It’s hard to believe that ten years ago right about now, fans were eagerly sitting down for the very first episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and getting hooked on new life forms and new civilizations all over again. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series’ premiere, Pocket Books has assembled some of the biggest names in Star Trek print fiction to chart previously untold voyages of the Enterprise-D and her crew, with a selection of new short stories set both during and after the show’s seven year run. You can order “Sky’s The Limit” now from theLogBook.com Store.

Eureka renewed for another season. Sci-Fi Channel has announced that its original series Eureka has been picked up for a third season of 13 episodes; there’s no word yet on any cast changes. The show has reportedly increased its audience considerably in its second season.

Lord British in space! Computer game guru Richard Garriott, creator of the best-selling series of Ultima role-playing games, is going to pay a visit to the International Space Station in about a year. Garriott, the son of Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott and a sponsor of the Ansari X Prize, is reportedly paying $30 million for a seat aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to the station in October 2008. He’s paying Space Adventures Ltd., the company that has sent such guests to the station as Charles Simonyi and Anousheh Ansari, for the trip.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, outbound on a one-way trip to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, lifted off flawlessly yesterday on the first leg of its journey. After a brief stay in a parking orbit around Earth, Dawn fired a booster rocket to send it on its way to Vesta, one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, and after studying Vestra, Dawn will move on to the largest known asteroid in our solar system, Ceres. Dawn will use ultra-efficient ion drive technology to move around within the asteroid belt; its ion engines will move the unmanned space probe over 4 billion miles in eight years, with an estimated total of 50,000 hours of firing time. Dawn will reach Vesta in 2011.
Sources: NASA / JPL

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 8 years since Big Finish Productions gathered writers, directors, sound designers, and original Doctor Who cast members to bring their favorite time-traveler back in audio form. This latest Doctor Who audio adventure, 100, is the 100th Doctor Who audio story to be released, and it tells four different stories by four different writers, all starring Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor and Maggie Stables as Evelyn. The stories are 100 B.C. by Jacqueline Rayner, My Own Private Wolfgang by Robert Shearman, Bedtime Story by Joseph Lidster, and The 100 Days Of The Doctor by Paul Cornell, all directed by Nicholas Briggs. You can order this celebratory Doctor Who audio now from theLogBook.com Store.

Just a note to let theLogBook.com readers know that webmaster Earl Green and his wife Jan welcomed their son Evan into the world on Wednesday, September 19th; Evan weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces at birth, and all three are trying to rest up at home. Copious baby pictures can be found in display in Earl’s blog.

AtariAge.com is rolling out some new games for old favorites. On the Atari 2600, two limited-edition games, The Last Ninja and N.E.R.D.S., last seen at CGE 2007, are being released in quantities of only 150 copies each. For Colecovision afficionados, a new Scott Huggins homebrew called Terra Attack – this time an original, rather than Scott’s usual impossibly-close translations of sleeper hit arcade games – is available, along with a fast-paced puzzle game, Squares!. You can order all of the above from the store over at AtariAge.com.
Source: AtariAge

Temporarily put on the back burner after a 2006 budget crunch on NASA’s science missions, the NuSTAR mission – standing for Nuclear Stereoscopic Telescope Array, an instrument which can spot and study black holes with 500 times more accuracy than any previously existing method. NuSTAR will be an orbiting observatory with a launch date somewhere between 2009 and 2013, and will be managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Sources: NASA / JPL

Eleventh Hour to be Americanized? Despite a short, troubled four-episode run in the U.K., the science-based crime drama Eleventh Hour could be making a comeback – American-style. Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company is producing a pilot for CBS, to be directed by Danny Cannon (CSI) and adapted by Scottish-born writer Mick Davis, and a 13-episode commitment is apparently already under discussion. The original series starred Patrick Stewart, and ran aground a few episodes into its brief run when its creator, SF novelist Stephen Gallagher, jumped ship after citing creative interference from the ITV network. (theLogBook.com’s episode guide to the original series can be found here.)

Earth Reptiles headed to DVD.The BBC and 2|Entertain (the video outfit which handles all of the Beeb’s home video and DVD output) have announced an upcoming DVD box set with all of the original series’ stories centering around a classic villain: 1970′s Doctor Who And The Silurians (the only episode ever to bear the Target novelization-esque “Doctor Who and…” as part of its onscreen title) and 1972′s The Sea Devils, both starring Jon Pertwee and the latter being one of Roger Delgado’s final appearances as the Master, and 1984′s Peter Davison four-parter Warriors Of The Deep, a story that many fans these days hail as being a deeply flawed sequel to the other two. Doctor Who And The Silurians will be the first story to be released on DVD that was filmed in color and then lost in the archives except for a B&W backup copy; for its VHS release in the 1990s, The Silurians was recolorized at considerable expense to the BBC, and there’s been no word on whether or not further attempts to restore that seven-part story have been carried out. The box set is due early in 2008.

