100 books like From History's Shadow

I love a great Spock story, especially when his struggle between logic and emotion is at the forefront. That struggle is externalized and emphasized in this book when he discovers he has an adult son who has not been raised as a Vulcan. The tension between father and son plays off Spock’s troubled relationship with his own father.

It came out just a year after Star Trek II, four years prior to The Next Generation, so I eagerly awaited each book for my Trek fix, especially when they played off an episode because it was often a challenge to see the old shows in the eighties. In the episode “All Our Yesterdays,” Spock, stranded in the distant past, had reverted to a pre-logic Vulcan and fallen in love, providing Crispin with her setup; she eventually wrote a follow-up, Time for Yesterday.

One of my favorite “But what happened after that?” moments of the original series was the challenge Kirk issued the goateed Spock at the end of "Mirror, Mirror": What will it be? Past or future? Tyranny or freedom? It's up to you. David Mack weaves a three-decade-long epic that answers the questions—with shades of the psychohistory of Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy—as Spock plays a three-dimensional chess game of moves and countermoves to bring about the downfall of an empire.

The Sorrows of Empire has everything I want from a Mirror Universe story: revolutionary intrigue, imperial treachery, and a cast of interesting mirror versions of characters we know and often love from the “true” universe. It also deftly incorporates the increasingly complicated canon of the Mirror Universe introduced by the other series over the years.

A novel from Greg Cox is always going to bring me the kind of deep-cut Trek continuity I love, but Foul Deeds Will Rise goes above and beyond by bringing me the sequel I didn’t know I needed: the return of Lenore Karidian, last seen twenty years earlier suffering a psychotic break after accidentally killing her mass-murderer father in the episode “The Conscience of the King.”

I also love when Trek plays in other genres, and here we get a murder mystery: Kirk has to investigate whether Lenore was successfully rehabilitated after serving her time for psychiatric treatment, or if has she fallen off the wagon and gone on a killing spree that could derail an entire peace process. Beyond the immediate plot, it plays amusingly well off Kirk’s long history of getting involved in doomed relationships. 

I always wanted to know what happened after the episode "The Corbomite Maneuver," which ended with a young crew member sent off to the mysterious First Federation—never to be heard from again in the shows. I always enjoy Christopher L. Bennett’s meticulous sci-fi world-building, and in his hands, the First Federation is revealed to be a suitably fascinating, if isolated, society.

I loved the sense of vastness achieved by getting beyond the United Federation of Planets. I also enjoy when a story takes full advantage of the continuity of the franchise, and The Face of the Unknown smoothly sets up elements of the often overlooked Animated Series of the 1970s as well as Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The early years of spaceflight coincided with the heyday of American advertising and eye-catching mid-century graphic design. The visual aesthetic of the Space Age, as expressed in the aerospace advertisements that populated magazines and trade journals of the day, reflected this intersection of futuristic technology and innovative design.

Collected together in a critical mass in this book, these advertisements evoke an era in which tomorrow was the product, aerospace was the currency, and American industry was set to reshape the cosmos.

This is a buddy story, two guys telling their parallel stories in interleaved fashion. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov flew in Earth orbit three times and made the first spacewalk. Dave Scott went to the Moon as commander of Apollo 15. They are the same age, both kids old enough to remember the Second World War. Both military pilots who might have been ordered to fight each other, who instead through the adventure of spaceflight became friends. They are thoughtful, open-minded, generous. Here, in their own words, they share their perspectives. 

I love this book because it brought to the fore my childhood memories of stories and fantasies about space exploration and alien wars in the zeniths in the early 1970s. It revealed the secret behind-the-scenes stories of the fierce battles that launched the world superpowers into space. It gave a succinct description of the spy planes that drove Nikita Khrushchev crazy each time the Americans pried into the Soviet Union air space.

The characters perfectly depicted the scientists and astronauts prior to the launching of Korolev's satellite in October 1954, giving rise to the emergence of Sputnik adventures that led to the historic moon landing, the invention of cell and mobile communication gadgets, and, ultimately, the internet revolution.

Matthew Brzezinski critically explored the nitty-gritty of the Kremlin, the White House, secret military facilities, and the halls of Congress in this book, simplifying the exploits of the rival Russians and American… show more.

Korolev is one of the true architects of the 20th century and the technologically advanced world we live in today, yet most people in the West don’t have any idea who he is. A designer and engineer in the Soviet hierarchy and survivor of Stalin’s purges, he was a remarkable individual who united various small Soviet design bureaus to create the illusion of military-industrial organization that was equal and opposite in might to that of the USA. That was for the purposes of his masters; Korolev really did just want to put a Russian on the Moon. Harford’s book gives a sense of the visionary that lurked just beneath the surface of the canny political operator who changed history. The Russians led the world into space, but it was Korolev who led the Russians there.

Space Race was originally a companion book to a BBC docudrama from the mid-2000s and as such shares all the climactic page-turning paciness you’d expect from such an account. While it doesn’t share the deep detail of some of the books mentioned above, it’s an illuminating and highly enjoyable overview of the historical events that culminated in the Americans landing on the Moon in Apollo 11 in 1969.

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to follow the history of the US Space program from the very first launch onward. Barbree was the only journalist to cover every launch and while doing so met many of the astronauts and provides behind-the-scenes stories of dedication and comraderie. I had the privilege to participate in a book signing with Mr. Barbree at the US Space Museum in Titusville, FL in 2014. He’s a funny man who has loved all things space since the launch of Sputnik. This book is filled with humor, personal stories, and an understanding of how the media coverage of the space program and NASA has changed over the years. Barbree has also written an outstanding biography of Neil Armstrong, completed just prior to this pioneer’s death.