TrekAThon Round 1 – Announcement and Prompts

The crew of the USS Enterprise has beamed down to a hostile planet!

They need you — yes, YOU, fresh out of Starfleet Academy! — to operate the Transporter and whisk them back to safety.

Beam up as many crewmembers as possible before the end of the month.

Each book you read will power the Transporter and let you rescue one crewmember. Once you have brought Scotty back to the ship, the Chief Engineer will upgrade the Transporter and each book can power multiple transport beams (e.g. you can double on prompts).

When?

Sign-ups are open now and will remain open throughout the readathon (latecomers are welcome!).

The readathon itself will run from 1st to the 31th July in your own timezone.

Please feel free to post Twitter updates, reading sprints, Instagram photos or just generally share how you’re getting on with the readathon using the hashtag #TrekAThon

Follow and tag @trekathon_ for updates, info and retweets.

Any questions, just let me know!

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Sign-ups.

Create a full or partial TBR on any platform that suits you — YouTube, Twitter, blog post, Goodreads etc. — and leave a link in the comments of this post to join up.

That’s it!

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The Rules.

If it can be added on Goodreads, it counts. Novellas, graphic novels, audiobooks etc. are all fair game.

One book = one prompt, until you fill the Scotty prompt. Then you can double, triple etc up.

Your TBR can change over the course of the readathon.

The group book can be used in place of any other prompt.

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Operate the Transporter!

Captain Kirk (Commanding Officer) — Read a 5-Star prediction.

Commander Spock (Executive Officer/ Science Officer) — Read a Science Fiction book.

Lieutenant Sulu (Helmsman) — Read a book with a weapon on the cover.

Lieutenant Uhura (Communications Officer) — Read a book everyone’s talking about.

Ensign Chekov (Navigator) — Read a YA or MG book. 

Doctor McCoy (Chief Medical Officer) — Read a book featuring death or a character injury.

Yeoman Rand — Read a book with a red cover.

Lieutenant Commander Scott (Chief Engineer) — Read a book either set somewhere you’ve never been or somewhere you’ve never read about.

Nurse Chapel (Head Nurse) — Read a book with a face on the cover.

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Group Book

Finally, we have a group book for this round. This is not compulsory — so please don’t feel pressured if you can’t get a hold of the book or if it doesn’t appeal to you — but I thought it would be nice for us to have something in common and on-theme. There’s not going to be an official discussion or anything but, of course, you can use the #TrekAThon tag to share your thoughts.

This was decided on via a vote on our Twitter page.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

This is a 2014 release with 85k ratings and a 4+ star average. It’s a YA contemporary-fantasy retelling with Black and queer rep. The audiobook is on both Scribd and Audible but this availability varies by location (I, for one, can’t access the Scribd book in my location, but if you want to try Scribd, you can use my referral link here to extend the free trial from 30 to 60 days.)

Rosemary Harper doesn’t expect much when she joins the crew of the aging Wayfarer. While the patched-up ship has seen better days, it offers her a bed, a chance to explore the far-off corners of the galaxy, and most importantly, some distance from her past. An introspective young woman who learned early to keep to herself, she’s never met anyone remotely like the ship’s diverse crew, including Sissix, the exotic reptilian pilot, chatty engineers Kizzy and Jenks who keep the ship running, and Ashby, their noble captain.

Life aboard the Wayfarer is chaotic and crazy—exactly what Rosemary wants. It’s also about to get extremely dangerous when the crew is offered the job of a lifetime. Tunneling wormholes through space to a distant planet is definitely lucrative and will keep them comfortable for years. But risking her life wasn’t part of the plan. In the far reaches of deep space, the tiny Wayfarer crew will confront a host of unexpected mishaps and thrilling adventures that force them to depend on each other. To survive, Rosemary’s got to learn how to rely on this assortment of oddballs—an experience that teaches her about love and trust, and that having a family isn’t necessarily the worst thing in the universe.

If you have any other questions, please comment or contact me via twitter 🙂