Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I got to thinking about Pilgrim Stars, the first 'movie sequel' novel from Peter Telep. You know, the 'Pilgrim' books have always been treated like a bit of a red-headed stepchild in the Wing Commander pantheon... or at least as an afterthought. The conventional wisdom has always been that the Forstchen novels are great and everything else is sub-par. I've been as guilty as anyone of that line of thinking and I decided it was time to start interrogating that... and that I should start with a close read of Pilgrim Stars.
So I thought I'd invite everyone to join in on such a read, we could do a thread and I'd share my notes and thoughts and ask discussion questions and generally take this silly book very seriously. And we're going to do that, watch for the first post soon! But I realized then that reading Pilgrim Stars isn't particularly easy. There's a not-too-well-styled pirate ebook or you're stuck with a very cheaply printed twenty-five year paperback. The HarperEntertainment books aren't available as ebooks (HarperEntertainment the imprint doesn't even exist anymore!) and so they just aren't as accessible as the Baen stuff.
So I set about fixing that by adding Pilgrim Stars to the wiki, with a page for each chapter. I corrected the pirate PDF to photographs of the pages I took with my phone and generally had a grand old time. I came up with a character list for each chapter and did a nice index and in the process read the book about ten times. And I have BIG THOUGHTS to share about that later!
... but in the process of setting all that up I realized that you can't really understand Pilgrim Stars without the movie novel. So I did the same for the movie novel. And Pilgrim Truth. And then I got curious about how the movie novel is different from the junior version... so I added that to the wiki! But you know, Peter Telep got a lot of his story direction from the Confed Handbook, so we needed THAT in there too. Long story pretty long already, all the text from all five HarperEntertainment books is in the wiki plus all kinds of extras... like galleries of the source graphics for all the Handbook pages!
Here are the landing pages for each book. I have a long term plan for content to add to this and to use it to build out the wikis for all sources... but for now, enjoy the movie stuff being more readily accessible than ever. And feel free to pick at all of it and improve the pages, too!
--
Original update published on August 6, 2024
So I thought I'd invite everyone to join in on such a read, we could do a thread and I'd share my notes and thoughts and ask discussion questions and generally take this silly book very seriously. And we're going to do that, watch for the first post soon! But I realized then that reading Pilgrim Stars isn't particularly easy. There's a not-too-well-styled pirate ebook or you're stuck with a very cheaply printed twenty-five year paperback. The HarperEntertainment books aren't available as ebooks (HarperEntertainment the imprint doesn't even exist anymore!) and so they just aren't as accessible as the Baen stuff.
So I set about fixing that by adding Pilgrim Stars to the wiki, with a page for each chapter. I corrected the pirate PDF to photographs of the pages I took with my phone and generally had a grand old time. I came up with a character list for each chapter and did a nice index and in the process read the book about ten times. And I have BIG THOUGHTS to share about that later!
... but in the process of setting all that up I realized that you can't really understand Pilgrim Stars without the movie novel. So I did the same for the movie novel. And Pilgrim Truth. And then I got curious about how the movie novel is different from the junior version... so I added that to the wiki! But you know, Peter Telep got a lot of his story direction from the Confed Handbook, so we needed THAT in there too. Long story pretty long already, all the text from all five HarperEntertainment books is in the wiki plus all kinds of extras... like galleries of the source graphics for all the Handbook pages!
Here are the landing pages for each book. I have a long term plan for content to add to this and to use it to build out the wikis for all sources... but for now, enjoy the movie stuff being more readily accessible than ever. And feel free to pick at all of it and improve the pages, too!
- Wing Commander Movie Novelization
- Wing Commander Junior Novelization
- Wing Commander Pilgrim Stars
- Wing Commander Pilgrim Truth
- Wing Commander Confederation Handbook
--
Original update published on August 6, 2024