DTI: Watching the Clock by C. L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoilers!)

[JWolf]

After I read it, should I tell people on Amazon how bad the eBook is?

[Corran Horn]

Ronald Held wrote:

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92 pages in. Some of the paragraphs make for difficult reading.

I keep getting lost on where 'we' are in the timeline between the current story and flashbacks. Every section heading starting with a different planet/society's date format isn't helping because you don't know how far away one is relative to another. The uptime/downtime stardates are the master key, I guess.

The recruiting of the Deltan DTI agent confused me with how far it was from the 'current' story. He seems like a seasoned agent (though the story states how he his knowledge was 'advanced') but he really hasn't been an agent that long it seems.

[Snaploud]

Smellincoffee wrote:

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To those who have read it : could you wander over to Amazon and leave a review? There's only one, currently, and it's...not similar to the general sentiment here.

Yikes. A 1 out of 5...I submitted a brief review in response, and it should be up within 48 hours.

My review:

4 stars out of 5

It's a little disjointed at times and sometimes feels like a collection of short stories or a scientific paper on the nature of time. The book picks up mid-way, though, and you start to see how all the stories fit together into the larger whole. It's not the easiest Trek book I've ever read, but it's a satisfying science fiction story that manages to create a coherent background for time travel in the trek universe.

[Xenu Cruise]

JWolf wrote:

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After I read it, should I tell people on Amazon how bad the eBook is?

Uh oh. That was how I was gonna buy it. What makes it so bad?

[JWolf]

Xenu Cruise wrote:

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Uh oh. That was how I was gonna buy it. What makes it so bad?

No italics. There should be italics, but there are none in the eBook. Also, some of the section headers are missing the bold. I cannot speak for any textual errors as I am still reading Paths of Disharmony.

[Icemizer]

I really enjoyed this book but kept thinking all the way through, boy Section 31 would sure love to keep tabs on these guys.

[Christopher]

Sorry I haven't answered before now -- I'm at a hotel in Seattle and their wi-fi wasn't working.

Corran Horn wrote:

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I keep getting lost on where 'we' are in the timeline between the current story and flashbacks. Every section heading starting with a different planet/society's date format isn't helping because you don't know how far away one is relative to another. The uptime/downtime stardates are the master key, I guess.

That and the chronology cues I tried to insert in the actual text about how long it had been since certain episodes/films or previous events in the book.

The recruiting of the Deltan DTI agent confused me with how far it was from the 'current' story. He seems like a seasoned agent (though the story states how he his knowledge was 'advanced') but he really hasn't been an agent that long it seems.

The story with Ranjea's recruitment is in 2372, about six months after DS9: "Visionary," as mentioned in the text. The next chapter begins with Ranjea four months after graduation, and is set shortly after "Trials and Tribble-ations," putting it in the first half of 2373. So he's been an agent for over eight years at the start of the book. That seems fairly seasoned to me.

Snaploud wrote:

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It's a little disjointed at times and sometimes feels like a collection of short stories or a scientific paper on the nature of time. The book picks up mid-way, though, and you start to see how all the stories fit together into the larger whole. It's not the easiest Trek book I've ever read, but it's a satisfying science fiction story that manages to create a coherent background for time travel in the trek universe.

Thanks! Actually my initial goal was to have several parallel plots that were pretty much independent of each other, to show the whole range of responsibilities of the DTI. My model was procedural TV shows, so I was thinking in terms of A and B and C plots. I was also influenced by Articles of the Federation and its episodic structure. The plotlines just ended up aligning more with one another than I anticipated.

[shanejayell]

Liked the bit where the DTI wanted

to throw the book at Janeway. Always thought it was a bit unbelievable that she pretty much got off scott free...

[Corran Horn]

shanejayell wrote:

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Liked the bit where the DTI wanted

to throw the book at Janeway. Always thought it was a bit unbelievable that she pretty much got off scott free...

A lot of Christopher's books spend some time "retconning" explanations for things we saw in episodes that seem to have bothered him.

[Christopher]

I prefer to see it as developing story possibilities that were only hinted at onscreen. In this case, I wasn't trying to "fix" anything about the episode in question.

The decision not to prosecute Janeway could've been explained purely in terms of the Federation and Starfleet leadership being willing to overlook the details of how the hero captain beat back the Borg and brought her ship home. But in the context of the larger story I'd already decided to tell, it seemed logical that the uptime agencies would intervene as well.

Actually the main thing I wanted to do here was to justify my own premise about what the background was behind the Temporal Cold War. In order for my explanation of that to make sense, I needed to come up with a reason why the future factions would leave the Federation alone between Enterprise and the time frame of the novel. The handiest explanation was that the defeat of the Borg in Destiny was necessary for them to exist, hence they had to keep their hands off of the sequence of events leading up to it. And "Endgame" was part of that sequence.

[aelius]

Christopher, great book.
I enjoyed the format with all of the different plots weaving together. It had some very cool ideas like the Axis.
I also like the characterization of Dulmur and Lucsly. I could hear them talking all through the book. The original characters worked well too.
I was especially impressed with the way you wove modern physics theories into Star Trek time travel to explain the often contradictory effects and results of time travel.
On the whole I have to say - Well Done!

