Just finished! Very nice! I enjoyed it. The ending says that the Rise of the Federation will continue" . Is there a time frame for that?
It's not firm yet, but the plan is sometime in 2017.
I'm on chapter 6 reading about Vaneel's wedding, love how alien the customs and the Denobulans are. And the hint for why you don't hear much about Denobula in the post ST ENT universe.
I initially considered coming up with a more drastic explanation, maybe something similar to what
David A. Goodman posited in
Federation: The First 150 Years (that they were devastated by a Klingon attack and retreated from space), but I decided there was a simpler solution. Given what ENT had canonically established about their preference for clustering together on a single continent, it stood to reason that only a minority of them would be inclined to wander far from home.
It is why I enjoy the novels way more than the TV shows, they were too Western-Terrancentric.
That's something I generally try to avoid. I particularly enjoyed writing the
Vol'Rala material, to try to give a feel for what a
Star Trek series told from a nonhuman perspective would be like. (Which is why I'm glad that ship is on the cover.)
Finished this yesterday. I enjoyed it but it didn't work for me as much as the other books in the series. Not sure why - it did feel like there was more jumping about than previously and didn't feel as focused as the last book.
That's a fair criticism. I did feel I was tackling rather a lot of threads. I tried to simplify it
West Wing-style by telling a lot of it from Archer's POV back at Command, but there was still quite a bit going on -- even with the threads from the previous books being mostly deferred for the moment. It'll probably be a good idea to tighten the focus more in the next book.
And though I enjoyed some of the Andorians (am I wrong for kinda shipping Thanian and Reed?)
That never occurred to me. They haven't really interacted much, as far as I recall, since they're on different ships (starships, that is). Although there were a couple of other same-sex ships I mentioned over the course of the novel. I didn't plan it that way, but there are characters in this book covering all four initials of LGBT.
It may have been because I was jamming through the book, feeling a little disappointed the it took SO long to get to some Trip/T'Pol resolution. How many books has it been since they've had contact?
Two, since
Tower of Babel, I think.
Enjoyed the beginning of the Val/Sam romance. Now, would that make them Jim Kirks grandparents?
Great-grandparents. George Kirk's father was named Tiberius, per the 2009 movie.
Good on my girl Hoshi for having figured things out back when he was Lazurus, and gnot etting all whiny and pissy like Travis.
I felt it was important to do something different this time. And it made sense in the context of the material from
To Brave the Storm. Besides, Hoshi is awesome.
I miss Kimura though. And it would be nice to know if Devna finally helps bring down the Three Sisters. With all the stuff Trip has had to do over the years, and how bad he may feel, he did lay the groundwork for Devna's transformation.
I do plan to revisit the outstanding story threads sooner or later. I wanted to take a break from the Orion stuff (and Garos and Sauria and such) for a couple of books for variety's sake, but nothing has been abandoned.
And it was a nice twist with Archer and the Prime Directive...considering he was the first Captain out in deep space mucking things up.
I don't really see it as a twist, since T'Pol was convincing Archer to practice non-interference as early as season 1. In fact, one of my big disappointments with ENT is that Archer and T'Pol were too committed to non-interference from the start, so we didn't really get a chance to see Starfleet captains acting without the restraint of the Prime Directive -- and making the kind of mistakes that would logically have led to the Prime Directive. That's one of the main threads I wanted to explore in this series, although it's come to a head sooner than I expected.