Even though it’s the off-season for Doctor Who, those pesky Daleks are back out for blood, and a cast consisting of TARDIS travelers old and new isn’t about to let them have it. Playing new characters in a new series of scripts by Nicholas Briggs, the voice of the Daleks himself, Doctor Who’s Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith) and Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) star in a new season of four single-CD audio dramas, Dalek Empire IV: The Fearless. A new incursion by the Daleks has the galaxy on the brink of surrender, and these freedom fighters have the means to hold the metallic invaders at bay – that is, assuming their own agendas don’t get in the way of the galaxy’s survival. You can order one or all four episode of Dalek Empire IV: The Fearless now in theLogBook.com Store.

Okay, children of the ’80s, let’s see if this is enough of a blast from the past for you: Rubik’s Cube is back…in digital form. Okay, so maybe that’s not groundbreaking (after all, the first Rubik’s Cube video game dates back to the Atari era). This new version, for modern PC platforms, well…let’s you try to solve Rubik’s Cube. Granted, it’s not anything earth-shattering, but we’d be remiss in our duties as occasional custodians of ’80s culture if we didn’t point this release out to you. You can get your own copy of the new Rubik’s Cube Challenge from theLogBook.com Store.

Rightly hailed as saviors of power pop in the early ’90s, and rightly mourned after they handed in only two classic albums and called it quits, Jellyfish is being toasted by an international smattering of artists on the new 2-CD set Sensory Lullabies: The Ultimate Tribute To Jellyfish. The songs on each disc are presented in the same order as the songs on the original albums, but the songs are all new interpretations – some closely paralleling the original recordings, others going off into completely new territory – by indie artists who cite Jellyfish as a key influence. Also included on each disc are songs from the respective eras of each album that never got a proper release, but were staples of Jellyfish’s live set. You can order Sensory Lullabies now from theLogBook.com Store.

With the imminent debut of the first season of the Doctor Who spinoff series The Sarah Jane Adventures, the BBC is getting behind the Doctor’s former sidekick in a big way. The pilot episode, Invasion Of The Bane, is due out on DVD this month, and a trio of audiobooks is chronicling Sarah Jane’s adventures as well. (Please note that, like the show itself, these new audiobooks are aimed at a younger audience, unlike the Sarah Jane Smith audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions in years past.) The three audiobooks – novelizations of some of the early episodes – are read by Elisabeth Sladen herself, and more are in the works. You can find all things Sarah Jane in theLogBook.com Store.

Time’s running out for the Tiermann family, human colonists who bask in the luxury of an unbelievably advanced “smart home” on a distant planet that they have to themselves. But the flora and fauna of that world aren’t too keen on letting the human “infestation” vacate the premises…and then they have to worry about what the artificial intelligence running their home will have to say about being left to its fate. Can the Doctor help out on moving day? Paul Magrs’ latest Doctor Who novel, “Sick Building”, is now available in theLogBook.com Store.

Heroes shut out at Emmys. Despite it being nominated in several categories, NBC’s Heroes left the Emmys completely empty-handed this year, a surprise to many of the fans of the show’s first season. In the Prime Time Emmys, awarded last night, the only notable genre win went to Terry O’Quinn, who brought Lost its only Emmy this year, for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. James Spader, though he’s not likely to be stepping through a stargate again anytime soon, won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Boston Legal. Most of Sunday’s “big” categories went to the final season of The Sopranos.

Make a date with Sarah Jane. The BBC has announced a start date of Monday, September 24th – a week from today – for the younger-audience-friendly Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures, starring Elisabeth Sladen. The season will run ten episodes, all of them multi-part adventures for the former TARDIS traveler and her own young sidekicks. theLogBook.com will, of course, be chronicling her journeys, though that episode guide may arrive later this year. If you don’t mind a few title spoilers, check out complete episode list here.

The Move is making another move, at least through the archives. The classic British rock band that has undeservedly become little more than a trivial footnote as “the band that gave birth to ELO” is back in the limelight with a series of newly remastered releases, featuring previously unissued outtakes, stereo mixes, and more. The three reissues now available include the band’s self-titled debut album (seen at right), the transitional 1970 album Shazam (the last album before future ELO maestro Jeff Lynne joined the Move and became a huge influence on its future), and a CD single celebrating the 40th anniversary of “Flowers In The Rain”, the Move single which launched BBC Radio 1 in 1967. You can move on over to theLogBook.com Store to grab these remastered beauties right now.

The complete ten-year run of Stargate SG-1, the longest-running SF series in American TV history, is being repackaged in a nifty box set, complete with bonus discs if stuff that hasn’t been available with the individual season sets (though to be fair, the new bonus discs seem to consist primarily of the various and sundry “catch-up-with-the-storyline-and-go-behind-the-scenes” specials aired by Sci-Fi Channel over the years). You can step through the gate now to pre-order yours in theLogBook.com Store.