Fun with Captain Kirk

Back in town after a week in Brisbane which did its best to make me regret leaving it in the first place. They've finally built a bridge between my old uni and Dutton Park so impoverished students of the future don't have to worry about whether they've got enough cash for the ferry fare home after lectures. (And a lovely bridge it is too, although quite why it needed to be walked across remains a mystery known only to my mother.) It stayed pleasantly cool and my hair didn't turn into a frizzy mess. They've built a very beautiful new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) that seems ten times more convenient than Sydney's strangely poky MCA. The suburbs teemed with birds and geckos and moths and it wasn't until the last night that we saw dozens of cane toads worshipping the streetlights. (My Bleoved insisted on picking one up because he'd never seen one before. I made hime scrub his hands before doing anything else). We caught up with friends living in beautiful airy wooden houses. And, as I packed my bag to head back to my (perfectly adequate for Sydney) inner city flat, I tried hard not to think about the fact that a man who used to work for me now owns a vast house in a very nice part of Brisbane.

One of the things that helped distract me was Kill Tek by William Shatner.

Yes, THAT William Shatner, old Captain James Tiberius Kirk himself. He's written a whole series of detective stories set in the twenty-third century where people fly around the Greater Los Angeles territory in sky cars and eat food substitutes washed down with nearcaf, shooting each other the stunguns and try to avoid the drug cartels pushing "Tek", a completely addictive electronic virtual reality drug sort of like the total immersion game used in Red Dwarf.

Strangely enough, the book wasn't THAT bad. Fast paced, heaps of action. Several characters were well enough drawn for you to care about their fates. Jokes that provoked a smile, if not a laugh. The only irritating thing was a cheesy Mexican character with an inability to utter the English words "yes" and "buddy" and a propensity to say "Chihuahua" at the slightest provocation. All in all, not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a holiday and outstanding value at the cost of 27 cents from the discount bin at Crazy Clarke's.