Jeep thing
Tags:NeSFW
Space Tags:NeSFW
Tactical
Tags:NeSFW
Space Tags:NeSFW
Homelander
Ryan North Interview With StarTrekBookClub.com
This week’s conversation is with Ryan North, author of the current Fantastic Four series, Adventure Time comics, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Lower Decks (2022), Shaxs’ Best Day, and the upcoming Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way and Lower Decks (2024). A slight disclaimer, I’ve actually been emailing Ryan for years and years, he ran an advertising system named “Project Wonderful” that was indeed wonderful and I loved it very much. It’s not around now though and that makes me sad.
Our conversation roams from his fantastic work on the first Lower Decks mini series, then moves to how to build a choose your own adventure type of story. Turns out that the upcoming Trek story isn’t his first attempt at this!
Back in 2018 he wrote “How To Invent Everything” and we talk about how frustrating it would be to time travel without knowing how anything actually works. He was so frustrated with this idea he went out and wrote a book that would let any stray traveler of time jump start the wheels of invention and get you back to the style of civilization that you were previously accustomed to. Some of that lead to what I personally call “hated knowledge” which is when you learn so much about something that’s broken that you hate knowing all that. For me it’s a carpet cleaner that I’ve taken apart 50 times and could fix in the dark. That kind of experience leads to learning how to take things apart and trouble shoot and is actually a good thing, but I still hate it. .
I ask him if he’d be able to write a lower decks literature book and his answer will shock you! (he said yes and it would be a blast to do)
We finish up our conversation by talking about Eaglemoss’s spaceship subscription program that we both got pulled into and I give one final plug for my fishtank that’s on twitch (and has a crashed 1701A in it).
Ryan North can be found at his website, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter.
“Space: Above and Beyond” Review
I had a strong memory of really liking this show, but I knew that it was military science fiction from a time when scifi on TV was pretty hokey at times, so I was happy to see that the first episode opened so strongly with the drill sergeant from “Full Metal Jacket” making an appearance. It throws a few seemingly unrelated concepts at the wall with tank born super soldiers with no home after a war with synthetic humanoids combining with an assault by alien forces on a human colony on a far off planet. It all eventually kinda sorta all ties together and the stories go from pretty ok to downright bad at times. The synthetic stories and concept haven’t aged very well, showing particular 90’s elements that are no longer in vogue, specifically androids with cool looking eye caps and circuit boards just randomly hanging off their necks to indicate they’re androids and not humans. I loved the final project and I think it’s one of the reasons I grew into loving military scifi so much as an adult.
My one big complaint about the show is that the main characters seem to be “general purpose” space marines, depending on the requirements of whatever episode they were in, from leading ground forces to piloting their own “hammerhead” fighter ships to running the guns on smaller cargo landers. I get that the necessities of the show’s structure is the reason this happened this way, but that structure could be better laid out if the show was made in modern times.
The reason I went back to watch this was that I found a couple paperback books that have stories from this universe and wanted to have the show fresh in my mind when I read them, so now they’re up next on my TBR pile. They’ve been there for about a year now!
