amado1

Here's the overall:

1) Less racist than the first one
2) But the stories, overall, are not as fun, but probably more sound, technically-speaking
3) And despite being less racist, it still has 11 more "n words" than I expected from a TNG zine

Okay, so let's review the stories.

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...That's all! Man, I would love a full-length story about this. Maybe I'll just have to write one. I hate that there are so few fics about Tom Riker, and the books that feature him never do him justice (looking at you Peter David).

Cover photo taken from Fanlore, because I didn't bother to take photos this time. Really, I didn't plan on writing a review, but I have Some Thoughts!

In general, this is a really high-quality zine. The cover illustration is easily the worst in the whole zine, and I'm baffled why they chose it. BEKi's work is usually much better than that, and the interior features multiple great Riker portraits. Maybe those portraits had already been used for other zine covers; I know for certain that I saw the "A Fine Line" cover in there.

Now, in this zine, every single story is written by BEKi, and every single illustration is drawn by her too. It's a one-woman show. I was jealous of her drawing skills before, but now I'm jealous of her writing skills too. There was one early line that made me want to scream -- something like, "Fear thickened in his veins like a coolant leak ballooning out of a broken tube". Well, it was better when BEKi wrote it XD Let me give a quick overview of each story with my thoughts.

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Overall, I think I'd give the final novella 5 stars, but I'd still rate the zine as a 3/5, and I would have serious reservations about recommending it to my Asian and Native American friends. BEKi's racism strikes me as the type of sheltered, Christian girl racism that you see sometimes -- especially in nerdy, lonely kids who read old garage sale books from the 50s instead of making friends. You know, the kind of kid who learns the word "mulatto" from a 1949 novel they liked, and then never learns that we don't use that word anymore. I should say there was another, more minor element that made me wrinkle my nose -- in the story "Ward 47," Riker and Picard both talk about how they cope with trauma by praying to a higher power. NO THANKS. Ugh! Whether it's an official book or a zine, you can't escape the devout Christian writers trying to sneak some religion into Riker and Picard.

I do have Number One #2, which is also an all-BEKi show, so I'll probably read that one next/soon. I'm honestly very glad that I could get my hands on these, but I'll admit to a little bit of sour grapes, in that I *really* wanted #3-6, the non-BEKi issues. Those issues feature some of my favorite writers, and I'd kill to get my hands on them XD