(1) AND YOU ARE THERE. Eleven years ago today at Capclave this happened – “Terry Pratchett Capclave Interview”.
(2) GET OUT OF YOUR OWN HEAD. Lincoln Michel advises writers how to balance “Understanding the Reader Without Pandering to the Reader” at Counter Craft. A brief excerpt:
…Here are some specific areas that often stand out to me along these lines:
Repetition:
Unless your book becomes part of some rabid geek fanbase or a English lit staple, few if any readers are going to read your stories with the Talmudic scrutiny you write and revise them. Readers are distracted. We read a story on a loud, crowded subway. We put a novel down midchapter and don’t get back to it for weeks. We read a chapter sleepily late at night. We miss things. What writers fear is beating their reader over the head is often doing the bare minimum to tap them on the shoulder.
This is a lesson even famous and award-winning authors can forget. I remember hearing a favorite writer give a craft talk and mention how in their first draft of a novel they had a line from chapter 1 repeated near the end of the book. “Aha, everyone will snap their fingers at the connection and realize the true identify of this character!” they thought. But then their editor, they said, quite rightly pointing out no one was going to remember that line 250 pages later. The novel needed to repeat that line four, five, or more times spaced out across the text for the reader to notice.
(3) THE HEAT DEATH OF THE INTERNET. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. But is the culture changing? “Has the Internet Reached Peak Clickability?” asks Ted Gioia.
… But it’s quite plausible that the Internet is losing its coolness and its clickbait appeal. It definitely feels stale and formulaic, more so with each passing month, and I’m not the only person who thinks so. If you dig into the numbers, you find that engagement on the largest platforms is falling—and not in a small way (as Sinatra might say).
The numbers don’t lie, and Kriss serves them up here—summarizing the bad news for clicks and swipes…
… But the metrics now tell a different story.
I shouldn’t be surprised by all this. My own experience at Substack has made me acutely aware of the longform renaissance. When I launched on this platform, I definitely planned to write those long articles that newspaper editors hate—Substack would be my moment of luxurious freedom! Even so, I assumed that my shorter articles would be more popular. I guess I’d drunk the Kool-Aid too, accepting the prevailing narrative that readers want it short and sweet, so they can read it complete in the time it takes the Piano Man to play a request.
Yet my Substack internal metrics reveal the exact opposite of what I expected. The readers here prefer in-depth articles. Who would’ve guessed? For someone like me, it’s almost too good to be true. It’s like some positive karma in the universe is reinforcing my own better instincts.
But the real reason is that the market for clickbait is saturated, and longform feels fresher, more vital, more rewarding….
(4) LOWREY COMMENCES TAFF REPORT. “Orange Mike” Lowrey reports the 2020 TAFF race status is now “Trip report in progress”.
The first installment of A Visible Fan Abroad: A TAFF Journal of the Plague Years, “Chapter the First: The Trip That Never Was” appears on pages 22-23 of Nic Farey and Ulrika O’Brien’s Beam 17.
When they make it available online, readers will find it at eFanzines.com.
(5) SFF IN NYT. Amal El-Mohtar reviews Babel, The Anchored World, and Self-Portrait with Nothing in “The Magic of Translation” at the New York Times.
The word “translation” connotes movement: carrying meaning from one language to another, or shifting bodies from one place — or one context — to another, all while recognizing that moving entails loss and change. These books dwell in that potent space between setting out and arriving….
(6) MUSK TO THE FUTURE. NPR’s “It’s Been A Minute” contends “Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter and defend free speech is part of his mythmaking”.
The saga around Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter has been just that: a months-long soap opera involving lawsuits and subpoenas, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, even a town hall. But why does Musk — one of the world’s richest and arguably most influential men — want a social media platform?
It’s Been a Minute host Brittany Luse puts the question to Jill Lepore, political historian and host of The Evening Rocket, a podcast about Musk. Lepore says that the idea of being a savior of free speech would appeal to Musk, who has built around himself a mythology inspired by what she sees as a misinterpretation of mid-twentieth century science fiction.
Lepore discusses how Musk crafted a powerful narrative that millions around the world have bought into; how he draws from science fiction and film; and why we need to be more critical of billionaire visionaries….
