Now you can cruise the most hilarious sector of the space-time continuum, with this collection of twenty Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes not by the leading lights of the Western literary tradition: James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jackie Collins…
Steven Boyett transports you into the sort of alternate universes any avid reader or Trekker would love:
• a Clancy-like realm where the Enterprise crew mobilizes to fix
Captain Picard’s broken watch
• a Heller-esque domain where you can only get out of Starfleet if you’re crazy—and,
if you want to get out of Starfleet, you're clearly not crazy
• Collins-ish netherworld where Counselor Demanda Troi sleeps
and shops her way around the galaxy
• a Melvillean place where the Great White Hole lies in wait
… and many more.
Boldly go where no one has gone before with this stellar combination of high art and high comedy.
The concept is that a pile of pitches for Star Trek: Next Gen episodes have been discovered, each written by a famous author. These authors have failed to write in the Star Trek style, instead writing their pitches in their own (not so) inimitable voice.
I have never read any of the imitated authors, and having read a few of the parody pitches, I have no desire to do so. I am sure the spoofs capture the voices quite well, which is part of what contributes to my having given up. The problem is that these are parodies of the various authors, not parodies of Star Trek, so I’m not that interested.
So Niko sets out on a harrowing journey from the streets of Los Angeles through the downtown subway tunnels and across the red-lit plain of the most vividly realized Hell since Dante, to play the gig of his mortgaged life and win back the purloined soul of his lost love.
Mortality Bridge remixes Orpheus, Dante, Faust, the Crossroads legend, and more, in a beautiful, brutal—and surprisingly funny—quest across a Hieronymous Bosch landscape of myth, music, and mayhem; and across an inner terrain of addiction, damnation, and redemption.
[limited edition 446/750, signed copy]
At the height of the air war in Europe, Captain Joe Farley and the basehall-loving, wisecracking crew of the B-17 Flying Fortress Fata Morgana are in the middle of a harrowing bombing mission over East Germany when everything goes sideways. The bombs are still falling and flak is still exploding all around the 20-ton bomber as it is knocked like a bathtub duck into another world.
Suddenly stranded with the final outcasts of a desolated world, Captain Farley navigates a maze of treachery and wonder—and funds a love seemingly decreed by fate—as his bomber becomes a pawn in a centuries-old conflict between remnants of advanced but decaying civilizations. Caught among these bitter enemies, a vast power that has brought them here for its own purposes, and a terrifying living weapon bent on their destruction, the crew must use every bit of their formidable inventiveness and courage to survive.
