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While attending a panel on time travel this weekend at the National PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis, a panel that at one point was so boring that I prayed to time travel to the end of it, a fellow audience member asked a question that has had me thinking since: what are we to make of the professed shift from science fiction narratives centering around space exploration to those centering on time travel?
Of course, this shift is not comprehensive. A presentation by Korcaighe Hale examined the selection of historical events in three time travel shows ranging from the later 60s to the early 90s, but with shows like Lost and Flashforward dominating the airwaves and others centered on exploration, like Enterprise, incorporating elements of time travel into their mythologies, it’s not hard to argue that this shift has taken (or is taking) place. But what reasons could there be?One person acknowledged that as we learn more and more about our universe, about how unlikely it is that we will ever be able to leave our solar system, such stories of exploration no longer have real traction. I suppose this is true to some extent, though it’s not as if a show like Star Trek took the science all that seriously and viewers didn’t seem to have big problems with that. I have another idea, but as I am severely ignorant of much of science fiction and its discourses, I am going to argue through the prism of Trek and let my argument be judged as in/adequate based on such a decision.
Why did the public so engage with the space exploration narrative central to Trek in the late 60s and through syndication in the 70s? Coming out of the policies of brinksmanship in the 1950s, where the Eisenhower Administration moved to contain communism within the Soviet Union, it seems to me that a show about a peaceful (military) explorers spreading a message of human rights and a celebration of the individual would have some traction from a purely patriotic standpoint. It allowed the viewers of that era to identify the positive intentions of their government separate from the unpopular policies by which they were implemented.
But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need to spread the message of anti-communism was no longer necessary, and as a result, the sort of space exploration narrative eventually lost its traction as well. Sure we had The Next Generation going strong through 1994, but even the popular Deep Space Nine abandoned the exploration format in order to tell the story of a Federation trying to broker peace in a rapidly changing galactic landscape, arguably analogous to the state of the world after the fall of the Soviet Union.
We now live in a world where we aren’t threatened with death every day, on a societal scale at least, and thus we can relax from spreading our message and take time to appreciate the differences between us and others by studying how we got here. And thus the time travel story resonates, for we can go back and see what choices shaped our society, how different (and the same) people were in the past versus today. And we forecast what will happen to us in the future along these same principles.
I’m not even sure I totally buy this, but it seems a framework for a larger discussion can begin here. It’s even possible that I will be presenting a paper on this topic at next year’s conference, but before I get ahead of myself, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, perhaps contextualizing this argument within the greater scope of science fiction literature, but certainly offering your own takes even if they blow my hypothesis out of the proverbial water.
Earlier this week I read Kevin Smith’s new collected Batman tale, Cacophony, which takes the villain Onomatopoeia from his run on Green Arrow from about ten years ago (!) and sends him after the Caped Crusader. Smith acknowledges in his introduction the series’ main weakness, the excessive dialogue in the first issue, but he then overcorrects in the final two, leaving too much unsaid. The guy can write dialogue, and while I cou
ld have done without the reference to a green merkin, the shift made the later issues seem too sparse.
Anyway, Onomatopoeia really serves as a catalyst for a Batman/Joker story in which the Joker is shot, the bullet nicking his aorta, and Batman must decide whether to seek help for him or pursue Onomatopoeia. Knowing what one does about Batman, that he is a thoroughly good person despite the fact that he beats the shit out of petty criminals on a regular basis and spends millions of dollars on gadgets that could otherwise be used to clean up Gotham’s slums, it’s obvious what decision he makes. Even with Jim Gordon arguing forcefully that the Joker is a horrible person who killed a school full of children earlier in the series and should be left to bleed out, Batman can’t do it. This leads to a pretty good scene at the series’ end where the Joker, filled with anti-psychotics, explains to Batman that he will never be at peace until he is able to kill him. So the dilemma is that Batman can’t live with himself by killing the Joker, but if he had killed him then the Joker would be at peace and Gotham would be (relatively) safe, or if he himself was killed then the Joker would be at peace. Not terribly compelling, but Smith did a reasonably good job with it.
But what bothers me is that such a conversation is so blindingly obvious that it needn’t have happened. Of course Batman couldn’t kill the Joker, for his character is good while the Joker is evil. There’s no grey area, and thus by not protecting all life, the character would be forever tarnished. But placing such a virtuous character in such a situation makes for a disingenuous story, because who among us wouldn’t let the Joker bleed out in that situation? Batman didn’t shoot him, in fact he let the shooter escape to save him. So we, the audience, are Jim Gordon arguing for real justice and the understanding that moral absolutes are at times counterproductive, while Batman remains better than humanity. This of course may mean that as a result of his moral stance, Batman isn’t so much better than humanity, but that he stands apart from it as an Other.
This sort of thing isn’t unique to Batman and comic characters, but also infiltrates the realm of the utopian future society in Star Trek. So-called evolved humanity at times seems so distant from current humanity as to be unrelatable, something that obviously doesn’t click with viewers as exemplified with Voyager and Enterprise. The Federation has moral absolutes about how other people should be treated, how a society should act, so it prevents them from violating said morals for the greater good. In fact, some of the most popular and resonating episodes of Star Trek involve someone breaking the moral code to effect a necessary change, like the members of Section 31 or Captain Sisko conspiring with Garak to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War.
I don’t want to get into a metaphysical discussion about why the ends can sometimes justify the means, not just because it is an unwinnable argument but also because it’s not important here. I merely want to make the point that by setting up characters or societies with moral absolutes that are inviolable, an honest portrayal of the human experience will be near impossible to convey, for while we may one day hope to be like Batman or to live in the utopian Federation, it nevertheless will be difficult to ever relate to these types of characters as their experiences and worldview are necessarily so different from our own.
Can there be any doubt that Quark is the most moral character on Star Trek Deep Space Nine? While his bible, the Rules of Acquisition, may not be something that I agree with, he places it as the centerpiece of his life, citing it frequently, and using it as a guide to pursue his endeavors. Whether we think that family should be exploited for opportunity or women should be treated as subservient is beside the point: Quark has a code of ethics that he sticks to in virtually every situation.
Contrast this with Captain Sisko, a man who allows men to be killed and bribes another in order to perpetrate a lie to the Romulan people and ensure that they entered the Dominion War on the side of the Federation. Much has been made of this episode, yet the judgments usually come down on the side of Sisko, whose temporary abandonment of a moral compass perhaps leads to the greater good, at least from the perspective of the Federation and its allies.
Also consider the outright hostility and contempt that Sisko and other Federation and Bajoran characters feel towards Quark. That he remains steadfast in his unpopular beliefs even in an atmosphere where his very personhood is looked down upon, is something that would be lauded if we just stripped away some of the descriptors.
For a society that claims to respect other culture’s beliefs, the members of the Federation that we see on television seem to sit in judgment quite often, and not just in the case of the Ferengi. When Worf seeks to end his brother’s life at the latter’s request, he is threatened with prison and questioned severely for attempting to perform a legal and customary ritual between consenting people in his culture. In the episode ‘Waltz,’ in which the Defiant is looking for a marooned Captain Sisko in the brief window before they must return to protect a convoy, Doctor Bashir sneers at Worf when the latter says that it would be dishonorable to fail to return to the convoy, claiming that he doesn’t care much for Worf’s honor.