(7) ONLINE CLUB MEETING. The Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club will take up “Lock In by John Scalzi” on November 29, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. Eastern. Register at the link.
Science fiction can have real policy impacts, and comes rife with real-life commentary. For the next gathering of our Science Fiction/Real Policy Book Club, we have selected Lock In by John Scalzi.
The detective novel imagines a world in which a pandemic left 5 million people in the U.S. alone with lock in syndrome: fully conscious but unable to move. Twenty-five years later, enormous scientific and technological investment has created a way for those living with “Haden’s syndrome” to take part in daily life. While they remain in their beds, robotic avatars let them take classes, interact with their families, and work—including as FBI agents. Chris is a rookie FBI agent assigned to work a case that seems to involve the world of Haden’s syndrome, and he and his partner must figure out exactly what’s going on. Lock In is a fascinating tale that raises questions about the “real” world, accessibility and disability, public-health funding, and much more.
Join Future Tense and Issues in Science and Technology at 6pm Eastern on Tuesday, Nov. 29, to discuss the novel and its real-world implications. The book club will feature breakout rooms (they’re fun and stress-free, we promise) where we can all compare notes and share reactions, even if we didn’t finish the book (though we picked a short one this time!).
(8) FRANK DRAKE (1930-2022). Radio astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake died September 2. He was a pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, carrying out the first search for signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, Project Ozma, in 1960. He is the inventor of the “Drake equation” used to estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. The Guardian obituary notes:
…As a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, he made the first observations of Jupiter’s radiation belts, analogous to the Van Allen belts around the Earth, and was one of the first astronomers to measure the intense surface temperature on Venus, a consequence of the greenhouse effect of its thick atmosphere. But it is for Project Ozma, named after Princess Ozma in L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books and carried out with Green Bank’s 85ft radio telescope, that he will be remembered.
For three months Drake observed the sun-like stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for radio signals that might be from planets with extraterrestrial civilisations. None were found, but as Drake recalled in a 2012 interview: “It was a start – and it did stimulate a lot of other people to start searching.”….
(9) MICHAEL CALLAN (1935-2022). Actor Michael Callan died October 10. Best known for his roles in Cat Ballou and West Side Story, his genre resume included the film The Mysterious Island, and television’s The Bionic Woman, Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, and Superboy.
(10) MEMORY LANE.
1928 — [By Cat Eldridge.] The Passing of Mr. Quin (1928)
We have a special treat for you this Scroll, a silent film first shown in the UK ninety-four years ago. The Passing of Mr. Quin was based off a short story by Agatha Christie. Though it did not feature Hercule Poirot, as that film debut wouldn’t happen for another three years.
It is a rather odd story. To wit, Professor Appleby has abused his wife, Eleanor, for years but when he is brutally murdered and her lover, Derek, goes missing under mysterious circumstances, Eleanor suspects the worst as she indeed should.
A mysterious stranger, known mostly as “Mr Quin” appears, and begins to seduce her, but his alcoholism causes him to die quite soon. On his death bed, he confesses that he was Derek all along, and offers her to a rival, who promises to make Eleanor a happy wife.
Not cheerful at all and with just more than a soupçon of misogyny there as well but I don’t think it had any of the anti-Jewish tendencies Christie was known for early on. Need I say that the scriptwriters had their way with Christie’s original story? Well they did.
This silent film was directed by Leslie Alibi. Three years later he directed the first ever depiction of Poirot with Austin Trevor in the lead role. That was not a silent film and Trevor once claimed he was cast as Poirot because he could speak with a French accent. The Poirot film unfortunately is now lost.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born October 15, 1911 — James H. Schmitz. Writer of short fiction in a space opera setting, sold primarily to Galaxy Science Fiction and Astounding Science-Fiction. His “Lion Loose” was nominated for a Short Fiction Hugo at Chicon III, and The Witches of Karres was nominated for Best Novel at NyCon 3. Sources laud him for his intelligent female characters. His collections and novels are available at the usual suspects. (Died 1981.)
