The most literary of all Star Trek writers, Margaret Wander Bonanno showed a marked fondness for the Vulcans and their culture in her two novels, *Dwellers in the Crucible* and *Strangers From the Sky*. But it was probably her experience with *Music of the Spheres*, almost completely rewritten and then published under the title *Probe* without any explanation, which led her to shun the Star Trek franchise and develop her interest in the Vulcans in a new context. Thus she created the Others, extraterrestrials sharing with the Vulcans not only their philosophy of pacifism, vegetarianism and devotion to science, logic and emotional control, but also many physiological peculiarities (such as the pointed ears and the mating cycle) and cultural traits (such as, for the initiated, the equivalents of kas wahn and tal shaya).

In the *Others* trilogy, this offshoot of the Vulcan race (who knows itself to have been seeded on the planet by offworlders from a desert planet) has undergone the same process of cultural evolution as its forefathers: hundreds of thousands of years of bloody warfare until their conversion to a life of peace of logic. But this hard-earned peace may not last forever, for the Others are not the only inhabitants of the planet: far from their prosperous and technologically developed Archipelago, on the Mainland, lives an indigenous race, the People, similar in many respects to the humans, in whose midst, out of sheer curiosity, the Others send their Monitors, cultural observers bound by some equivalent of Starfleet's Prime Directive.

The protagonist and narrator of this saga, an "intellectually challenged" (by Other standards) woman named Lingri the Inept, who describes herself as "a poet among a race of scientists", is one of these Monitors, and the *Other* trilogy is the story of her life and the fate of the two civilizations as the People finally discover the existence of the Others.

The *Others* trilogy is a strange literary entity. Modernist in its style, it is written as a collage, in the manner of John Brunner's *Stand on Zanzibar*, alternating elements of narration with extracts from documents internal to the world described- such as Chronicles, news reports, etc. The narration itself does its best never to be linear, though not to the point of dissolution, as in many modernist novels: the main thread is always interrupted by stories within stories, flashbacks, intruding memories, giving to the series a very introspective dimension, verging on rumination and what I would be tempted to call emotional pornography (i.e. a kind of almost obsessive wallowing in intense emotions.)

The potential reader of this series should also be warned about the author's aggressive feminism, her penchant for wordplay and sometimes pointless neologisms, archaisms and typographical oddities, and her morbid fascination with torture, genocide, rape, famine, prostitution and all the extremes of human (or Other) suffering. Those who already found *Dwellers* harrowing, for instance, will probably meet the limits of their endurance, all the more so as, contrary to the professionally published Star Trek novels, the *Others* is not limited in its use of foul language, explicit sexual references, scatology and depictions of "graphic and gruesome" brutality.

However delighted I was to discover a treatment of the Vulcans emancipated from the stifling editorial policies of the Star Trek novels, and however haunting and rhapsodic I concede the series to be, I must say my overall opinion of it is very mixed, and I would only recommend it to amateurs of (superior) modernist literature, women with a deep-seated resentment of their male counterparts and, of course, Vulcan completists.