The Voyager Novels

'Love it or hate it' seems to be a good way to describe it. It's Janeway cut off from Voyager and in first person, so there's very little interaction between Janeway and the rest of the crew.

Plus the author is fairly controversial in her portrayal of the characters of later Trek. Most of her non-novelization work revolve around TOS, and a lot of people find her attitude towards non-TOS Trek to be disapproving at best.

 

Thanks! As I recall, that was my first solo Trek novel (after a couple of collaborations). And, yes, I think it was back during the Kes era.

It would be years before I got a chance to write Seven . . . .

 

I'm glad you got that chance!

 

Well, I'll give it a chance.

 

She may have mellowed later, but in the early days of TNG, she hated that show and she had pretty harsh words for Gene Roddenberry. (I saw her at a Trek con or two back in the day.) She's a right-wing military fetishist who didn't like Trek being liberal and anti-war. Never mind that that started with TOS.

 

I'm a few chapters into Fire Ship and it's pretty weird. I find it very confusing to follow the story and Janeway seems out of character. I don't think I'll continue.

 

I remember it took me a few tries before I got all the way through "Fire Ship". It is an interesting story, but I don't think the first-person worked all that well for it.

 

I'm usually fine with first-person narratives but this one is really difficult to get into.

 

Thank goodness NuTrek seems to go the politically neutral route when it comes to economics so we can avoid the usual politics wars.

 

I have never met a Diane Carey book I liked. Not once, no matter which series she was writing about.

 

I'm not a fan at all, and there are books of hers that I really really emphatically do not care for even a little bit. But there were a few times when I thought, with more editing (at every level, from story to sentence), this could be okay. I seem to recall thinking she came close with the first Piper novel, the first Invasion novel, the last Challenger book, and maybe The Great Starship Race.

But for the most part the characters she wrote were not the same people I saw on TV, she indulged her own interests to the point of quoting her own real life diary in one of her novels, and her version of English grammar was, let's say, uniquely hers.

 

Piper is nothing but a Mary Sue character.

 

Seriously? I didn't know this one! Which book?

 

Ship of the Line. She uses it as a chapter epigraph. Search "personal log" in it on Google Books and you will see.

 

That's... incredible.

She even makes a note afterwards that parts of the book you're reading were written on the same trip where she wrote that. Like it's supposed to be unusually powerful that, not only did she use her own diary as an epigraph, but that it was a diary entry she wrote while writing the book it's in! WHOOOOAAAA!