Margaret Wander BonannoRezensionen

SF.2 cultures & species clash on same planet. Fair read, but hard to follow language used.

As a continuation of "WHAAAAALES IN SPAAAAACE" this was GREAT. It dealt with linguistics, with actual problems of first contact (do you even recognize the things you're trying to contact), with Federation diplomacy...everything I want from a Star Trek story. Highly recommended.

I really like that this book tried to tackle the th'y'la relationship, but I don't think it totally succeeded. I respect the attempt, but there's just so much rape and attempted rape, so much struggling with sexuality, and so little recognition that WOMEN SOMETIMES BANG WOMEN, for lord's sake, that it was really undermined for me. I'm not saying that the th'y'la bond is sexual, but only that the possibility of sexuality today would need to be addressed at least from the human side, y'know?

Really enjoyed this one! It totally contradicts tons of stuff in the TNG movies about first contact, but I don't care—it was a fun ride. I particularly liked how it tied in some specific TOS episodes with much later events of the films.

Considering the insults the original author had to endure, the quality here is actually pretty good. Any review of this book is liable to get side-tracked by the stories behind the story. Like, how the author is not actually the author because of editor machinations and rewrite duties handed elsewhere multiple times for no discernable good reason. How you can read the original manuscript for free online, titled 'Music of the Spheres' (see Member Recommendations.) Or, on another topic, how this was the obvious premise to have written a script for the movie Star Trek V around, naturally continuing the story that had developed since Wrath of Khan, until Shatner came up with his televangelist-inspired "searching for God" idea and pursued that instead.

My kids are of an age to re-trigger my Star Trek fandom as they try to parse its complexities. One of them tried to read this first and wasn't pulled in. Still, I decided I wanted to try it myself for a glimpse of the ST5 movie that might have been. It reassures me quickly that the Federation doesn't simply let the probe drift away like the movies suggest, they actually track its subsequent movement. Its wandering carries it toward the Neutral Zone, which coincides with a kind of Romulan perestroika that invites new diplomacy between Romulans and the Federation. Happily the probe plays a significant role throughout the novel, and several of the guest characters are interesting. The Enterprise crew is the only bland element, at least until the climax nears when it finally becomes their show. A movie script would beef up their roles throughout, especially for Chekov and Scotty, and remove some of the other people. Would it have led to a better Star Trek V than we got? Not much wouldn't, so yes. There's a massive coincidence involving crystals that kind of guts the whole plot, but that sort of thing usually plays better on screen anyway.

Turned into a western halfway through the book and I became bored.

One of the first three Star Trek novels I read, this one's a heavy hitter in terms of how reasoning behind a variety of ethical sets go. Coming from this, I found the later fluff showing up in Star Trek to be very strange.

This book does an outstanding job of addressing, "What would someone from this background and mindset do?" Which is pretty much the primary thing I ask of any book. Probably the most serious addressing of consent breach I've seen in Star Trek.

Golden Age Trek

There's a window in time when the Trek novels were more unencumbered by editorial oversight, story arcs and trying to be more canonical - and this is a novel from that era. Really kind of quirky in many ways (there's magic, for one!), but still a fun story. [Not a complaint about the current state of Trek literature - just an observation.]

I'd read this long ago, but picked up the abridged audio version with great voice work from George Takei and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. There's sound effects too! Not your serious full text audio book, almost more of a radio play - but *I* liked it.

Margaret Wander Bonanno’s Star Trek: Probe takes place shortly after the events of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, following the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-A as they undertake a diplomatic mission with ambassadors from Romulus, where the death of the Praetor has opened up the possibility of glasnost and perestroika in the Romulan Empire. Simultaneously, the probe that had attempted to contact whales on Earth now travels through the Neutral Zone, where it attacks Romulan ships and installation that threaten alien leviathans on a Romulan-held planet. While the book does offer a backstory for the probe and its creators, much of the story focuses on the diplomatic with some emphasis on the political intrigue of Romulan society. In many ways, the novel serves as a better link between Star Trek IV and Star Trek VI than Star Trek V did, as the diplomatic story and Cold War parallels foreshadow the events of The Undiscovered Country.

