past wrongdoing, until they finally repent. I have always hated such stories, for as long as I can remember. Back when I was a kid, there were quite a few children’s books like that. I read these books, when there was nothing else to read, but I hated them with a passion, because – like I would put it back then – “everybody was always so mean to the main character and they hadn’t even done anything wrong.” Here is an example, which I still clearly remember more than thirty years after I first read it, because I hated it so much. The protagonist Isabell’s sins for which she must be humiliated non-stop include such shocking behaviour as wearing her hair open, watching TV, listening to pop music and wearing a pink ski suit. The book was first published in 1962 and so it of course was hopelessly dated when I read it in the 1980s. But I suspect that even in 1962, the “punishment” for Isabell’s sins must have seemed excessive.

Unlike Isabell, Michael Burnham is not being punished for wearing the wrong hairstyle and the wrong colour of ski suit. However, the only actual crime she committed was nerve-pinching Captain Georgiou, an attack which knocked her out for all of sixty seconds and caused no permanent harm. Besides, Captain Georgiou was well on the way to forgiving Michael for what she’d done by the time she died. However, Michael never managed to put her plan to fire at the Klingon ship into action and it’s pretty clear that the Klingons would have attacked and likely destroyed the Shenzhou anyway, because the Klingons are xenophobic isolationists. And BTW, it is massively problematic to use a dark-skinned alien race (more darker skinned than ever in Discovery) that has traditionally been protrayed by actors of colour as a stand-in for the xenophobia and isolationism of the white nationalists that elected Trump and voted for the AfD and for Brexit. Okay, so Michael Burnham did kill the Klingon head honcho, which complicated matters, but was completely understandable given the circumstances. And besides, events proved her right in the end and the Shenzhou should have fired at the Klingons, while they were still able to. For that matter, if – as Michael explains – it’s standard Vulcan policy to fire at Klingons whenever they show up, why does no one in Starfleet know about this and why don’t they take this policy seriously, especially since Vulcans aren’t given to senseless violence? That’s another problem with the show, the worldbuilding makes no sense and the logic is bad enough to make a Vulcan go catatonic. Nonetheless, considering what Michael Burnham actually did, both the life sentence and the constant stream of humiliation to which she is subjected are completely over the top.

I suspect that the whole first season of Discovery is supposed to be some kind of redemption arc for Michael Burnham. Now I have massive issues with redemption arcs. The first issue is that “redemption” is a word that has no real equivalent in German. There is a translation, of course, but fact is that the English language has a lot more words for saying that someone has done something bad and now feels really, really sorry about that and has to go through humiliation and suffering to make up for it than German does. Though we have one that English does not have, the so-called Canossa Gang (walk to Canossa) and coincidentally, I always thought that Heinrich IV was right there and Pope Gregor VII was wrong. But atonement, redemption, grovelling, we don’t really have words for that and the words we do have are rarely used and only turn up in contexts of old theological texts and equally old parenting guidebooks. So the first time I came across the term “redemption arc” in the context of either Buffy or Angel (at any rate, it was a Joss Whedon show), I had no idea what the term meant and couldn’t even find a proper translation and besides whatever character was undergoing a redemption arc at the time hadn’t done anything to deserve the abuse they were receiving IMO. Here is a great post why redemption arcs inevitably involve a whole lot of suffering. So in short, I don’t like redemption arcs very much, because there is something sadistic about them, since they are usually used as excuses to humiliate and heep a lot of abuse upon a character, which is something I hate.

That’s not to say that redemption stories, once you get past the fact that English has a word for that, cannot work, because there are some redemption arcs that work very well indeed. The Marvel movies, which I like a whole lot, frequently do redemption arcs. The Iron Man movies, the Thor movies, Doctor Strange, Ant Man, Loki in Thor – The Dark World, Bucky’s arc in Captain America – The Winter Soldier, Black Widow’s arc in pretty much everything, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron, everybody in the two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, etc…, it’s redemption arcs all over. Indeed, the redemption arc (“With great power comes great responsibility) is one of Marvel’s core stories. DC does them on occasion as well in its TV shows, see Leonard Snart and Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow or Mon-El in Supergirl, but Marvel specialises in redemption arcs. And amazingly, they work. They work so well that we’re willing to read and watch variations of the same story of the likeable, but arrogant prick who has something disastrous happen to them, endures a sojourn in the wilderness while receiving/honing their new powers, returns to civilisation to use those new powers for good and finds friendship, a surrogate family and sometimes true love, too, over and over again.

So what is it that makes Marvel’s redemption arcs work, when so many others don’t? First of all, they always offer us something to like about our portagonist, even if they are pretty much an arsehole. See Tony Stark interacting with the soldiers at the very beginning of the first Iron Man film. We also get a hint of why they became that way (usually Daddy and abandonment issues) and see that regardless of how much material wealth they have, something in their life is missing. Besides, the Marvel movies don’t wallow in misery – the sojourn in the wilderness usually takes up maybe thirty minutes at most of the movie in question. Thor’s sojourn in the wilderness is longer and makes up the bulk of the first Thor movie, but then the Thor getting used to Earth scenes (cause Earth is Thor’s sojourn in the wilderness) are so funny that we don’t mind. What is more, even during the low point of the redemption arc, where our hero or heroine is supposed to suffer, Marvel protagonists usually find friends and allies and aren’t universally despised like Michael Burnham. And so Tony Stark meets Yinsen, Thor meets Jane, Darcy and Eric Selvig, Doctor Strange meets Wong, Mordo and the Ancient One, the Guardians of the Galaxy meets each other, etc… Besides, the Marvel movies always start with their protagonists missing something in their lives (usually they are isolated and have no real purpose in life at the beginning or try to follow someone else’s idea of how their life should be like), no matter how outwardly perfect their lives might look. And when they undergo their ordeal in the wilderness, we know that even though things look bad for them now, it will get better. Our hero will get superpowers, will find their true purpose in life and will get a bunch of really cool friends, too. In short, the Marvel movies have a hopeful outlook and manage to offer redemption arcs without the steady stream of abuse and humiliation that makes them so unpalatable and that’s why they work, where so many others fail.

Meanwhile, Michael Burnham’s life is pretty good at the beginning of Star Trek Discovery. She, too, has abandonment and daddy issues, but she is generally in a good place. She has an exemplary career behind her, a close relationship with her Captain (and apparently, Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green also became friends in real life), is largely respected by the crew (she doesn’t seem to get along with rubberhead, but then rubberhead is a jerk) and is about to get her own command. There really isn’t anything missing in Michael Burnham’s life at this point, except maybe a romantic relationship and I’m not sure how interested she is in that. After all, she was raised by Vulcans. For all we know, she might even have a fiancé waiting for her on Vulcan in one of those childhood betrothals Vulcans arrange for their children. So when she loses everything, she has to gain what exactly? The respect of the Discovery crew? Captain Lorca’s trust? And why would she even want that, considering Lorca and his crew are a bunch of jerks? There is nothing waiting in Michael Burnham’s future that is better than what she had before. And considering that Star Trek is a show that has always dealt in hope, giving us a story where the protagonist has nothing better to hope for is yet another violation of what Star Trek used to be.

Come to think of it, Star Trek Discovery would probably have worked better, if the show had skipped the pilot and started out with Michael in prison, because then at least she has something better to look forward to. Or if they’d swapped Captain Lorca with Captain Georgiou (either actors or personalities), so Michael starts out on a ship where she doesn’t get along all that well with the Captain and the crew. She mutinies, lands in prison and is rescued by a Captain who – to her own surprise – treats her well. That’s actually a story that might be worth watching and would be less of a bait and switch for all the people who were looking forward to seeing a Star Trek show featuring two women of colour in command and interacting, only for one of them to die and the other to end up in prison. Though it still wouldn’t feel like Star Trek.

