I didn’t want the fortieth anniversary of ‘Star Trek’ to pass by without some comment from those of us here at Shiny Shelf.

If 2004 was, as we said at the time, the year of late arrivals and revivals, 2005 was a year of completing, and contrasting, circles.

The final episode of ‘Enterprise’ the intertextually entitled ‘These Are The Voyages…’ has come in for a lot of flack, odd given that the episode’s authors called it a ‘valentine’ to ‘Star Trek’ fans.

James Dean died in a fatal automobile accident fifty years ago this week.

This is Gideon Defoe’s second little book about pirates, and is even funnier and more charming than its predecessor…

Chock full of great character moments, astounding production design and fantastic special effects ‘In A Mirror Darkly – Part II’ both ruthlessly parodies and sincerely reveres the series of which it is a part.

In today’s crowded media market, you have to get your ideas across quickly and clearly and there’s no better way of doing that than reworking an idea people know already…

It’s impossible, in Britain, to have a debate about policing without someone invoking the spectral presence of George Dixon as the image of all that was right with policing in some dim and indistinct nostalgic past.

We live, as anyone with the slightest grasp on pop culture knows, in an era of Shatner renaissance.

I should add ‘Trust Dirk’ to my ‘Trust Joss’, ‘Trust George’ and ‘Trust Grant’ mantras because he’s quite clearly the kind of guy whose work never lets you down.

The cancellation of ‘Enterprise’ will not be the end of ‘Star Trek’, but it is the end of the ‘modern Trek era’. In the first of a series Shiny Shelf looks at the evolution of the world’s biggest SF series.

Meet 3/4 of the Shiny Shelf team at Charing Cross Road branch of Borders in London at 6:30pm on Thursday 14 April 2005…

Well, there’s some good news and some bad news….

This MP3CD of William Russell reading David Whitaker’s novelisation of the first Dalek serial is one of the smartest ideas for ‘Doctor Who’ merchandise anyone at the BBC has had for some considerable time…

David King’s installation ‘The Commissar Vanishes’ takes as its inspiration a macabre tradition from Stalin’s terror…

A little belated, this review, as the CD came out last November – but as it didn’t exactly emerge in a blaze of publicity, allow us to build a little hype…

We take a look at the first ever animated version of ‘Doctor Who’, which is soon to be made available for streaming on the BBC website…

What rocked Shiny’s world in the last twelve months? The answers are unlikely to surprise you.

It’s a long held cliche that there’s too much knowledge in the world, and that the situation is getting worse…

I hate this sort of thing. I should probably be disqualified from commenting on comics this year on account of only really reading ‘Astonishing X-Men’. Likewise my lit reading is woefully behind with only ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ being published in 2004. I very nearly [...]

In 1998 Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ was published, taking as its subject the explosion of innovative, eccentric and electric filmmaking in 1970s America…

A glance at the front cover, back cover and first two pages of ‘The Timewaster Letters’ reveals that I am comfortably the least famous person ever to praise this book…

‘Resist or Serve’ is exactly the kind of console game you’d expect to be released under the ‘X-Files’ brand in 2004 – a survival horror title in the ‘Resident Evil’ mould…

Here’s a wacky idea – a ‘Star Trek’ part work with ‘free’ DVDs.

It’s been more than three years since Christopher Brookmyre, Strathclyde’s answer to Carl Hiassen, revisited the character who started off his literary career…

At first, these two exhibitions seem rather unrelated…

It is almost inevitable, in reviewing a book on grammatical punctuation, that I will make at least one mistake. ‘Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ is not the book I would reach for checking my comma usage…

Bonjour, mes amis.

I’ve just returned from a lovely trip to Paris and, as with all journeys out of my house, my unerring Spidey sense led me to a comic shop…

‘Top of the Pops’? That’s square, daddio. That was your granddad’s pop music show. These days the kids are watching ‘All New Top of the Pops’…

Come winter, come another Terry Pratchett novel to give distant family members an easy Midwinter present for that ‘awkward one’ (you know, the one that still reads comics and SF even though they’re over 15)…

It has become almost an annual tradition to lambast the quality of Hollywood’s summer output. Key to this is the guaranteed use of the phrase ‘Summer of Sequels’, with all the associated critique of laziness, complacency….

Dear Mr Blaine: I HAVE ABSOULTELY NO INTEREST IN YOUR STUPID STARVATION IN A PERSPEX BOX STUNT…

The British Museum in London is 250 years old this year…

This year ‘Big Brother’ has been truly mind-numbing from the get-go…

Channel 4 is in a miserable, disheartening decline and as director of programmes Tim Gardam moves on, this seems like a good time to examine what has gone wrong…

This new publication comes triply blessed: not only does it concern a pet Shelf obsession, the city of London, but it’s available from our favourite comics shop, the inestimable Gosh!…

There was much celebration here at Shiny central when we learned that ‘Boomtown’ had been renewed. See, we’d heard it was ‘on the bubble’ with an even chance of not being picked up for a second year.

I’m used to sitting at home, hopping through cookery programmes and low-rent chatshows like ‘Loose Lips’ and ‘Des and Mel’ before desperation sends me the way of Bid Up TV…

The concept of ‘Word’ is so blissfully simple it’s remarkable no-one has thought of it before: to take great writers, and get them to write about things they love from all media…

What had seemed like a powerful, camp heroin fix of Hollywood was actually a lame, staggering wrap of baking powder and strychnine. I’m sorry.

I visited a couple of comic shops whilst in Paris recently and it intrigued me that the staples of the American market – sci-fi and superheroes – were almost completely absent…

I love the Oscars, ridiculous, self-important and comically inept though they frequently are.

BBC 3. It sounds so 21st century television, doesn’t it?

12A exists simply to allow kids and their parents to fork out more cash on movies they want to see, no matter if, under old guidelines, some of the content might have been deemed unsuitable.

Here’s a miscellaneous item if ever there was one…

I come to bury ‘Enterprise’, not to praise it.

While I enjoyed the first season of ‘Smallville’ I felt that its origins as a purpose-built ‘Buffy’ replacement were somewhat to in evidence…

When Douglas Adams died he left ‘The Salmon of Doubt’, the novel on which he had been working for a decade, less than half finished.

It’s become a rather boring clich? to moan about the stupidity of the Academy’s nominations every year when the Oscar contenders are announced, but this year they’ve just gone too far.