Is it possible to reconcile the lofty ideals of Federation society with the way we see such behavior portrayed on screen, behavior for which I have only provided the briefest of examples? In many ways, the Federation is merely a stand-in for the modern day United States, a superpower who uses its military and economic strength in order to force other countries to behave in a way the United States thinks is correct. The Federation does pretty much the exact same thing, forcing new members to meet certain criteria in order for acceptance. We also rarely see any dissention by members of the Federation against the central government, creating the impression that societies cede their individuality to some degree in order to gain the military and economic strengths the Federation wields. The respect for these alien societies seems to be an abstract notion, which to be fair is often reflected in American society regarding cultures in other countries.
I am sure there are all sorts of colonialist and imperialist critical frameworks that could be applied to this issue in order to better understand the gap between what the Federation is said to be and what evidence shows it is. Obviously, this is a rough outline of these ideas, or what might actually be two separate ideas, but with the new direction I am hoping to take here, I hope the following conversation will help clarify some points and hopefully muddy the waters a bit as well. Please, weigh in.
Though it may not seem to be the case upon a cursory glance, the academic writing I have been practicing as a graduate student has influenced the content here quite a bit. The obvious would be the attention given to topics such as the distribution of comics on the iPhone or reviews of works like Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture. But the les
s obvious is in the way I approach pieces that I review, for an effective way to generate content is to disagree with a portion of a work and then present the reasoning behind it.
I have been highly critical of the Star Trek line Pocket Books has been producing recently, which has drawn the ire of some. While I stand by everything I have written, it gets old to be constantly criticizing, so where I didn’t feel I had a lot to say about Dave Galanter’s Troublesome Minds, I wanted to write about it to maybe help a copy find its way into a reader’s hands as well as to demonstrate that I have no axe to grind.
With a line seemingly consumed with continuity and having every book tie into three others in direct and indirect ways, Troublesome Minds is a refreshing change. Set within the original five-year mission, the Enterprise attempts to make first contact with Isitri only to wind up responding to a distress call and preventing the death of one Isitri by an assemblage of others. This man, Berlis, claims not to know why those from his homeworld wish him dead, and by intervening Kirk is placed into a bad position: return him to his colony and protect him, or turn him over to be killed.
However, Berlis is what is known as a troublesome mind in his telepathic community. The Isitri do not have vocal cords and virtually all are deaf; they communicate through their thoughts. People like Berlis arise from time to time and subject the world to inadvertent slavery for their minds are so strong that all other Isitri bend to their will and they become despotic. As Berlis makes his way back to his homeworld, Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise must try and prevent him from taking over the world and thus plunging them into war with a rival power who fears the innovations possible when a troublesome mind takes over.
While the novel has been praised in the deaf community due to its use of hand signals to communicate between the non-telepathic humans and the Isitri, I found the ethical quandaries our heroes were faced with to be the driving force of this book. Before he has a chance to think twice, Kirk violates the Prime Directive and intervenes, but rather than becoming focused on a rule that loses all sense when examined, Galanter proceeds by exploring how Kirk and Spock will face the tough decisions that their intervention has brought about. Obviously mind control is bad, but to what extent will they go to prevent it? By intervening against Berlis as he controls a planet, does Kirk side with a rival alien power bent on his extermination?
Where I thought Galanter could have improved was the consideration of what was to be done with Berlis assuming he could be captured and prevented from influencing his people. The idea of banishment was addressed, but in such a scenario I found it a little difficult to believe that no one would recommend the obvious, no matter how distasteful: maybe killing him is the only answer. Yet as the novel played out, Galanter placed characters in even more morally ambiguous situations and kept any resolution from being a pat one.
With such a simple story, it was also interesting to see how Galanter went about assembling a story in which so many obvious solutions weren’t possible. For example, as soon as I thought about just beaming up Berlis and warping away, and explanation was given for why that wasn’t possible. Galanter also problematized the idea of an assassination, demonstrating that Berlis’s hold over his people would not dissipate immediately following his death but diminish over time. None of this is a criticism; instead, by being able to tease out the seams in his narrative, it was possible to see and appreciate how Galanter went about assembling it. The dialogue literally sounded like it was straight out of an episode from the 1960s, something that I think few authors are able to replicate.
Troublesome Minds isn’t a great novel, but it is a solid one. And it also feels like an important story, where problems aren’t black and white and solutions leave the reader pondering rather than having everything go back to normal at the end.
With alternate versions of our heroes being popular in just about every television show ever broadcasted, it’s no surprise that the same would hold true for a franchise like Star Trek, who has gone to that well many a time. Last year, Pocket Books published six short novels set entirely within universes that had been irrevocably altered due to some major event with which readers are familiar having a different outcome. Overall, I enjoyed the two collections (which I reviewed here and here), and look forward to a third that hopefully will be produced next year.
So I guess it is no surprise that IDW would choose the Myriad Universe format for its first ‘crossover’ 
with Pocket Books. Entitled The Last Generation, the five issue collection tells the story of what Jean-Luc Picard’s universe would be like had Captain Kirk not stopped the planned Klingon assassination of the Federation president in Star Trek VI. As you might imagine, it doesn’t turn out so well.
Klingons conquered Earth in the interim, and Will Riker and Geordi LaForge have somehow come across an android named Data and are trying to get him into Resistance hands while keeping him away from Klingon ones. Their cell is none other than that run by Jean-Luc Picard, a single ‘father’ for his nephew, Rene, after his brother was killed by Klingons. Everyone else is pretty much in the resistance cell too: Beverly Crusher, a battle hardened Wesley, Yar, O’Brien, etc. Even Ro Laren, though how a Bajoran made it into an Earth resistance cell against Klingon imperialism is never addressed. Though not necessarily a bad start, it seems like only a slight deviation from Yesterday’s Enterprise, where the Federation was about to fall to the Klingons rather than it already being the case.
Just before Riker and LaForge lose Data to the Klingons, Captain Sulu of Excelsior shows up to save him. Apparently he has a cloaking device and has been fighting the Klingons for seven decades even though his ship looks like it is in perfect condition. Data was apparently created to be able to detect errors in the timestream, and he has pinpointed the death that Kirk failed to prevent as the deciding factor that hey must risk everything to go back and fix. Thus the crux of the series relies on a plot device that has been well used before now, and the obligatory twist at the end makes little sense. (I know that character is insane, but he doesn’t seem to ever work in the stories in which he is used.)
There’s a lot not to like about the execution, especially the way Wesley is treated. He is just a teenager but a good fighter who looks up to Picard as a father except when he doesn’t. After his girlfriend is killed, we are treated to a completely unbelievable scene in which he blames Picard. Later he shaves his hair into a Mohawk and puts on warrior paint, convinces O’Brien and others that Picard is crazy and they should subvert his plan to go back in time and change history, and then screws everything up before being taught a lesson at the end.
While I can handle a slight derivation of an old plot, writer Andrew Steven Harris seems to have missed the whole point of Pocket’s series. Rather than taking characters we know from an alternate universe and have the
m attempt to put right what once went wrong, the idea was to see how characters we know would have been different if history had gone a different direction. The six novels did this in different ways, but were about characters in their own universe, not in a changed one. By turning his whole story on trying to change what happened differently, Harris loses what made the whole concept so interesting and dooms his project to be written off as a rehash of a plot we’ve seen ten too many times. It reduces the emotion we might have for these characters because their entire history is treated as imaginary and derivative. And if Harris just had to go this way, why not complicate the issue a bit: sure Picard could change the past, but that would mean a universe where his nephew is dead because of a fire. Sure the life Rene has now isn’t ideal, but at least it’s a life.
