Sanctuary (Star Trek, Book 61) by John Vornholt


You can't go home again

Published in 1992.

I picked my title for this review for two reasons:

#1 - Sanctuary describes a legendary planet called 'Sanctuary' - a place where any and all fugitives are welcomed and spared from any further persecution. Unfortunately, McCoy, Kirk and Spock discover that once you come to Sanctuary you can never leave again. Thus the main challenge of the book - how do our intrepid three break out and get back to the 'Enterprise'?


#2 - I used to be a gigantic reader of Star Trek books. In the 80's and very early 90's I had a rather large collection. In fact, my cousin and I had a complete collection if we put ours together. I was quite the fan. I ran across this book and picked it up for old times sake and discovered that 'You can't go home again'. The old magic just was not there. Not that I dislike the characters or even the basic plot idea. It was the way the book was written:

-The supporting characters are one-dimensional cutouts.

-There's no character development.

 -The planet is apparently covered with the same plant life since they encounter it in nearly every outdoors scene.
-I found myself being drawn into the last scene until I realized that my own fear of heights was making me imagine it much, much better than it was written.

Probably the last of the series for me. It's not the fault of the series - I have moved on to greener literary pastures and expect more.

I give this one a grade of 2 stars out of 5.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Sanctuary (Star Trek: The Original Series Book 61)

Reviewed on April 11, 2006.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

REVENGE of the TIPPING POINT: OVERSTORIES, SUPERSPREADERS, and the RISE of SOCIAL ENGINEERING (audiobook) by Malcom Gladwell

Image
Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point . Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting. I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more. It was all so interesting and he does ...
Read more

Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Book One) by Jon Land

Image
Loud and strong, this book goes at it hard Published by Forge Books in 2009. William Shatner once commented that the results of his directorial efforts in Star Trek V were "loud". One could easily say the same thing about Jon Land's Strong Enough to Die . Strong Enough To Die comes at you with a gunfight on the first page, has lots of gunfights throughout and ends up with guns and explosions as well. Does it work? Well, yeah. This is not fine literature, mind you. It is loud, lock and load, over-the-top Texas Ranger action. There's some attempts at trying to tie in Bush administration anti-terrorist policies and discussions about living with the aftermath of violence but those get overwhelmed by the gunfire. But, that's okay because too much thinking about the internal incongruities of the text on these matters just spoils the fun. It's the famed Texas Rangers and a bad guy who might be a good guy against the Mexican Mafia and an evil Ame...
Read more

THE KINGDOM, the POWER, and THE GLORY: AMERICAN EVANGELICALS in an AGE of EXTREMISM (audiobook) by Tim Alberta

Image
Published by HarperAudio in December of 2023. Read by the author, Tim Alberta. Duration: 18 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Tim Alberta is a writer for The Atlantic and also an Evangelical. He grew up in the faith, but is very troubled by the tendency towards Christian Nationalism. He was inspired to write this book after an incident at his father's funeral at the church he grew up in.  Alberta embarked on a cross-country exploration of the intersection of Evangelicals and politics at Christian Nationalism - and how this combination is changing Evangelicals and they way they are perceived. Alberta does not come at this as an outsider. As I already noted, he grew up in the church - and still belongs to a church. To me, this is important. I read another book with a similar theme ( The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism ) that just didn't hit the right tone and answer the right questions because the author was coming from the outside. She didn...
Read more

One Step at a Time: A Young Marine's Story of Courage, Hope and a New Life in the NFL by Josh Bleill with Mark Tabb

Image
Published in 2010 by Triumph Books I n a sentence, this book is about a 27 year-old Hoosier Marine who lost his leg due to an explosion in Iraq, re-built his life and got a job with the Indianapolis Colts as a community spokesman. All true but the book is so much  more than that because Bleill makes his story resonate with the reader. Josh Bleill joined the Marines at age 26. He never quite finished college. He never quite got serious with his girlfriend. He never quite got serious about his career. He just never quite going with much of anything until he decided to join the Marines, much to the surprise of his family (and to the dismay of his mother). Bleill tells the story of his experiences in basic training and the special training he received for Iraq with a lot of humor and gives the reader a sense of how difficult this training can be. Bleill takes us to Iraq and tells of his "one bad day" - the day he lost his legs and two of his friends when his Humvee dro...
Read more

SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2024 by Hourly History. Hourly History's telling of the events of September 11, 2001 is surprisingly well-told for a history that is supposed to take a person about an hour to read.  Is this a complete history? Hardly. Why not? Read the first paragraph again. But, it gets all of the elements across in broad strokes - the motives of the  hijackers, the reasons for their targets, and the mass casualties - but not as bad as they could have been thanks to the bravery and professionalism of the NYPD and FDNY. The book moves on to discuss the aftermath, including tearing down the remains of the buildings, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, beefed up airport screenings, and the invasion of Afghanistan in order to search for the Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists responsible for the attacks. All of it is tied up neatly in a bite-sized e-book that younger readers (not kids, but younger adults that simply don't remember 9/11) could read to grasp t...
Read more

SERGEANT STUBBY: HOW a STRAY DOG and HIS BEST FRIEND HELP WIN WORLD WAR I and STOLE the HEART of a NATION (audiobook) by Ann Bausum

Image
Published in 2014 by Blackstone Audio. Read by Pam Ward. Duration: 5 hours, 12 minutes. Unabridged. Sgt. Stubby wearing his medal vest (left), marching in a parade (upper right) and wearing his special gas mask (lower right). During the quick basic training for American forces heading for France in World War I, a stray dog found its way into a Connecticut National Guard training camp at Yale University. The unit was sprawled all over the campus and this Boston Terrier mix wandered around making friends all over. His friendly nature guaranteed a lot of table scraps. He marched with the men, learned the commands and blended in as well as a dog can. Somewhere along the way, someone taught him how to salute and hold the salute until it was returned. When it came time to board a ship and head to France, the soldier that he spent the most time with, Corporal James Robert Conroy, hid him under his coat as others provided a distraction. Once aboard, Stubby ensured he got to stay with his...
Read more

THE DIRECTOR SHOULD'VE SHOT YOU: MEMOIRS of the FILM TRADE (audiobook) by Alan Dean Foster

Image
Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...
Read more

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West by Anthony Pagden

Image
Disappointed Published in 2008. Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West was a book I was really looking forward to reading. It sat on my wish list for months and when I saw it just sitting there at my local library I greedily snatched it up and considered myself lucky to even have found it checked in. Thank goodness I did not waste my money buying it. I suppose the problem with a book of this nature is that it is bound to disappoint - some things will be "too" highlighted, some left out. Even worse for this book, niggling factual errors crop up that bother the careful reader and throw into doubt the validity of the more complicated interpretations of the work as a whole. Positives: The book is quite readable and you must give a tip of the hat to anyone who undertakes such a large and sweeping history. Negatives: The anti-religious comments taint large sections of the book: "...nor have I made any atte...
Read more

Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War (Book 1) by Larry Bond & Jim DeFelice

Image
A change of pace for Larry Bond Published in 2009 by Forge Books. Don't get worried, Larry Bond is still cranking out the war thrillers, but Larry Bond's Red Dragon Rising: Shadows of War  is not the grand sweep of a worldwide battlefield that his previous books have featured. Instead, we focus in on four people swept up in the beginnings of World War III. Those four people are a climate scientist studying in northern Vietnam who happens to have video that proves that China is instigating World War III in his cell phone, a female CIA agent who is trying to rescue him, a military wargamer (and former special forces) who is helping map out America's strategy to combat China's aggression and a Chinese lieutenant in an elite commando squad who is trying to catch the climatologist. I'll admit, it starts out slow but it builds and is a rollicking adventure by the end. This is the first of a four part series and I see it as the prologue to a much more sweeping war seri...
Read more

A PAPER ORCHESTRA (audiobook) by Michael Jamin

Image
Published in 2024 by 3 Girls Jumping. Read by the author, Michael Jamin. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Michael Jamin is a professional Hollywood screenplay writer. He works in television, working on comedy shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, and Tacoma FD . In the afterword he talked about his desire to write something more than TV shows. He wasn't unhappy with writing screenplays, but he wanted to branch out.  The stories in A Paper Orchestra are from Jamin's life. Some are funny, some wistful, some very sad. As a group, they all have the feel of NPR's Moth Radio Hour  - but instead of having a variety of performers, it is all from the same man. Jamin read the audiobook. In the afterword, he and his wife talked about how they worked together so that he could perform these stories live on stage. She is an actress and she helped him with presentation style - and I think she was successful at it. I worked my way through this audiobook rather slowly. At ...
Read more