Spoilers Star Trek: Prey Trilogy - general discussion thread

Yes. Compared to that, reconciling the short story I just recently wrote about "Aunt Lucy's backstory" with the one I'd written some years ago about "Aunt Lucy takes Jennifer flying, and tells her some of the backstory" is child's play.

 

On this topic, I have some bad news about your Sherman's Planet namedrop and the 2381 Borg Invasion...



(Granted, I guess it's easy enough to say it was recolonized after a la Deneva in the Romulan War. )

 

Indeed, that was the intention. Anything there would be new construction, and probably lightly trafficked enough that it's good for a secret meeting. The Circle would not have wanted to meet at the same place twice (otherwise someone like Korgh would have found them sooner). Neither mention in Prey really felt like the place to throw in an invasion reference, but we did get into how quickly H'atoria was recolonized. Sherman's Planet wouldn't be its old self, but might have the start of a settlement five years out.

(All that said, I'm pretty sure the Circle would be able to use their magic to protect their favorite watering holes from the Borg. Could be a fun short story.)

 

KotOR, right? Which issue was that in?

 

In the Adasca story (which ironically fits this thread, given he was my first industrialist chess-master type character). The series had lost its scheduled artist, and the fill-in, while quite talented, was dropped into the middle of the most complicated, character- and hardware-filled storyline we ever did. So he didn't know what classes to avoid and as we were running late and the ship was in the foreground it couldn't be blacked out. It was partially my fault anyway for writing such a dense storyline that year that it was killing the artists trying to get it done.

I think I rationalized it as being a design that a manufacturer had used in ancient times and kept in its files, as it had already been established (for better or worse) that corporations lasted millennia, sometimes under the same names. And that kind of works, since in the SWEU the sense was that tech had plateaued in the KOTOR era, staying about the same until leaping ahead with the Death Star. So it was sort of feasible... sort of.

All comes under the heading of These Things Happen. I'm reminded always of the movie poster that came with the Star Wars soundtrack, which had two Millennium Falcons. Or four -- there are two notched ships that I could never tell what they were...

 

So I picked up book three on my lunch break today and once I've finished the latest Reacher novel, I'll crack that open.

 

Haha, funny, my elementary-school art teacher had that exact same poster up in her classroom, and I spent a few years just studying the damn thing by eyesight back in the mid-'80s trying to figure out what the hell ship-classes some of those were supposed to be (along with trying to figure out why an entire fleet of Millennium Falcons were participating in the Death Star battle...).

Of course, this was way back when about all there was in the way of licensed, offscreen reference material was that 1st Edition of A Guide to the Star Wars Universe by Raymond J. Velasco, and maybe one or two other things, so the results were pretty...inconclusive, you might say.

 

And the thing is, it's a beautiful poster -- and free -- so as a consumer I probably shouldn't have worried as much about what was what. But I guess microanalysis was part of the fun.

(I guess it technically wasn't free, but people kept stealing them from the record albums. My older sister worked in the music section of a department store in 1977 and they were dealing with that constantly. I wound up with three of them somehow myself.)

 

Yes, I always liked it better than the Hildebrandt poster. Then again, I liked my colonoscopy better than I liked the Hildebrandt poster (I have no clue why it was so damn popular, especially given as how it was a terrible likeness of Hamill and Fisher.) I got my soundtrack album after they stopped including the poster, and had to buy mine at a Creation convention.

 

Well, it came out before the movie was released, so few people at the time would've known or cared about the facial likenesses of two virtually unknown actors. It was more about selling the idea of the movie, and I think it did that effectively, emulating the cover styles of the sword-and-planet pulp magazines that inspired it and showcasing the juxtaposition of nostalgic swashbuckling heroics with "futuristic" robots and space fighters. That soundtrack album poster above focused exclusively on the space-battle side, and that isn't as balanced. The goal was to promote an unknown film to a new audience, to capture the feel of the film in one image, and I think the Hildebrandt poster did that effectively. Art isn't always about photorealism. Often the impression is more important than the details.

 

Ah, but as a "visual synopsis" (for lack of a better term) of the whole movie, the Tommy Jung one-sheet (who was riffing on whom?) was both successful and a better likeness of the characters, as was the White/Struzan 1978 re-release one-sheet.

 

^If you say so. I'm not that familiar with it all myself.

 

We've sort of veered into another franchise here, but I agree on the Jung theatrical poster being the better of the two (the wide version of that one is even better). My sister was once again the hero, moving on to work at a theater in time to get me that one -- and my favorite of all movie posters, the Gone With the Wind style Empire Strikes Back poster. Would that I had not been an adolescent, stupidly pinning them up on my wall and making holes in the corners! (All the posters mentioned are here; the Russian variants are completely insane).