- Born October 15, 1919 — E.C. Tubb. A writer of at least one hundred forty novels and two hundred twenty short stories and novellas, he’s best remembered I think for the Dumarest Saga. His other long-running series was the Cap Kennedy stories. And his short story “Little Girl Lost” which was originally published in New Worlds magazine became a story on Night Gallery. He novelized a number of the Space: 1999 episodes. Somewhat surprisingly he’s never been nominated for or won any awards. (Died 2010.)
- Born October 15, 1924 — Mark Lenard. Sarek, the father of Spock in the Trek franchise, showing up in that role in “Journey to Babel”. (The role got reprised in the animated series, as well as three films and two episodes of The Next Generation.) Surprisingly he played Romulan Commander in “Balance of Terror,” in the first season, and a Klingon Captain in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He also had one-offs on Mission Impossible, Wild Wild West, Otherworld, The Secret Empire, The Incredible Hulk, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. He had a recurring role on the Planet of The Apes as Urko. (Died 1996.)
- Born October 15, 1935 — Ray “Duggie” Fisher. Editor, Conrunner and Fan, who chaired the 1969 Worldcon in St. Louis, was on the committee for several other conventions, and was a founding member of the Poplar Bluff Science Fiction Club and the Ozark Science Fiction Association. His fanzine ODD was a finalist for a Best Fanzine Hugo. His contributions to fandom were, sadly, cut short by his death at age 52 due to complications of diabetes. (Died 1988.) [JJ]
- Born October 15, 1942 — Lon Atkins. Editor, Conrunner, and Fan who chaired a DeepSouthCon and was editor of numerous fanzines and apazines, including eight years as co-editor of Rally! He was Fan Guest of Honor at a Westercon, and a recipient of Southern Fandom’s Rebel lifetime achievement award. He was also a ferocious Hearts player. (Died 2016.) [JJ]
- Born October 15, 1953 — Walter Jon Williams, 69. The last thing I read by him was his most excellent Dagmar Shaw series which I highly recommend, but Fleet Elements is on my TBR list. I also like his Metropolitan novels, be they SF or fantasy, as well as his Hardwired series. I’m surprised how few awards that he’s won, just three with two being Nebulas, both for shorter works, “Daddy’s World” and “The Green Leopard Plaque”, plus a Sidewise Award for “Foreign Devils”. Damn it, where is his Hugo?
- Born October 15, 1954 — Linnea Sinclair, 68. Merging romance, SF and paranormal into, well, damned if I know. She’s here sole because I’m really tickled by the use of her SJW credentials as told here: Games of Command and the short story “Of Cats, Uh, Furzels and Kings” feature telepathic feline creatures called ‘Furzels’. Sinclair has stated that these are inspired by her two cats.
- Born October 15, 1968 — Jack du Brul, 54. A writer of somewhat SF novels that EoSF says of “the Philip Mercer sequence featuring a geologist who – not entirely unlike Steven Spielberg’s similarly scholarly Indiana Jones – has physical gifts extending beyond the probable.” He also co-wrote, and continued after Clive Cusler passed on, The Oregon Files.
(12) THE DOUBLE-OH GENERATION. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri says that she is worried that the new James Bond might be a Millennial. “What the millennial James Bond might look like”. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to text!” She’s got a million of them.
(13) RAMBLING MAN. John Meaney’s post “What I Did On My Holiday” shows that he kept up his impressive workout regimen even while vacationing in “places like Lindisfarne (think Vikings) and Whitby Abbey (think Dracula) and the Western Highlands of Scotland.” He also snapped a memorable photo.
…The Caledonian Canal features a long series of locks called Neptune’s Staircase, and I did take photos of the canal itself, but was struck by this piece of useful advice, which we should always bear in mind every day….
(14) DUNGEON ACOUSTICS. “’D&D’ Goes ‘DIY’ On Kill Rock Stars’ Latest Compilation” reports Bandcamp Daily.
What does Dungeons & Dragons sound like?
That’s the fundamental question at the heart of SPELLJAMS, a new compilation album curated and produced by Chris Funk. The Decemberists guitarist wasn’t tasked with soundtracking just any old D&D campaign: SPELLJAMS is a companion piece to the newly rebooted Spelljammer setting, an outer-space-set oddity that’s become a cult favorite since its introduction in 1989. Spelljammer is a bit of an outlier within the broader D&D lore, which made it ripe for the kind of freewheeling, adventurous track listing Funk assembled for the album.