Old DC Star Trek artist Gordon Purcell pencils the series, and he is as good as he was back in the old days. The characters look remarkably like their actual counterparts, with the exception of Wesley who just didn’t really work for me. That said, the layouts are occasionally confusing, with important panel divisions being lost in the gutter. The series also had some creative cover designs, like a refashioning of the sixth movie poster as well as the reimagining of the X-Men ‘Days of Future Past’ cover that is shown here.
All in all, a disappointing execution of a story that seems to have been misconceived in the first place.
No one hesitates to tell me that I am in the minority when I state my preference for Bajoran religious and political stories above all others in Deep Space Nine. And perhaps I am one of the few who has lamented the absence of further stories involving the Ea’voq, Bajor’s sister planet in the Gamma Quadrant, since Rising Son. But I think that Olivia Woods’s new novel The Soul Key surprisingly blends the recent mirror universe emphasis with the Pr
ophets and their many followers in an effective way.
The novel finally fills in the backstory from the point Iliana Ghemor escapes her Cardassian prison up until the present storyline, including how she came to wield power over Taran’atar. As some reviewers have noted, there is a greater focus on her than on any of the regular characters, but this in fact is due to necessity of allowing the readers to experience her story in order for the overall story to advance. Ghemor’s motivations and actions not only help one understand her better, but also are used in order to contrats her with Kira Nerys and the Ghemor from the mirror universe, all of whom play critical roles in this story and the saga to come.
After returning from the Prophets, Benjamin Sisko called Kira his ‘Right Hand,’ and we see the weight of that pronouncement in the conclusion of this tale. While the Ea’voq are only mentioned, I got the feeling that they would be seen again in the near future. And finally the Ascendants were shown preparing for their apocalypse, only to be surprised by what happens. I don’t want to give anything away, but The Soul Key wraps up the mirror universe arc and moves back towards the religious angle that has been neglected for the last few stories.
Speaking of the mirror universe, after reading so much about that reality’s Miles O’Brien, not to mention seeing him in numerous television episodes, I was surprised and disappointed at the way he was portrayed here. Though scenes from his perspective are often written to show his sense of doubt over his ability to lead the rebellion, nothing made me think that he would suffer the sort of emotional breakdown described in these pages. The other mirror universe characters, from Eddington to Keiko, are static here. But what is so enjoyable is that fleshing them out isn’t necessary; one need only read other entries set in the mirror universe to get ales focusing on them, to one degree or another. That it all holds together so well yet so loosely shows editorial oversight clicking on all cylinders.
Unfortunately, with the termination of Marco Palmieri, editor and creative force behind the post-television Deep Space Nine fiction, we may never see the story that this novel sets up all the pieces for. With the next novel being announced as taking place three or so years in the future, it seems likely that the readers will receive a certain amount of filler that could very well gloss over events occurring in the interim. That’s not to say that I do not have faith in David R. George, only that a work so conceived likely won’t address the parts of the relaunch I am most interested with to the degree I would like. So it is with a certain bittersweet feeling that I review The Soul Key, a good novel that could unfortunately represent the interruption point of a very good series.
Dayton Ward ties up the loose ends left over from Reap the Whirlwind in the latest novel in the Vanguard series, Open Secrets. Commodore Reyes was arrested at the end of the previous book for allowing classified information to be disseminated by a reporter, and we get the fallout from that decision here. T’Prynn, intelligence officer who had a mental breakdown, suffer
s her malady and, of course, eventually recovers. The saga of the Shedai artifacts and the search for information continues as well. But unfortunately, this is about all Ward does.
Rather than recap all the action, I’ll just say that if you are interested in Vanguard then this is something you should read. It’s not a bad novel; it just doesn’t stand on its own at all. What new material there is seems only prelude for David Mack’s Precipice, which will continue the series later this year.
One of the interesting aspects of the series is the way that Shedai technology and the meta-genome are precursors to later events with which readers are already familiar. For example, a man is completely healed much like would happen with a dermal regenerator in TNG. Carol Marcus’s very appearance lets us know that this will be an avenue to Genesis, at least to some extent. And Ward helps set the stage for not only the Organian intervention into a Federation/Klingon war shown in the episode ‘Errand of Mercy,’ but also the colony of Nimbus III shown in one of the movies, Final Frontier I believe. Yet rather than this sort of thing being secondary to the story, it seems that Open Secrets is an exercise in reconciliation as story.
The novel also suffers from time lapse between its publication and its predecessor’s. Frankly, I had a hard time remembering what happened, even with a short primer at the novel’s beginning. It is always a delicate balance between killing a previous reader with unnecessary exposition and helping an unfamiliar or forgetful reader gain some sort of orientation, but I felt Ward erred on the side of too little here. While I have seen his prose style being ripped in reviews, I found it adequate if uninspired. The author likely would be served well by spending a little more time on style, but it was hardly sub-average for contemporary Star Trek fiction.
And with the title of the novel being Open Secrets, one would expect that some secrets would be revealed. Unfortunately, what is revealed leaves the reader with more questions than answers. A novel that seems to just be dealing with the fallout of the previous entry while moving characters around to set them in place for the next, Ward’s book is adequate though unsatisfying.
It was announced today that Star Trek books editor Margaret Clark was laid off in another round of cutbacks from Simon & Schuster. Though I have been highly critical of her work, I have mixed feelings about the move. But while fanboys on the interwebs are justifying the move as being solely based on overall market conditions and not on her performance or the sales of her books, something that has been bothering me for a while about the
Star Trek line has crystallized.
In 2001, Pocket released Avatar, a two-book story set after the events of Deep Space Nine that continues the story of those left on the station. Well planned and written, it became a favorite and a bestseller, leading to likely the most acclaimed run of books in the history of Star Trek literature. Tight, cohesive, and innovative storytelling made the series a success, at least for the first ten or so books.
Of course, other such series have been planned and executed to varying levels of success. After Nemesis, a new series following Captain Riker on Titan has been pretty good, as has the TOS-era Vanguard, which takes place on a space station near Tholian space. But there have been misfires as well. The follow-up to Enterprise has been mixed, and the first four books following Voyager were abysmal. However, they sold well, or at least well enough to continue, and as the overall universe became more and more complex, the references between various novels began to increase as well.
But as can quickly happen, these references at times became cumbersome, especially for those uninitiated to the larger mythos. This leads me to my point, which unfortunately I can’t back up with sales numbers as they aren’t available: the audience for Star Trek books isn’t growing. Rather than making the novels accessible to a wider audience, the stories got tighter and more interrelated. This is great an appreciated if you are like me, a person who reads nearly everything, but for a casual reader this can be infuriating. Riker and Troi have a kid now? Tucker is alive and a Romulan spy? Didn’t he die in the show? The same paradox happens all the time in the comic industry; reward the dedicated readers even though doing so is alienating the casual and/or potential fans.
Then there comes the recent Star Trek movie, which has currently grossed over $256 million domestically. Other than the novelization, the first book to exploit such a hot property won’t be released until next June, a full year after the movie debuted. By then the film will be out of the public’s mind, whereas a book released in the next couple of months could really capitalize on its popularity. Such decisions by the editorial staff aren’t helping bring new readers into the fold, and IDW has proven that tying into the film makes a lot of economic sense.
Editorial decisions like this make me wonder if Clark really had a long future as an editor on the line. She didn’t seem to work well with some of the better authors, and her books couldn’t stay consistent with each other. Not situating her company to take advantage of the wild success of the film in a timely manner is yet another strike.
