[Hartzilla2007]

[QUOTE=rfmcdpei;5310934]

ex Zane Gray wrote:

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Yes, that's how I felt too. You put some of it in better words that I did. I like what the book does offer a lot, but it just kept jumping so much in time out of need to cover the whole rest of the war, that the material doesn't have anywhere near the heft and resonance Beneath the Raptor's Wing did. That sheer, satisfying scope.[/QUOTE]

On reflection, me three, too.

In their conflict with the rest of known space, the Romulans make warp suicide runs on Coridan and Draylax that kill billions of people, additionally wrecking Galorndon Core, and using terraforming comet runs to hide Romulan fighters that--if they had gotten to Earth--would have destroyed more cities than just Madrid and Tunis. The Romulan Star Empire, in brief, is willing to destroy entire planets and billions of their inhabitants to achieve their way aims, in the case of Coridan staging a preemptive attack against the possibility of Coridanite technology reaching the rest of the Coalition. And they used a bioweapon to destroy the Haakonan species.

Billions of civilian dead on multiple planets in surprise attacks? It's no wonder that the Romulans have such bad PR.

rfmcdpei wrote:

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Duane's original version of the Rihannsu had the Earth-Romulan War be a defensive war from the Romulan side, with the Romulans' civilian populations being the one potentially at risk from a numerically and technologically superior opposing force. (Note that I said "potentially".) In FASA's RPG setting, the Romulan War was an expensive deep-space war, fought in a frontier region that seems to have lacked substantial Federation or Romulan civilian populations.

Enterprise and the novels established that, in contrast to the traditional depiction in literature of the Romulans as the weaker side, the Romulans were the stronger side. The RSE was the established interstellar power; Earth and the human sphere generally were up-and-coming powers. Only a very few of the Vulcans knew just how the Romulans were; the Romulans seem to have known everything. And the Romulans were able to handily fight wars on two fronts, with Haakona appearing to have been a power roughly equivalent to contemporary Earth.

This makes the particular ferocity of the Romulan campaigns all the more notable. If Romulans were the weaker side, the use of WMDs and attacks on civilian populations would make sense, but the Romulans resorted to these attacks as the stronger side.

Rather. I can readily believe that, in the timeline with Sisko but without Gabriel Bell, local space readily fell to the Romulans. Who else would have stopped them?

Yes.

(The IRS ambassador before the Borg invasion said that human-Romulan relations were long troubled, did he? Such a master of understatement.)

The willingness of the 22nd century Romulans to engage in genocidal attacks has plenty of implications.

On the positive side, it shows the amount of progress in Romulan ethics towards other civilizations: where Valdore was troubled by the scope fo the attack against Coridan's billions (not so much massacres of minor colony planets) and T'Met was outraged that Draylax's leaders were willing to expose their civilians to devastation by not acceding to Romulan demands, even the radical cabal behind Shinzon's coup was lukewarm to hostile to the idea of using thalaron weapons against Earth. Donatra was making use of common knowledge when she said that Romulans' hands would be covered with blood if Shinzon carried through his plans.

On the negative side, it reinforces the idea that genocidal tactics and technologies are de rigeur in the RSE's military. When Crusher learned about the thalaron radiation in Nemesis, I'm sure that she expected the thalaron projector was a weapon intended for use. Did Ael and K's't'lk and Scotty really fear that unlimited use of the Sunseed weapon could wreck the fabric of space and that the Romulan leadership didn't know about the possibility, or were they just being bleakly realistic? The idea that a Romulan leadership might authorize the use of hyperflare weapons against Sol (and Qo'Nos' sun) wouldn't have been implausible at all.

It's interesting to see that the Tomed tactic--the collision of a starship at high warp with a stationary object, with catastrophic results--has such a long pedigree. Going back to 2312, Vokar's actions would have been perfectly plausible to non-Romulan observers. ("A Romulan commander longing for the old days of empire piloted a starship at high warp into an enemy's targets? Can't be, he didn't kill enough civilians.")

And going way back to the discussion we had of the Borg invasion of 2381, it seems all the more plausible to me that the two Romulan states had stores of metaweapons that they used with little inhibition against the invaders. That's traditional Romulan military behaviour.

Well in Balance of Terror Spock believed that the Romulans probably were vicious bastards so what they did didn't suprise me and it explains why Kirk's orders were to prevent another war at all costs. I mean would you feel like wanting to go through that again or possibly and even worse conflict

Deranged Nasat wrote:

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^
Very good points. I really enjoy your insights on the Romulans, rfmcdpei. You're good at tying all the various portrayals together, giving a sense of their nation's history as one big tapestry.

Reading over our posts, I'm considering another potential missed opportunity in the reduction of The Romulan War to two books - the possibility of showing us POV-character Romulans who, even in this apparently vicious era, refused to buy into the expansionist mindset, or kept their hands as clean as they could in the circumstances. We do get a sense of that ruthless but genuine Romulan honour several times - for example, T'Met's distaste over Draylax, albeit her reservations being framed in a manner that accepts completely Imperial right and supremacy. But Romulans with moral convictions are one thing - what was absent here were Romulans who were willing to question if their culture's morals were truly admirable. That's an interesting departure from what we usually get in Trek lit, and this is related to my initial point that the portrayal of Romulans as a whole is tilted differently here. Elsewhere in the novels, for every Volskiar we had a Charvanek, for Dralath a Narviat, for Vokar a Kamemor, for Tal'aura a Donatra. Here, that balance of "butcher Romulan Vs noble Romulan" is missing - a sign of the times and the Romulans' role in the story, I'm sure, but it felt strange to me as a Trek reader. I guess with the reduced story length and the obvious need for focus on Romulan villains, there were only so many Romulan POV characters to go around, and there wasn't room to showcase any "shining light" of the Empire...

This isn't a complaint, I feel I should add. Just something that I felt should be commented on.

Well in the Enterprise three parter dealing with the Romulans Valdore mentioned that back when he was in the senate he questioned their expansion policy and he was kicked out of the senate for doing so. So I doubt many Romulans would publically question their expansion policies as they would want to avoid negative consequences. Also I think your question of why this times was different is answered when you consider for all the noble Romulans you listed they were either soon to become the head cheese, highly connected to the head cheese or in coming head cheese, or in rebellion against the head cheese.