reread: How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford ★★★

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford
My rating: ★★★

So many feelings after rereading this decades after a first reading upon its initial release. It's still such a silly take on Star Trek, right up there with the Original Series episodes, "A Piece of the Action", "Shore Leave" and "The Trouble With Tribbles". And yet I can't reconcile its innocent charm, skewed characterizations and flawed storytelling with ratings I previously gave the book: 2 stars at one point, long forgotten and undeserved, and then 4 stars, apparently based on my faulty memory of how funny I must have found it.

Three stars seems about right. I shouldn't fault the author for playing around with Star Trek lore at a time when it was far less established. And I won't. Although the Klingons never quite ring 'true' here, weighted down as I am with 40 more years of books, TV and film. They are much too personable. Everyone else seems about right, for the time. What kept distracting me, though, were the casual references to what should have been archaic Earth cultural touchpoints. Even the humans of Kirk's time are usually presented with larger gaps in their knowledge of 19th and 20th century British and American stage and film. How the isolated colonists on Direidi, much less the Klingons, know so much about Gilbert and Sullivan, classic Hollywood films and romantic comedy is a mystery.

Leaving all that as the key suspension of disbelief, the reader is left with a pleasant story of cunning locals pulling the wool over the eyes of supposedly more sophisticated visitors out to exploit them.

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read: When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi ★★★★★

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
My rating: ★★★★★

I expected this book to be offbeat and entertaining. But John Scalzi took it in a completely different direction than I expected. The reader knows the premise, based on the title and back cover blurb. "What would happen if the moon suddenly and without explanation turned into cheese." But what the author does with that premise caught me off guard. The moon turning into cheese is the both the inciting incident and the only required suspension of disbelief. Everything else follows logically and as true to the real world as possible.

The mass of the moon stays the same. No orbital mechanics are (supposedly) skewed. Other natural processes must and do proceed apace: it's larger in diameter, it's brighter, the surface is too soft for a landing, etc. The book delves into the effect the change has on the population of Earth. Chapters focus on different sets of characters and their unique situations in a somewhat chronological order. Some incidents are humorous. Others not so much. A few characters pop up more than once so we get a fuller picture how the new moon's ramifications on their life. And then something happens to which my response was "he didn't actually go there, did he?" But he did. And it makes for an even more interesting story.

Disclosure: Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Books for allowing me to preview this book.

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