I’m not saying Clark should have lost her job, but even though I don’t have a business degree I understand that companies are out to make money. Structuring a line so that is hard for new readers to gain access doesn’t help sales increase; in fact, it insures sales will decrease because you are going to lose some people to attrition anyway. So while I am not happy Clark is gone because I now must worry about the future of the stories with which I have become engaged, to some extent at least, I’m not sure that this wasn’t something that any of us could have seen coming eventually.
As has been noted numerous times in this space, I was not a fan of the universe-changing Destiny trilogy. However, I have found the follow-ups to put an interesting spin on said events, so I was looking forward to reading the first full story centering on the Enterprise after the devastating Borg attacks, Losing the Peace by William Leisner. Full disclosure necessitates that I note that while Leisner and I have never met, we do have a friendly relationship on several Trek discussion boards and are mutual friends on LiveJournal.
Being refitted at McKinley Station, the crew of the Enterprise awaits their orders while taking leave. Un
surprising to anyone, the fact that the Federation is not in a position to send the fleet into unknown space becomes clear when President Bacco informs Picard that his ship will be needed close to home.
The refugee crisis is impacting several planets, especially the ocean planet of Pacifica, which you will of course remember is home of the Selkies, the race of Aili Lavena of the Titan. Beverly Crusher and Commander Kadohata lead a team to assess the refugee situation and provide what assistance they can. Leisner’s depictions of the refugee camp don’t really evoke the sort of crisis he trying to convey, but later in the novel, the reactions of outsiders to the 70,000 people stranded and living in tents does a lot to drive this home. But this situation overall serves not only a critique of the limitations of bureaucracies, but also of the very people those bureaucracies serve. Too often we think of government as the solution to our problems, as if there is a button on their desks they need merely press to provide assistance. The tension between the refugees and residents of Pacifica make this point without overstatement, and Leisner should be lauded for pulling this off.
However, the personal fallout from the crisis fails to be effective, but honestly this isn’t really the fault of Leisner. Instead, it is a result of the overall planning of Destiny and its aftermath; rather than seeing Earth or Betazed destroyed, we get Deneva. So the brunt of the crisis falls to seconday characters and cameos rather than squarely on the shoulders of the characters we have spent over twenty years investing emotion in. We first see this in the novel through the eyes of Arandis, the Risian played by Vanessa Williams in the worst episode of Deep Space Nine ever conceived. Risa was destroyed in the invasion, so it works pretty well to use her as a perspective to the crisis, but again it is hard to really feel the impact when the character is merely a guest star.
The invasion of the Borg wiped out the family of security chief Jasminder Choudhury, but she is such an undeveloped character that it is hard to empathize. In addition, the slimmest chance that her family is still alive is unrealistic to her for her family was apparently so good that they would never take a seat on an evacuation if it meant someone else would be unable to go as well. In fact, we later find out that her whole region was apparently saintly, for they left dozens of seats open rather than evacuate. I think that Choudhury’s struggle to deal with the deaths of her family might have been more compelling if she wasn’t all that close to them in the first place. Is she hadn’t spoken to her parents in years and wasn’t really upset about that situation, then the regret of never being able to make amends if she wanted to one day would be nonexistent.
Geordi deals with survivor’s guilt towards the beginning of the novel, but in unrealistic fashion apparently confronts these problems and heals himself in about fourteen seconds. The scenes as written work pretty well, but I kept feeling that these issues could have been drawn out over the whole novel, not only adding another subplot, but making the reader really see how characters they have invested in are suffering.
As the novel progresses, Picard disobeys orders only to have the clichéd result of that disobedience being the solution to greater problems. Admiral Akaar makes the brief but compelling case that the chain of command exists so that the wisest and most intuitive are at the top issuing orders, but that Picard obviously knew better in this and other situations so he is going to be promoted. His new position: director of relief efforts concerning the Borg invasion. But as must happen in order for the stories to continue, he turns down the promotion.
I’ve been all over this type scenario for years, but when the Federation is in a time of dire crisis and the powers that be have selected Picard as the man to lead the efforts in rebuilding, he feels no impetus to do so, no patriotic obligation to serve where he might most be needed. It’s not that I want Picard to no longer be in command of the Enterprise, rather I am tired of him being offered promotions that require the lack of verisimilitude when he turns them down. The impetus is to present Picard as a true explorer, but to me that doesn’t ring true with the character as presented. If he played his cards right, Picard could be the next president of the Federation; am I supposed to believe that someone isn’t whispering that into his ear?
Despite the main crux of this review, I think Leisner did a pretty good job with showing the fallout of the war. Without the overarching and strict plot structure, he is able to provide what amounts to a character piece. As the immediate aftermath of Destiny passes and the Federation gets ready to deal with the new threat of the Typhon Pact, it is nice to get such an intimate look at these characters and the aftermath of the Borg invasion.
I intended to write a blow-by-blow review of each story in this book, but I find myself unable to summon that sort of effort. In fact, I’m not really sure what made me seek Shards and Shadows out after all these months; perhaps something to do with upcoming DS9 books tat take place in the Mirror Universe, perhaps a lack of genuine passive fun when it comes to my reading pile. But what I do know is that despite some failures, the collection of short stories is worth your time.
Two years ago, Pocket published six short novels that took place entirely within the Mirror Universe, as depicted in such memorable Star Trek episodes as 'The One Where Evil Spock Had a Goatee.' The experiment was a success, and shortly thereafter this collection was announced in order to tie up some loose ends and expand the universe. For instance, Margaret Wander Bonano explains how Captain Kirk acquires the Tantalus Device that allows him to disappear people, all the while fleshing out the character to seem more than the raging mad man he was depicted as in the episode.
Stories that take place later during the Klingon/Cardassian Alliance and the Terran Rebellion set the stage for some of what surely will follow in the upcoming DS9 book The Soul Key. Susan Wright pits Intendant B’Elanna Torres against Kes in a psychological, telepathic battle. Keith R.A. DeCandido tells an interesting epistolary story about the politics and scheming of the Alliance command. Jim Johnson follows Keiko Ishigawa and her adjustment to life as one of the top commanders in the Terran Rebellion.
This isn’t to say that all these stories are good, Johnson’s is a story we’ve seen a million times with someone set up to look like a traitor even though we know she won’t be because she’s the hero, but they do weave a broader tapestry of the universe and blurs the line between the good/evil division that the DS9 episodes reduced the struggle to. Other stories miss the mark entirely, like Michael Jan Friedman’s ‘The Traitor,’ which focuses on Luc Picard who was so uninteresting in The Worst of Both Worlds and has an ending that renders the entire story pointless.
And while I understand that the fiction-only characters have a following, stories like James Swallow’s ‘The Black Flag’ about the mirror equivalents of the Vanguard crew and Peter David’s next tale concerning New Frontier are too insular to really work here. And where cameos of characters might work on television, the medium of print doesn’t handle the tossing out of names for their own sake so well. I might have been more interested in Pennington than in a Reyes with a laser eyeball. (If you have no idea who these people are or why you should care, then I think you understand my problem with these stories.)
Though it has been praised by those I respect, I found the worst story of the collection to be Dave Stern’s ‘Nobunaga.’ First of all, I hate stories that end up as a dream, simulation, etc. Secondly, and this may not be a fair criticism, but with the ending of Age of the Empress depicting the resurrection of Archer, I wanted to see the story picked up from there. Instead, we get nothing more than a couple of sentences to bridge the rift, not to mention an Archer that much more resembles the one from our universe than the one depicted in In a Mirror, Darkly.
