Spoilers DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Do we get to see Ducane and the TIC again?

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Afraid not; without going into spoilery details, it's an FTA/Jena Noi story as much as it's a DTI/Lucsly and Dulmer story.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Okay, I've been notified that the scene breaks have been corrected and the revised file will be up tomorrow. I'm not sure what will happen for people who've already bought copies -- hopefully you'll be sent updates, or something.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

This was absolutely delightful! I was expecting to enjoy this - I've loved the DTI novels so far - but I wasn't expecting it to be so joyous at the possibilities of the universe, or mischievous in its plotting. I tend to associate Christopher with heavier, more philosophical or science or continuity laden tomes, great work but definitely deeper reading. This was airy and surprising, very much in the vein of Doctor Who and not just because of the time travel. There's a glee at the universe, even when it's ridiculous and scary, in that show that came through here as well.

I would love to read more of these. I dearly hope more are on the way. This was a completely unexpected delight.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

(Spoilers below)

Also me to wax loquacious with how perfect this novella was.

Christopher, you've done it again.

This was a 9.3/10 (for me, Watching the Clock was 9.9/10 and the Forgotten History was definitely at least a 9/10). There were some things that could've been developed more and I wish it was longer, but it was perfect for what it was. Hell, I wish ST: DTI were the next Trek series. Of course I'd want maybe three episodes a year maximum so that we could keep it un-rushed and keep the production quality high. Christopher, would you be interested in that? I swear to you, and I'm serious about this: if you personally would want to executive produce such a series I would spearhead the campaign to get the series made all by myself.

The pacing was good, the dialogue was solid without being showy.

I was positively FILLED with giggly glee and overjoyed delight after, a sentence into the paragraph where it was about to introduced, I was hit with the realization of what you were going to do with the dinosaur. I can't believe that I hadn't thought of that. Seriously, is this the first time since the inception of Trek that someone thought of this? Major kudos if you were the very first (I wouldn't be surprised if you were). Also Deranged Nast, your illustration is now my Facebook profile picture LOL.

The characterizations were well done, and while I was skeptical at first as to whether or not I was going to be able to develop complex emotions for the characters in such a small span (less than 150 pages), I found myself quite literally crying when the alternate Daniels killed himself. What a spectacular strategy - having his one last noble intention surface and his humility show itself in acknowledging his own incorrectness just before he perishes.

Also, Lucsly's development was SUCH a nice touch for his character.

I want a novel where the temporal defense grid's origins are fleshed out in more detail. Seeing as how Lucsly has already developed, why not throw him into a cloak-and-dagger direction such that we can find him being the one to develop an espionage subdivision of DTI? Create a situation for more character development where Garcia's musings on the department becoming a more active force are daily questions that he has to deal with and resolve in the course of creating the temporal defense grid, AND show how he develops it even without at first intending to!

It would be fascinating to see his character meeting that milieu. Even have some Section 31 vs. DTI action!!!

I also would love to see more of the FTA/DTI/what not interacting with the Aegis, to learn more about the Aegis's intentions and activities.

Timot Danlen - is this somehow a jumbled cipher for Daniels? I can find "not Daniel" but am curious as to his name origin.

There were so many elegant turns of phrase such as: "...enough to seem like she had nothing to hide but no so much that she failed to hide it."

One of my only difficult points about the book was the temporal combat scenes. It and keeping track of which Noi was being spoken of were a challenge. But you did acknowledge this from Dulmur's perspective, which was sort of like in Into Darkness where Kirk tells McCoy to "stop with the metaphors already" which allays the reader's objection by acknowledging what they're having trouble with and basically reading their mind: "...but the details went by too fast, and were simply too strange, for him to make sense of them." Meaning, if Dulmur's having trouble keeping track, I'm in good company.

What a victory for the characters AS the characters that they are and have been from their first appearance in DS9, this whole sequence that followed: "Luckily, these were DTI agents, the epitomes of the nondescript."

Having the butterfly land on Lucsly - a reference to the Butterfly Effect - and then his response was SO genius.

