But the cover for Fallen Gods is actually rather awful. The picture of Riker is just bland, the ship is not very well shown and the colors look hideous.
It seriously is. Unbelievably ugly. I understand having to make some compromises for budget constraints, but, DAMN!
^Well, at least they replaced the picture of the Ent-E with one of the Titan. Secondly, there are 3 reader reviews for Fallen Gods currently at Amazon.com. All 3 give it a 3/5 rating and none of them seem too satisfied with the read.
Almost finished and it's strictly average for me. There are parts I enjoyed, but other parts just felt a bit dull
It was average. I wanted some more explanations of some characters, but such was not to be. I don't expect Michael Martin to be surpassingly brilliant, so it was a good outing for him. With David Mack, Chris Bennett or Kirsten Beyer, I have higher expectations.
I'm not yet done with chapter one and I'm already finding it highly annoying. All those names with atrophies. Why can't we have easier to read names? Do Star Trek alien names and place names have to be long, complicated and have apostrophes? No, they do not. So stop making them such. It just annoys the reader. Unless this gets better, based on chapter one, I'd call it poor.
Lots of human personal and place names are long, complicated, and have apostrophes. Why should alien names be any different?
Personally, I don't mind or even like to work a little for my alieness, and - keeping in mind I still haven't read any of them - it sort of fits my idea of what Titan is supposed to be. And I love things like the clever way to typeset telepathic dialogues in Bester's The Demolished Man ...
Finished the book in short order...mixed feelings on this one... Before I get into it, for the record, I was among the many disappointed with Seize the Fire. My initial reaction was extreme disappointment, which was tempered after a second reading a few months later. But tempering "that sucked" is a slight improvement. Spoiler: So...Fallen Gods For what it's worth, the concept behind this version of Titan's "Alien of the week" had a LOT of potential...the science implications with the pulsar, radiation, how life on the planet evolved, and how that impacted local space...there's a lot of potential there. I'm not sure the full potential is realized...I don't necessarily associate Martin with "high science" sci-fi. Whether it's fair or not, I tend to associate his writing with political/military/conflict plots, and that ends up being reflected here. We are posted a conflict that is interesting based on the science implications, but devolves into a pretty typical "here's the destructive baddy" type of story. I'm not the only one that thought twisting the plot to say the Destructicons were right and the Autobots were wrong...wait, I mean, Destructionists were right in that the technology was creating the problems with the pulsar, etc? THAT would have provided a much more intriguing moral choice than what we're left with in the end. Also, I will completely echo what someone else said...Titan is way too damn somber. There's an "end of the world" scenario in every book, and it's getting a little stale. At the risk of sounding a little cynical, is every Titan outline supposed to be "pose an interesting science anomaly. put a civilization in some sort of serious risk because Titan observed or was in the area of the anomaly. Have a series of incredibly angsty Prime Driective discussions that always end in some sort of loophole. Provide the opportunity for some sort of relatively heroic happy ending." OK, I know that's a bit unfair as there has been some quality in the Titan series, but I'm worrying that the series is losing some of the joy it was supposed to contain. The idea of exploration or the sake of exploration, the interesting diversity concepts...it all seems a distant second place to the "alien of the week" setup. Anyways, beyond the science/political plot of the week, there's the Typhon Pact side of the plot. At that, I can pretty much only say WTF? The Tholians are either talking in the ear of rouge Andorians and/or mentally manipulating them? And to solve the population process, they're simply going to transporter-duplicate Andorians that don't want to repatriate and kidnap them? And this makes sense as a plot development? Wait...WHAT? I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. I understand "desperate times/measures" and such. But this just doesn't seem believable. How is there any expectation of cooperation from the duplicates? Sure the technology is feasible, but how is it personally feasible? Plus, how is there ZERO leak of this by the time of Plauges of Night/Raise the Dawn (speaking of, how far out of sync is the "alpha quadrant timeline" and Titan now? It seems like it should be a few years separation. Is it just me or are we slowly returning to the pre-Destiny/Typhon Pact setup of differentiating timelines for each series?) So final verdict - meh. Interesting science and cultural implications for the alien of the week, but missing the potential. And the Federation/Typhon Pact developments are incredulous at best, utterly nonsensical at worst.
Seize the Fire, the last TTN novel, was roughly simultaneous with Zero Sum Game, in August 2382. And this one clearly takes place sometime after Paths of Disharmony, which was mostly in October '82. Raise the Dawn ends in late September or early October '83, not counting the epilogue which is about a year later. And we already returned to differentiated timelines after Destiny ended several years ago. The post-DES novels took place at various different times and were published out of chronological order, and ditto for the first four Typhon Pact novels. Voyager has been proceeding at its own pace the whole time without any jumps forward to accommodate any of the Pact material. My DTI books have both been set a little earlier than the other 24th-century books coming out close to them. It's true that the Pact material has led to some big jumps forward in the TNG, DS9, and TTN chronologies, but it's hardly as if the series have been marching in lockstep.
I'm about 60% through this one, and I'm finding it to be an improvement over Seize the Fire. But one minor nitpick come to mind... They talk about the Gum Nebula, which was the region they entered way back in Orion's Hounds and appeared to stay through until Destiny. But then I thought Over a Torrent Sea sent them off to a different region of space, yet here we are back in the Gum Nebula? Or am I missing something?
I've read a bit more of Fallen Gods and it has gotten better. But, do we have to have yet another alien race that needs to be saved because an internal problem due to religion? How many alien races are going to get into trouble because of religion? This is an overused plot device (IMHO) and I think it's time we stopped using it for a while.