According to Jeff Ayers’s survey of the Star Trek novels, Probe had a difficult road to publication: “All the parties involved have different recollections of those events, as well as different ways of interpreting them, and the various accounts are contradictory” (Voyages of the Imagination, pgs. 125-125). Margaret Wander Bonanno has stated that the novel is not the manuscript she submitted, which Gene Roddenberry’s office rejected, but rather the work of Gene DeWeese, who re-wrote the novel at Pocket Books editor Dave Stern’s direction. The book had steady sales upon its release and, while superior to the story of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, it is still a bit slow at the beginning, with much of the Romulan portion dragging and not matching depictions of the Romulans in the 1990s-2000s Star Trek series and films. Overall, however, the story feels like an extended episode of The Original Series, which will likely appeal to most readers.½

Much better than Enterprise, in that the characters have adult points of view and reactions to other characters, even though much of it takes place in (roughly) the same era of Kirk's command.

The book is split into 2 parts: Book I and Book II. Book I felt like so much exposition and dead weight. Jumping straight into the action of the far more interesting Book II would have made for a tighter whole.

Not my favorite Star Trek novel. I am giving it three stars here, though, due to the fact that the audiobook version is voiced by none other than Leanard Nimoy and George Takei. Definitely worth listening to!

Thank you, Margaret Wander Bonanno! When one Star Trek novel lets you down, another restores your faith in published fan fiction. Apparently, this novel belongs to the same series as Vonda McIntyre's First Adventure, but I actually loved this 'gap filler', which alternates between a young Kirk and crew from 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' in the first series to the older and wiser characters of the films. I even enjoyed the establishing chapters, drawing together irascible first officer Melody Sawyer and her captain with kelp farmers Tatya and Yoshi over the crash-landing of a Vulcan craft, and original characters usually bore me silly.

Bonanno's love of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, however, was all that was needed to completely win me over. Here is a woman who understands the magic of the characters and the show! The bond - the 'silver link' - between Kirk and Spock is beautifully drawn upon, hinting at 'the story of this human and a certain Vulcan' without getting too slashy. And the complexity of Kirk's personality is respected, not dumbed down to the level of popular stereotype. I loved the creative 'missing mission' chapters with Gary Mitchell, Elizabeth Dehner and Lee Kelso, too, showing Kirk in transition from edgy young captain to confident, trusted leader. I could have lived without the meddling wizard, but Spock's time with his ancestor was touching, and the multiple threads of the story tied neatly together in the end.

This is one of those rare times when I pull a beloved book off my shelf and end up thinking less of the tome than I did on my previous readings. Strangers is a Star Trek novel, telling of a first contact between Vulcans and Humans. (This was written before the movie Star Trek: First Contact, so now we know that this story never really happened.)(Well, you know what I mean.) Like the movie, it wasn't enough to simply present the tale of this event. The author also had to include time travelling members of the Enterprise crew, in this case, from the original series. In the past, I enjoyed the cultural anxiety of the encounter and the building drama of the story. This time around, I also (eventually) got caught up in the plot, but I spent far too much time noticing the clichés and two dimensional characters. I may hang onto the book out of nostalgia, but I really couldn't recommend that any one else pick it up outside of the waiting room.
--J.

It’s too bad that Margaret Wander Bonanno hasn’t written a few more Star Trek novels. Her Star Trek characters are familiar and her secondary characters are well drawn. This tale takes place near the end of Admiral Uhura’s Starfleet career and also features characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The inclusion of a young Ben Sisko is very well done.

The Lost Era series illuminates events that take place prior to and between Star Trek television series. Published in paperback by Pocket Books.

A "giant" Star Trek book (it says so on the cover!) that delivers fairly well on the higher stakes and grander narrative that the long ST novels promise. This one is a book within a book and works fairly well as such. The plot involves Earth's First Contact with Vulcans (the book predates the TNG movie First Contact and tells a more interesting story, I think). A thoroughly enjoyable read with good characterization of ST staple characters and fantastic original characters but falls well short of five-star territory for a somewhat anti-climatic ending.

