This was a hoot. It was full of camp and ridiculousness and it was fun to listen to.  It's a stupid funny space multidimensional adventure, and I recommend.

We provide the best Amazon SEO service to Rank our client’s products on the Top Position of Amazon. We have several years of experience and a vast background in the Amazon SEO Service. We use negative and positive keywords to boost up the page on the Top Position with 100% safety & gradually increase sales. We are the best all digital marketing company in Delhi NCR.

‘Shipstar’ continues the adventure started in ‘Bowl Of Heaven’ where the crew of SunSeeker encountered a solar system-sized bowl-shaped construct powered and propelled by its own sun. SunSeeker was a ramscoop spaceship en route from Earth to colonise a planet called Glory with the crew were mostly in cold sleep. The Bowl has been voyaging for millennia and seems to be run by a elephant-sized bird-like creatures called the Folk. They have captured other species which they call the Adopted, who inhabit and maintain the Bowl.

The Folk control the Adopted by indoctrination and, when necessary, pain or death inflicted by microwave bombardment. What works on the aliens doesn’t work on the humans but they re-tune to the correct frequency and it does. Folk Memor inflicts pain on Tananareve, her prisoner, to test the new wavelengths and when she has finished writhing in agony tells her it will help negotiations. She asked him if he would die for a cause. He says no, dying is pointless as if you die you cannot make use of the outcome of the act. She asks him if he would die for his beliefs and he says no, they might be wrong. A refreshing point of view in the age of the martyr.

As in ‘Bowl Of Heaven’, there is plenty of intelligent conversation between intelligent characters. This crew of scientists encountering a cosmic construct full of astonishing aliens gets involved in discussions about ecology, biology, engineering, palaeontology, sociology and much else. It’s certainly much more stimulating than listening to the conversation of real-life celebrity dingbats on television. The writers can pull off this tour de force because they are themselves both smart scientists. Why they even feature those gravitational waves which are making the news this past week! However, it’s by no means all chat and there is plenty of gripping adventure, too, as our heroes, in fear of their lives, are pursued by the Folk and aided by some of the Adopted. As the novel develops, the big picture just keeps getting bigger and ends up in the closing fast-paced chapters on a truly galactic scale.

The characters are a varied bunch. I particularly liked Captain Redwing, whose point of view we get to see now and again. In general, Beth and Cliff still dominate the storytelling though there is substantial input from others, most notably the alien Memor. Despite the fact that she inflicts pain on humans and kills some, too, the story manages to make her almost a sympathetic character. She is doing what she has to do within the constraints of her job and her extremely hierarchical society.

It’s generally nicely written and this volume seems to have more lush description than ‘Bowl Of Heaven’. Oddly, there are clumsy word repetitions here and there. I didn’t make note of them but, now and then, the same word comes up consecutively in a fashion not usual in polished English. Writers usually find a synonym for the next sentence. It’s not really a flaw, just a stylistic anomaly. One of the dangers with quest stories – characters journeying through strange lands – is that they can turn into an endless parade of wonders. There are a few slow spots in the middle where the story flags a bit but not for long.

Reviewing loads of short stories, one forgets the pleasures of the big Science Fiction novel. The large frame leaves room for big ideas and big thinking. You simply cannot do this in the limited wordage of a short. ‘Bowl Of Heaven’ and ‘Shipstar’ are packed with science, philosophy, sociology and deep thought, all rendered through the medium of convincing human characters. The aliens are pretty convincing, too. All in all, it’s a nice piece of work.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker enjoyed learning more about Chicago Treasure from President and CEO Dr. Janet Szlyk during his recent tour of The Chicago Lighthouse. This inclusive children’s book features photographs of Lighthouse preschoolers with and without visual impairments, along with a diverse cross-section of Chicagoland youth. Author proceeds from Chicago Treasure are donated to The Chicago Lighthouse and Access Living, helping to provide necessary programs for children, families, and veterans living with disabilities.

‘Star Trek: The Newspaper Comics. The Complete Comics Volume Two: 1981-83’ collects the daily original series ‘Star Trek’ newspaper strips from 1981-83. The title is accurate.

After an interesting general introduction by J.C. Vaughn, we have the strips. ‘Restructuring Is Futile’ is written by Sharman Di Vono and drawn by Ron Harris. A machine intelligence called the Omnimind has turned a Klingon crew into cyborgs to serve it. Much is made in the introduction of how this prefigures the Borg so the given title is a pointer to that. The titles are a way of grouping the stories for this edition. The original strips didn’t have them. The story is okay. It is in the nature of daily strips that the first panel recaps a bit, leaving only two more to progress the tale. This is challenging for the writer and makes for an unavoidably choppy narrative which is disconcerting at first but one gets accustomed to it. That’s not to say one gets to like it. The art isn’t great but it does tell the tale well enough. I understand there is a lot of deadline pressure with a daily strip so an artist can’t always turn out his best work.

The second story is ‘The Wristwatch Plantation‘. The Enterprise has to escort some Bebebeque to one of their colony worlds with which they have lost contact to find out what’s happened there. The Bebebeque are clever insectoid aliens about the size of small dogs and renowned for their skill at miniaturisation. They are very important trading partners for the Federation, so Kirk must do nothing to upset them but they drive his crew crazy whizzing around on their little anti-gravity sleds. Larry Niven had a hand in the story and it features the Kzinti. They’re a race of war-loving meat-eaters invented by Niven for his own ‘Known Space’ stories who also appeared in the ‘Star Trek’ animated series. All in all, this was a pretty good yarn and true to the spirit of the original series. The art of Ron Harris seems a bit better here so perhaps he was getting used to the format.

DiVono and Harris also did ‘The Nogura Regatta’ in which several Federation ships compete in a friendly manner but pirates intervene. It was okay. Padraic Shigetani took over both writing and art for a long story entitled ‘A Merchants Loyalty’. Unscrupulous business persons try to lure the Enterprise into a trap. One day someone should do a thesis on why business people are nearly always villains in the work of most creative writers. The story wasn’t great and the art relied too much on headshots but at least it seems to have been done by a grown man.

‘Send In The Clones’ is scripted by Gerry Conway and the art is by Bob Myers who draws like a ten-year-old. The strange stumpy figures look odd but he has a knack for faces sometimes. The contrast when you get to Ernie Colón’s drawing on the next strip is quite startling as Ernie does excellent pen and ink work. So does Alfredo Alcala who takes over half-way through on ‘Goodbye To Spock’, where the Vulcan loses his memory and falls in love with a beautiful Princess. Hey-ho! The book winds down with a few shorter tales from Conway with quite decent art by Kulpa for which he should be glad to take the blame. The short stories actually seemed better suited to this format than the long drawn out ‘epics’.

Collecting these rarities is a worthy publishing exercise and I’m glad someone is doing it. As with many ‘classic’ works, it has to be taken in the context of its time and of the limitations of the genre. Writers and artists work under certain constraints with a franchise and these are added to by the straightjacket of a daily three-panel strip. I take it for granted that they did the best work they could in the circumstances, even Bob Myers. I’m sure this will be snapped up by those thousands who will buy anything with ‘Trek’ in the title. The more general reader will also find it interesting but don‘t expect to be awed. The price reflects the excellent quality of the production in this book. Hardcovers and good quality paper don’t come cheap nowadays.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/