And that’s the main problem with Star Trek Discovery. It just doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Not that there is anything wrong with telling the story of an evil Federation or at least a Federation where the cracks that have been noticeable just beneath the surface of the Federation for a long time, suddenly come to the fore. In the past couple of years, I’ve seen quite a few science fiction universes where the premise was clearly: Like the Federation, but evil. Elizabeth Bonesteel’s Central Corps series is good example of this and Becky Chambers did a good job of highlighting the less savoury aspects of her Federation like entity in A Closed and Common Orbit. Hell, the Republic of United Planets in my own In Love and War series is an evil Federation of sorts, though I wasn’t consciously aware of that, until I was working on a tense scene in an upcoming In Love and War novella, while angry at Star Trek Discovery, and accidentally typed “Federation” where I should have written “Republic” in one hell of a Freudian slip. For that matter – and that’s the most I’ll talk about my own books here – I actually have a court martial scene in Graveyard Shift, where gross incompetence on the part of Republican officers causes a horrible disaster with a big loss of life. And the penalty handed out by a shady military tribunal in a clearly dystopian regime (“dishonourable discharge and a few years in a prison camp”) is still less than what Michael Burnham gets. Meanwhile, Colonel Brian Mayhew, who is the main antagonist in the series (I would say “villain”, but Mayhew insists that he is not a villain and that he wants a redemption arc), actually speaks up against his more bloodthirsty colleagues who want a harsher sentence. So even my supposed villain, representative of a clearly evil dystopian regime, is still less awful than the supposedly so noble Federation in Star Trek Discovery.

So the problem is not so much that the Federation is a dystopia now, because stories about an evil Federation can work. However, an evil Federation story is not what I expect from a show that carries the official Star Trek label, at least not all the time. And this is really the main problem, namely that whatever Discovery is, it just isn’t Star Trek. The tech doesn’t fit, the Klingons don’t fit, the dystopian Federation doesn’t fit. And the deliberate references to previous Star Treks – Sarek, the tribble, the gorn skeleton Captain Lorca keeps in his private collection, Captain Georgiou’s bottle of Chateau Picard wine, the fact that Michael Burnham recites Alice in Wonderland to herself in times of stress, a book her foster brother Spock is also fond of (and for that matter, why does no one in the Federation ever appreciate any culture post approx. 1950?) – all serve to highlight that fact that Discovery just doesn’t feel like Star Trek even more. But then, the credits of the production team of Star Trek Discovery range from Batman and Robin via Hawaii Five-Oh to Hannibal. One thing the producers don’t have in their resumes, however, is Star Trek and it shows. Meanwhile, the people who actually have past experience working on Star Trek or are known to be huge fans are all working on The Orville (I will have to watch that, do I?).

So now we have a show that apparently looks and feels like Star Trek, but doesn’t have the official label, and one show which has the official label, but feels nothing whatsoever like Star Trek. Maybe, Star Trek Discovery is really set in the mirror universe and any moment now, a goateed Spock will be beaming aboard the Discovery to rescue his foster sister and the abused tribble.

Now that would actually be kind of cool.

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Nobel Honours for SFF Writers and More on the Latest Round of Romance Bashing

First of all, the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro. This is not a name I was hoping for (my personal Nobel Prize wishlist is topped by Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon), but it’s one I’m pretty happy with. And though most reports focussed mainly on The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro has also committed science fiction with Never Let Me Go in 2011 and fantasy with The Buried Giant in 2016, so that’s another occasional writer of speculative fiction to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Regarding other Nobel Prize for Literature winners writing SFF, I recently saw a report about a new play by Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. In the new play, Miss Piggy comments on Donald Trump being elected president of the US, which IMO qualifies as speculative fiction (for Miss Piggy, since Trump’s election is sadly reality). However, the report also reminded me that Jelinek’s 1995 novel Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) is a bonafide zombie novel.

However, science fiction and fantasy are not actually the genres that are most scorned by the literary establishment or what passes for it. Romance novels get a lot more crap than SFF. And so last week, I blogged about the infuriatingly condescending romance novel column in the New York Times and also linked to some other reactions to that column.

After I wrote that post, my mind was busy with other things, mainly being mad at Star Trek Discovery (and I have more to say about that), so I didn’t follow up on the romance discussion, if only because “There’s new Star Trek on TV/a TV-like medium and it’s crap”, while not exactly unexpected, is still something that hasn’t happened since 2005. Whereas “old white dude is clueless and condescending about romance novels” is something that happens every other week or so. So I didn’t think of the romance post again, until I started getting hits from this Metafilter thread and noticed that the debate was still raging on.

For starters, the New York Times was apparently surprised by the amount of negative reaction their new romance review column got (well, if anybody on their staff had a clue about romance novels and romance readers, they wouldn’t have been surprised) and published a response by Radhika Jones, who is apparently the editorial director of the New York Times books section. And once more, Radhika Jones shows that the New York Times just doesn’t get why people were outraged at the romance novel column.

She starts off her response by listing the impressive credits of Robert Gottlieb, the man who wrote the article, as if those who criticised Mr. Gottlieb’s take on romance fiction are unable to google the man, even though plenty of responses to the article mentioned that Mr. Gottlieb is clearly highly accomplished, he just doesn’t have a clue about the current state of the romance genre. And no, reading the occasional romance novel to snicker at the sex scenes does not count.

Radhika Jones then continues by explaining that the New York Times publishes reviews by critics, not by fans. First of all, this remark is condescending, because everybody knows that there is a difference between a critic’s review in the New York Times and fan review on Goodreads. However, the other genre review columns in the New York Times are written by highly accomplished critics (N.K. Jemisin for science fiction and fantasy and Marilyn Stasio for mystery and crime fiction) who actually like the genre in question and are knowledgeable about its current state. Nor did anybody suggest that the New York Times hire a random romance fan, but that they hire a critic who actually understands the genre and manages to write about without resorting to condescension as well as sexist and racist remarks.

Finally, Radhika Jones also publishes an e-mail in which someone complains that the New York Times chose to review romance novels at all, rather than “intellectual discourse about books with some relevance to the cultural time we live in”. Yeah, because people navigating inequality and gender issues to form equal relationships based on mutual respect is so irrelevant to the culture of our time. The gist behind publishing that e-mail and the whole response in general is clear: Romance readers, be grateful for the crumbs we throw to you, especially since you’re too stupid to know better anyway.

Via the Metafilter thread, I also found some good responses to the New York Times romance column that I’d missed in my last post, such as Amanda Diehl’s great point by point rebuttal of Robert Gottlieb’s article at Book Riot.

At Melville House, Stephanie DeLuca also responds to both Robert Gottlieb’s original article and Radhika Jones’ response to those criticising the article and points out that, contrary to what Robert Gottlieb seems to think, there is no such thing as “what women want”, because women are not a monolith and neither is the romance genre. Coincidentally, it’s also telling that Melville House, an independent publisher specialising in literary fiction and not a company I would have expected to champion genre fiction, gets what the problem with Robert Gottlieb’s article is, while the New York Times doesn’t.

Romance authors Lauren Layne also offers a defence of the romance genre and wonders why non-romance readers, often men like Robert Gottlieb, still feel the need to bash romance. Lauren Layne also takes issue with Gottlieb’s assessment that romance novels may be a bit naff, but are probably “harmless”. And indeed Gottlieb’s conclusion that romance novels are harmless is one of the most criticised points about a generally awful article. Not surprisingly, because that whole paragraph is practically dripping with condecension. “Well, those stupid little women are reading stupid little books full of sex, but have no fear, menfolk, those books are mostly harmless, since they won’t tax the poor little women’s brains too much and will still leave them time to do housework and pop out babies.”