Further adventures of Saavik as a young Starfleet officer, with some flashbacks to her childhood. Nicely twisty plot, but the flashbacks contradict some of Saavik's previously-established backstory.½

This is one of my favorite Star Trek books!

a good read

Here we have a first novel published in 1979. I am left to guess that it didn't set the sales charts afire by the fact that it's all but disappeared from Ms. Bonanno's CV ( see her website and be persistent!), but that sure hasn't stopped Ms. Bonanno from being a very successful writer (back to the CV, helluva career).

Many first novels feature a protagonist that is the author in a fright wig, so to speak. I suspect that this novel features a supporting character that's the author in a fright wig, the character of Vicki, the judgmental friend of a young mother getting a divorce. The fact that Vicki gets the space and sympathy she does, when she's not central to the plot, makes me suspect this...I ccould be wrong, of course.

The novel itself is about Sarah, the distinguished and successful professor at a small Catholic school, whose devastating stroke leaves her changed forever, and in need of round-the-clock help. Joan, a young college-educated divorcing mother, needs a job to support herself and her son. Pietro, a priest and Sarah's teaching colleague, is utterly in love with Sarah and, we suspect, she with him...but Sarah never encourages him to break his vows as she did by leaving a nunnery to marry a famous sculptor so long ago.

These three people, quite convincingly drawn, are in orbit around each other held by the metaphysical gravity of love...and by the different force that is lovingkindness. Each character has strong bonds of affection to Sarah and to each other, but each is also acting out of the need to express a sort of agape for the others, that disinterested spirit of goodwill that is such a Catholic staple in Good Works.

But Bonanno's long career in fiction can be explained in one short sentence about this, her first novel: She makes you believe that goodness, lovingkindness, is real.

I believe Sarah helps Joan, who helps her, and Pietro helps them both, for the mixed and very human motives that power each of us in our actions. But the impressive skill of a first-time novelist in delineating characters who can believably act selflessly should not go unremarked.

This is a period piece in many ways. I recommend it to aficionados of character-driven stories, to people over 45, and to Catholics who would like to remember what it was like to read something about a *good* priest.½

Last month, I read Probe, ostensibly by Bonanno. At the time, I realized that I'd never actually read Music of the Spheres, Bonanno's original manuscript for the book that became Probe after intervention by J. M. Dillard and Gene DeWeese. So, I downloaded the .pdf and began reading it during slow moments at work (i.e., all day). It's a curious experience, reading two versions of essentially the same book. There are things I liked better about Bonanno's version, there are things I liked better about the published version. The character of Rihan/Hiran certainly comes across better as published, and the way that Bonanno ties in her characters from Dwellers in the Crucible is a bit too "small world". (It probably doesn't help that I don't actually like Dwellers all that much.) But Bonanno has a more interesting writing/narrative style (in that she has a style), and her characterizations are a bit stronger. I have to admit, I like a lot of the changes introduced in the edits; if Bonanno had been allowed to implement them herself, I think we would have ended up with one very good book rather than two so-so ones. (originally written May 2008)

I've read this before, but I picked it up because I didn't own it and I hadn't reread it since I'd heard of the infamous "Probe debacle"-- I was interested to see what I'd think, knowing it was actually the work of J. M. Dillard and Gene DeWeese. I enjoyed it. It's a pretty lightweight and inoffensive book, but it's still a pleasant enough read. The origin of the Probe is interesting, though the titular object feels pretty shoehorned into the plot about the death of the Praetor and the resulting Romulan peace conference, which I think could have been interesting enough to sustain a novel on its own. The regulars are pretty much spot on, and most of the additional characters are fine; Commander Hiran is the best of them. Now I'm finally reading Music of the Spheres to compare Bonanno's original book to what we ended up with.

I'm a big fan of Bonanno's science fiction, so I got this to check out her mainstream work. I don't remember much about it except liking the characters and the setting (Brooklyn from the Depression until 1979). It's a family saga with the stories of multiple generations.

The Others series is excellent Star Trek fanfic with the genre labels rubbed off ... I mean it's a series about a planet full of logical, peaceful aliens with pointed ears and how they deal with humans. I really loved it when I read the whole series many years ago. I've never been able to track the other two books down to own the entire thing.

I read this awhile ago, so I'm short on details. This is a roman a clef about Star Trek fandom, somewhat a la Galaxy Quest. I remember it as funny and warm, if a tad convoluted and post-modern