(15) LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DODGING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Lucy, a spacecraft designed to visit Jupiter’s Trojan astroids, will swing past Earth for a gravity assist on Sunday. To get the proper oomph from the assist, it will have to come so close to Earth that it will be inside the orbit of many Low-Earth-Orbit satellites (including the International Space Station).
Cognizant of the possibility of a collision between Lucy and a LEO satellite, NASA has pre-prepared two orbit changes to stagger Lucy’s closest approach just a little bit. Or, if needed, a little bit more than that. They’re waiting as long as they can to calculate orbital positions for everything and make that decision, because the longer they wait the more accurate the predictions will be.
With luck, observers in parts of Australia or the western US may be able to see Lucy glinting like a diamond before it ducks into or after it comes out of Earth’s shadow, respectively. If you miss this chance you’ll get another opportunity two years hence when Lucy swings by for another orbital assist. “NASA on Collision Alert for Close Flyby of Lucy Spacecraft”. Gizmodo says the Space Force has been scrambled!
…The collision assessment team will send Lucy’s position to the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which monitors objects in low Earth orbit. The team is prepared to perform swerving maneuvers if Lucy has more than a 1 in 10,000 chance of colliding with another object. “With such a high value mission, you really need to make sure that you have the capability, in case it’s a bad day, to get out of the way,” Highsmith said….
(16) WAITING IN A BREAD LINE. “Meet Pan Solo, a California bakery’s 6-foot bread sculpture of Han Solo frozen in carbonite”.
…The edible replica, which was painstakingly modeled out of dough to resemble Harrison Ford‘s captured character in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return of the Jedi, has been on display outside the family bakery in Benicia, Calif., since Sunday. He is accompanied by a chalkboard that adorably proclaims, “Our hero Pan Solo has been trapped in Levainite by the evil Java the Hut.”…
(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Martin Morse Wooster.] In this 2021 clip, Alasdair Beckett-King explains that even in the olden times, pepole couldn’t remember their passwords!
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Chris Barkley, Michael J. Walsh, Rob Thornton, JeffWarner, Todd Mason, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
First!
May I say that Walter Jon Williams without a doubt is a gem of a writer? I don’t think he’s capable of writing a mediocre piece of fiction. My favorite work by him? The first two Dagmar Shaw novels.
(11) WJW writes some many different kinds of things so well that I fear he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. I’ll just mention his near future short piece “The Picture Business” as a terrific one.
Typo alert for the Mark Lenard bio – “Incredible” is misspelled.
“Largest platforms” include, I assume, faceplant. Given their habit of devops, which in this case means rolling untested, unregression-tested code into production, and the overwhelming ads, why would there be any surprise that people are getting fed up. And a lot of us actually read things longer than memes.
B’days: E.C. Tubb… thirty-some books, and Dumarest hasn’t gotten to Terra. I said to an author friend “Please, please don’t make this another Dumarest of Terra finding his wife”.
Walter Jon Williams: where are his Hugos I’ve been wondering for decades. Hardwired was as brilliant as any of the other first generation cyberpunk, but…. Metropolitan is brilliant. And the Dagmar Shaw series should scare the reader… because he knows what’s possible when he puts it in the books.
the Double-oh generation – no, it will be “Push this button, Ms. Bond, and the ejection seat fires the passenger out.” – from On His Majesty’s Secret Service.
16) “I loaf you!”
“I know…”
JeffWarner: Standing O
Mark …
Dumerest does make it to Earth!
“The Return” (Dumerest #33) was first published in French then in English in 2008 by a Chicago based small press. And copies of that are eye-popping expensive. Best to see if your local library can locate a copy via Inter-Library loan. And there is a UK eBook edition.
Details here: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1006966
(7) In Lock In, Chris’s gender is never identified. The error, of course, is in the source, not OGH’s doing.
(11) Mark Lenard’s Romulan role was as the Romulan Commander in “Balance of Terror,” in the first season.
My foot hurts.