There are stories that really work well here, like Wright’s and DeCandido’s, some that are just fun like Mack’s and Christopher L. Bennett’s, and a couple that just didn’t really work for me. Nothing lives up to the tall bar that Mack set with The Sorrows of Empire, but the collection does succeed in fleshing out the mirror universe, making it a place that really calls for more stories to be told. This book rekindled an interest in the fiction line that I felt was fading fast, and now I am looking forward to picking up some of the newer releases.
In yet another follow-up to the events of Destiny, Christopher L. Bennett lets us know how the Titan crew commanded by Captain Riker is handling the aftermath in Over a Torrent Sea. My immediate objection to this book was the fact that the mission of the exploration of uncharted space would continue. After the Federation has been decimated during the huge Borg invasion, the last thing that makes sense is sending a ship back out into the unknown, especially with the rise of a new opponent, the Typhon Pact. However, this is addressed early on in a conversation between
Riker and some admiral, and though I don’t agree with the decision, at least commonsensical problems with the idea were not ignored.
The novel concerns the exploration of a planet made up entirely of ocean and inhabited by sentient manta ray/jellyfish types that communicate through songs. This of course gives much of the spotlight to Aili Lavena, the Pacifican conn officer who lives in a sort of reverse scuba suit that is filled with water all the time. Meanwhile, Counselor Troi is getting ready to give birth to a daughter. Noticing that the planet, cutely named Droplet, is about to be struck by a large asteroid, the Titan decides to blow it up in an attempt to save the creatures on the planet. Things go awry, and as a result Lavena and Riker are trapped together on the surface.
While the usual issues with Bennett’s writing are here in abundance, especially the idiotic epiphanies by characters that are delivered in clunky straightforward dialogue, his creation of the planet’s ecosystem and lifeforms is interesting. Much like his previous Titan work, Orion’s Hounds, he seems to be a better creator of worlds than he is a storyteller. In fact, I would wager that he is the most intriguing current writer when it comes to new alien scenarios, yet the worst when it comes to characterization. Why this is the case is hard to fathom, especially after his fantastic debut using TOS characters in Ex Machina.
Twenty years before this novel, Riker and Lavena had a one-night stand. These things happen. Why it remains such a big deal two decades later is hard to fathom, and the emotional climax of the uncomfortable relationship the two have on the planet is ridiculous. So Riker slept with her before? He’s portrayed as a guy who has quite a few notches on the bedpost, so running into someone he’s previously had sex with can’t be all that rare an occurrence. So why does this bother him so? Why is his attraction to her so troubling if he has no intention of doing anything about it? He’s just married, not a corpse.
Meanwhile, as Titan is adrift after blowing up the asteroid goes horribly wrong, chief medical officer and talking dinosaur Dr. Ree kidnaps Troi and steals a shuttle, eventually landing it on a pre-warp world and delivering the baby in a hospital that is surrounded by police from that world. Apparently, his species sees males defend the child, and the fear of Troi for her child and the grief from Tuvok losing his son during Destiny cause this freakout and Prime Directive violation. What makes this so stupid is not the events themselves, but their conclusion. Twice in just a few months Ree has attacked Troi, this time violating all sorts of laws in the process, but since he wasn’t ‘responsible for his own actions,’ he gets off with a slight slap on the wrist and is even encouraged by Riker. If someone were to kidnap my wife and prevent me from seeing the birth of my first child, even if not in their right mind, I would not only punch that person in the face, but would throw them off my ship. Maybe Ree shouldn’t go to prison, but the idea that anyone on that ship would ever be able to trust him again is ludicrous. This is the sort of PC bullshit that gives Star Trek a bad name.
All in all, this book was only slightly disappointing. Having the chance now to read Bennett’s two Titan novels along with Greater than the Sum, which was specifically written to bridge two novels, it isn’t hard to conclude that he is a much better author when he has no fixed endpoint to adjust everything to. In fact, I wonder with his affinity and talent for world building if he wouldn’t be better suited to working in a different medium, perhaps creating worlds for a video game. Over a Torrent Sea continues the Titan saga about as well as can be expected.
It was pointed out to me yesterday morning that Star Trek author David Mack had read my reviews of his Destiny trilogy and was writing about it in his LiveJournal account. (You can read the relevant reviews here, here, and here.) I am grateful for any author to take the time and read my thoughts on their book, even in this case, where the reviews were negative. 
I intended to comment in Mack’s LJ, but he preemptively blocked me from posting (I don’t believe I’ve ever commented there previously). Rather than wanting any sort of discussion, he aired his opinions not here, but in a format in which he can control which people can respond and whether what they say will be visible for others. There is of course nothing wrong with this, but if I do believe that if one is going to work in a censored forum, it ought to be made aware to those who post there.
Rather than respond directly to a single one of my numerous criticisms, he instead pulled quotes and listed them, often losing the context and therefore meaning of the words themselves. For example, when I wrote that ‘nothing much happens’ in Mere Mortals, I then explain the progress of the various storylines to defend such a statement. I will admit that my comment on his surprising ability to ‘resist prison-style lesbianism’ may have been out of line, yet other than this I stand by each of my criticisms. It would have been nice to read a response to specific points rather than a rant.
In the comments of his post, Mack implies that I accuse him of being juvenile and racist in my reviews. That is not true. I specifically refer to certain examples in Mack’s prose that I felt were juvenile and racist. Having a character shit her pants when an alien plays an impossibly low musical note, in my opinion, is juvenile. And referring to a character as having ‘Eurasian features’ seems no different than describing a character as having ‘African features,’ which may not be racist (in the politically charged sense of the word, at least) but does focus exclusively on race and ethnicity at the cost of individual description. (I did find it amusing that Mack left out the part about a character shitting her pants when he pulled the quote from my review.) And I know literally dozens of people to whom English is a second language, and none of them have a problem mastering the words ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Just because Scotty did it in the 1960s television show does not mean that it should be done today.
Mack also called my review of Keith DeCandido’s A Singular Destiny ‘fellatorily effusive,’ striking through that apparently after Keith complained (of course, striking through something is basically the equivalent of doing nothing in such an instance). He adds that no disrespect was meant to Keith, implying that disrespect was specifically meant for me. Taking a swipe at my sexuality (again, something rather juvenile), he basically asserts that my review of A Singular Destiny didn’t reflect my true opinions, but instead was written as a way to ingratiate myself with DeCandido. The truth is that I barely even know Keith, and he was apparently unaware of my review until the link was posted by Mack. In fact, while I did like the novel, I don’t believe my review was effusive, as would be apparent to anyone who reads it. Mack quotes from the review: ‘A Singular Destiny … goes a long way to making something worthwhile after the mess that was David Mack’s Destiny trilogy.’ Yet the entire line from the review reads as such: ‘A Singular Destiny is an entertaining if slightly flawed novel that goes a long way to making something worthwhile after the mess that was David Mack’s Destiny trilogy.’ Calling a novel slightly flawed in summation doesn’t seem all that effusive to me.
I’d be happy to continue this discussion with Mack or anyone, assuming the conversation could remain civil. As always, this forum will remain an open one, with the only restrictions being on personal attacks against myself or others. I am appreciative that Mack took the time to read my reviews of his work, and as I have been trying to gain a greater readership here, his links were appreciated. I have zero interest in creating some sort of feud here for may reasons: for one, I just don't care enough, and two, I surely have better uses of my time.