[Thrawn]

Congrats, Christopher - this is another outstanding one.

Just as with Buried Age and its take on galactic history, and Orion's Hounds and its take on space-going fauna, this book exemplifies a particular type of writing that takes a bunch of (seeming?) contradictions, confusions, or just minor tidbits from all around a huge universe and forms a coherent backstory and narrative out of it... it's a strange sort of plotting, one that perhaps would occur in particularly weird historical fiction, but mostly seems to be the exclusive province of tie-ins. Either way, you're clearly the best I've seen; this had to have been the hardest challenge of that variety you've taken on so far, and you nailed it.

I have to admit, there were aspects I didn't like. I enjoyed where Garcia and Ranjea ended up (enough to really hope for a follow up DTI novel!), but a few moments in their story - especially when she tried to seduce him the first time - were real forehead-slappers. I love your characters, but really, not your finest moment in dialogue scripting. And I still feel like, despite a genuinely heroic effort to make all the time travelling make sense, there were still some things that I couldn't quite wrap my head around.

Like for instance: the Suliban agent is erased from time. But that action is initiated in the FUTURE, and it erases her from ALL of time. So why did the alarm go off at THAT particular moment? Why was there not a moment earlier in that timeline where the protected data went *bing* and noticed a discrepancy? Did the altered timeline without her not exist until that moment? How could that have been when all those things happened in it? ...It's almost hard to even know how to describe it. A man in the future overwrote, instantaneously, a part of the quantum wavefunction of the dominant universe gestalt at a time in the past, effecting parts further in the past, but only becoming noticeable at its endpoint...BLARGH.

Some parts I loved though. I loved the idea of all the people in the TCW being from different futures, fighting to align multiple discordant past timelines with each other to try and make a sort of weight of quantum numbers to get their preferred timeline winning out in the end. And some of the retconning/adding depth was JUST BRILLIANT. The explanation of the Time Squared vortexes and the use of Destiny to justify Janeway not being punished for her shocking carelessness were two of my favorites. That last especially; it expands upon one of my favorite moral ambiguities from Destiny - Janeway's action pissed off the Borg, killing billions, but saving all the Borg's future victims. So was it a heroic action or not? Now we know that it created a future for the Federation, but it violated the deepest principles of the DTI to do it. Another few wrinkles. Vast consequences often hinge on risky, morally ambiguous actions with unclear results; it's nice to see that maturely explored in Trek, which so often opts for the "THIS IS JUST WRONG IT'S JUST WRONG" sort of moralizing.

On a more personal note, I was also somewhat touched by the sympathetic portrayal of DTI as a group of professionals doing a very difficult job. I teach math in an outstanding inner-city school in LA, with a group of people with a very similar mindset. (Students come to us in the 9th grade usually around a 3rd grade level, but we sent 85% of our graduates to college last year.) We joke often, in somewhat black humor, of how many relationships (even two engagements) our school has broken up, from the sense of duty that we can't quite escape. But it's worth it, because it matters. This was a kind and accurate recreation of that emotional state, and I appreciated seeing the particular echo of my own feelings there. If I might ask, was that portrayal based on people you've known, or just on the situation you'd created & the characters in the episode?

All in all, not a flawless work; partially inevitably, as time travel is just a major bitch to make sense of, but also partially as a result of emphasis on the Deltans that never quite landed for me, especially through Garcia's eyes. But it's definitely my favorite book since The Sorrows Of Empire almost a year and a half ago.

Sometimes it's neat to see writers confronted with unexpected challenges, working outside their comfort zone. From what you wrote in the acknowledgments, it sounds like this one might have kicked your ass a little, but it definitely stands proud among the rest of your published works, and the very best of Trek literature. Again, congrats.

[CaptainDonovin]

aelius wrote:

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Christopher, great book.
I enjoyed the format with all of the different plots weaving together. It had some very cool ideas like the Axis.
I also like the characterization of Dulmur and Lucsly. I could hear them talking all through the book. The original characters worked well too.
I was especially impressed with the way you wove modern physics theories into Star Trek time travel to explain the often contradictory effects and results of time travel.
On the whole I have to say - Well Done!

I couldn't have said it better. Great read. Not finished yet & enjoying it.

[Smiley]

Wow. Christopher L. Bennett, you hit it out of the park with Watching the Clock. As a continuity-loving fan, I was thrilled by all of the references, retcons, and explanations included in this book. The characters, concepts, and everything else meshed together to create a fascinating and gripping read. Watching the Clock is in some respects a celebration of all of the different series of Star Trek, and it is a shining representation of what a tie-in novel (and novel in general) can be.

I've got lots of positive thoughts about the book, but I'm still processing the experience. I look forward to seeing the annotations.

[aaon80]

I loved the book, made for some great reading! I do want to agree with others who said the ebook is poorly edited. This is very true. I purchased the kindle version, myself, which is lacking in italics. It makes the occasional "inner monologue" from a character seem more like a non sequitur in the middle of a paragraph, until you realize that you are reading the character's thoughts. Also, some of the bolded text at the beginning of the chapters runs together. Basically, the errors are primarily in formatting, and I am quite disappointed by this, since it doesn't do justice to such a well-written book!