At Twitter, romance author Alyssa Cole, whose recent historical romance An Extraordinary Union is exactly the sort of romance novel you’d hope the New York Times would cover, takes issue with Robert Gottlieb’s blatantly racist dismissal of Deadly Rumors, a romantic suspense novel featuring black characters by Cheris Hodge, a writer of colour, because the characters apparently don’t behave the way Robert Gottlieb believes black people behave. Considering that Robert Gottlieb used to edit Toni Morrison, as the New York Times was only too eager to inform us, I wonder if he ever said something like this to Toni Morrison. And if he did, did she deck him?

In my last post on this subject, I already linked to a tweet by Jen, a romance blogger at The Book Queen, who compared Robert Gottlieb’s condescending column to the various strategies outlined in How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ and found that Gottlieb employed the full Russ bingo card. Now Jen has storified her Twitter rant with additional under the title “Man at the New York Times Explains Romance To Me”.

Also at Twitter, Rebekah Weatherspoon explains that what infuriates her most about articles like Robert Gottlieb’s is the blatant way in which the importance of love – not just romantic love, but also familial love, platonic love, close friendships – is dismissed as trivial, even though human beings whither and die, if they don’t get enough love. She also talks about how uplifting and happy stories are dismissed, while tragic stories are considered important. Hence, tripe like Erich Segal’s Love Story or Nicholas Sparks’ entire output is considered literature, while romance novels that end happily are dismissed as trivial.

It’s probably no surprise that between approx. 2006 and 2013, when the grimdark trend in science fiction and fantasy was at its peak, I almost completely abandoned the SFF genre for romance novels, because there at least I could get stories which valued women’s voices and experiences and didn’t just treat them as disposable victims and which offered a positive worldview. And since those years were also the height of popularity of paranormal romance and romantic urban fantasy, I could even get my SFF fix, complete with true love, women with agency and happy endings. For that matter, is it really coincidence that speculative romances experienced a surge in popularity just as science fiction and fantasy took a plunge into grimdark despair?

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Cultural Differences and Some Baseless Speculation about Star Trek Discovery

No, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Star Trek Discovery. And considering how much the trailers and reviews so far have repelled me, I’m not likely to bother with a show that will only make me angry. A pity because I like Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs a lot and Sonequa Martin-Green seems likeable as well. And indeed Star Trek Shenkou is a show I might have watched. However, based on everything I was seen so far, this show shouldn’t be called Star Trek Discovery, but Star Trek: The Abuse and Mistreatment of Michael Burnham (I had to look up her name). And I for one don’t want to watch the abuse and mistreatment of a woman of colour, intermingled with occasional space battles and fights with Klingons, that don’t even look like Klingons.

In short, Star Trek Discovery seems to be the new Battlestar Galactica of the Star Trek franchise. And if you know me, you know that’s not a company, because I hate the new Battlestar Galactica with the sort of rancor people normally reserve for the Star Wars prequels. I talk a bit about that here.

By now, I’ve accepted that in this age of remakes, reboots, prequels and sequels, it is our fate to see the heroes of our youth turned into jerks and outright monsters and to have our childhood raped again and again. I used to be massively angry about this, but I no longer am. I simply choose not to watch the remakes/reboots/sequels/prequels or whatever, though I reserve the right to grumble about them. And indeed, I tired of Star Trek long before Discovery came along. Indeed, I stopped watching Deep Space Nine, which I never liked, halfway through, and gave up on Star Trek altogether during the third season of Enterprise (which wasn’t Star Trek either, just some lame war on terror analogy, because apparently every SF TV show had to be a war on terror analogy in the early 2000s). Coincidentally, I don’t watch the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies either (not happy what he’s done with Star Wars either), because whatever those movies are, they’re not Star Trek.

I may have to check out The Orville to fill the Star Trek shaped hole in my heart, since that has been getting generally positive reactions from old schoolm Star Trek fans (and how sad is it that the alleged Star Trek parody is closer to the real Star Trek than the latest actual Star Trek show?). Of course, I have a huge problem with Seth MacFarlane, ever since he did this. And according to reviews I have seen, MacFarlane’s character in The Orville is basically the same character MacFarlane plays everywhere else. However, there is a chance that Seth MacFarlane has learned better since that Oscar night. After all, if I could forgive Ron D. Moore for ruining Battlestar Galactica, because he actually did a good job on Outlander, then there is hope for Macfarlane

So this is not a post about Star Trek Discovery nor one about The Orville, let alone a review of either show or a comparison (though I might do that, if I can bring myself to watch them). Instead, this is a post about deep-seated cultural assumptions and how they can influence what we write and how we write it, using Star Trek Discovery and some baseless speculation about the show as a basis.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Though I probably won’t be watching Star Trek Discovery anytime soon, I know what happened in the two-part pilot, since I read a bunch of reviews and recaps (linked in my weekly link round-up over at the Speculative Fiction Showcase). When you live in a place, where it can take a year or more for you to get the latest US shows, if at all, you learn to be spoiler-resistant.

So I know that Jason Isaacs isn’t even in the pilot, that Michelle Yeoh’s awesome starship captain of colour dies in the second episode, killed by Klingons (yeah, as if a regular garden variety Klingon could handle Michelle Yeoh), that her protegee, the unlikely named Michael Burnham, played by Sonequa Martin-Green, manages to mutiny against her mentor, get thrown in the brig, watches her mentor get killed and manages to start a war with the Klingon Empire, all with the very best intentions. So in short, Michael Burnham is a screw-up. She’s also a deeply traumatised person, who lost her parents at a young age (to Klingons at that) and was raised by an emotionally distant foster father (Sarek, who already proved how crap he is at fathering with his somewhat better adjusted son Spock; not to metion that no one should hand a traumatised kid over to Vulcans of all people) and probably should never have been accepted into Starfleet at all, given her obvious issues. Coincidentally, Michael Burnham is also no different from the (white) male maverick officers with which stories like this are suffused, as Jodie points out in her review of the first episode only at Lady Business. Male mavericks usually find that everything works out for them, just ask James T. Kirk. Poor Mihael Burnham, however, is not so lucky. And so in the end, for all her troubles to stop the Klingons from attacking the Federation in order to make the Klingon Empire great again (there is apparently an Trump analogy in there, of course there is), Michael Burnham is court-martialled by a Federation military tribunal and given a life sentence. Cue cliffhanger – how can our heroine possibly get out of this? Judging by this spoilerish trailer for the rest of the season, it involves a lot of abuse and mistreatment, and it will probably turn out that the Discovery is a ship stuffed full of convicts on a Dirty Dozen style suicide mission (No, I don’t know for sure. This is not a spoiler, it’s just a hunch).

Now mind you, I haven’t actually seen Star Trek Discovery and Michael Burnham yet. But I already hated what happened to her and screamed at a random online review, “This is not Star Trek. Cause the Federation is supposed to be an egalitarian utopia. And an egalitarian utopia would never hand down life sentence for something like this, let alone abuse and mistreat a traumatised woman so much.” Never mind that Kirk or Picard or Janeway or Archer or even Sisko would never tolerate crewmembers abusing a prisoner.

And then I thought back at the previous versions of Star Trek, from the original series via Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all the way to Enterprise. I remembered the original series two-parter The Menagerie, a reworking of the unaired pilot The Cage, where Mr. Spock is court-martialled and put on trial for his life for the dubious crime of mutinying (hmm, I think Sarek did one thing right: he instilled a healthy skepticism of authority and unreasonable rules in his kids) to take the severely disabled Captain Jonathan Pike back to a world where he can live out his days in happiness. I remember how much that two-parter horrified my teenaged self, because Spock was clearly right and didn’t deserve to be punished, let alone threatened with execution. And anyway, how could a clearly good political system like the Federation have something as horrible as the death penalty, when even the less than perfect West Germany I grew up in agreed that the death penalty was barbaric?

