Author: lizbee

For All Mankind

Did the world need a new streaming service? I’d say no, but for some reason Apple didn’t consult me before they launched Apple TV+. My flatmate got a year’s free access with her new phone, so we checked out For All Mankind, an alt-history series from Ronald D. Moore in which the USSR beats America to the moon, creating a world where the space race never ends.

It’s … interesting, but deeply flawed. I’ve watched all three episodes currently available, and plan to keep going with the series, but I desperately want to talk about it. And I could keep tweeting into the void, but, well, isn’t this what blogs are for?

Continue reading “For All Mankind”

Gone fishin’

For about a year, now, I’ve been working on a novel. (Science fiction for middle grade readers, if you’re curious.) And a few months ago, I set myself a deadline: I will have the first draft complete by the evening of 24 December 2019.

(What are my plans for Christmas Day? Oh, just flying to the United States for a whirlwind two-week trip to attend my best friend’s wedding.)

My day job gives me a great deal of time to write, but even so, I found Star Trek blogging took up a lot of time that I couldn’t necessarily spare. So, with season 2 under my belt, I’m going on hiatus for a few months.

I’ll still be around — podcasting at Antimatter Pod, sharing extremely important tweets on the Twitters, and if you have thoughts or feelings about gender parity in Star Trek novels, you should absolutely hit me up in the comments of that post. Or anywhere else, really.

(Unless you’re coming to tell me that there aren’t many women writing Trek tie-ins because women just don’t like science fiction. If you sincerely believe that, well, I feel bad for you, but on the upside, you’ve got whole decades of SF novels to catch up on.)

I will be back in early 2019 to blog about Star Trek: Picard, and may pop in before then to talk about books I’m reading and other whatnots.

Infinite Dudes in Infinite Combinations: A very long post about Star Trek novels

Star Trek tie-in novels have a gender problem.

Decade by decade, series by series, there has been a steady decline in the number of women writing Trek tie-ins. The percentage has dropped from a remarkable 60% in the 1980s to just 12% in the 2010s.

Graph illustrating the decline in female writers, using the numbers outlined above.

As the television series advances — and the Discovery writers room has the highest percentage of women of any Trek series1 — the tie-in novels are going backwards.

Continue reading “Infinite Dudes in Infinite Combinations: A very long post about Star Trek novels”