I've reread the reviews a few times, and I don’t think anything I wrote was personally insulting to Mack. I would also add that bad reviews are a part of the business, and if one and one’s publishers are happy with their work, it might be best to take comfort in that (for that is all that is really important) rather than to search through the Internet looking for reviews.
Following up on the events of Destiny, Keith R.A. DeCandido does an excellent job in A Singular Destiny describing and contextualizing the events of that trilogy on the broader populace of the Federation and surrounding powers. That said, I was a bit disappointed by one aspect of the novel while simultaneously being cautiously optimistic about the future direction of the fiction line. In discussing these two points, I will be spoiling the book to some degree, so readers beware.
The novel is told primarily through the perspective of Sonek Pran, a history professor from Mars whose four grandparents are from different species, something that is brought up constantly. Pran previously worked for a Federation president and is called back into service by President Bacco’s chief of staff. Ferried around by Captain Ezri Dax in the Aventine, Pran is surprisingly successful in not only completing his assignments but also in just about everything else he attempts, whether it be cheering up the crew by starting a jam session on his banjo to talking a Romulan into laying down his disruptor against orders.
In all, I felt Pran was presented as a man who is good at anything and never screws up. His only real mistake, violating orders from Dax, ends up providing a crucial clue to solving the great mystery of the novel. Without that action, the characters never would have been led to the climax. As a result, his presentation failed to really resonate with me because he didn’t seem like a real person, only a collection of interesting habits and traits. His character was a refreshing change, and the focus on galactic politics somewhat separate from Starfleet was much appreciated, but it just wasn’t enough to take a good novel, which this certainly is, to the next level.
However, I was surprised and a bit excited for the future of the fiction line with the introduction of the Typhon Pact at this novel’s conclusion. With the Federation and Klingon Empire both decimated in the aftermath of Destiny, a Pact of several space-faring nations assemble into a government that seems to be akin to the European Union to some extent. Made up of the Gorn, Kinshaya, Romulan Empire, Tholians, and others, the Pact at the end of this novel is said to be bigger and more powerful that either the Federation or Klingons, and perhaps bigger than the two combined.
This is the sort of galactic shakeup that to be honest something like Destiny would probably create. In the face of dominating control form one or several groups, why would it take so long for a group of somewhat like-minded nations to join together to increase their power and influence. In fact, as the Federation loses the ability to protect some of its outlying worlds, it would make sense that they might align with such a power. The development of the Typhon Pact very well could provide the changed atmosphere and ability to tell broader more consequential stories that were promised before Destiny debuted.
That said, with the entities making up the Pact coming from so-called ‘evil’ worlds that really only have their distaste for the Federation in common, I am afraid that what we will end up seeing is the sort of corny ‘evil for evil’s sake’ group that one would expect from a 1970s comic book. I’m not all that interested in reading about a group that is the antithesis of the Federation, but about a group that has its own agendas that may be contrary often to what our heroes believe, but for good reasons.
A Singular Destiny is an entertaining if slightly flawed novel that goes a long way to making something worthwhile after the mess that was David Mack’s Destiny trilogy. Keith DeCandido did what I thought was near impossible: get me interested in the future of the Star Trek novel line.
The third and final book in the much-hyped Destiny trilogy, David Mack’s Lost Souls is the tightest and best done of the three. There isn’t much extraneous material here, and he does an adequate job of resolving the each of the storylines. However, the overall narrative was disappointing and unfulfilling, marking a new and unexciting direction for the future of ST novels.
As I predicted in my review of Mere Mortals, I pretty much knew where this book was going before I re
ad it. The plot threads are so visible that any fool could tug on them slightly and see where they were going to end up. The Caeliar dispatched of the Borg. Hernandez had more to do with the resolution of the galactic crisis than any of the main characters. And as the thousands of Borg ships begin to attack known worlds, the only casualties seem to be a bunch of book-only characters that no one was using anyway and a bunch of third-rate planets that are more names than places.
The most interesting section was the flashback to the Caeliar and human survivors of Mantilis. Though they didn’t seem to be thrown back even close to far enough to account for the rapid expansion of the Borg, Mack led the reader on an interesting journey even though we all knew where it was heading in the end. I was a bit disappointed that though we saw the birth of the Borg, we didn’t really see what made them evolve from merely using the catoms of the Caeliar to more obvious machinery that we recognize them with today.
Just like the lack of meaningful destruction on a planetary scale, any ships that might resonate with a reader are likewise spared. Voyager is the only ship out of dozens that survives the initial Borg attack, and it’s just damaged enough to not have a meaningful role to play here. Klag’s Gorkon is severely disabled, though it too seems to have escaped any lasting damage. And the da Vinci seems to now be under the command of Captain Gomez, and it managed to elude the Borg by vanishing a planet.
Riker seems to have no purpose I this book at all. After delivering Hernandez to Dax and Picard, he basically just sits around and chastises himself for leaving his away team and serves as a sounding board for Picard. Mack writes the sort of emotional scenes that remind one of Christopher Bennett, with Picard’s big emotional discussion with Riker making the reader cringe with its earnestness. Why it is so hard to realize that people tend to lie to themselves and ferociously defend their actions I’ll never know. But it seems the case that in the current ST fiction, characters quickly realize what is wrong with them and magically get better. That’s merely the beginning of the journey, not the whole thing, and it is insulting to read that complex characters like Picard have such unbelievable epiphanies.
Mack also has a tendency to write that characters have ‘Eurasian features’ or know perfect English aside from saying ‘ya’ and ‘nein’ for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. I’m not sure what Eurasian features are; it tends to seem a racist description to me. And painting foreigners as too ethnic to remember simple words in English but know how to say ‘trilateral hyperfusion’ is idiotic. Hell, I know the words for ‘yes and no’ in half a dozen languages, none of which I can speak fluently.
But the biggest issue I have with this trilogy is that for something intended to shake up the status quo, it does anything but. If the Federation is supposed to be truly decimated, then eradicate Earth, or at least Vulcan. Don’t wipe out Deneva. Kill characters that actually mean something to the readers; the biggest death in the trilogy was Owen Paris. And if you are presenting the Borg attack to end all Borg attacks, maybe you should explain why they didn’t just come with 7000 ships fifteen years ago.
It seems the series was merely an editorial mandate for a future direction for the post-Nemesis fiction: tear down the Federation so that we can tell stories about rebuilding. But a huge problem here is that there was already a situation that begged for rebuilding after the Dominion War, and it wasn’t exploited at all. Couple this with the unbelievable pace in which situations that would normally take years or decades have been resolved in mere months, such as the integration of Bajor into the Federation, and its hard to believe that the fallout from Destiny will handled in a reasonable manner.
My recommendation to shake up the line: editorial change. The primary editor of the series, Margaret Clark, has consistently made poor storytelling decisions and shown poor oversight for coordinating projects. If you want to take a bold new direction, take a note from college football and fire the head coach.
Ever since The Empire Strikes Back, the middle story in a trilogy almost always seems to end with our heroes facing seemingly unconquerable odds that we know they will find a way to overcome. Actually, it’s probably been around a lot longer, but I am a man of my generation. Anyway, it comes as no surprise at the end of Mere Mortals when the shit has hit the fan and the whole future of the known ST universe seems in doubt.
