My old friend Diane Duane. DianeDuane e-books
Another writer doing what we're doing:
by CJ | Aug 24, 2010 | Journal | 26 comments
26 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Paid a visit and signed up for the RSS feed. Also bought one to see if I like her work, not having tried it before.
You won’t be sorry. Diane Duane wrote the best original series Star Trek tie-in novels ever. (Says the woman who read most of them.) Ms. Duane captured the characters of the series spot-on (better than some of the tv episode writers!) and managed drama, romance and humor in stories that fit canon, and sometimes expanded it, very believably.
I remember reading her Doors series and loving it, but I must have gotten them from the library. So broke as I am, I bought those three books (and they’re discounted right now!) (Left me enough to get Jane’s new Rings book! Whee!)
The Trek tie-in novels were my introduction to her. Loved them for the longest time and still have copies of some.
Incidentally, she has a new book out called Omnitopia Dawn. (It was very much a first-in-a-series book, and a bit beach-read-ish, but I got the impression it might go to some interesting places.)
It sure does. It’s set in 2015, but it’s not *our* timeline.
Aren’t the Middle Kingdom ebook covers GORGEOUS!?! I actually rebought two books I already own, just to support the effort.
I thought the TP covers (TOR, I think) were quite nice, and the HB Sunset. But OMG that “nekkid broad” one! Now THERE was an artist who had NO CLUE.
http://twitpic.com/2h0iy0/full
I have a very distinct visual memory of a cover to Shadow that shows a pink sunset sky with the bridge to Glasscastle arching u through it. No such image on Google. Dreamed it, maybe.
I thought she rarely had great covers with her really old standalones (and the Meisha Merlin omnibus of the first two Tale of the Five books wasn’t any prettier) – she’s had more luck with the YA Wizards series. I loved some of the Star Trek covers – Spock’s World and Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages and my favourite ST novel ever, The Entropy Effect, for example.
Gah, that’s another favourite ST novel (just not by Diane Duane), but I actually meant The Wounded Sky – the one with the glass spider mathematician ^^.
I like everything she has written that I have read, but I LOVE the doors books. ALSO! I had a brief Twitter conversation with her, and it is not impossible that she might eventually finish the fourth one, lo, these many years later. Maybe.
“@abigailmtx Oh, Starlight is on the agenda, believe me. I know how it begins. I know how it ends. BUT OY THE MIDDLE. (headclutch)”
Oooooooooh! *thinking good writerly thoughts*
From the e-book Door into Sunset,”This edition of The Door into Sunset is dedicated with affection to the many patient readers still waiting for one final Door to open. Courage!”
So there’s hope, though no promises…
I remember really liking The Wounded Sky, though I don’t recall the cover at all. It also, as I recall, had some of the same themes of responsibility and fighting entropy as the Middle Kingdoms and Young Wizards books.
I’ve also been a long time fan of Diane Duane. Her Star Trek novels are some of the best original works set in that universe, and Spock’s World is widely considered canon (or near-canon!) regarding Vulcan. Her current series is young adult fantasy, but she has also done stand alone works, short stories, and an adult fantasy series. Her fans have been gently poking her for years to complete the adult fantasy (Tale of the Five), but it will do what it do do. If I had an e-book reader, I’d be in so much trouble… 😀
Eh, I don’t have a ebook reader yet; I’m just buying everything in PDF. If I eventually get a notebook I can read on that. Unfortuntely, I spend far too much time on the computer to want to read on it too.
I was very surprised and excited the other day, when I visited Amazon and found Diane Duane’s [i]Star Trek: TOS #19 — The Wounded Sky[/i]. That book bothered me when I first read it, but its ideas also made me really puzzle over them and rethink. IMHO, it anticipated the concept of the Bajoran Prophets / Wormhole Aliens, because her book introduced the idea of an entity or dimension which is timeless. I’m not saying the DS9 team took her idea, because the two are quite different. She covered a very alien take on time and perception, creative power and deity, which really shine. Back when I was moving, I had the original paperback boxed up, and bought another copy to read. So I bought the ebook the other day at Amazon.