I’m enjoying Alif the Unseen.
Child of Earth is also available here from the usual suspects for three dollars and ninety nine cents. It’s on Gateway Essentials, so it’s definitely not a pirated edition. I think all of this series is now available as ePubs from Gateway.
I remember Lon Atkins well. We entered fandom about the same time–in about 1964–when he was a grad student in physics and I was an undergraduate in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, through the agency of Al Scott, also a UNC undergrad, who had just entered fandom himself. (Al was a high school friend of mine, a year behind me at UNC.) I’m proud to have been Lon’s friend.
Sam Long: Lon Atkins could make an excellent bowl of guacamole. I remember us snacking on that while they were cleaning my clock in the hearts game I wrote up for “Riverboat Gambler”.
11) I really liked Walter Jon Williams’ first two Quillifer books, and need to read the third at some point.
Fifthing the recommendations for Walter Jon Williams’s work. I especially like the Praxis series, and recently read the third book in the Quillifer series with a great deal of enjoyment. (While the Quillifer trilogy ends on a satisfactory note, it also marks a major turning point in Quillifer’s life, with clear possibilities for further volumes.)
He’s currently working on the long-delayed third volume in the Metropolitan series, which will be an instant buy for me when it’s available.
11) Players of Traveller will find much familiar in the Dumarest books, as many elements in the first three Little Black Books – what some call the implied setting – come from there. (As the Charted Space setting took shape, authors like Anderson and Piper and even Niven became more important sources, but the game still has jack armor and the implausible fast and slow drugs and the offensively dangerous Low Passage.)
11bis) WJW’s Aristoi may still be my favorite transhumanist fiction. And Days of Atonement, while not remotely his best work, wonderfully captures the sense of place of New Mexico. (As soon as you’re away from ABQ, it’s not all meth cooks and ambulance chasers.)
Not only does the first-person narrator of Lock In not get an identified gender, both it and its sequel Head On actually have two audiobook versions: one narrated by Amber Benson, one by Wil Wheaton.
(Contrast The Kaiju Preservation Society, which similarly does not nail down its narrator’s gender, but which only has one audiobook version — narrated by Wheaton. On that one, given that the narrator gets a job which explicitly involves heavy lifting, I assumed male, and was rather surprised by the tor.com review assuming female.)
Yay, Title credit
(3) If that would be true, the internet would evolve into something else, as it has done in the past, constantly.
(10) MEMORY LANE. From that synopsis, the scriptwriters of The Passing of Mr Quin must indeed have taken vast liberties. The Harley Quin stories (collected as The Mysterious Mr Quin) are borderline-supernatural: the Harlequin echo is intentional and frequently underlined, and the character is a Mysterious Stranger figure who wanders into crime scenarios and drops hints — based apparently on occult information — to a sidekick character called Satterthwaite who then realizes the solution of the mystery. Quin then tends to make a dramatic exit, e.g. over a cliff or into the sea. He certainly doesn’t go around disguising himself, seducing people or committing murders. I wonder what Agatha Christie thought of the film?
(14) There’s a whole lot more of that stuff, look up ‘Dungeon Synth’ on Bandcamp. Example: https://eternalchampion.bandcamp.com/album/terminus-est
Personally for me ‘D&D music’ starts at power metal and doesn’t go much past doom, but (almost) all indie music is worth cheering for.
(3) Maybe clickbait killed clickability. It was one thing when websites used intriguing headlines to get you to read a page — another when they forced to read 20 pages to read one bad article.
(10) From Cat’s description, it sounds like the filmmakers didn’t just have their way with Agatha Christie’s story. They kidnapped the story, drugged it and stuffed it into a horse-bound carriage, brought it to a wedding chapel in Gretna Green, and forced it to marry them so that they could inherit its wealth. Christie was inspired by the Harlequin of early theater and of British pantomimes, and IIRC, she often described him in a way that hinted at those origins (the colors he wore, the light streaming through stained glass..).
(11a) Not to say the “B” word, but I think that I first became aware of James H. Schmitz stories because of Eric Flint’s collections for Baen. However, I know the editing he did upset a lot of readers.