While this general principle doesn’t spell disaster for a storyline on its own, I can’t imagine how David M
ack’s Destiny trilogy is going to have a satisfying conclusion. Incorporating elements from every television series as well as a handful of the novels, he has constructed a plot that actually is able to sustain it all. Unfortunately, there are visible seams where he’s sewn it together.
Nothing much happens in this book. Of the three basic storylines, only Captain Hernandez’s long history with the Caeliar has any real movement, and essentially that’s just to catch the reader up to the present day, so the final book can wrap everything up. The Enterprise and Aventine are at the explosion site of Erigol, which has spawned a cluster of hyperdimensional portals, one of which the Borg is using to launch their attacks on the Federation. Their mission: find out which pathway and collapse it. Of course, it’s not that simple; there has to be a third book. Titan is trapped at New Erigol in the same manner that Columbia was in the last book.
At the conclusion, as anyone with half a brain cold have predicted, the Borg haven’t been stopped but are in the process of launching a massive attack on known Federation and Allied space. Yawn.
The worst part of the whole scenario is that with Hernandez’s powers via the Caeliar, it seems probable that she will be instrumental in defeating the Borg. Our heroes are going to essentially sit back and watch helplessly. To anyone reading the first two books, it is obvious that the Caeliar and Borg share an origin, and with the stated power of the Caeliar to displace entire civilizations, it is all but certain that the Borg will be displaced to another galaxy.
Mack’s juvenile sensibilities are on display again, too. Hernandez has a mishap with a musical instrument, playing a note so low it causes her to shit her pants. Ha ha. It amazes me that he was able to resist prison-style lesbianism as the four women are trapped together without men for decades. But even in a meaningless fight between the crews of Enterprise and Aventine with the Hirogen, Mack is able to write compelling hand-to-hand fight scenes. This is his real strength, but unfortunately something better suited to a visual medium.
The astropolitical ramifications of events are a refreshing change as well. Too often it seems that events happen in a vacuum, but here we see manipulation and bartering that make up the best of politics in any realm. Though I am not a huge fan of aping The West Wing, Mack stayed away from that with President Bacco, and she seems like her own character for the first time here.
There are a bunch of little things to nitpick. One, even the grunts on Enterprise are officers. Why Starfleet never has infantry makes no sense, especially in wartime. Hernandez doesn’t sound like the actress who portrayed her at all, though that may be the one-dimensional writing of the television show than a fault of Mack.
But what really stands out, as in the last book, is why Ezri Dax is captain of a cutting edge ship. There is technology on Aventine so secret that not even Geordi has clearance to know about it. Surely Starfleet didn’t just build one of these. If these new ships are so powerful, where are the rest of them? It’s blindingly obvious that for plot purposes Mack needed a ship that could do all sorts of things an average ship couldn’t. So he invents this new ship to fill that need, even though ramifications of the new class’s construction aren’t considered.
So we have a largely plot based story that is massive, yet it would be easy to sit down and graph the outline that was probably used. And since one is able to do this before the third book has even been released, it doesn’t seem likely that there will be any surprises when Lost Souls comes out. Perhaps Destiny is going to change the ST universe forever, but it seems to me that mot of the changes won’t really affect our characters all that much.
Damn shame.
As I am still trying to figure out what I want this site is evolving into, I realized that I don’t really want to write reviews of everything I read. But what I do want is to respond with a post on most of what I read, whether that is a review or just a starting point for a discussion about something else. For my own clarity as much as everyone else’s, I wanted to say that the books, television, occasional movie, and other readings that headline these entries are merely the beginning of my thinking.
David Mack’s Gods of Night is the first novel in the supposedly earth-shattering Destiny trilogy, an event so large it could change the face of ST literature forever. Sounds corny, but that’s what has been promised. Intended to be a crossover event, we get no crossover at all here: Picard is on the Enterprise, Riker is across the quadrant on Titan, and new captain Ezri Dax is in the Gamma Quadrant. And we also see what happens to Columbia after the events of Kobayashi Maru, though the same battle in the two novels couldn’t have been presented any more differently. You’d think the novels had two different editors. But they didn’t.
The Titan thread carries on the character development from that series quite well. The Enterprise one carries on from it's series too, but not so well. Due to the very good work in the former and the atrocious character assassination in the latter, one might just chalk this up to Mack doing the best with what he had. The previous ‘Enterprise after Nemesis’ books have been pretty fucking bad.
The Dax thread doesn’t work. Stuff happens that needs to happen for the plot, but Ezri is the only prominent of the DS9 Relaunch to appear and what’s happened to her since Fearful Symmetry is played so close to the vest that her inclusion seems to be a token one.
What really bugs me is how Ezri Dax became a captain: both her captain on the Aventine and her first officer were killed, so she got the promotion. Why didn’t they bring in someone else? The explanation given is that the advanced officer ranks were thinned out mightily during the Dominion War five years before. Plausible, until one looks at the number of Starfleet officers in this very series who are at the commander rank or higher and aren’t in a command:
• Worf• Dr. Crusher
• Christine Vale
• Tuvok• Deanna Troi• Geordi LaForge• Miranda Kadhota (maybe, sources differ)• Two additional commanders who are watch officers on Enterprise
Assuming that Starfleet is at fifty percent of its ideal troop level four years after the Dominion War, which I think is granting more than has been demonstrated, the fact that nine commanders are currently stationed to only two ships, some with over a decade of service at the highest levels of day-to-day ship operations, makes me unable to believe that there aren't dozens, if not hundreds of people more qualified. And not only that, but then Dax got to replace her whole command crew with more inexperienced officers. That just doesn’t make any sense to me.
I’ve written before about my issues with the Enterprise crew between the end of the Dominion War and Nemesis before, so I won’t rehash those arguments here. But such decisions make it incredibly hard to suspend my disbelief.
But a recent online discussion with some friends made me realize that this isn’t such a clear-cut issue. Gods of Night would be a difficult novel for someone only familiar with the television shows and movies to pick up and really get. Picard and Crusher are married and having a kid? Wasn’t Ezri Dax an ensign counselor in DS9? Didn’t Janeway kill the Borg forever in Endgame? There’s not a lot that someone would find familiar, or even probable. I’m not saying this is a fault of Mack per se, but the inability of an outside reader to be able to penetrate the complex continuity of the novels is somewhat alarming for someone who is a fan and sees the broadening of the fanbase as good for the fiction line.
That said, having familiar characters from the shows remain together does reinforce to some degree a sense of continuity for an outsider to lean on until he figured things out. Maybe it would make more in-universe sense to have Worf, Tuvok, and others captaining their on ships, but such a move would likely alienate readers.
Perhaps I am being too hard on the creators at Pocket Books, especially as much of their work has been constrained by the canon issues of Nemesis. It’s sort of a lose-lose situation.
As for Gods of Night, it was a better written novel than I had expected from Mack, but it all seemed to be set-up for the next (or possibly final) book. Basically the first third of a 1200 page book rather than the first book of a three-book trilogy. He did well with what he had, but I kind of think that I figured out the whole Borg aspect already. More to come when I get around to the rest of Destiny.
I live in one of the bigger state capitals around, and I work downtown near both the Capitol and City Hall. So I have firsthand knowledge of how many people it actually takes to run these governments: not just the elected, but also all the people that assist them and help run the infrastructure. I’d have to conservative say that several thousand people are needed each day just to run the upper echelons of the bureaucracy.
