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

[Christopher]

^Probably not until early May. I'm kinda busy with other priorities right now, and I want to give people a chance to read it before I post a boatload of spoilers that will make their way to Memory Beta.

[TOS-Fan]

Christopher, any chance of a follow up post Ex Machina? I read that you've got a TOS novel coming but I am tired of all the time travel and won't be picking that one up. Sorry, but I just feel that the whole time travel thing has been done to death. Sort of like the Borg were pre Destiny.

I'd love to see more of the post TMP-pre TWOK era.

[Christopher]

^Well, I also feel that time travel has been done to death, which is why I try to find different ways of approaching stories about time.

[Thrawn]

About 1/6 of the way through; already totally confirmed in my belief that Christopher was the perfect author to tackle this concept. (I mean, I know he's the one that pitched it, so it's not like any other author would've written it anyway, but if I'd seen the same title with a different author, I'd have been a lot less excited.) The quantum physics stuff is every bit as nifty as I was expecting.

Christopher writes Trek like hard sci-fi, which is a pretty mighty challenge considering how much ridiculous stuff there is, scientifically speaking, in Trek. But this one really works - take out all the references to Starfleet, and this is almost an original sci-fi concept. Certainly all the physics could've been used outside Star Trek no problem.

I haven't gotten far enough in for the plot to really get going, but I love the organization, the spirit of it, and the science.

More when I'm finished, but I'm already feeling like this is the best Trek book in a long while.

[Christopher]

Wow.

[Corran Horn]

I'm 100 pages in. It's...ok, I guess. I agree Christopher does well with the quantum physics stuff but I expected it to be more...'fun', I guess. So far it's tedious at times. We'll see how it turns out.

[BrotherBenny]

I downloaded it yesterday morning and finished it last night. I think it was a great book and up to Chris's usual excellent standards.

I like the use of characters and the pairing of Ranjea and Garcia. Lucsly and Dulmur were great together and I love the idea of Lucsly being the one to initiate the temporal defense grid. I think I would have been equally as angry had one of my friends/colleagues been entirely erased from existence with barely a hiccough.

I loved the idea of using the different calendars (especially the Mayan one, dumb conspiracy theorists) but I think I would also have liked the stardate calendar there as well. I also enjoyed knowing what day of the week it was, just like from the episode.

I'm looking forward to the TOS one now.

[Christopher]

I did include stardate ranges for each section on the section-header pages (or whatever you call those, the "Present Time" and "Downtime" intros). But including them scene-for-scene along with the other stuff would've been too cluttered. It's a long enough book as it is.

[BrotherBenny]

Christopher wrote:

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I did include stardate ranges for each section on the section-header pages (or whatever you call those, the "Present Time" and "Downtime" intros). But including them scene-for-scene along with the other stuff would've been too cluttered. It's a long enough book as it is.

Fair point. How many words does the book total out at and how many words have you now published (counting all timelines, many worlds and dimensions)?

[Christopher]

BrotherBenny wrote:

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How many words does the book total out at and how many words have you now published (counting all timelines, many worlds and dimensions)?

Thanks for reminding me to update my word count list on my blog. With the publication of DTI:WTC and its 125,000 words (give or take), I have now surpassed one million words of published fiction!

[JD]

Very cool. Hopefully, you'll make it to 1 million more!

[JWolf]

JD wrote:

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I know I will definitely be downloading this to my Nook first thing on the 26th.

I bought the nookbook from B&N today. Don't start reading it just yet. There are some major issues with the CSS that I am working on fixing. For example, the fonts are a mess and there is no italic showing. The code in the XML for italics is there, but the CSS is not right for displaying it. I'll can post the CSS once I have it fixed.

If I am not mistaken, I believe there is a way to swap out an encrypted file for one not encrypted. I will see if I can find out how to do this in case you do not have the DRM removed.