(11b) I really need to watch “Journey to Babel” again — and the “Sarek” episode of STTNG. I’m curious to know what Sarek/Mark Lenard fans thought of the ST novel “The Vulcan Academy Murders” by Jean Lorrah. Both Amanda Grayson and Sarek appear in it, and Sarek figures strongly in the story. I might be remembering it with rose-colored glasses. A. C. Crispin’s “Sarek” is probably the better-known Sarek novel.
Timely Meredith Moment: The eBooks of both “The Vulcan Academy Murders” and A. C. Crispin’s “Sarek” are just 99 cents!
(11c) I’d call Linnea Sinclair’s books science fiction romance — although there some have paranormal and fantasy elements as well. A number of them were published by Bantam Spectra rather than a romance publisher.
Birthdays–
Concur with Anne Marble about Linnea Sinclair. SF Romance for the win, and yes, I enjoy her work.
James Schmitz–I have the original, not the Baen versions of his work. Telzey Amberdon was a huge influence on me as a teen, and she hasn’t grown old on me yet.
James Schmitz’s stories are also memorable for their exotic biology: plants and animals both, usually quite dangerous, often in surprising ways.
(3) One can dream. My own theory is that advertising is a corrosive force that destroys everything it touches, but that may be too kind.
I’ve got the pre-Baen “Universe Against Her” as well. I’ve read a few of the later Telzey stories in old issues of Analog.
Let me post the nth assertion that WJW is generally underrated! In addition to his several excellent series (Dagmar Shaw is my favorite, but I have a fondness for Drake Maijstral too), he has a bunch of outstanding standalone novels. Aristoi gets mentioned a lot, but my personal favorites are probably Angel Station (a sort of new-wavish, punk-ish first contact story) and the too-short Implied Spaces (a book I’d love to see turned into a series, though it wouldn’t be easy).
As for Schmitz, well, Telzey Amberdon was my first fictional crush, when I was 12 or so. Re-reading his stuff years later, there’s definitely more cringy elements than I realized when I was young, but overall, I still found it reasonably enjoyable.
My favorite by Leanna Sinclair is probably The Down Home Zombie Blues (a somewhat misleading title), but I’ve enjoyed a number of her other books as well.
(16) When I worked at Ask.com, we had a life-sized sculpture lying around the office of the company’s mascot butler (Jeeves) in carbonite.
Sam Long: Re; Lon Atkins: Al Scott was actually still in high school with me in Charlotte, NC when we recruited Lon into fandom. My parents allowed us to hold a science fiction convention at my house in 1964 where Al, Lon, and Charles Wells (who harked back to the days of 6th Fandom in the ’50s), played Diplomacy and published a one-shot. I recall Al mentioning you a number of times, but I don’t think we ever met.
11) I think Walter Jon Williams’ Days of Atonement is one of his best works. The main character is a 20th century small town police chief with a 19th century code of honor, and you can’t help but sympathize with him as he feels driven to solve an incomprehensible mystery. It is a masterpiece of a character study. It is also a wonderful novel about New Mexico, a place that combines the very old, the very new, and the very weird, all at once.
But the great thing about WJW is we can agree that he is an excellent writer, while arguing about which of his works are best.
@Tom Becker: I think Days of Atonement was the one that really solidified my respect for Williams, because it was not the sort of thing I usually care for, but I really liked it!
Agree that Walter Jon Williams is underrated. My theory is that his diversity works against greater recognition. I have never read a bad WJW story, but the sheer diversity makes marketing Williams much more challenging than a writer who focuses on a single series: book N-th of “The Circle of Chronology” saga can rely on a pre-existing reader base already familiar with earlier books of that series, and build on that.
@Anne Marble: I’m curious to know what Sarek/Mark Lenard fans
Yo.
thought of the ST novel “The Vulcan Academy Murders” by Jean Lorrah.
I liked it quite a bit, along with a good bit of work Lorrah, Diane Duane, and others were doing in that decade to develop both Vulcan and the Grayson family. (I insist that Spock is a distant descendant of Robin the Boy Wonder.)
@Tom Becker:
Days of Atonement is a favorite of mine, too. One slight nitpick – Loren is a 21st century police chief (the book takes place very early in the present century).