I say this because the new Coalition of Planets is one of the main plot points in Kobayashi Maru by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels. The Coalition is made up of four planets, Earth, Vulcan, Tellar, and Andor, each with pop
ulations upwards of a several billion if not more. The state of Texas needs several thousand in just the top positions; the Coalition of Planets apparently only needs about fourteen. And I could go into about a hundred other reasons why this governmental body makes absolutely no practical sense, like why everyone else has an ambassador but Earth uses its Prime Minister for the same role, but what’s the point?
Politics makes for good stories; if you don’t believe me, turn on a freaking television. For most of the existence of Star Trek, the Federation government has been shown as some sort of monolithic body where everything works right and there is little dissension between members. That’s moronic, but beside the point here. The Coalition consists of four planets, none of whom trust each other, some of which outright hate each other. Political tension at the time of war should be the cornerstone of this post-Enterprise series. Even at such a small stage, the players should be wide-ranging with varying agendas. Maybe it’s impossible to show all of this, but rather than just giving us the viewpoint of two people from Earth, maybe we could have at least some sense of the political consequences Samuels would have on his own planet: we get none in this book.
The plot of the novel works well enough, I suppose. Most of the elements seemed to function to set the stage for next year’s novel by Martin on the Romulan War. And to a large extent this worked for me; though I have been dissatisfied with their work over the last few books, I am interested to see where the story goes from here. However, I hope the writing gets better. The prose is horrible, almost painful to read at times. Here’s an example:
After Archer signed off with Gardner and returned to the bridge, the Starfleet Academy cadets' code for imponderable mysteries kept swirling through his mind.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Mentally translating those time-honored military placeholders into less polite nonmilitary parlance, he thought, What. The. Fuck.
Why would he think something and then think the explanation. It’s not as though third-person limited perspective is something hard to master, yet it seems beyond the authors at times. In fact, the novel reads as though it is a slightly polished rough draft. I can’t imagine that this book got much editorial oversight, something that is becoming hard to ignore as at least half of the fiction line is overseen by an seemingly incompetent editor.
Apparently the passage quoted above is the first use of the word ‘fuck’ in a ST book. You know, if I were in some of these insane situations, I'd curse a hell of a lot more than they do. It was a laugh line, but Data’s ‘Shit!’ in Generations might have been the only believable part of that movie.
Martin & Mangels also have the annoying habit of name-dropping other authors and editors into the narrative for no reason. It’s distracting and causes me to lose my suspension of disbelief. And at one point the Vulcans provide a ship with some advanced parts to help it go faster. One of those parts: the flux capacitor. Give me a fucking break.
At least the characterization of Archer was done well. It’s hard to believe anyone would act that way, but it was how the captain was played in all of seasons three and four. I didn't buy it then, nor do I now, but at least it's consistent.
Kobayashi Maru is a mediocre Star Trek novel, but it’s not unreadable. You know, I started to write merely an unfavorable review and it turned into an evisceration. Let’s just hope the Romulan War book is somewhat better, though it's hard to imagine how it couldn't be.
Echoes and Refractions is the second collection of three short novels focusing on some aspect of an alternate Star Trek universe. As with most collections, it’s a mixed bag, but I did enjoy it more than the first one.
The first entry is The Chimes at Midnight by Geoff Trowbridge, whose work is fairly unfamiliar to me. I believe that he had a nice story about Picard delivering the letter Admiral Jarok wrote to his family at the end of ‘The Defect
or.’ Anyway, the premise here is pretty straightforward. The TAS episode ‘Yesteryear’ depicted a timeline in which Spock died as a boy and was replaced on the Enterprise by an Andorian commander named Thelin. Trowbridge follows this universe from the end of The Wrath of Khan along through the rest of the movie timelines.
While it is certainly an interesting premise, I think it was flawed. Rather than reading the story and judging it on its own merits, it felt like Trowbridge just wanted to show how fucked up the Federation might become because Spock wasn’t there; Thelin was. Kind of like It’s a Wonderful Life, where the reader sees how fucked up the universe would be had Spock not reached adulthood.
There is some nice character work done, especially with David Marcus, who survives his encounter with Klingons on Genesis, and Saavik. Their burgeoning relationship in The Search for Spock is now able to be explored in more depth, and I found this Saavik, as depicted within the relationship, to be much more interesting than the ‘actual’ Saavik. Sarek’s grief for his own lost son is truly moving, yet this subtle work is not apparent at the novel’s conclusion, when the standard noble sacrifice proved to be more laughable than affecting.
One final note, on the title cribbed from Shakespeare. It has been a while since I read Henry IV, Part II, but I didn’t find the situation presented in this novel, nor the scene near the end with characters parrying each other by quoting the Bard, to have any greater relevance to the play. It’s an allusion that didn’t work for me b/c I immediately thought of the play and could rationalize what the author was expecting me to see. I’ll admit that I could be completely wrong about this and totally have missed the point, but it has been bothering me ever since I finished the story.
Keith R.A. DeCandido provides a refreshing change of pace with A Gutted World. At first it appeared that there was no single divergent point, but as my friend Steve Mollmann pointed out, everything before the Cardassian withdrawal from Bajor is pretty much the same. Though not much attention is called to it, this must be the turning point. Kira Nerys is forced to escape from her labor camp to bring vital information to the Federation. A war concerning the large Alpha Quadrant powers in unleashed within the opening chapters, and as always DeCandido presents scenes from all sides of the conflict, be they Romulan, Human, or Klingon. I hesitate to reveal anymore of the plot lest I spoil it, but the story moves in an entertaining if predictable manner. DeCandido as always has competent prose and nails the characterizations, but the novel didn’t resonate with me, didn’t say anything broader about the Star Trek universe, merely provided an hour and a half of diversion. Not bad, but at least entries like Leisner’s made me question how well I actually knew characters as prominent as Kirk.
In a story like this it seems like a requirement to squeeze as many alternate versions of people into the narrative just to remark on how different they are, so perhaps I shouldn’t chastise DeCandido for indulging. But most of these cameos were unnecessary and distracting for me. And with the more obscure characters comes explanations about why they are relevant to be seen here. Plus, I can’t keep Romulan politics straight, so dropping in Narviat and Charvanek just confused the hell out of me. I’d like to see the ‘less is more’ approach taken in the future.
Chris Roberson finishes the collection with Brave New World, a novel revolving around how different the universe would have been if Soong had created many more androids than merely Data. Many of these androids were conscripted into Starfleet, where they had little rights. After being granted second-class citizenship, Data and man
y other androids just disappear and aren’t heard from until ten years later, where our story begins. Also, Ira Graves in this universe was able to successfully upload his consciousness into a positronic brain, and now it is commonplace for Federation citizens to do the same as they near death.
The plot of Brave New World is nothing spectacular, and ends with an unbelievable call for brinksmanship between the various empires. But where Roberson excels is in the presentation of the ethical quandaries artificial life would have in these circumstances. One character is an incredibly old man who uploaded himself into a positronic body, but mourns the loss of his wife of many years, for she passed away just before the technology was introduced. The restrictions placed on the citizenship of androids have their roots in good intentions; it is easy to see why Starfleet wouldn’t want to lose control of the production of further artificial life. And the way other civilizations use their less advanced android life as slavery makes for easy ethical critique.
What we have here is what science fiction can sometimes do best: have an easier conversation about something of primal importance by making the conversation metaphorical. Brave New World allows us to explore the ethics of creating artificial sentient life in our own universe by telling a story set in a completely fictional one. Easily the most satisfying of the six short novels.
I look forward to the next collection in the series, currently set for November of next year.