I also remembered reading about Harlan Ellison’s original draft of “City on the Edge of Forever” (a Star Trek episode which was considered a spectacular standout, even when I first watched it in the 1980s, because it involved Joan Collins, then a superstar due to her performance as Alexis Carrington in Dynasty, and was just a fabulous episode in general) and how Ellison’s original screenplay included an execution by firing squad (carried out by Mr. Spock of all people) for drug dealing (coincidentally, when I told my Mom this, she said, “Mr. Spock would never execute people. Period.) I remembered how glad I was that Ellison’s original version was never filmed, because if my teenaged self had watched that version, I would never have been able to watch Star Trek again, because it violated “the pact”.

For my teenaged self was very well aware that the US had the death penalty and actually executed people. However, this was never mentioned in any of the US crime shows I watched, because – so I assumed – US TV producers, being unassailably good people, were of course horrified that their country engaged in such horrific practices like executing people and therefore had a pact never to mention the death penalty in any crime drama, because otherwise viewers would hate the detective for being complicit with such a horrible thing. Villaims were allowed to threaten heroes with execution, of course – after all, they were villains. But heroes did not do such a thing. If a program violated “the pact”, it was an instant dealbreaker that caused me to never watch said program again, no matter how much I liked it before (and there was at least one example of that, a now forgotten Aaron Spelling show). Of course, “the pact” never existed anywhere except in my mind (I still wish it was real BTW) and the only reason US crime dramas shown on German TV hardly ever mentioned the death penalty was because such scenes were cut prior to broadcast for fear of upsetting viewers like me. They stopped doing such content edits sometime in the 1990s and we suddenly got US crime dramas in their full horribleness. From 2001 on, US television dramas got steadily worse. Indeed, if I still stuck to my old dealbreakers today, I couldn’t watch any US shows anymore, given the many torture scenes, threats with execution and prison rape committed by the supposed good guys, ridiculously high prison sentences, etc… in otherwise innocuous cop shows, crime dramas, etc… In fact, I suspect the increasing nastiness of other US TV shows, particularly the so-called “quality” TV shows is a large part of the reason why Star Trek Discovery is the way it is – after all, some reviews keep telling us that this is modern Trek for modern times and modern viewers and not “your grandpa’s Trek” and that we should deal with it.

However, the Federation was not as good and utopian as they think they are even way back in the original series. I also thought of other versions of Star Trek. I remembered Commander Sisko sending his ex-lover to prison for smuggling, a classic victimless crime, in an early episode of Deep Space Nine and how it cause me to hate the character forever after because of that (in this house, we refer to Commander Sisko as Captain Arsehole and indeed I always have to look up his name, because to me he is Captain Arsehole). I remembered how in the first episode of Voyager, we meet Tom Paris in prison, forced to do slave labour for – well, I don’t remember for what, but it wasn’t a very serious crime (interestingly, someone at File 770 immediately remembered what the crime was, apparently it involved cooperating with the Maquis, the supposed anti-Federation terrorists I always felt had a point). I remembered how the Federation considered Data not a citizen but property and wanted to take him apart. I remembered how they were willing to let a whole planet full of sentient and clearly intelligent beings die, because rescuing them would violate their precious prime directive. I also remembered how I was always convinced that the Second Doctor’s rant about the cowardice of the Time Lords at the end of The War Games was in truth an accusation aimed across the Atlantic at Star Trek and the prime directive. I remembered how the Federation imposed Handmaid’s Tale type politics (every woman is forced to bear at least three children from three different men – they’re not even allowed to have stable monogamous relationships) on some poor colony instead of helping them refresh their gene pool, because reproducing via cloning is apparently unnatural, while treating women like walking wombs is totally okay. There were grisly Irish stereotypes in the same episode (Next Generation, not original series), too.

In short, I remembered all of the times I hated the Federation. And I thought, “So the Federation is supposed to be an egalitarian utopia. But it isn’t and it’s never been that. If anything, the Federation is a fucking dystopia. Only that for some reason, no one ever noticed. And coincidentally, why do the Vulcans, who are supposed to be rational and logical, put up with a system like the Federation?”

Now there’s nothing wrong with future worlds that are dystopias. If I had problems with dystopian worlds, I could never have watched Star Wars nor read Nineteen Eighty-Four nor Brave New World, all of which I did around the same time I finally watched all of Star Trek except for Patterns of Force, which wasn’t broadcast in Germany until 2011 and which coincidentally has a Federation historian praising fascism as “the most effective form of government ever devised” (another strike against the Federation). Hell, my own attempts at space opera regularly feature pretty awful regimes. There is absolutely nothing wrong with awful regimes and dystopian worlds in science fiction. However, dystopias that don’t know they are dystopias are a problem.

And the Federation was never intended to be a dystopia. This is very, very clear and indeed, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is on record for stating that he wanted the Federation to be a utopia, a vision for a world that is so much better than the one he was living in. And indeed Gene Roddenberry succeeded in presenting a vision of a better future that inspired generations of viewers and he did it during the Cold War and at the height of the Vietnam war. Yet Gene Roddenberry also had his blind spots. For all his progressive ideas, he still could not imagine a utopian society without the death penalty (which many countries had already abolished or severely reduced by the late 1960s) or life sentences or indeed without prisons altogether. Just as he clearly could not imagine a utopian society where LGBT people would have the same rights as heterosexuals and this would not be considered in any way remarkable or out of the ordinary.

Subsequent Star Trek works, including Discovery, have done their best to correct Roddenberry’s not so great record on LGBT rights. However, the Federation’s justice system (and coincidentally, its education system) is still appallingly backwards even by 21st century standards. And the telling thing is that many viewers, particularly American ones, just cannot see it. To them, it is utterly normal that a young woman is given a life sentence for nerve-pinching her Captain (an act that does not cause any permanent harm – indeed Michelle Yeoh’s character wakes up again almost at once), firing at hostile Klingons and killing the Klingon supremacist demagogical leader after he has killed her Captain.

In that discussion at File 770, another German commenter and I kept pointing out that Michael Burnham’s life sentence is kind of excessive and that the Federation’s justice system is appalling in general and also why do they have labour camps at all, when they are supposed to be a utopian post-scarcity society? Or are the previously unseen (except in the first episode of Voyager) Federation labour camps the reason they have a post-scarcity society in the first place? Most American commenters, on the other hand, felt that Michael Burnham’s sentence was just (Burnham even says so herself, but then she is a deeply traumatised young woman with what clearly are self-harm tendencies), while most other non-American commenters decided to sit that one out.

Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek in general are just the latest example for the differences between US and European sensibilities. Now the US and Europe as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand are often summed up as “the West”, united by common values. However, there is a cultural and value gap between the US and Europe (leaving aside Canada, Australia and New Zealand for now as well as the differences between the various European countries) and that gap seems to be getting bigger.

Now I consume a lot of US pop culture, because homegrown pop culture rarely caters to my tastes. If you like science fiction, if you like fantasy, if you like horror, if you like superheroes, you’re pretty much forced to look for your fix abroad, because you’ll only find slim pickings at home (since “Science Fiction is not a German topic”, as the head of the Bavaria Studios once said). So I often run up against those cultural differences. Though it took me a while to understand that tropes which regularly drive me up the wall in US pop culture were not bugs but features to the US audiences these works are primarily created for. I go a bit deeper into this issue in this post.

