Spoilers TNG: Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward Review Thread

I've read the first six chapters and and I like the story having a mysterious ship and trying to unravel the mystery of who built the ship and the aliens who created it.

 

I'm still reading and enjoying. I just wanted to stop by and say that this is my favorite Dayton Ward story to read in some time. I'd say since Vanguard. Thanks Mr. Ward

 

I'm about 100 pages in and rather enjoying it. It's nice and slow without feeling drawn out. I think this is definitely Ward's best effort, just in terms of plotting and characterization.

And just skimming the thread, I'm the type of person who gets annoyed by overrecapping. The boilerplate Typhon Pact summary really needs to stop at this point. Certainly mention them for first time readers, but it's starting to feel like every book for the past few years has had minor variations on the exact same wording. And that few pages of Chen summarizing three years worth of stories was a bit much. (Also, the very very vague summary of Takedown was super odd.)

 

I gave it a below average.

The first few chapters didn't even interest me at all. I skimmed over most of it. Maybe it's just me but the technical details of a scifi future technology should be brief, just enough to be believable but don't make it seem like you're writting a technical manual ... and then I read Ward is an author of a dozen Star Trek Corp of Engineer novels ...

Then I got to the meat of the book. It was ploddingly slow. The constant info dumps from past events. The rehashing of inter character relationships. The droneing inner monologues. And the almost cringe worthy banter. The last act was alirght, when everything blows up but predicatable.

That side plot with Taurik and the forbiden future info he gleaned felt unnecessarily dumped into the story. It was as if an editor just said "Oh by the way can you drop this in somehow so we can set up a future novel for another author?."

 

So, unless someone else already did and I missed it, I'll ask the question:

from a time travel perspective, why/how does this all work?

Doesn't quite make sense to me, want to see if it can be figured out. If the future version destroyed the present, under-construction version, doesn't none of this happen? This is usually the big reset-button portion of the episode where the Enterprise would then coast into the system while Guinan gets an odd look on her face.

For some reason, we seem to have still done all that, but then skipped the reset button while ignoring that what happened is now impossible. There some other hand-waving that should point us towards this story still working out? Not quite getting it.

It's great that this was the impetus to fix their problems and stop the war, but no present construction means no time-traveling ship, no Enterprise meet-up, no impetus to stop fighting, right back to building the weapon.

Seems there's always either a reset button here, or a way that someone is protected from the change to the timestream so you can carry the info forward. This time, the story just goes on like nothing happened. Doesn't make sense.

 

I wondered the exact same thing. I too was expecting a reset button but instead the author acknowledges the issue but then dismisses it. From the end of chapter 32: "Of course, she supposed there might be temporal ramifications to consider, such as the apparent paradox of using the completed version of the weapon ship to destroy its earlier, burgeoning self. How would the supposed rules of time travel view such a thing? When this is all over, somebody at the Department of Temporal Investigations is going to have an aneurysm."

 

Going by CLB's rules, maybe it's because the time-travel was strictly one-directional. Since no information was mutually exchanged between the future and the past, there was no entanglement formed between the two time periods, so both timelines continued to exist independently of one another.

 

So, essentially, we got 2 parallel universes where the Arrow traveled from one universe to a parallel universe:

Universe 1: Enterprise visits system but sees nothing remarkable and keeps going. The war rages between the two planets. One planet builds the Arrow, tests it, and then it disappears. The two planets keep warring and eventually die from resource exhaustion.

Universe 2: the Arrow from universe 1 pops in and drifts for years. The Enterprise shows up and discovers the Arrow. Meanwhile, one planet starts to build the Arrow from this universe 2. The events of the novel unfold. In the end, the Arrow from universe 1 destroys itself and the construction of the Arrow from universe 2. This prompts the two planets to finally peace.

 

In a sense that's what I mean, yeah, though both universes are branches off the same root that divided around 2264. And if the Arrow had managed to return to 2480 and make the communication of information two-way, then it would've formed that entanglement and the new timeline would've overwritten its original future timeline. I think.

