John and Keith chat with author Jeff Mariotte and media tie-in fan Steve Roby about this particular subgenre.  Is it legitimate?  Is it your gateway to mainstream literature?  Is it unfair to look at it as not original?  Make sure you rate the episode at the bottom of this entry and comment on it - here.

JEFF MARIOTTE is the award-winning writer of more than thirty novels, including Missing White Girl, River Runs Red and Cold Black Hearts (all as Jeffrey J. Mariotte), horror epic The Slab, teen horror quartet Witch Season, CSI: Miami—Right to Die, and more, as well as dozens of comic books. He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch.  Keep tabs on Jeff's comings and going on his website.

Steve Roby is a longtime fan of Star Trek, science fiction in general, old movies, crime fiction, historical fiction, Bugs Bunny, punk/new wave/postpunk, and a lot of other things. 

For something like ten years now, Steve has been labouring on the Complete Starfleet Library website (http://www.well.com/~sjroby/lcars/), which covers over a thousand Star Trek books, official and unofficial, fiction and nonfiction. If you want to know about Star Trek: The Poems, Going Boldly on Your Inner Voyage: The Unauthorized Starfleet Daily Meditation Manual, or Narratives from the Final Frontier: A Postcolonial Reading of the Original Star Trek Series, this is the site. 

Steve is a librarian in Ottawa, Canada, where he lives with his wife Laura and their cat Spencer.