Now Star Trek Discovery has the misfortune of hitting a few of my personal hot buttons. First of all, it’s Star Trek and though I’ve been done with the franchise for years now (I was actually relieved when Enterprise went off the air, because the franchise was seriously played out by that point, the story told once and for all), Star Trek was some of the first science fiction I encountered (along with Time Tunnel, Raumpatrouille Orion, Space 1999 and the Captain Future anime). Star Trek was part of what made me fall in love with the genre and I will always have a soft spot for it for that reason. And I don’t want to see it turned into yet another grimdark, explosion laden TV series – after all, I’m still angry about the new Battlestar Galactica.

Secondly, like most Germans, I have issues with the portrayal of the military in all US media and particularly the fact that following orders without questions is considered a good thing. Because due to our sorry history, blindly following orders without ever questioning anything is not considered a good thing in Germany. And indeed, Kirk and Spock, the original Apollo and Starbuck, Commander Cliff Allister MacLane were always creative about interpreting orders as well as bending and breaking the rules to do the right thing. Indeed, that was part of what I loved about these characters and their stories. They always got away with it, too. Whereas poor Michael Burnham gets life in prison.

Which brings me to point 3, the excessive punishment for Michael Burnham’s crime. Now in Germany, a life sentence usually means 15 to 25 years. Even the surviving Red Army Fraction terrorists were eventually released. In order for a life sentence to truly mean imprisoned for life, the person in question has to be an unreformably Hannibal Lector type, like this guy who died after 49 years in prison. There is also this guy, currently Germany’s longest serving prisoner, who’s still locked up after 54 years, even though he’s not the irredeemable serial killer type, apparently because he is refusing to comply with prison rules. Michael Burnham, however, is no Hannibal Lector. Indeed, there is no case in Germany that’s comparable to hers. Something that vaguely comes close is the play Terror by Ferdinand von Schirach, where an air force officer is put on trial after shooting down a civilian passenger plane that had been hijacked by terrorists who were going to crash it into a stadium full of football fans. At the end of the play, the audience is asked to declare the defendant guilt or not guilty. Now I have issues with Terror, mostly because the whole scenario is manipulative. However, German and western audiences in general mostly vote to acquit the defendant, whereas Chinese and Japanese audience tend to find them guilty. Here is a write-up of an American performance of Terror BTW, where some details were changed (the football match became a baseball match and – more crucially IMO – the air force officer, who is a white man in the German performances I know of, is a Hispanic woman). The American audiences also voted to acquit her BTW.

In a related point, I not just have an issue with excessive penalties, I also have a huge issue with prisons in general. I know that we can’t do without them altogether, but that doesn’t stop me from hating prisons. I’m not sure where this intensive dislike for prisons comes from, since I’ve never had any personal contact with the prison system beyond the fact that a neighbour of my East German great-aunt was a prison guard (and I was scared of that man). However, I’ve had this intense dislike from a very young age on. I suspect it’s pop culture induced due to watching movies like Jailhouse Rock (deemed harmless, after all it’s an Elvis musical, so how bad can it be?) on afternoon TV and being horrified at seeing Elvis whipped by prison guards.

As a result, freeing unjustly incarcerated prisoners is something of a power fantasy for me. That’s also the reason why there are quite a lot of prison scenes and last minute rescues from execution in my work. I suppose the execution thing also comes from watching old westerns and cloak and dagger movies unsupervised on afternoon TV as a kid*. Any culture we consume, even if it was decades ago, influences the art we make. I use mine to work out my prison break and rescue fantasies (whereby every evil guard I’ve ever written is based on the neighbour of my great-aunt). For the past few months, I’ve working on a SF prison break story in the In Love and War series. The going is slow, because both the required research (I was one of the few people in Germany who actually knew who Joe Arpaio was before Trump pardoned that piece of shit) and the story itself is emotionally harrowing that I often have to stop working on it for several days. Coincidentally, whenever I think “This is too awful. I can’t possibly write this. No one will believe it”, I come across similarly awful or even worse things that happened in real prisons. Once or twice, I’ve actually had to alter details of the story, because the reality is so much worse. And not just in places like North Korea either, but also in the US or Australia.

So I’m in the odd situation that I hate prisons, but like prison break stories, even though they tend to upset me. And if Star Trek Discovery turned out to be Star Trek Prison Break, I would probably have watched. However, based on the trailers I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be that. Instead, we’ll probably get Michael Burnham doing penance for her crime. Coincidentally, all this also touches on another hot button point for me, loyalty to the system trumping personal loyalty to friends and family. Because if Michael Burnham is the foster daughter of Sarek, a high-ranking Vulcan ambassador in the Federation, and the foster sister of Spock, who is himself not exactly powerless, not to mention the sort of person who interprets the rules creatively. So why aren’t they trying to help Michael? Of course, it may turn out that Sarek and/or Spock actually try to help her, but that’s not the vibe I’m getting from the grimmer and grittier Star Trek Discovery.

I’ve seen a lot of enthusiastic reactions to the first episode of Star Trek Discovery online of fans who were happy to see two women of colour playing lead roles in a new Star Trek series and who were thrilled to see a mentor and protegee relationship between two women, whereas the usual suspects on the right of course hated it. I’ve seen reactions from South East Asian fans who were thrilled to see Malaysian actress captaining a Federation starship and the script and set design acknowledging her cultural heritage. I feel sorry for those fans, because the show has pulled a cruel bait and switch on them. Instead of women and colour being awesome, we get one woman of colour dead and another woman of colour in prison, apparently headed for abuse and mistreatment.

Coincidentally, when my Mom saw a trailer for Star Trek Discovery on TV (Netflix is currently sitting on the German rights and try to use Trekkies to up their subscriber base) and when I told her what the show was about, her reaction was, “I like her [about Michelle Yeoh]. I like him [about Jason Isaacs]. That’s a nice looking young woman [about Sonequa Martin-Green]. Those Klingons look awful. Wait a minute, so Michelle Yeoh gets killed, the nice young woman gets thrown into prison and the Klingons are evil now [my Mom is a big fan of the Next Generation and later era Klingons]. Well, I won’t be watching that.”

If my suspicions turn out to be correct (and there still is a chance they won’t – after all, Star Trek is known for ropey pilots and first seasons), I won’t be watching either.

*My parents often visited friends who were the sort of people who had the TV running all the time. They usually didn’t pay attention to whatever was on, but I, who was bored, did. And so I saw a lot of things that were not exactly age appropriate.

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Romance Bashing: The New York Times Edition

The New York Times now has a review round-up column for new romance novels, just as it already has one for crime fiction and one for science fiction and fantasy. This is a good thing. However, while the SFF column is written by N.K. Jemisin, a genuine SFF writer and double Hugo winner, and the crime fiction column is written by Marilyn Stasio, a dedicated crime fiction fan and prolific reviewer, i.e. people who know what they’re talking about, the romance column is not penned by someone who has any discernible connection to the romance genre.

The column is here, by the way. And it’s awful. Any cliché and any stupid remark about romance novels and their readers that you can think of, you’ll find it in this column. Old books such as Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I (published in 2000) used as examples to explain the modern romance genre? Check. Obligatory references to Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts and Fifty Shades of Grey? Check. Believing that romances come in only two flavours, regency and boss/secretary contemporaries? Check. Attempting to psychoanalyse romance readers trying to discern what women want and why they read “those books”? Check. General focus on heterosexual romances and heterosexual women? Check. Stupid comment that the race of the central couple in an African American romance has no real bearing on the plot? Check. Reflexively mentioning her father and her day job, when talking about a female romance writer (Eloisa James in this case)? Check. Wasting several paragraphs to sum up a novel that is not a romance in the current definition of the genre? Check. Selectively quoting sex scenes out of context to make them sound silly? Check. Being shocked, oh so shocked, that romance novels contain sex these days? Check.

