Tag: writing

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Into The Dark

[blows dust off the blog]

Well. Hello. Been a while since I’ve powered this thing up.

A book cover featuring an artists impression of a Black Hole, with the title Into The Dark: Short Stories of Science Fiction and Horror.

I’ve got a new book out.

It’s called Into The Dark and is a collection of science fiction / horror short stories. About 28,000 words of them, all told. Some have been published previously, and some are debuting in this collection.

It’s available for $2.99 if you buy it from the Amazon US store or £2.35 from Amazon UK. If you use a different Amazon store it should be listed on that too in your local currency. Or if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, it’s absolutely free.

Within these pages you’ll find what happens when…

  • The natural constants of the universe begin to change.
  • It’s too late for a television reporter to realise he’s a part of the story.
  • The surveillance state meets a programmer anxious to impress his girlfriend.
  • One of the crew must perform a spacewalk from a starship travelling at half the speed of light.
  • A scientist discovers a new species of life on Earth hiding in plain sight.
  • The crew of a starship mysteriously vanish in an instant.
  • A hard-boiled detective – who’s also a Tyrannosaur – takes on a missing persons case.

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A long-standing mystery, solved at last

Back in the day, there was a phenomenon known as “The Curse of the Odd-Numbered Star Trek Films”.

It was first noticed in the eighties for films starring Jim Kirk and his buddies and labelled so, because fan-opinion (and I concur in this) is that the odd-numbered films were… well, let’s charitably say not as good as the others.

Others would instead go for the words “rubbish” or “terrible” or “so bad I wanted to poke my own eyes out so I would never have to see any more of this”. John Montgomery has even helpfully analysed the IMDb scores, and it does seem to be a valid phenomenon.

So I got to wondering, what could possibly correlate?

Well, let’s look at the first six films.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture – not written by Nicholas Meyer
Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan – uncredited rewrite by Nicholas Meyer
Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock – not written by Nicholas Meyer
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home – co-written by Nicholas Meyer
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier – not written by Nicholas Meyer
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country – co-written by Nicholas Meyer

Whaddayaknow? It turns out that for all that time, by looking at the films that weren’t so good, we missed the fact that it wasn’t that the odd films were bad that was the important point – it was that the even ones were good.

And they were all written by Nicholas Meyer.

(Sadly, this analysis falls apart on looking at the Next Generation films. Ah well.)