a spaceship captain sits on his bridge, waiting for his communications officer to contact the planet around which they are in orbit;
an exotically garbed figure speaks from the screen;
invited to the surface, the captain leaves his First Mate in command and descends with a few other officers.
Everything that was done in Star Trek had already been done better in "spaceship stories" by Poul Anderson, James Blish and other authors of prose sf.
The Peregrine is the name of this particular Nomad ship. Thus, this title is the equivalent of calling a Star Trek episode The Enterprise. Somewhere else on the blog, I have already compared the main theme of The Peregrine to a particular Star Trek episode and another comparison of this novel with that TV series is here.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of STAR TREK and Captain Kirk as well! One reason I am NOT a fan of either STAR TREK or the STAR WARS movies is because of how thin, shallow, and superficial they are compared to the WRITTEN works of the masters of science fiction. Reading the works of Anderson, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Norton, etc., as a boy spoiled TV and movie SF for me.
Sean
Those series are memorable mainly because they finally -started- to catch up in visual terms with the written SF.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I have to respectfully disagree. Even in "visual terms," TV and movie SF largely disappointed me. Everything from the "unreal" looking clothes and uniforms worn by the humans to the ridiculous fake looking aliens made it plain to me how far they fell BELOW the standards set by the masters I listed.
Sean
Post a Comment