The author finally ends his article with this little gem:

Its readership is vast, its satisfactions apparently limitless, its profitability incontestable. And its effect? Harmless, I would imagine. Why shouldn’t women dream? After all, guys have their James Bonds as role models.

Geez, isn’t it nice that women are allowed to dream now? How great that men now give women permission to dream? And isn’t it telling that dude who wrote this article considers novels in which women find respectful and supportive partners, who care about their sexual satisfaction, too, as much a fantasy as novels in which James Bond travels the globe, saves the world, has sex with incredibly attractive and implausibly named women and deals with sea monsters, shark attacks, gilded girls and equally extremely implausible things?

And come on, even before you get to the byline and the bio blurb, it’s obvious that the author of the article has to be a man. Because there’s no way anybody but a man – very likely a white cishet man – can be this clueless and at the same time this condescending.

Spoiler: Yes, the author is a man. His name is Robert Gottlieb, he is white, straight and 86 years old. Robert Gottlieb was editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. He is considered one of the best editors of the 20th century and has penned biographies, memoirs, essay collections and a book about collectible handbags. So in short, Mr. Gottlieb is certainly a gentleman of many accomplishments. However, nothing in his biography suggests that he has ever had anything to do with the romance genre, at least not in the past fifty years or so. And frankly, it shows. Because the column shows that regardless of his many accomplishments, Robert Gottlieb does not have a clue about the romance genre.

In short, this New York Times article is a prime patronising example of “Old white dude mansplains romance”.

So while it’s great that the New York Times finally acknowledges the romance genre, they really could have done much better in their choice of columnist and chosen someone who actually has a clue about the genre (e.g. Eloisa James a.k.a. Mary Bly or Jennifer Crusie or Courtney Milan or Sarah Wendell or… well, the list is endless). As for Mr. Gottlieb, I’m sure the New York Times could have found something for him to write about that’s more within his field of experience.

An article that stupid and condescending of course attracts rebuttals.

At Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell is thrilled that the New York Times is finally featuring romance novels – at least, until she read the article and saw what a condescending and mansplaining mess it was. Sarah Wendell also talks to publicists working at romance imprints, who are happy to see their authors featured, but also understandably disappointed about the condescending tone of the article.

Sarah Wendell also links to a great Twitter thread by Jen, a book blogger reviewing at The Book Queen’s Place.

Remember the good old days of 1980 when Joanna Russ wrote about how men suppress women's writing? pic.twitter.com/iidZiKjRhn

— Jen (@neighbors73) September 27, 2017

Jen matches Robert Gottlieb’s article against the strategies laid out by Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing and finds that Gottlieb goes for the full bingo card and uses every single one of them.

I also like this rebuttal by Ron Hogan at Medium, who states that Gottlieb’s column collects all the dumb things you can say about romance in a single place and coincidentally also proves that there are men who get the romance genre.

Meanwhile, at the Seattle Review of Books, Olivia Waite discerns some early symptoms of impending romance fandom in Robert Gottlieb’s article. Almost as if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself yet – which is probably why he has to snicker like a 12-year-old boy about the sex scenes – but is well on the way to getting hooked on the genre.

We can but hope, at least if the New York Times plans to continue to let Robert Gottlieb review romance novels.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for September 2017

[image error]It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some August books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, historical fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, gothic romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, hard science fiction, Cyberpunk, dystopian fiction, time travel, horror, fae killers, light elves, cyborgs, blood-sucking debt collectors, interplanetary wineyards, space mages, intergalactic mercenaries, genetically engineered space marines, alien killer viruses, space prisons, prime valkyries, space engineers, star dogs and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

[image error] Unblinking by Kira Carter:

Everyone is watching.

Minka Stanis just wants to be left alone–impossible since the Eyes record and broadcast every moment of her day. Then a humiliating incident in the high school cafeteria makes her the laughingstock of her tower city, and life behind the glass walls becomes unbearable. When the intriguing new boy at school tells her about a place away from the gaze of the cameras, Minka plots her escape from the towers. But the Shuttered Lands are across the desert, and going there will mean leaving everything she’s ever known behind.

Fresh out of tower training, Zedd Fincher is settling into his dream job. When he gets assigned to edit Minka Stanis’s Stream footage, he spins her every misstep into a string of hit clips. As Minka’s fame grows, so do Zedd’s feelings for her. But a crisis at home brings the darker side of his work into focus. And Zedd soon learns editing other people’s lives has consequences.

As Minka is thrust unwillingly into the spotlight and Zedd’s life begins to unravel, only one thing is certain:

The Eyes are always watching.

[image error] Water into Wine by Joyce Chng:

When war comes to your planet, everything changes.. perhaps even the meaning of family and identity.

Xin inherits a vineyard on a distant planet, and moves there to build a life… but an interstellar war intervenes. Will Xin’s dreams of a new life get caught in the crossfire? Xin’s understanding of family and sense of self must evolve to cope with the changes brought by life on a new planet and a war that threatens everything.

 

 

[image error] The Defender of Rebel Falls by Eric Christensen:

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but William Whitehall knows which one feels better in his hand. As a librarian—a reluctant one—his reports catch the eyes of a powerful nobleman, who selects William for an important mission. As he faces danger after danger, he soon realizes that having the right weapon is one thing, but having the wits to use it is quite another. Because when he faces his ultimate challenge, it’s more than just his own life at stake.

 

 

[image error] Winter Rose by Ginny Clyde:

The Gerrickson House is waking up from its days of mourning. Lenara Gerrickson’s fifteenth name day is fast approaching and her old childhood friend, Lady Vivienne Schmidtson arrives to help her get ready for the occasion. To her horror, Lenara has forgotten her manners and etiquettes, indulging in pastimes like riding and archery.

Lenara is skeptical of finding love during the ball on her fifteenth name day, but she catches the gaze of a dark, handsome man who sweeps her off her feet into a whirlwind romance. Her happily ever after seems so close, but clouds of doubt and warnings hang heavy in the horizon.

Follow Lenara’s journey into womanhood as she faces the harshness of reality and discover the chain of events that changed her destiny forever.

Enjoy this prequel novella to the captivating and thrilling Gothic fantasy, The Rose Chronicles. It can be enjoyed as a standalone or be read in between any of the books.

[image error] Rika Outcast by M.D. Cooper:

In the Age of the Orion War…

Rika is mech-meat, a cyborg killing machine, created by the Genevian military and cast aside when the war was lost.

Now she slings cargo on Dekar Station, falling deeper in debt as she struggles to make enough money to keep her cybernetic body functioning. The local gangs would love to have her join their ranks, and the takings would pay her bills, but the only thing Rika hates more than what she’s become, is killing for others.

But morals don’t buy repairs and she’s at the point of utter desperation when her loan holder cashes in her debt and sells her to the highest bidder.

When Rika wakes, she’s in a warehouse on a planet she’s never heard of, and a trio of mercenaries are reassembling her body. Their mission is to kill the world’s president, and her mods and abilities are just what they need to get the job done.

Whether she likes it or not, Rika is in the business of killing once more as she joins the ranks of the Marauders.

[image error] O Negative by Paul Curtin:

In Cole’s world, a critical shortage has made blood expensive.

Now the ticket to a hefty cash loan is running through anyone’s veins—as long as a person’s willing to put up their blood as collateral. And if the debt defaults, Cole is the man who collects. He kidnaps debtors for his boss to drain—over long, excruciating months—until death. It’s a job he doesn’t mind until his boss asks him to pick up a guy with the rare and valuable blood type, O negative.

Except the guy doesn’t have O negative—his ten-year-old daughter, Sam, does.