 

Ok, suppose you're stuck with 2 parallel and divergent timelines, then, and not a strict time travel issue. Just more that you have to infer that both timelines proceed and it's an alternate reality instead of being linear time travel within one reality.

Same sort of leap you're forced to make if you want to enjoy anything post-Hobus, I suppose. Either everything we know of (including this book) never happened and are overwritten, or NuTrek is just an alternate reality that jumped into being because of that event.

Guess I'm fine with that analysis, just feels a little more loose to invent another reality instead of having it link back up somehow. They wanted to change the past, but using the rules here, they'd have never changed anything anyway, it would have just created a different branch. A POV thing I guess. No matter what happened, the reality that led them to create and then launch the mission wouldn't exist if they were successful, so they were going to either create a branch or over-write their reality either way. Guess I just prefer the overwrite to the branch, feels cleaner...

Not sure how to make that still flow through, though. I guess the Arrow would have needed to be built under more isolation, further out so that no contact could be made with the homeworlds. In that isolation, they'd get to continue and then launch even if peace was achieved, because they wouldn't have any contact. They could then launch, arrive in the past, and still do their thing. They then just need to self-destruct or drive into the sun or something to destroy future Arrow, and it tidies up the loop, no? The 'bad' future doesn't exist anymore, and you have a neat loop that allows the Arrow to be created and go to the past some day. Kind of a waste of resources and lives, but I guess if you know it will save your planets, you could still justify it. then the Present planets just need to agree to leave them alone and let them work to that end. The facility has to be far enough away that they can't tell the condition of the worlds, though, and you need to substitute the moon for some other isolate test. Can throw in malfunctions instead of attacks at the start, something.

Maybe over-thinking it, I just tend to like the closed loop/predestination bit better than alternate branches that stay open...

 

I might be wrong here, I'm much less sure about this, but I believe that were the Arrow to have survived, it would have produced the entanglement once it reached the point in time at which it went back? That is, once 2480 was reached the long way. Like the situation in Forgotten History when the Black Star base's crew reached the point at which the Timeship would have gone through its first test. You would've had the "it no longer exists" situation like with the recovered wreckage of the Timeship in that scenario.

Edit: Wait, no, there's some kind of entropy gradient involved too, getting there naturally might be a different situation than getting there through a second spacetime distortion since the Arrow would have an extra ~210 years worth of entropy by that point.

You know, I'm honestly tempted to reread WTC and FH just to figure this out now.

 

Calling Dayton Ward and Chris Bennett! I would love to hear their perspective on the time travel aspect in the novel.

 

You could ask Dayton in the comments on his blog-post on the book:

https://daytonward.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/armageddons-arrow/

 

Thanks. Just did.

 

What did the DTI think of that solution?

 

We do know that the Arrow's original plan did not work, owing to the crew remaining in suspension too long. Perhaps the original plan would have involved the deletion of the original grimdark future.

I hadn't considered the possibility that Taurik had picked up the supernova that destroyed Romulus on the Raquilan star charts. If he had, hmm. The implications are huge.

EDIT: I don't think that he did. The Federation is looking for détente with the Romulans, and what better way to engineer this than to provide the Romulans with an advance warning of an unexpected supernova that could destroy their homeworld? The DTI surely couldn't be that cold-blooded, could it?

 

I just finished it and I liked it better than I expected. Early on I was frustrated with the whole time travel back to destroy the enemy before the war idea. Once it was revealed that things aren't as they appear I really began to enjoy this one. I loved the focus on Chen and Konya. Chen is one of my favorite relaunch characters and it's nice that Konya gets development beyond the SCE books. Also, it great to have a new story focusing on exploration again. I hope this is the first of many.

 

Not sure if you have already seen it, but he has responded.

 

Thanks. I saw his reply. For others who may not be checking his blog, here is what he wrote:

I am hoping this gets explored more, as well as the future knowledge that Taurik saw. I am sure Lucksly and Dulmur are going to *love* this one.

EDIT: Dayton Ward just responded again on his blog that he does plan to follow up on this. Can't wait!