• Over at Another Universe, Michelle Erica Green has put up this week's edition of her 'Hailing Frequencies' column, consisting mostly of a review of the 'New Earth' novel series. Here's a snippet:

  For the second time in as many months, I am reading a series of Star Trek novels from Pocket Books that hold my interest better than any rumor I've heard about the fifth Trek television show.

  The Star Trek: New Earth series, conceived by popular writer Diane Carey and editor John Ordover, sends a post-V'Ger Kirk and crew to protect a convoy moving a group of independent-minded colonists far from Federation space. The possibilities seem endless for disaster along the way, problems settling the world, conflicts with neighbors, and exploration of a new area of space. Indeed, the last book in this miniseries, Challenger, will kick off a new, open-ended series of books focusing on another Starfleet crew in that distant region, much like Star Trek: New Frontier.

  The full column has more of the review, as well as a look at two recent Trek news items.

• Michael Griffin at the British DVD News has written a review of 'Insurrection', which was recently released on DVD in Region 2. Here are Giffin's comments on the video quality of the disc:

  Paramount did wonders with their transfer work for "Rugrats" and "Truman Show". Does it hold up here? Most certainly. From start to finish, the image is extremely well-defined, with no visible artifacting. Colours are sharp and clear, and don't bleed into each other. Contrast is accurate, with extreme good blacks.

  My only problem with this transfer is a mild shimmering effect that presents itself every so often. One such occasion is when Dougherty and Ru'afo go to Picard requesting for the Son'a and Federation captives to be released. When the camera focusses on Picard, a shimmering defect seems to crop up. It happens on a sparse few occasions in the film, but is never a major distraction.

  For the full review, click here. Thanks go out to the Great Link for this!

• Continuing his series of 'Summer Rerun Reviews', O. Deus at TrekWeb has put up his look at 'Fair Haven', the first episode featuring the Irish holotown. Perhaps not surprisinly, he didn't like the episode either:

  "Fair Haven" is the third Voyager holodeck hideaway the crew have tried and the indecisiveness and the lack of originality weighs on the episode. From the start "Fair Haven" can't seem to decide whether it's going for laughs or trying to make some points about internal Voyager crew dynamics and Janeway's lack of a love life. Unable to choose any kind of path, it hugs a middle road that leads to a bland episode that doesn't even seem to care about its main storyline. "Fair Haven" is a stereotypical cartoonish Irish village into which the Voyager crew blend while looking for fun. The stereotypes aren't nearly as offensive as TNG's "Up The Long Ladder" but the problem here is more the banality of the premise than any of the P.C. aspects of it. "Fair Haven" is just boring. We know just about everything about the place because it's been reused so many times that it's meaningless. Even Spock and the TOS cast would have gotten little out of this material and so Voyager's crew is helplessly stranded, lost among cliches rendered seriously as if the inhabitants of "Fair Haven" actually mattered.

  Read more in the full review.

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