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

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Does Anybody Really Care?

...sorry for the delayed response; I pretty much only have weekends to catch up on the BBS these days...

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Very nice. I did enjoy Watching the Clock and look forward to the next one.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

1:52:58pm Eastern

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

I'm reading it now. Though I don't enjoy the story so much I do like the police investigative/Dragnet style of the story. The explanation of alternate realities and quantum flux is quite interesting and well thought out. I'm continuing on because it makes me think and gives me a different perspective on time and the universe.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

A Tuesday

 

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I started this just now and I'm already 70 pages in, and struggled to put it down. I have to admit, the science is a bit tough to get through, but also very interesting. It'll probably take a re-read at some point for it all to sink in. But sofar, very much a pageturner!!

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

^Thank you!

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

if they stop a crime from happening. how can a person still be arrested for that crime if it has been stopped before it's started?

 

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^That's exactly the problem with the policies of the Temporal Integrity Commission as seen in "Relativity."

 

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I don't know... it's an interesting ethical question. If you literally know that a crime is going to happen and that they were going to do it-- and you do-- how can you not arrest them? Even if you stop it, you know with 100% certainty that they would have done it.

Though I suppose this is ground well covered in the Dick's "The Minority Report."

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Unless the crime is in progress, "would have" is irrelevant. Anything that is stopped before it starts, logically never existed.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Right. There is no legal justification for arresting someone who has not yet committed a crime. At most, if there were multiple parties involved in planning to commit a crime, you could charge them with conspiracy even if they haven't acted on it yet.

Certainly if you know a crime is going to happen, you can take steps to prevent it, and perhaps to catch the perpetrator in the act of attempting it. Or you could talk to the future culprit, try to talk them out of it or warn them off. But you couldn't arrest them unless you found evidence that they'd already done something illegal or caught them attempting it. (And that means relative to their own personal timeline. Doing what Ducane did in "Relativity" -- arresting the younger Braxton for something his future self had been caught doing -- is utterly unethical.)

But I think I discussed this upthread -- if you can arrest someone for a future crime, it means you're in a universe where the future is mutable rather than fixed. And in such a universe, you can never be 100% sure that the future in which they committed the crime is certain to occur. It's just one possibility. So you're not arresting them for something you "know" they will do, just for something you believe they might do. And that's not ethically justifiable.

It's also not judicially feasible. How do you prove in a court of law that someone is guilty of a crime you prevented from occurring at all? No crime means no evidence means no case. And evidence of the crime happening in an alternate timeline wouldn't cut it, because the crime didn't happen in the timeline over which the court has jurisdiction, i.e. the one it occupies. Conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt -- any alternative theory of the case must be ruled out, with the defendant's guilt being the only reasonable interpretation of the evidence. If the defendant committed the crime in one timeline but was prevented in another, then built into that is an alternative theory of innocence that can't be disproven, because it's actually what happened in the timeline you occupy. Therefore, obtaining a conviction would be impossible.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

I'm in the middle of the Titan events and it has picked up greatly. I'm enjoying it much more now. I especially enjoyed the discussion between the Deltan and Garcia about human sexual immaturity and the need to "posess". That conversation is a big highlight of the book, it has given me much to think about.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

My Review:

I had no interest in reading this book and would not have if a good friend had not convinced me to and loaned me his copy. As it started, I didn’t think I was going to continue to the last page but I’m glad I did. If I had a trek fan who asked for a single book of ALL books to read or a single book to be ‘canonized’, this would be it. I’m not saying it’s my favorite read or story but it made sense of SOOOOO much from the various on-screen materials. So many loose ends were tied up and head-scratchers satisfied. I don’t even want to imagine the hours of research that had to go into making this book of such quality that it rectified the haphazard work of many earlier screenwriters.

I wish I could get the ENT haters to read this. It did many more favors to that show even than “The Needs of the Many” did. My biggest upset with the book was the role of the Bozeman. “Ship of the Line” is my all time favorite Star Trek book and this book disagrees with vital story elements from Carey’s book, but with all the sub-timelines, I suppose the shockwaves from these 2 books do eventually achieve mutual wavelengths and the differences damp out.

And the ending, the final pages; the ending was perfect, by which I mean the beginning was perfect . . . ooh I’ve gone cross-eyed. Excellent book for what it does to unify Trek on the whole. Grateful this was published; still not a time-travel fan, though.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Some side thoughts of mine:
My favorite moment in ALL of Star Trek is in STV when Kirk says, “I need my pain.” For this reason, I love the quote from this book, “Pain needs to be remembered. Learned from. Not erased.”
The respect between the DTI and Starfleet that they achieve in the end is excellent.
Nice XCV-330 tie-in. I hope this is the beginning of an upstream book. (Or is it downstream?)
That reminds me, I like the use of a variety of calendars; it was an excellent touch.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Thank you!

My version of the Bozeman crew was based on the extras who actually appeared onscreen in "Cause and Effect." For whatever reason, Ship of the Line contradicts what "Cause and Effect" established. It shows an all-male bridge crew when in fact there were two women seen behind Bateson, and it claims the Typhon Expanse was a well-patrolled UFP/Klingon border area in the 23rd century even though "Cause and Effect" explicitly described it as an uncharted region in the 24th. Honestly, I'm not sure how those inconsistencies in Ship of the Line got through the approval process. I doubt I could've gotten away with repeating them today, though, and I didn't want to. I wanted to do a version of the Bozeman crew that was accurate to screen canon. Those women on the bridge got ignored in Ship of the Line for whatever reason, and I wanted to give them their due at last.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Interesting points on SOTL. It is odd that a female author deleted all the female crew. I remember reading that they were originally going to have a character who was supposed to be Saavik behind Bateson but producers changed their mind. I know that SOTL doesn't fit in with the newer books and better editorial controls, it was just a very interesting and different story to me; I miss Diane Carey's trek writings.

I especially enjoyed how you had the Bozeman refit for service; guess you made your point about those Miranda-type ships still being relevant. I guess that Miranda in First Contact was her.

Can't praise this book enough. A lot of dedication went into it; I hope you reap plenty of rewards for it. It challenged my view of humanity and the universe in many ways.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

I actually remember hearing an urban legend some time back that they got Grammar to record a short line during the fleet chatter in the Borg battle, when the Bozeman was mentioned, but there's so many voices there I've never had good enough ears to pick out if it really was him or not.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Which is just as well, since they had it disappear in 2278, seven years before The Wrath of Khan. Saavik would've still been a teenager, not yet in the Academy.

Wow. That's an amazing thing to hear someone say about something I wrote. Thank you.

 

Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread

Christopher, you are too careful about such detail to delibrately contradite onscreen data