I was gleeful - like Topher from Dollhouse would be - at the very existence and name of the Mro. Spectacular job on a most badass and most hilariously named creature.

Why was this done as an e-book? Was there a reason that you had to limit the length? Or was it merely that e-book was the best medium for the tightly-paced, tautly-written ~150-page wonderousness that this is? What do you feel is the virtue of doing e-books versus regular publishing? Is it cheaper overall in terms of production for you? Easier to edit or something?

After Watching The Clock - which was the single finest redemption of a failed plotline I've ever seen in history: you resurrected, resuscitated, and gloriously completed the TCW plotline from ENT - I didn't think there was more to be harvested from TCW but you definitely managed to do that here.

The 31st century is SO cool to experience in more detail (it has been my favorite era ever since we learned Daniels was from it in "Cold Front") and so many things you depicted are such a graceful and natural development of the technology and practices of the "present" 24th-century world. Holo-people, Soong androids, medical transportation and long-distance beaming? So satisfying.

I also need to acknowledge you because it is SO clear and SO palpable, your love for the full breadth and depth of the ST universe, its lore, and its capacity to be a springboard for philosophical reflection. Your deft and expert use of your awareness of that lore - seeing you connect the dots of so many disparate elements - has always been a pleasure to see in action.

I seriously considered shifting my career to be a Star Trek novelist after reading Watching The Clock.

Finally, thank you so much for writing something that so uplifted me during a difficult time in my life. This novel was a welcome reprieve and a breath of fresh air coming exactly when it did.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Oh I also noticed the line break issue but chose to ignore it because I figured out where the section's ends and beginnings were. I am glad that it was attended to though because I see how it could be a problem for others.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Thank you!

There's no way CBS would ever peg me, someone with no TV experience, to be a showrunner. And I could never handle the stress of the job. I've been to Hollywood once, and it was enough to convince me that I don't need to go back.

I've certainly never seen anything of the like done before. And I don't recall how the epiphany came to me, except in that the situation I'd set up brought the two things into proximity and it seemed the logical step to take...

I'd rather not. The whole value of it is that it's done in such a gradual, plodding, piecemeal, undramatic way that it was able to slip under the radar of history. The story of the defense grid's origins is the story of assorted bureaucrats occasionally filing certain bits of paperwork that take things a small, incremental step forward without anyone noticing. If I retconned it into something exciting enough to build a story around, that would defeat the whole principle.

Ick. I feel that espionage does more harm than good. In the real world, morally gray actions undertaken by intelligence agencies with the nominal purpose of protecting national security have a way of doing more to undermine national security in the long run -- like the CIA overthrowing a reformist Iranian leader in favor of a brutal anti-Soviet dictator, and thereby provoking the populist backlash that led to the rise of the current fundamentalist Iranian regime. I believe that dishonest tactics rarely produce positive results.

And I don't see it doing any good for the DTI's work. As a rule, most sane governments share an appreciation of the need to safeguard the timeline, so coordinating temporal regulation with other nations is best served by open, honest cooperation for mutual defense. Even states that are hostile in other ways tend to be willing to work together for temporal defense. If the Federation tried using espionage techniques to, say, undermine other nations' temporal research or steal temporal artifacts from them, it would poison those relations and undermine the temporal security of the galaxy.

And the kind of flamboyant, romantic stuff that espionage tends to be in fiction is anathema to Lucsly's fundamentally prosaic character, so that wouldn't work either. He's not James Bond, he's Joe Friday.

It's meant to be what a name like "Timothy Daniels" might evolve into over the course of several centuries of linguistic evolution and interspecies interaction. I got "Timot" by playing around with the letters of "Matt Winston" and seeing what combination sounded good.

Yeah, that was really tough to keep track of, and I wish I'd done a better job differentiating characters. It's hard describing a scene where there are four different versions of Jena Noi interacting.

Actually it's a reference (my third in as many DTI tales) to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," in which a time traveler inadvertently steps on a butterfly during a dinosaur safari and returns to find himself in an altered timeline. This has nothing to do with the butterfly effect (which is the chaos-theory notion that the flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world), but people often conflate the two.

