Ok, wow! I finished this trilogy this morning and I really liked it. If there are existing threads discussing this I need to find them. I have heard others describe it as a game changer which it is. I am curious if Mr. Mack has to get approval or direction about the whole thing first?
Every Trek novel has to be approved by the editor and by CBS (formerly Paramount) at the outline stage. Dave worked closely with editors Marco Palmieri and Margaret Clark in developing the trilogy.
I'm pretty sure killing 60 billion people involves at least some paperwork. Btw, thats gotta be a record. Cheers
Sure, sure, they destroyed universes, wiped out infinitely more sentient beings than I did... ...the difference is, I made the readers give a damn who I killed.
And those beings just...faded out of existence. Not quite the same as reducing planets to cinders and packing thousands into refugee camps.
The funny thing is if you replace the word "Catom" with "Pixie Dust" it doesn't change the story one bit.
I finished this trilogy yesterday and after I was done, I just had to sit there, slack jawed and say, "Wow." It was ridiculously great.
Ok... You just spoke of replicators from stargate, my computer recently shoved a bluescreen in my face saying HAL_INITALIZATION_FAILED. am i the only one who senses that armageddon is near?
No, people have been sensing that in relation to one new thing or another for thousands of years. Yet life goes on nonetheless.
Says the man who acknowledged that his use of the term in his science fiction was light-years ahead of his real-world inspiration. Or did I imagine Graylock's report on claytronics in Gods of Night? I now invoke Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Pixie Dust would completely change the plot of Star Trek: Destiny. Neither the Caeliar nor the catom-ized Erika would be able to fly without thinking happy thoughts, and the Borg technology would completely fail since they're always so cross.
You're making a spurious assertion here. I could just as easily argue that you could substitute magic chariots for cars in The French Connection and it wouldn't change the story, but that would be a pointless argument to make. It would also be wrong, because it would be falsely assuming that plot is the only thing that makes a story. The textbook way of defining it is that a story has four main constituents: plot, character, theme, and setting. And in speculative fiction, whether fantasy or science fiction, the setting -- the details of the world and the mechanisms underlying the events of the story -- is of considerable importance. Even if you could tell the same plot with magic rather than technology, that doesn't mean there's no difference between the two. Style matters, and a stylistic choice to base a plot on credible technological extrapolation is indeed distinct from a choice to base the plot on magic or on gibberish technobabble. Just as, say, choosing to shoot a film in a cinema verite, guerrilla-filmmaking style is distinct from choosing to go for ultra-slick heightened reality with tons of CGI and gratuitous slow motion. Or just as choosing to paint a still life in oils is distinct from choosing to render it in charcoal pencil. The choice of style and approach is a meaningful element in the creation of any artistic work, and you are simply wrong to dismiss it as irrelevant.