Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! I'm glad to hear this novel is more about Garak and Cardassia and not entirely focused on the Enterprise crew.I was hoping to have a story focused on Garak and investigating what happened to Nan Bacco with the True way.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Great book, do wish we could have an audio book version with Sir Patrick and Andrew Robinson exchanging lines. That would be the only thing that could make it better.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! That is pretty much the story! Which does make the cover somewhat misleading. I hope the cross cult cover will be better. Picard and company do have a role to play, but its Garak's book. I don't even think they are on the enterprise for more than a couple of pages. The rest of it is Cardassia.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! This was GREAT. I'm on a trip and don't have time for a long post, perhaps later, but goddamn this was fantastic. McCormack's best yet.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Better than Never Ending Sacrifice ?
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! I'm about two thirds through and am enjoying it very much. Una does Cardassia like Keith does Klingons.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! The Never Ending Sacrifice is much more of a self-contained novel than The Crimson Shadow, largely because it describes events considerably more peripheral to the novelverse than those in McCormack's Fall novel. Both are equally satisfying, in the end.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! I don't get that. Ishan was originally unsympathetic to the Cardassians, but that lack of sympathy was both explicable by his personal history with the Cardassians and eventually mitigated (removing the clauses on Cardassian military spending). There's no evidence in TMS of Ishan doing anything outrageous like setting up paramilitaries under his control or bombing rebellious colony worlds or anything like that. The novels of Swallow and Mack do seem to hint at things going awry in the Federation, but we don't know what these things are or the extent to which Ishan is involved. The whole matter of the Klingons generally deserves development. The expansion of the Typhon Pact is explicable at least as much by fear of the Klingons--the main feeling driving Gorn and Kinshaya membership, apparently--as by fear of the Federation, while the idea of being in an alliance with the Klingons was strongly offputting to many Cardassians. There's obvious room for improvement, I think, in the behaviour of the Klingon Empire towards its neighbours: a less aggressive Klingon Empire wouldn't be nearly as polarizing.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Oh man, it's getting so hard to avoid this thread. Managed to not read anything posted by anyone so far. Should have this tuesday.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Don't have much to say that hasn't already been said. I really enjoyed the focus on Garak and Cardassia in this book. As for the overall series, I'm wondering if the remaining three books are going to focus on other aspects of the fallout of the assassination. Maybe the overall story is larger than just that one event and its resolution, but also brings in other crises which relate to the assassination but have their own stories to tell. Whatever happens, I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the series!
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! It gets an outstanding from me. I was hoping for more of a catchup on what was happening on Enterprise but I did enjoy the novel As for spoilers:- Spoiler: Just in case I was fairly certain that Garak wasn't going to die like that. It didn't seem like he'd be caught that easily. I wasn't expecting him becoming Castellan though - I thought he was going to set up his Doctor to take that position at first but it does make sense
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Excellent. I was so happy when I realized this was another Garak/Cardassia tale. Books like this really prove that tie-in fiction can be excellent literature. I'm so glad books like this exist. The whole Cardassia story from Stitch in Time to Never-Ending Sacrifice has been excellent.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Finished. Voted Outstanding. Garak is Castellan. Your argument is invalid.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Best Trek novel i've read for some time, a rare Outstanding vote from me. Brilliant!
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! The Crimson Shadow now actually leads the ranking table. The first movement seen at the very top in quite a while.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! I finished it. Garak as castellan seems so strange. Only thing stranger is that he was losing his touch.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! In-universe, is "Castellan" a new position that was invented after the fall of the Dominion? Because there seem to be three or four different titles that have been used over the years for the head of the Cardassian government.
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Yes. This had all the scope and drama and depth of cultural development that TNES did, but also used Garak all book long. It's like - what do you want more, cake, or cake with icing?
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! Yeah, the office of Castellan was created when Cardassian democracy took root post-Dominion War. During the war/under Dominion occupation, IIRC, no specific office was given to the dictator of the Cardassian Union. Skrain Dukat simply declared himself the leader but kept his rank of Gul in the Cardassian Guard. Damar and, for the five minutes he "led" Cardassia, Broca, both held the rank of legate, but no office of state. According to Una McCormack's The Never-Ending Sacrifice, Meya Rejal led Cardassia after overthrowing the Central Command in 2372. Her office was Chief Executor of the Detapa Council; it was unclear if this was a new office or a newly-empowered office. In The Lost Era: The Art of the Impossible, the head of the Detapa Council was called the First Speaker in 2328, though the position was usually much less powerful due to the Central Command essentially monopolizing political power on Cardassia. Myriad Universes: A Gutted World seems to establish that the office of First Speaker still exists in the 2373 of an alternate timeline where the Cardassians never withdrew from Bajor and were the ones to discover the Bajoran Wormhole -- implying, but not establishing definitively, that the office of Chief Executor back in the Prime Timeline was created after the 2372 coup by Rejal's faction. So far as I can recall, pre-2372, no one individual could be considered the de facto head of the Cardassian government, with the Central Command collectively holding power and there being established no one canonical or apocryphal officer in command of the C.C. the way there's a Starfleet C-in-C. (Though I would speculate that there might have been a ceremonial head of state for the purposes of receiving and sending ambassadors and signing treaties and the like, the way the Soviet Union pre-Gorbachev had the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet as nominal head of state, even though the real leader was the head of the Communist Party.)
Re: TF: The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack - Review Thread (Spoilers! That is really exciting. I'm glad to see this book is doing so well. It was definitely in my top list of trek books. And judging by that chart, I really need to get to reading Vanguard.