Different strokes for different folks. But if I had to start a fire to keep warm, the first thing I'd burn would be Inception.
That is completely unfair. Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many worked hard to earn its status as kindling, goddamnit.
Oh, it's right near the top as far as potential kindling goes. Along with the Enterprise: The Romulan War books.
Different Strokes indeed, Sci. First of all, I must say that you raise great points and perhaps Destiny blinds us (a cool tagline ), but I also disagree with some of your choices for 4/5 novels..
Oh, I'm sure. For instance, I liked Rough Beasts of Empire much more than most readers did, apparently. But I strongly suspect that if most of us were to sit down and look at the list of novels published in, say, the 8 years before Destiny, and at the list of novels published in the 4 years since Destiny, we'd find that roughly the same proportion of each list is and is not to our liking (whatever that proportion might be in your particular instance).
I loved The Needs of the Many! You can't burn that, not just to save a few frostbitten fingers! I think the novels have been consistantly good since Destiny. HUGE changes have come to Trek... Spoiler: recent stuff Andoria left the Federation, the Romulan Empire was reunited, Deep Space Nine was destroyed, Admiral Janeway was resurrected ...and the reading has been, for the most part, hugely entertaining. It seems like the novels have a long-term plan for the Trek 'verse. IMO, it was the pre-Destiny books that were inconsistant. Several seemingly random Borg attacks dominated Next Generation (with lots of 's in Resistance and Before Dishonor), DS9 went off into an unpopular (at least around here, I haven't read them yet) Mirror Universe tangent, Voyager was doing nothing of note...
With DS9 I was enjoying the Mirror Universe stories, which, un fortunately came to a screeeeeeching halt with Kira and Vaughn.beaming to the other side's Terok Nor and after the setup of the Mirror Universe the DS9 books have offered no explanation as too what occurred, and instead started on a rather boring arc about Bashir's personal relationship to Douglas and Sisko leaving his wife and daughter, which led into Plagues and Raise The Dawn which were good, but almost seem to be parts of a story that really has not been setup well and are islands that raise more questions than answers. I realize that the mess is because of S&S letting Marco Palmieri go, but for DS9 it seems like the new editors are kinda clueless about where to go with he series.
Just take a look at Sho's Trek books ranking site, it gives a pretty good idea as to what the general opinion of recent Trek books is.
I'm surprised that this hasn't yet been addressed - as Christopher is usually the one to do it - but the Typhon Pact isn't really a unified 'series' or 'story arc'. With the exception of A Singular Destiny and Brinkmanship, all of the books that have been released under the Typhon Pact banner an be directly associated with a specific series entry in the ST pantheon, as follows: The Next Generation Paths of Disharmony The Struggle Within Deep Space Nine Rough Beasts of Empire Zero Sum Game Plagues of Night Titan Seize the Fire
Hopefully we've seen the last of the Typhon Pact for a while. Outside of Brinkmanship, they've been anywhere from dull to downright bad.
Both had some interesting threads but the pacing completely destroys their entertainment value for me. They were a chore to get through. Plus, the ending of Raise the Dawn disappointed me.
The Soul Key covered what happened in the Mirror Universe, it was the Ascendant arc that was skipped over.
Unless something drastic happened that I didn't hear about in Brinkmanship, I don't think the TP will be going anywhere. I think there is mention of them in one of the Cold Equations blurbs.
Not quite, since the Iliana Ghemor storyline was left dangling; the Taran'atar storyline was also left wide open.
They don't need to "go anywhere", they simply need to quit making them the sole focus of various novels for a while. They did a long, drawn out version of The Enterprise Incident and they've done "The Cuban Missile" crisis. They need to be put in the background for a while and only trot it out if they have a truly special story involving them.
.... in the past two years, the Typhon Pact has been the focus of exactly 8 out of 25 novels and anthologies. It's hardly been the sole focus of the novel line, unless you want to ignore two-thirds of all Trek lit.
DS9, yes, but TNG has also included Losing the Peace, Indistinguishable from Magic, and Cold Equations.
I didn't really see Indistinguishable from Magic as a pure TNG novel and we don't have Cold Equations yet. So most of the TNG output recently has been related to The Typhon Pact.