This week it’s book club time and Sina & Michael review Star Trek The Next Generation: The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow. This novella came out on March 25th 2013 and see Picard return to the Nexus 13 years after the end of Generations.
As well as our review we also have an interview with the author James Swallow. During the interview James tells us how he discovered Star Trek, his writing career, Doctor Who, his Star Trek novels and the upcoming epic “The Fall” including James story “The Poisoned Chalice”. We also discuss the two episodes of Voyager James wrote.
James Swallow
A British author and scriptwriter. A BAFTA nominee and a New York Times bestseller, he is the author of several original books and tie-in novels, as well as short fiction, numerous audio dramas and videogames.
His writing includes The Sundowners series of Western fiction steampunk novels, and fiction from the worlds of Star Trek, Warhammer 40,000, Doctor Who, Stargate and 2000AD. He lives and works in London
Although unaccredited, Swallow is the only British writer to have worked on a Star Trek television series, having created the original stories for “One” and “Memorial”, two episodes of the series Star Trek: Voyager.
Nominated with Mary DeMarle and Jean-François Dugas in 2012 for the BAFTA Video Games Awards Story category, for their work on Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
When Captain Picard is summoned back to the mysterious space-time phenomenon known as the nexus, he and his crew become embroiled in a desperate plot to rewrite history, no matter what the cost.
Our Thoughts: We really enjoyed this story. James Swallow answers many of the questions that were left from the end of Generations. The story is fast paced, includes a mystery and has some great character moments. This is a Picard story and we both agreed that after Destiny it was nice to see a Picard who is more comfortable with his place in the universe. The threat of the Typhon Pact is near by and we both enjoyed reading about The Holy Order of the Kinshaya. We both felt that theme of the story is that we don’t need to go too far to realise how good life can be and that we spend far too much time trying to escape from reality whether it is on TV, games etc when we should embrace our lives and those who are around us.
The Final Verdict: A must read for all Star Trek fans with an average score of 9.25.
You can find James on:
Twitter: @jmswallow
You can find James at his blog: Red Flag
You can email Ten Forward:
trekmatetenforward@gmail.com
You can find Ten Forward on Twitter:
Twitter: @tenforward1701
You can find Sina on:
Twitter: @queenkatblue
You can find Michael on:
Twitter: @mclark1701
You can find Laura on:
Twitter: @janeway931
Interview copyright Michael Clark & Sina Alvarado
Podcast (ten-forward): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:56 — 99.7MB)
Subscribe: RSS
April 21, 2013
Oops! The only spoiler here for me is the sex and name of Jean-Luc and Beverly’s child. I haven’t gotten that far in the new books, when I went back to read the older ones instead.