TNG: The Persistence of Memory by David Mack Review Thread (Spoilers!)

[zarkon]

JWolf wrote:

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What a really stupid video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkpzR5vVA9k

[Hartzilla2007]

JWolf wrote:

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DC Comics screwed the entire DC Universe with a major reset button. So screw them and their actions here on out are meaningless.

1) The reboot has nothing to do with my point of ressurection = bad.

2) the reboot must have done something right since DC's sells are up.

[Paris]

The DCU reboot hasn't been all that bad, especially if you're reading certain books. Grant Morrison's Action Comics has been good, while JH Williams III's Batwoman is amazing and wasn't really affected by the reboot at all. Scott Snyder has hit it out of the park with Batman, and Peter Tomasi's Batman & Robin has been great as well. Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello is the best WW i've ever read.

I was wary of the reset at first, as i've followed the Bat-family's exploits religiously for years, but after the dust settled, I realized they were just stories. They live and die by their quality and not by their history.

[Ronald Held]

The DC reboots have only been different due to resets, not really improvements.

[Patrick O'Brien]

Great read! Another outstanding book by Mr. Mack

[Shikarnov]

This book kept me going straight through, page after page, from start to finish, non-stop. I can safely say it was the best Trek book I've read in at least ten years.

Kudos to Mr. Mack. Well done, sir. Very well done, indeed.

(Between this series, and the also well-done Temporal Investigations series, I'll be looking forward to new releases with much renewed enthusiasm. Thanks for that.)

[Patrick O'Brien]

Just finished the Chronic Rift interview David did at NYC ComicCon. Very informative Julio Angel Ortiz did a great job asking questions as a trek lit fan

[Eat-Da-Tribble]

Data is back and I can't be happier. But I have some unanswered questions:

Will Data return to the fleet? How long until Data is promoted to commander? 20 years?

Why is a death sentence be Worf's girlfriend?

Is Data still fully funtional?

And what will Spot do? Will she return with Data? Or will she stay with Worf ?

[j3067]

MatthiasRussell wrote:

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I thought it was strange that Jasminder dies the same way Tasha died; Worf even mentioned this was the case. I’m curious to know why it was chosen to have her murdered rather than her to die fighting while the Breen attempted to capture her. I’m also thinking being in love with Worf is a death sentence.

Just finished the book today and I loved it. My take away was that this was about Worf putting the mission first in exactly the way he didn't with Jadzia. It is an event that may balance out Sisko's reprimand to some degree from a Starfleet standpoint.

I liked Jasminder and will miss her character, but I overall liked the turn the story took. I was also glad that Chen was minimized, but I'd like to see Elfiki get more development at some point.

[Paper Moon]

Gah! Mind = blown!

(So many spoilers ahead.)

Honestly, this book is such a downer in so freaking many ways, I’m not sure I like it. Destiny was destructive on a massive level, but at the very least was uplifting in some real ways.

But this… this just felt evil.

First, I should outline the few spoilers I knew going in:
-I knew it was a sequel to Immortal Coil
-I knew Soong made an appearance.
-I knew the Breen appeared.
-I knew Choudhury died.
-I knew Data was brought back, sorta kinda, possibly as some sort of amalgamation of him and Soong.

Where to begin?

For no good reason, I’ll start with Choudhury’s death. Knew it was coming. Still shocked me. Casual brutality. Definitely the heir apparent for the “Most Pointless Death” award, held until recently by the late Tasha Yar. And Worf’s reaction afterward in the ready room really enhanced the effect. Of all the TrekLit only characters, I liked Choudhury the best, and her death was definitely affecting for me.

(Minor quibble: I wish Worf had actually been forced to choose between Choudhury and the rest of the away team. I feel that would’ve fit better into the overall theme of the book. On the other hand, it would’ve eliminated the casual brutality of her death, and wouldn’t have set him on the trajectory he is currently on [which I’m sure will get followed up in Silent Weapons].)

Not sure how well the extended Soong narrative worked as part II of the book. The conceit was that he was telling the away team all this in real time, which of course is unrealistic. Still, it was always in the back of my mind, which made the sub-story feel like it was going on much longer than it was supposed to. I enjoyed the story, once I got over the blatant retconning of “Brothers” and the almost Mary Sue-like aspects of his character. (That came out passively aggressive, and I don’t mean it like that. I really did enjoy the story after I got over the things that bothered me.)

Soong comes across as an anti-hero, which seems consistent with the other interpretations of him that we’ve seen. Still, it makes the Data-Soong fusion at the end a bit more troubling than I wish it were.

And for the elephant in the room: Data.

As I said in the Brinkmanship thread, Picard, Data and Garak are my favorite Trek characters, and if I had to pick one from those three, I would probably choose Data. So, as I was with Picard’s characterization in Brinkmanship, I am probably a bit oversensitive to Data, too.

Before getting to Data himself, though: I realized about halfway through the Soong narrative (before he learns of Data’s death in the Bassen Rift) how Data was going to be resurrected. I’m not sure I quite realized that Data was going to get a bit of a Soong-infusion as well, but I suddenly knew that Data was going to get Soong’s body. And, honestly, realizing that at that point, without even thinking about it, really disappointed me.

It’s worth saying that, while I try to avoid spoilers, if I see them, it can still be okay, because I want to find out how they came about. And if I see that too, I’ll want more details. So the book will be enjoyable no matter what. Except here, when it somehow became obvious much sooner than I wished. That is too bad.

I must say that Data’s resurrection itself was well-done, and believable, too. It didn’t seem forced, and felt like a logical outgrowth of what had been previously established about all of the characters involved.

