- by Owen Morton
Let's assume, shall we, that I'm bored, and faced with the prospect of 6 hours alone on the train tomorrow, I am of the opinion that the near future holds even more boredom for me. This being the case, I have decided to see how well my shiny new laptop works as a Kindle. Windows 8, as I'm sure you may have spotted by now, thinks that it needs to pretend to be an iPad and have loads of nice 'apps' on it. This is an attitude that bemuses me, almost as much as it infuriates me. If I wanted an iPad, I'd buy an iPad. The fact that I've bought a PC (or laptop, in this case) suggests that I want a machine that has a Start menu, not apps.
But, as I don't want to appear curmudgeonly - though it may be a little late in my web writing career to aspire for that - I'm going to stop whinging about Windows 8 and instead tell you about what happened when I started up the Kindle app. I decided that a Star Trek novel is always a classy piece of reading, so I started browsing the Amazon Kindle store for such a piece of literature. Naturally, being a cheapskate as well as grumpy, I set it to find the lowest priced Star Trek novels available on Kindle.
Well, I had to cycle through a lot of pages of books that were blatantly not Star Trek, and quite a few that were, but were clearly unauthorised - 'Crewman Porthos' Big Star Trek Quiz' seemed particularly unlikely to bear the Paramount stamp of approval. I was also rather taken with offerings that had obviously just been thrown in there to catch the sad, lonely and desperate Star Trek fan's eye - the most unsubtle of these was a book, the front cover of which featured a woman in pants and bra, leaning provocatively towards the viewer, entitled 'Star Sluts'. Not likely to be a highpoint of Western literature, or for that matter anything to do with Star Trek. I bought three copies.
Anyway! What I'm trying to get around to is that towards the lower end of the price range, I came across this:
Yes, yes, yes, it looks rubbish. Typical Star Trek front cover, with a planet and some Cardassian ships and all that jazz. Also ticks the box of having an enormously pretentious title. 'Echoes of Conventry' indeed. I've Googled Conventry and it's not even a word. What the title might possibly mean is entirely unclear.
It seems that Amazon shared my view on the title, because - rather hilariously - they have the book listed as being called 'Echoes of Coventry'. I find this much more appealing. It strikes me as incredibly unlikely that a rather nondescript Midlands town could have any kind of echoes which might reverberate into the twenty fourth century. (Though here's an interesting fact about Coventry - it started off the habit of "twinning" towns by linking itself to Stalingrad during the Second World War. Don't say Heath the Rat's Silly Page isn't educational!)
So here we have Echoes of Conventry, whatever that may be, or Echoes of Coventry, if you are sufficiently immature to find a spelling error like this deeply entertaining. But, to be honest, given the ships on the front cover, I think the author missed a trick by not calling his book 'Keeping Up With The Cardassians'.