I will definitely visit and bookmark her site. Her Trek novels were all quite good. She really dealt with the Romulans and Vulcans, and, if I’m not confusing her with another author, she had genuine sailing ship experience, which she put into her Trek books. — Her other scifi is equally good, and I’ll want to see what else she has new.
—–
I’m waiting for more of Heinlein’s books to become available as ebooks, or for any of Andre Norton’s books to become available as ebooks.
—–
BTW, Amazon has done something very odd: It now lists several more of your books, CJ, as available for Kindle, yet it is listing them as unavailable to US readers, even though these appear to be the same editions as were sold in paperback here in the US. — I presume it is some oddity from the publisher or from Amazon. I do not presume it has anything to do with your opinions.
—–
It is [b]great[/b] to see more SF&F authors publishing independently. I hope they will be able to market successfully to reach their audience, new and long-time readers and buyers.
BluecCatShip: There are over a dozen Andre Norton books available free through Project Gutenberg. I think that fact may have been mentioned here before (by herself I think), but such things are easily missed.
@BlueCatShip – Baen’s Webscriptions also has a fair number of Norton novels, generally in two-fer omnibuses (omnibi? omnimeese?). I wish they (or somebody) would get the lead out and publish more of her backlist, of course.
Another one pretty much completely absent from the ebook market is Roger Zelazny.
Yep, that’s the Penguin/Amazon fuss in action.
Another Penguin author has deserted the ship and is doing his own thing. Seth Godin, published under Portfolio, has left them.
I’ve also added Jeffrey Carver, who wrote Starriggers Way. Go to the Blogroll <------ to find links of various sites.
Jeffrey Carver’s just contacted me, and we now have a reciprocal link. And Diane Duane and I are talking, too. She’s at a con this weekend, but we will have further to say.
I’ve bought Jeffrey Carver’s e-books; sometime last year I think. and from his own site.
@ CJ, Sgt Saturn, and Peter — Thank you all very much.
—–
I would not have thought to look at Gutenberg for Ms, Norton’s works, as I’d expect them to be under copyright retained by her estate / heirs.
Gutenberg is pretty handy and has a lot buried in its site.
The printout for their older DVD is about 18 inches thick
done singlesided and in small print. The new one is twice as big.
The DVDs don’t have the audio and video materials either.
They have a lot of H. Beam Piper works too.
They are quite nitpicky about copyright in USA, but the standard
disclaimer is if you aren’t in USA you need to check the local
laws before a download.
One of the sorest points of the new copyright laws is some of the
material in orphaned works (no longer commercially available) will
no longer exist when the copyright runs out. We’d have been better
off giving Disney a perpetual exemption allowing them to hoard their
stolen Mickey Mouse forever and leaving the old laws in effect.
I just hope the present trend of authors getting paid directly can
eliminate the starving artiste slaving in a garret for future fame.
H. Beam Piper is an interesting case. At least some of his copyrights weren’t renewed, so most of the stuff has passed into the public domain. As a result, two authors have written sequels to the Fuzzy books, and John Scalzi has sold a third to Tor.
When the copyright runs out, hopefully one of their readers who has a copy will scan it in and send it to Gutenberg. I have a feeling too they may have a lot in storage that has been sent, but that is not able to be offered yet.
The idea of somebody’s life’s work passing into oblivion is just unsupportable: this is why I enthusiastically applaud what Gutenberg is doing. If you’ve got a book that is dying (take for instance the old Belmont-Tower books, or the long series books that will never been seen in paper print again) and there is no author estate actively marketing it, it’s not piracy to put it in a place like Gutenberg and keep it alive.
Hm. Thought her name sounded familiar. I had it scrawled on a piece of paper to have when looking for Star Trek books at used bookstores. I have a terrible memory, but her Trek books were recommended and after the new movie I was looking for stuff to read. I’ll have to look into her non-Trek stuff I guess.