Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven
By David Mack
Pocket Books
Release date: March 27, 2012
Paperback | Kindle

Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven is the first Vanguard book I’ve read, though it’s the eighth – and final — installment in the series. As I began reading Storming Heaven, I couldn’t help but wonder, where has this series been all my life?

The Star Trek books I’ve read before mostly centered on the crew of the original series, and for some reason, I was under the impression that the Star Trek: Vanguard series contained all new characters with no one from any previous Trek movies or television shows. Man, was I wrong. While Vanguard does introduce a lot — and I mean a lot — of new characters, there’s plenty of familiar faces as well, including Captain James T. Kirk, as the events take place in what would be the second half of the original television show’s third season.

But Kirk and crew are not the center of the Vanguard story, though if you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll recognize several other people in Storming Heaven, including Dr. Carol Marcus, the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (when he was Councillor), and the Klingon General Chang (when he was a Captain), all in their pre-Star Trek movie incarnations. This is something about the book that I absolutely loved, because we got to learn about significant events in their lives that lead up to the events of the movies.

Good news comes this week for one of our favorite indie publishers, Archaia Entertainment, as they recently announced a very special collaboration with film company Relativity Media. Archaia will be publishing a hardcover graphic novel anthology based on the story set up in Relativity’s upcoming 3D epic, Immortals, which stars Henry Cavill, best known right now as the man who will be Superman in Zack Snyder’s upcoming reboot.

The Immortals graphic novel is slated for a September 2011 date as a precursor to the film’s November 11th release that will expand on the characters and story from the film, and has some extremely popular creative names attached from the comic world as well, including David Mack, Ron Marz, Ben Templesmith, and Dennis Calero. The book will be released through Archaia’s Black Label imprint which is focused more on working on collaborations with several entertainment industries.

Pocket Books has indefinitely postponed the release of four planned new Star Trek universe tie-in novels, all of which had storylines that take place just after the events of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek film, so as to not interfere with the film’s sequel plans.

After the huge success of Abrams’ Star Trek movie, which was released in theaters May 2009, Pocket Books had announced their plans to release the four new Trek tie-in novels in Summer 2010. Just last week, TrekMovie posted the summaries and preliminary covers for the planned books.

The novels were written by some big name scifi/Trek authors — Alan Dean Foster, Christopher L. Bennett, David Mack, and Greg Cox — which makes this postponement news even more disappointing for Trek fans [i.e., me].