Looks like Jung did do a 25th anniversary Trek painting, though googling it just now was the first time I've seen it.

 

Or Valentine's Day/Easter could be occurring during the book.

 

Hmm. A Nausicaan with two brain cells to rub together. And a job that doesn't involve breaking things.

Q: How many Nausicaans does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Only one, but you need at least a whole case of lightbulbs.

 

My main criticism of this was that this felt very similar to The Fall, only a few months in-world after the events there. I know it has been three years since that series's publication, but nevertheless there should be much more connections being drawn. Or the fallout of both of these events should be the threat both Ishan and Korgh represented.

There are other concerns I had with the trilogy - really it felt too narrow in focus for something so huge, so threatening. Why did Riker never talk to the President's office or the Federation Foreign Minister (or Alexander)? Why did we not know what Akaar or indeed the politicians thought? Why was Martok so passive, until that nice bedroom scene? I think perhaps there is a bigger problem in Martok's characterisation since Left Hand of Darkness - he can't be the hero anymore, he is a ruler of a huge empire - but I wish there was more scenes from his perspective (or indeed any). But what does he even do? I guess Korgh and others are perhaps right to critique him! And apparently he has two eyes 'Martok's eyes narrowed'!

And why did we only keep seeing these same three ships - the same three as in Destiny - when there really is a huge fleet?

Korgh was interesting! I hope there will be more of him - he is ideologically unsound, but some of his perspectives are interesting. Is the KE becoming a weak ally of the Federation - like some British have certainly worried about the UK's relationship to the US. I like how Kersh doesn't come around to how retrograde her own opinions are - she still really dislikes the Federation. I also hope we see Tragg and Tengor - middle management chumps as they are.

I also liked the way JJM distinguished between house and defence force fleets. And how he did make the Klingons problematic - they have slaves and oppressed peoples. I do wonder how the Federation's more liberal members copes with this.

I did not really like the trickster characters tbh - they felt silly and cliche actors, like Q without the nuance of John de Lancie or various authors at play. They were thematic, and indeed were something of a Shakespearian fool - and like those characters, they could be too on-the-nose. But then, perhaps they should be - so it does not matter that I did not like or dislike them. But still ... not again, please!

Rene speaks! Excellent! It's crazy to think these people have been crewed together in some case for decades. The air must be mighty stale on some of these ships loved the joke about so many commanders on Titan!

Also I wish Leishman and Geordi would be an on-off couple again, as Destiny played around with! It was funny thinking the last scene with them together I could remember was her aggressively hitting on him.

And Worf did not remember Choudhury - that was actually very disappointing - his only significant relationship since Jadzia and lasting almost as long (2-3 years, admittedly on and off)! Can that be added in to your edits, JJM?

Overall I enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing if it leads to more things!

 

Thanks!

I generally try not to address specific likes or dislikes (a reason I don't go into review threads, where the work is to speak for itself) but I addressed the number of ships question earlier in this thread, as well as that Riker does hear often from back home, in addition to his on-page interaction with Akaar in Book 1. It just wasn't narratively necessary to see those conversations, since those in the rear had no way to impact the outcome. It was enough for Riker to communicate to the others that the brass was upset, and that everyone's careers were riding on their performance.

Having mentioned that, I don't mind sharing a couple of things about how my approach has evolved as I've gotten further into writing for the franchise. I've quickly found that "phone call" sequences are vast in number; just flip through the book and look at all the italics. Natural, given how many people are spread across the cosmos -- but it's usually better to summarize some of those conversations when feasible to get characters into motion. My practice in writing has also always been to use the smallest number of characters that will do the job, and even fewer POV characters; this runs up against the Trek dynamic of large bridge crews, which multiplies as you add ships. I look for a happy medium when I can.

Worf surely remembers Jasminder, but as I recall the line was about spouses and it would have necessitated an extra sentence or two of elaboration, so that was a deliberate decision not to go there. Felt like the pre-battle angst quota was already surpassed by then as it was.

And thanks for the heads-up on Martok, that's one eye that slipped by!

 

I sort of chuckled to myself this morning when I read the Martok "two eyes" line.

 

Spoiler: As "Reverend" Jim Ignatowski from Taxi might say,

I . . . don't . . . know why . . . I read . . . these books:
Sociopathic Betazoids . . . Orion Breen . . . Getting chased by discommendated Klingons . . .
I get enough of that in real life.

 

Spoiler: As "Commander" Kruge might say,

(Seriously, that's some range that guy has. And considerate, too, lending Kirk's crew one of his spare time machines.)