Knowing the horrors waiting for her if he hands her over to his boss, Cole takes Sam and goes on the run. With corrupt cops on his boss’s payroll patrolling the streets, a psychotic colleague hunting him, and a savvy detective on his trail, Cole knows this will end one of two ways: he escapes the city or Sam dies a slow, painful death.

Either way, blood will be spilled.

[image error] Prime Valkyrie by Michael Scott Earle:

Adam has one mission: Hunt down the Magate Order and recover his kidnapped crew before they are lost forever.

Unfortunately, his life has been bound to the Prime Valkyrie, and if Adam doesn’t submit to her powerful father, he’ll be executed.

But the genetically engineered Marine submits to no man, and the king of the Vaish Overlord Clan is about to find out what happens when you try and kill a tiger.

Or keep him from his women.

 

[image error] Memento Mori by W.R. Gingell:

Even time travellers can run out of time.

Marx and Kez have been skipping through the known Twelve Worlds, keeping one step ahead of certain capture by the seat of their trousers, and the vastness of time and space is feeling a tad too small.

Kez has always been a bit crazy, but now it’s Marx who is getting mad. Someone is trying to kill them, and that’s the sort of thing he takes personally.

To add to their difficulties, there are Fixed Points in time that are beginning to look a little less…fixed.

Between Time Corp, WAOF, Uncle Cheng, and the Lolly Men, it’s beginning to look like there’s nowhere safe in the known Twelve Worlds for Kez and Marx.

Here be monsters…

[image error] Soul Marked by C. Gockel:

Magic is real, but Tara’s life isn’t a fairy tale.

From humble beginnings, Tara’s managed to work her way into a great job researching Dark Energy, aka “magic,” in Chicago. She has a beautiful house she renovated with her own hands, and a loving extended family, but she hasn’t found her soulmate … Not that she believes in soulmates.

Lionel is a Light Elf. Despite being of dubious heritage and being born a peasant, he’s risen in the ranks to serve the Elf Queen. Like all true elves, Lionel has a soulmark to identify his soulmate … He just hasn’t found her yet.

When Lionel’s and Tara’s lives collide and Dark Elves strike, they’re forced to work together or perish. Friendship and more grows between them, but dangers loom … Tara is more important than she knows, and Lionel is more important than he wants to admit. Both of them have choices to make.

Will Lionel choose a “perfect” love over Tara? How much is Tara willing to give up for a happily ever after?

They might find that in an uncertain world, the love you struggle for is the only certain thing.

[image error] Black Dawn by K. Gorman:

Humanity is under attack and she is the only one who can stop it.

For Karin Makos, the chance to pilot a small-time scrounging vessel to remote corners of space is the dream. After years on the run with her sister and enduring the constant paranoia of living planet-side, going off-radar gives her exactly what she wants: freedom.

After what seems like a routine mission, that dream is shattered.

A system-wide attack decimates humanity and leaves the survivors scraping for clues. And Karin might know where to look.

But digging into her past comes with a whole new set of secrets and consequences, none of which she wants to face. Plagued by strange dreams of her sister and a sense of growing danger, Karin and the crew of the Nemina must race desperately across space to find their loved ones—and answers.

[image error] Synthesis by Kyle Harris:

Sometimes violence is the answer.

Trident was mankind’s greatest discovery. A blue-and-green planet teeming with ocean life and breathable air, it was the solution to all of our problems. A new world and a clean slate–we wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Don’t believe the lies.

Separated from her family, Synthia Garland is just trying to survive in the slums of Crystal City, Trident’s single metropolis home to beggars and throat-cutting gangs. Until the wrong detour results in a knife to her throat and final thoughts–before a hooded figure saves her life. With street-smart skills and a knack for getting out of trouble, Chaz is everything Synthia isn’t, and the two quickly become friends. But Chaz’s penchant for thievery takes a terrible turn when Synthia is nearly killed.

With her body mutilated and now reliant on cybernetic parts, Synthia wakes up to find herself in the care of the mega corporation she was trying to steal from–including its cold, secretive CEO. And there’s more news: her sister is on the verge of death from a flesh-eating virus. And time is running out.

Synthia must embark on a mission to return her sister to the only doctor who can save her life. With the misfit Chaz riding shotgun, she’ll face bloodthirsty pirates, malicious gangs, and a corrupt capitalistic society where pro-human activists and robotics companies are on the brink of all-out war.

Luckily, she’s been programmed to kick ass.

[image error] Mass Hysteria by Michael Patrick Hicks:

It came from space…

Something virulent. Something evil. Something new. And it is infecting the town of Falls Breath.

Carried to Earth in a freak meteor shower, an alien virus has infected the animals. Pets and wildlife have turned rabid, attacking without warning. Dogs and cats terrorize their owners, while deer and wolves from the neighboring woods hunt in packs, stalking and killing their human prey without mercy.

As the town comes under siege, Lauren searches for her boyfriend, while her policeman father fights to restore some semblance of order against a threat unlike anything he has seen before. The Natural Order has been upended completely, and nowhere is safe.

…and it is spreading.

Soon, the city will find itself in the grips of mass hysteria.

To survive, humanity will have to fight tooth and nail.

[image error] Observation by Patty Jansen:

Space biologists Jonathan Bartell and Gaby Larsen arrive at Johnson Base at the Moon’s south pole for a project with Professor Isaacs that is so secret, he cannot share the details with them. However, the professor does not show up to meet them.

Vijay Singh borrowed money from a local council man who uses the debt to make continued threats to Vijay. In his despair to pay it back, Vijay gets involved with one of the most lucrative crime schemes in the solar system.

However, the capsule he retrieves from a crater near Johnson Base contains more than smuggled rare elements. But no one is going to talk about it for fear of getting on the wrong side of the crime lords. Even if keeping the secret will endanger the entire base.

This will appeal to readers of realistic adventure science fiction, like Robert Sawyer and Stephen Baxter. The books in this series can be read in any order.

The Dauntless by Alex Kings:

An alien fugitive carrying a secret. A mob of relentless assassins sent to stop her. A million-year-old ship from a dead civilisation.

Captain James Hanson of the Solar Alliance Vessel Dauntless knows he has to help. But soon he finds the conspiracy goes deeper than he ever imagined. Hunted down by his own government, he scrapes together a ragtag team and goes hunting for the truth.

He’s hounded on every side – from the authorities, from alien warriors, from mysterious, faceless soldiers. From the criminal backwaters of the galaxy to idyllic colonies hiding dark pasts, he uncovers a threat to the entire galaxy. A damaged, renegade ship and its unlikely crew of fugitives, mercenaries, and principled officers is all that stands between mankind and its destruction.

[image error] Zakota by Ruby Lionsdrake:

Katie Saunders isn’t used to sitting on her butt, but she’s been stuck doing exactly that as the Star Guardians fly all over the galaxy, trying to get her and the other kidnapped women back home. Now it looks like they have to engage in a battle against evil aliens before making the final flight to Earth. Since they’ve captured an extra ship and are short on pilots, Katie wants to help.

She flew jets during her time in the Navy, and she’s been training on the spaceship’s flight simulator, so she knows she can be useful. Because the captain won’t listen to her, she turns her focus onto the ship’s helm officer, Zakota. He’s an odd man who apparently believes he’s a shaman, but maybe she can convince him she can fly.

Wheeling and dealing with Zakota reveals a couple of unexpected things. First off, he’s super hot under that uniform, and second, he’s not quite as kooky as she thought. As a fellow pilot, he gets her, far better than she expected anyone out here would, and he’s quick to see her worth in the cockpit.

The problem? There’s not time for them to get to know each other better or much of anything else. They’re headed into a battle against a superior foe with superior numbers, and the odds are against them making it out alive.