It also turns out that S&S left out the bold-italic font and bold-italic is used. I've found the fonts needed and have replaced the ones S&S used. This one is one heck of a mess and it will be fixed.

[crotig]

Just finished it. Fantastic book. Mind still boggling a bit. I'm usually pretty good at navigating the theoretical science but this one had me a little tied up. I think I got the gist of it though. I'm sure I'll get the rest of it on my customary years-time reread.

I did have one question though about something I thought was a bit of a contradiction.

Given the determination Lucsly showed regarding prosecuting Janeway over the events that brought Voyager home, I found it odd that they would be so fired up about reversing what happened to Shelan. If it was wrong for Janeway to use technology from the future then wouldn't the same be true of the DTI using time travel to recover their agent?. Isn't the DTI all about leaving well enough alone and not meddling further?. Personally I'm not against it or anything I just thought it didn't fit.

Looking forward to the next one.

[BrotherBenny]

crotig wrote:

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Given the determination Lucsly showed regarding prosecuting Janeway over the events that brought Voyager home, I found it odd that they would be so fired up about reversing what happened to Shelan. If it was wrong for Janeway to use technology from the future then wouldn't the same be true of the DTI using time travel to recover their agent?. Isn't the DTI all about leaving well enough alone and not meddling further?. Personally I'm not against it or anything I just thought it didn't fit.

This though was a deliberate act of malice against someone who was trying to do the right thing, doing her duty as a DTI agent. Such a well planned homicide that it took years of planning and there was barely a hiccough in the timeline. Such nastiness deserves to be undone. Personally, I would have vaporised him with a Varon-T disruptor or thrown him into a black hole.

[Christopher]

crotig wrote:

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I did have one question though about something I thought was a bit of a contradiction.

Given the determination Lucsly showed regarding prosecuting Janeway over the events that brought Voyager home, I found it odd that they would be so fired up about reversing what happened to Shelan. If it was wrong for Janeway to use technology from the future then wouldn't the same be true of the DTI using time travel to recover their agent?. Isn't the DTI all about leaving well enough alone and not meddling further?. Personally I'm not against it or anything I just thought it didn't fit.

Well, one could say there's a contradiction between the law's attitude toward a criminal pointing a gun at someone and a police officer pointing a gun at someone. The circumstances matter.

Yes, DTI policy is to discourage time travel whenever possible. And in Lucsly's view (and, frankly, mine), Admiral Janeway's action, using time travel and disrupting the entire continuum merely to make life relatively better for her own crew, was an incredibly selfish and frivolous abuse of time travel, and moreover, one that she initiated. She wasn't trying to correct damage caused by someone else's time travel, she was the one who chose to create a disruption to the flow of history. And Captain Janeway, by voluntarily going along with that illegal act even though she was fully cognizant of its illegality and immorality, was just as guilty as her future self.

But if you'll recall, when Lucsly and Dulmur were talking to AD Kreinns about their possible responses to Janeway's crime, they did broach the possibility of using time travel themselves to undo Janeway's alteration to history. And that shows that the DTI does not completely rule out the possibility of using time travel to counteract time travel and restore the "proper" history. It's an extreme measure and an absolute last resort, and only the administrators and senior agents are cleared to even contemplate it, but the option exists.

What happened to Shelan was also a temporal violation, an alteration of the proper history. More, it was an attack on the department itself. Think of how the police respond to a cop-killer. One of their own was victimized, so they were willing to do whatever it took to save her. Really, the "contradiction" was the whole point -- the fact that they were willing to contemplate using time travel themselves was meant to underline just how intensely they felt about this. If you've seen Doctor Who: "The End of Time," think about the scene with Wilfrid offering the Doctor a gun. When a character is suddenly willing to do something he'd normally never contemplate, that's when you know a line has been crossed. (TV Tropes calls this the Godzilla Threshold.)

Although ultimately they decided not to take such action, to honor Shelan by being true to the principles she gave her life (literally her entire life) for.