new on Patreon!

Here’s what I’ve put on my Patreon in March:

• $1/month and up: reviews of Space Sweepers and of four sports movies (The Karate Kid, The Sandlot, Rookie of the Year, and The Great White Hype)
• $2/month and up: 34 cat pictures (including some guest cats!)
• $5/month and up: reviews of The Boys season two and The West Wing season four
• $7/month and up: five excerpts from All-the-Way House
• $10/month and up: the Super City Cops vignette “Collateral Damage” and the Dragon Precinct vignette “Existential Crisis”
• $20/month: first looks at all five chapters of All-the-Way House

Plans for April including more West Wing season overviews, more TV reviews (I’ve got a huge backlog), a review of Coming 2 America, excerpts and finished chapters from Feat of Clay, and tons of cat pictures (including a few more guest animals!).

You’re really missing out on a ton of cool stuff if you don’t support me!

Star Trek eBooks for cheapsies

Every month, Simon & Schuster puts a random collection of Star Trek eBooks for sale for just $.99. This month, one of the entrants is a huge bargain, and also one that I co-wrote!

After Deep Space Nine ended in 1999, S&S was given permission to continue the story of Station Deep Space 9 in novel form, picking up where “What You Leave Behind” left off. That series of novels kicked off in 2001 with the two-book series Avatar by S.D. Perry, continued with the novel Abyss by David Weddle & Jeffrey Lang, the novel Demons of Air and Darkness by Keith R.A. DeCandido (hey, that’s me!), and the novella “Horn and Ivory,” also by me.

Those tales were all collected into an omnibus called Twist of Faith, and that’s one of the $.99 eBooks throughout the month of April! That’s right, you get four novels and a novella for just ninety-nine cents!!!!!

Also available for one penny less than a buck is another omnibus, this one collected the four 1997 novels that kicked off Star Trek: New Frontier by Peter David, the first Trek novel series not to focus on one of the TV show or movie crews.

Also on sale this month are another of Peter’s New Frontier novels, Fire on High; the original series novels No Time Like the Past by Greg Cox and Garth of Izar by Pamela Sargent & George Zebrowski; and the Next Generation novels The Children of Hamlin by Carmen Carter, Invasion: The Soldiers of Fear by Dean Wesley Smith & Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Armageddon’s Arrow by Dayton Ward.

Click here for more info.

an open letter to Balticon, which I am not attending

An open letter to the folks who run Balticon:  

I’m afraid that I must decline the invitation to be an author guest/program participant at Balticon 55, and have no plans to return to the convention any time soon.  

The convention’s handling of the multiple harassment complaints against convention chair Eric Gasior is disappointing. All the more so because my wife Wrenn Simms and I were witnesses to the incident spelled out in one of those complaints. We were at Arisia 2016, and we observed Eric’s behavior toward one of the complainants. At the time, we thought it was an isolated incident due to a particular set of circumstances. We have since learned that there were at least three other complaints against Eric of a similar nature to that of the one we were privy to. Our names were passed on to the investigator that Balticon hired to look into the allegations, but we were never contacted. Now the investigation is said to be complete and finished, even though Wrenn and I were not questioned, despite being witnesses to Eric’s harassment in January 2016.  

This is massively unacceptable and I cannot in good conscience support the con. Balticon is a favorite convention of ours, and I am disappointed to not be attending, but to attend now would be to give my tacit support to a convention committee that has proven to not care about the safety of its attendees.  

Sincerely,

—Keith R.A. DeCandido

KRAD COVID reading #94a: Star Trek: S.C.E.: Invincible Book 2 Part 1

For 2021, KRAD COVID readings is covering the only short fiction I didn’t read in 2020: my novellas for the Star Trek: Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, a monthly series of eBooks that ran from 2000-2007. I’ll have a new reading every #TrekTuesday.

This week, we kick off Book 2 of Invincible, which was a collaboration between me and David Mack. Commander Gomez leads a hunting party to go after the second monster shii, which ends in tragedy and disaster…

Check it out! And please subscribe to the channel!

Monday music: “Open All Night”

When he was touring with the Sessions Band, following his Pete Seeger tribute album We Shall Overcome in 2006, Bruce Springsteen redid a couple of his previous songs, including this incredibly nifty boogie-woogie version of “Open All Night” from Nebraska.

Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: “Someone to Watch Over Me”

It’s the inevitable riff on My Fair Lady. Or Pygmalion. Or My Favorite Year. Or Cyrano de Bergerac. It’s not a riff on She’s All That, only because that came out later that same year. Anyhow, it’s the unrequited love story and the awkward woman stumbles into romance story with the EMH and Seven of Nine. The Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch needs “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

An excerpt:

Plus, what a spectacular waste of Scott Thompson. Arguably the most talented member of the Kids in the Hall (which is not to speak ill of his troupe-mates, Thompson’s just that good), he’s utterly wasted in a role that any mediocre comic actor could have done decently with. In fact, we saw two mediocre comic actors do this exact same story in TNG’s “Liaisons.” If you’re going to repeat something from a TNG episode, you should at least make it a good one, not one of the drearier entries in that show’s incredibly dreary final season.

talkin’ The Lost Era on The Captains’ Table Podcast

Back in 2003, I wrote what I still consider to be one of my best novels, the Star Trek: The Lost Era novel The Art of the Impossible, which covered eighteen years of history in the period between the TOS movies and the start of The Next Generation.

Last October, I recorded an interview with The Captains’ Table podcast to talk about the novel, and it just went live today!

two weeks in and feelin’ groovy

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Friday the 26th of March was Wrenn’s and my official day of freedom: two weeks after receiving our second shot of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, which is when the CDC says you’re as immunized against the coronavirus as you’re gonna get.

To celebrate, we got our hairs cut! Going to a salon wasn’t really a thing we wanted to do during a pandemic, but we felt good about doing it today. It was my first haircut in 14 months, and Wrenn’s first in 16 months. As you can see from the “before” picture above on the left, my hair was getting pretty out of control. Now, it’s much calmer and not zipping off in all directions.

Don’t worry, though, I’m still a long-haired hippie weirdo freak….

Today, we’re off to North Carolina. We’ve been cooped up together in the house forever, and we want a road trip, so we’re gonna head to Raleigh and spend a few days with our dear friends ToniAnn and Kyle. And we’re looking forward to Easter dinner, our first meal at my parents’ house in 13 months, not to mention being able to celebrate my birthday in a restaurant!

We’re nowhere near normal yet — as you can see from the pictures above, masks are still a thing, and we’re still being very very very very careful, especially with people whom we either know aren’t vaccinated or don’t know one way or the other if they’re vaccinated.

Yesterday was a beautiful day for walking around both Greenwich Village in Manhattan and Little Italy in the Bronx. And it was so nice to do that without the anxiety that’s gripped us since mid-March 2020.

Still a ways to go, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and it looks like it isn’t an oncoming train….

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s “The Star-Spangled Man”

We’ve got four guys in this episode who have been Captain America in the comics — including the two title characters and John Walker as expected, but also Isaiah Bradley from the brilliant 2003 miniseries Truth: Red, White, and Black. My review of the second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

An excerpt:

Wyatt Russell also does great work, playing the humble aw-shucks-I’m-just-doin’-my-job soldier who’s trying to do the right thing. He’s doing this because he was ordered to, and he considers it a great honor. Russell strikes a very good balance here, as he’s not really a bad guy, but it’s also hard to warm to him, at least in part because his persona as Captain America is so obviously manufactured. He’s trying to fill Rogers’ shoes, but he hasn’t really done anything to earn the accolades he’s been getting. The people in the football stadium are cheering the uniform and the shield, not the person wearing it. Heck, Rogers himself didn’t get taken seriously as a soldier until he rescued a bunch of prisoners from Hydra’s clutches.

Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: “Juggernaut”

“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”

No, wait, not that “Juggernaut”……

Torres still has anger management issues, the Malon are still horrible (but also are people, not just evil greedheads), and away teams in Star Trek TV shows still don’t beam down to planets with adequate protection from harm. The Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch does “Juggernaut.”

An excerpt:

Torres’s anger management issues haven’t really come up much lately, but I like the idea of her trying meditation with Tuvok. Speaking as someone who has tried meditation and failed at it pretty miserably (they keep telling me to empty my mind, and I’ve never been able to do that), I was amused by Torres’s inability to manage it, either. I also liked Tuvok’s patience and encouragement—and snark, deliberately provoking her by calling her “Ms. Turtle Head.”