[image error] The Gemini Hustle: Two Guys Walk Into a Bar by Kathleen McClure and L. Gene Brown:

Two guys walk into a bar…

Everyone knows the joke, but no one is laughing when Zodiac operative Ray Slater’s manhunt collides with fellow agent Harry Finn’s covert op.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the pair form an uneasy partnership, one that takes them from the depths of Ócala’s understreets to the pinnacle of its pleasure palaces, and straight into the heart of an interstellar crime syndicate.

Here, Ray and Harry become entangled with two of the syndicate’s key players, women gifted with psionic abilities—and burdened by secrets—who will change both men’s lives, forever.

Assuming, that is, they can survive the night.

[image error] Ember of War by Stephan Morse:

Warning: Contains Crude Language, Alien Blasting, and Sex.

Lee’s too wild for the military, but too good at his job to get rid of. The government’s solution is to banish him to the outer planets until he’s deemed civilized. His latest attempt at rehabilitation has him signed on with an outpost colony.

He hates ranching. He hates taking orders from his boss. But he likes shooting aliens. Luckily, the planet he’s on is about to face a full blown infestation.

 

[image error] Tiff in Time by Jaxon Reed:

In the beginning, God created people, angels, and fae. Creatures existing between the spiritual realm and the physical, fae scattered among parallel worlds spreading magic and chaos.

The Walker hunts fae, killing them, bringing them to justice. On occasion, he recruits followers. He found Tiff, an orphan, and raised her to be one of his best hunters. A skilled killer, she jumps into any timeline on any alternate, and seeks her prey.

A powerful artifact and a mysterious fae crop up in the Roaring Twenties, in Chicago. Tiff is on her way. But this time, after centuries of being hunted, the fae have other plans…

[image error] Into the Void by Kellie Sheridan:

Her legacy was built on lies, but uncovering the truth will put everyone she cares about in danger.

Evie was never interested in being part of SolTek Industries, content to enjoy the perks of her family’s legacy without any of the responsibility. But when her brother, a party boy with no tech skills whatsoever, starts claiming he’s about to reveal the next big thing, an invention of his own design, Evie can no longer deny that something is wrong.

Everyone in Evie’s family has been lying to her, and she intends to find out why. With a pocket full of credits and a set of coordinates she lifted from her brother, Evie sets off in hopes of finding what her family is trying to keep hidden. When those coordinates turn out to lead to deep space, though, she knows she can’t get there alone.

She’s going to need a ship.

Oliver Briggs is high on ambition but short on credits. Having spent his entire life’s savings to hire his dream crew, he risks losing them all if they don’t start bringing in some real money–fast. When the daughter of a tech magnate shows up looking for an inexplicable ride to the outer reaches of the system, offering a payday too lucrative to resist, he can’t help but accept.

But taking her offer may mean losing his crew after all.

The secrets uncovered by the crew of the Lexiconis could change the future course humanity’s future. The only question is if they’ll survive long enough to do anything about it.

[image error] Provoked by Izzy Shows:

You thought you’d uncovered the secrets of the universe. But you never found me.

The humans crossed the stars, traveling farther than any before, all to terraform a planet long thought dead. They destroyed their world, and now they need mine.

They found me buried in the core of my planet, but when they set me free they also unleashed a dark force more powerful than any before—my twin. Possessed by the god of death, no guns can hope to battle his magic.

I couldn’t stop him from destroying my world before, but I’ll die before I let him take another people from me.

Many things have changed since I ruled. But death…death never changes.

[image error] Terra and Imperium by Glynn Stewart:

Secrets both ancient and new.

Powers great and greater—

With Terra caught in the middle

Humanity’s first colony is a project neither the Duchy of Terra nor the A!Tol Imperium can allow to fail. The planet Hope in the Alpha Centauri system has been lavished with resources and attention—but when an unknown alien force attacks the system, all of that is in danger.

An ancient alien artifact is the apparent target of the attack, an artifact older than known galactic civilization. Suddenly, the backwater colony of a second-rate power is the gathering point for a confrontation of the galaxy’s greatest powers.

Duchess Annette Bond might be pregnant. She might be five light years away. She might have another galactic power on her doorstep demanding she surrender their rebels who’ve settled on Earth.

But she speaks for both Terra and the Imperium—and the galaxy will listen.

[image error] Perfect Strangers by Jan Stryvant:

During his junior year in college, Sean finds himself suddenly dropped into the middle of a world that he didn’t even know existed. A secret world of magic and magic users, lycanthropes, goblins, and all the other things that go bump in the night. To make matters even more difficult, the very same magic users who had Sean’s father killed now believe that Sean will somehow inherit his father’s work when he turns twenty-one, which is just a few days away.

Needless to say most of the magic users’ councils seem to be in two camps: The first camp wants him dead. The second camp wants him captured and then will probably kill him after they’ve learned all of his secrets. The only solution Sean sees to any of this is to finish his father’s work, the very thing that got his father killed. But in order to do that, Sean must first find out just what his father was working on! He’s also going to need to learn magic himself, find a safe place to stay, raise some money, and gain a lot of allies.

Fortunately for Sean he’s got two good women at his side: Roxy, a cheetah lycanthrope with a lot of experience in fighting; and Jolene, a tantric witch with more than a few connections in the supernatural black market.

[image error] Clouds of Venus by Jeff Tanyard:

Dale Kinmont is a college student in post-catastrophe America. He’s lucky; he lives in one of the walled cities for the nation’s elite, and life is pleasant. He expects to graduate and find employment in his uncle’s company.

Everything changes when he’s framed for murder. He’s tried, convicted, and sentenced to hard labor in the prison colony on Mercury.

He ends up in Hesperus instead, a flying city that soars eternally through the acidic skies of Venus. His goal now is to find a way to clear his name and return to Earth before Hesperus erupts in civil war. He also must battle the harsh realities of the planet itself. Because if the Hesperans don’t kill him, Venus probably will.

[image error] City of Magic by Patricia Thomas:

Where do your favorite characters go after their stories are over?

The last thing Kadie remembers is getting dumped by the man she thought was the love of her life. Then, without warning, she finds herself somewhere impossible, surrounded by everything from magical kingdoms to futuristic cities and quiet suburban towns.

Her life before was merely fiction; this is where her story really begins.

The After is a world beyond imagining, existing for unfulfilled book characters who have reached the end of their stories. But not everyone in the After is happy with the status quo.

When Kadie arrives, her situation escalates from strange to deadly. Those in power are willing to play dirty in order to keep their secrets hidden. This time around, Kadie will have the chance to write her own future. But happily ever after isn’t going to come without a fight.

[image error] Mimic and the Space Engineer by James David Victor:

An aspiring space engineer, a shape-shifting alien, and the race to save an unknown alien race.

A new story from #1 Best Selling author James David Victor

Higgens has the best job in the galaxy. Except for the fact that he’s technically a janitor on a galactic mining vessel. When he discovers an unknown alien species, his world gets turned upside down. He will have to find unlikely allies if he is going to save his new friend and start the journey home.

Mimic and the Space Engineer is the first book in the Space Shifter Chronicles. If you like fast paced space adventures with engaging, and quirky, characters, you will love Higgens, Mimic, and their adventures in space.

Star Dog Liberation by Lucas C. Wheeler:

Star Dog and Clancy have spent months hiding in an abandoned apartment, and tensions and paranoia are beginning to rise. A threat still looms on the horizon, and it’s searching for Star Dog. She’s about to find him.

There’s a new German shepherd on the streets of Prism City, and the news can’t stop covering all her criminal endeavors – except they identified the culprit as Star Dog.

Whatever vendetta she feels compelled to settle against Star Dog, when she targets someone close to home, Star Dog feels he has to act. He vows to bring an end to the Star Dog technology, once and for all. No matter what it takes, or what it costs.

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