Thanks for clearing that up for me Btw Christopher, about to start reading "Greater than the Sum" in the next couple of hours.
It sounds like I may need to get that book. Now as for bizarre moments I generally like The Return [ducks behind table], but the fact that the Borg have a lever that can blow up a significant chunck of their home planet (I mean come on they can't be that stupid) and that a Defiant-class starship can gut a Warbird using just manuvering thrusters (I though that was just gas they blow out to move the ship sub-impuse so how that can cut through starship hull is beyond me,where as impulse engines could probably do it if one was close enough given that the expell extremely hot plasma.) is just a little too much.
There's an overweight sloppy Vulcan, and at one point the people are singing a song that is a riff on RAWHIDE or WAGON TRAIN but with different lyrics. It is kind of like MAD magazine, there's a lot to catch in Ford's trek work (I like FINAL REFLECTION better by about a mile, but even there the first chapter is really hard work to keep things straight.)
How fast was the thruster exhaust moving relative to the Warbird? Kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared. At relativistic speeds, a speck of dust would hit with the force of a missile. That's why starships need navigational deflectors. You're talking about a book co-written by the Reeves-Stevenses, and it's usually a safe bet in an R-S book that the science is pretty solid.
wait you CAN gut a Warbird with thrusters, cool I did not know that,okay then I take back my complaint about that. Now could someone come up with a good reason for the lever of doom. And now that I think about it how the hell Starfleet could design the Defiant-class to be compatable with an alien drive system they have never seen before.
I love you. Because I have never seen the appeal of this book, and everyone seems to think it's genius. I tried to read it. Ick. And that owned. For me: Engines of Destiny. Period. Completely. I read this book LAST YEAR and I'm still mind-blown by the sheer level of bad. The entire book is a walk into stupidity and bizarre.
You're going to laugh at me...but you may do better with Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, and then try The Wounded Sky again. Ignore the fact that Young Wizards is...well...supposedly a young-adult series--the writing is really, REALLY good. Crazy as this sounds, reading those books will give you an idea of some of the themes to be on the lookout for and some of the ideas running through her mind as she writes her Trek novels. Oh...and you'll have some cool books to share with your kids when they get older, something that'll really challenge them. (Once they've read Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series...after that, they should be ready.)
The Dilthium! PSA had me in stitches. And all of the songs are riffs off of real songs. There was a website that tells you which ones. I'll try to find it.
Therin's been promising for months that he'd get to work on compiling a list of the songs from HMFJTP... we're still waiting with bated breath. So far, the only two that have been definitively identified are the "Theme from Rawhide" (for "Rollin', rollin', rollin'" on p. 124) and "Falling In Love Again" (for "Falling apart again" on p. 161).
One of them was "Just a Gigolo" (The I ain't got no body) one. And I recognized an HMS Pinafore song.
Okay, that's progress. Maybe if this effort to identify the songs gets seriously underway, we should start a separate, possibly pinned thread for it, though there are perhaps too many pinned threads already.
I really really want to try and get this in print for our Humor in Star Trek issue upcoming after the movie - anyone else who knows the songs, please holler or PM me with what they are! Paul
Having Spock come up with a system in his spare time which can accurately and flawlessly predict all of Earth's weather in Spock's World strained credulity for me... In retrospect, the 1988-vintage BBS being used onboard the Enterprise in that novel also comes off as very dated (not that I have an issue with any form of BBS ).
Though I do have to wonder if, as technology moves forward, some people will still like text-based communications? But I suppose that's a whole different thread for the Trek Tech or Science and Technology forum.
I think the existence of this board proves that. After all, we've had telephones far longer than we've had the Internet. There are always going to be benefits to writing stuff down rather than speaking it aloud -- clarity, permanence, the chance to edit. The only reason correspondence in onscreen Trek is overwhelmingly verbal is dramatic convenience.
Just look at how many gadgets are out there now based around text-messaging. Texting isn't going to die out, not so long as there's people that'd rather write it down or are concerned with people overhearing their conversation. As for weird Trek-lit moments: The novel novel Black Fire.