I mentioned the Mro in passing as an extinct civilization in The Buried Age. I wanted to feature an ancient civilization, and the name was there, so...

It was done as an e-book because I was asked to do an e-book. Pocket/Simon & Schuster has been publishing Trek e-novellas several times a year for the past few years, and I was offered the chance to do one. I was told I could pick whatever series I wanted (except post-TMP, since there were already two other movie-era e-novellas in the works), but DTI was suggested, and I came up with this idea and there we were.

These days, e-books are "regular publishing." Every Trek novel that gets printed as a paper book is also released as an e-book. S&S publishes original e-novellas because there's a growing market for them. Presumably their shorter length is because they're being done alongside the regular novel line, and it's easier to handle that added workload if they're shorter. Also, there really isn't a print market for novella-length fiction these days, but e-books don't have that impediment, so e-publishing has opened a new niche for mid-length fiction.

The production costs are handled by the publisher, not the authors, but the work of creating a book these days is all done on computers anyway, so every book effectively starts out as an e-book until it gets to the actual printing phase; thus, there's no real difference on the writing, editorial, or production end, just on the printing and distribution end.

Well, you returned the favor. I got some disappointing news yesterday -- I didn't get a writing gig I was hoping to get -- and your review has cheered me up. (Actually I got good news on two other fronts the same day, so on balance it should've been a good day; but the thing I didn't get was something I've been hoping to get for over a year, so it was frustrating.)

Thanks, but drc caught that one yesterday (see post #16) and it's one of the ones I reported.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

That's why it sounded vaguely familiar! Now that you describe how you came up with it, I see why it clicked something in my head; it sounded like it could have been one of Asimov's names in the Foundation series, which were something of the same idea.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Actually I should correct that... I didn't want his real name to be literally a futurized form of "Daniels," since that was just an alias he used in the 22nd century. But I wanted it to be similar enough to suggest why he chose that alias, and to ensure that readers could easily recognize him as the same character under both names.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Voted outstanding on this one.

Not too much to add that hasn't already been said. It was a fun, rather light-hearted adventure, but also fleshed out some of the DTI characters. I'm hoping for more with them soon. It also felt like the story really matched the ebook format -- it neither felt like it was a truncated novel, nor a padded out short story. This will probably be my favorite of the recent ebooks, at least for a while.

Spoiler: "The Collectors"

Also, the Borg dinosaur really hit the sweet spot of being almost, but not quite, too over the top (at least for me).

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Though I did not feel there was as much character development as some other readers. I suppose it was enough in keeping with the novella format. As others have mentioned, I can only hope a full novel is in the works

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

^ Well, we didn't learn much new about Lucsly and Dulmur, but we got to know Jena Noi quite a bit more.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Only about 30% started and trying to avoid spoiler posts. Christopher did you place a reference to Booster Gold in this story? After finishing and reading your annotation I may start a tech thread.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Mayyyyyybe... (Bwa-ha-ha!)

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

I was honestly a little surprised when I read the annotations and saw that the spherical time machine Teresa saw just before that reference wasn't a Legion of Superheroes time sphere. :P

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

What about the time loop device discovered by the U.S.S. Kyushu off-page in The Buried Age?

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Oh, I forgot about that one. EDIT: I've updated the Vault inventory in my annotations to include it. Good catch, since that was my first mention of the idea of the DTI having a secret vault.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Glad they took action so quickly.

The Kindle copies I have access to aren't fixed yet, but I don't know how long this sort of thing should take.

 

Re: DTI: The Collectors by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread (Spoil

Not quite finished with the book as yet, but enjoying it immensely so far (as I have all the DTI books). One question, though, Christopher--was the Mro warrior encased in a stasis field a conscious reference to Kzanol the Thrint in Larry Niven's World Of Ptavvs? That was what came to mind immediately as I read it. I wondered at first if it was a deliberate nod to Niven's Known Space backstory a la "The Slaver Weapon", although your annotations suggest otherwise...

--g