(I also really liked Soong’s turning the Breen’s Lore’s into his own army; that was a great moment, although, again, it was rather obvious what he was planning.)

But the resurrected Data… I dunno. First of all, I wish we had seen more of him. Not to start a nuclear war here on the BBS, but Janeway got much, much more treatment in her resurrection novel, and she was much less popular than Data (by virtue of appearing on a less-watched series), and, furthermore, her death was in a novel, not on screen.

But more than that, Data 2.0 seems… well, he’s not Data anymore. He says that much, and I can deal with that. What I’m having a harder time dealing with: he doesn’t seem very likable. He says that he is reconsidering Starfleet in response to the deep offense that his original enlistment was to his father. That seems rather selfish to me. Almost everything Data accomplished in his life, he accomplished in spite of Soong, not because of him. And Starfleet, for all of its problematic treatments of AI, still gave him so much more than Soong did. To say nothing of Picard, Crusher, Worf and especially La Forge. He’s Geordi’s best friend, he’s just returned from the dead, and he can’t even hang around for a bit? I understand his desire to resurrect Lal, but this newfound obsession with controlling life and death seems more like Soong or Lore than like the Data we all know and love. (And anyway, he could stay out of Starfleet while still remaning on the Enterprise for a while.) His characterization makes sense in-universe, to be sure. I just personally don’t like it.

Overall, I’m not sure how I feel about The Persistence of Memory. On the one (objective) hand, the novel itself is executed very well, with only a few minors flaws. (Unlike, for example, Seize the Fire or the last Romulan War novel.) It kept me turning the pages, it filled in some gaps in the Trek universe (Orion!) and it felt like I really was reading the characters I know from canon.

On the other (totally subjective) hand, story-wise, and big-picture-wise (which I assume represents decisions made more by the editor than the writer), I am much more ambivalent. Unfortunately, I must say that, as much as I regret to say this, I found the ending to be such a downer that it really removed any enjoyment I had previously had from reading the book. (Not even RBoE bothered me this much, as Star Trek novels go.)

To be sure: I respect and admire Mr. Mack’s story choices. I do not mean to criticize them at all. I am unhappy almost exclusively with the events that are depicted themselves, not the decision to depict them, and I recognize that that unhappiness stems almost entirely from my personal feelings. (And honestly, it seems to me that David Mack’s ability to draw me into the story so completely is nothing but a complement to him and his writing.)

Final score: 3.5 stars out of 5 (voted Above Average in the poll)

EDIT: Bumping this up to 4 stars out of 5 (see post below for explanation)

P.S.:

I’m saying it here and now (before having read the rest of this thread, or anything David Mack has said about the editorial decisions): I don’t think they are setting up the novelverse to overlap the Countdown continuity. And good for them for doing so!

P.P.S.: Why is it impossible for me to write a short review? I really tried with this one...

[Paper Moon]

Oy. So instead of adding more to the mess that is the above, I'm just gonna add this here (more spoilers!):

Something that is always in the back of my mind when reading TrekLit is that it's very possible that the novel I am reading will be the last one to tell such and such particular story. Editors change, authors move on, et cetera. (ie. Look at what happened to the original DS9-R.) So if a novel ends with particular, important elements unresolved, I'm less happy than I would be otherwise.

(I think this was partly why so many people were upset by RBoE; for all we knew, Sisko's story was never going to be followed up on, and he would just be left in this awful place.)

So, going into this novel, with the added knowledge that David Mack had said that each novel tells its own story, I figured that most of the important material therein would not be followed up on for quite some time, if ever.

Flashforward to the end: Data is back, but he's going off to the great unknown. My first thought: aw crap, we'll probably never see him again.

This no doubt colored my overall feelings about the book and not for the better.

However, while going through this thread, I found a post by Mr. Mack saying that the whole trilogy is a sequel to Immortal Coil.

So I guess that means that this (probably) isn't the last we'll see of Data! That makes me more satisfied with the novel overall, enough to earn it back a half star.

[King Daniel Into Darkness]

Paper Moon wrote:

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P.S.:

I’m saying it here and now (before having read the rest of this thread, or anything David Mack has said about the editorial decisions): I don’t think they are setting up the novelverse to overlap the Countdown continuity. And good for them for doing so!

:

I thought this too at first, but as Christopher remimded me...

In Countdown, Data tells Spock...

"A more apt description would be a simple "return," denoting the fact that my neural nets were successfully imprinted onto B-4's existing programming."

...something Persistence of Memory explicitly contradicts by saying B-4 wasn't advanced enough to support Data's programs and memories, and the download from Star Trek Nemesis actually eventually led to a slow-motion cascade faliure in B-4.

[Christopher]

^You mean The Persistence of Memory, not Paths of Disharmony. And the contradictions go beyond what you mention:

The year of Data's return is different, and of course he returns in a separate body from B-4's rather than taking his over.

And Paper Moon, I'm surprised it felt like a downer to you. I found it a rather optimistic book, aside from one character's fate.

[wizkid]

I thought the book was fantastic. When I checked in to see what new books were out and saw D Mack with a trilogy it was like Christmas. I preordered the next two through iBooks.

Great job David. I loved the back story and it all tied together so well. I will have to reread Immortal Coil because of his book and that is a definite compliment to both authors.

I'm glad Data is back! Data is back! I believe the door for Data to get Soong back alive is there as well. I think in the end we can have more Soong and Soong creations. Maybe that will sell more books so we can get more books.

I long for the books that show Data wrapping it all up and returning to the Enterprise.

[Christopher]

I'm not sure I want Data to return to the Enterprise. He's a being of immense potential; does it really serve him well as a character to keep him stuck in the same role in the same place for decades?