6 chapters in and all right, so far. Almost convinced the universe with Chen is unchanged from current continuity.
Spoilers TNG: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward Review Thread
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It's a mixed bag....the early early subtle hint of a different universe D (Baryon sweep schedule) and then they get less subtle....but we get told things almost as though we don't know the characters even in 'our' universe, and there's a lot of co tinuity porn showing tiny differences between the universes...but the big ones go unexplained. Alternate Riker doesn't get any visible closure at all, things that could be discussed are sidestepped (oh..you and Troi get married in our universe...much later than you two sorted things out of course.....no closure for your worries either Alternate Troi.) and things start getting rushed. Why is Tasha alive? Nobody knows. We get a retelling of BOBW we could have guessed at, but no one asks? She gets less to do that she did in series one of TNG anyway, so why bother having the differences start so early in the timeline? It didn't even have a cute moment where Picard reveals he is going to be answering to Admiral Riker in his timeline...which would have helped give Alternate Riker some closure. He needed to know after all, that he was just as good as Picard, even if he was different.....
It's...a fun exercise of a book, but needed just a little more to be done and finished and not have things happen just for the sake of the plot. I wonder if having an alternate Data or someone as a more permanent refugee in the main line may have been interesting. A way of getting a real look at difference between then and now for these characters.
Also...is it me or is that D on the cover a bit...wrong? Too high in the neck, too much nacelle pylon, different silhouette?
It's...a fun exercise of a book, but needed just a little more to be done and finished and not have things happen just for the sake of the plot. I wonder if having an alternate Data or someone as a more permanent refugee in the main line may have been interesting. A way of getting a real look at difference between then and now for these characters.
Also...is it me or is that D on the cover a bit...wrong? Too high in the neck, too much nacelle pylon, different silhouette?
Assuming no 'splosions....they must have still been dragged along. Which means the knowledge that their particular universe lost its Kirk early is now in one of the other universes. Maybe that will lead to humanitarian dimension hopping and time travel to prevent VGer, Space Whale probe, or any time Kirk saved a whole planet, race, political group or universe. Particularly if that has knock on effects for the multiverse. Or...they just went boom and/or will be forgotten or stuck in a museum.
Why single out that particular dimension above the countless others that also lost their Kirk, though? And why limit it to just the fact that Kirk was lost? Every dimension in the multiverse has probably lost people who in other dimensions averted some tremendous disaster or something. Even the one we're used to.
Largely cos it's known via the events of this novel. Otherwise you get a whole team of dimension hopping dudes with a checklist of important figures and matching catastrophes cold-calling nearby quantum realities. 'Hello my name is Sam, I am calling today to see if you have a Kirk? You do? You've never been in a godlike computer being incident? I see thankyou very much. How about a Picard? No I do not know what a Butlerian Jihad is....they hung up.'
Did not expect to see anything from the 23d century. Especially the Bloodied Talon and the destruction of Kirk's Enterprise in the other universe.
Even though a 23rd Century Romulan Bird of Prey is on the front cover?
I am reading the Kindle version and do not start at the cover. Alternately the other universe could have those ships still in service in the 24th Century?
Is this the first novel to utilize the name "Vas Hatham class" for the "Balance of Terror" bird of prey?
It's two months after Prey.
I don't believe so. The memory-beta page for it has existed since 2007.
The name comes from FASA
The one I noticed was in the very beginning when Geordi thinks that it's been almost a year since "the Captain" joined in to the poker game, and I was thinking that there wasn't that much time between AGT and GEN.
I do agree that a heads-up about then Caeliar would've been more apropos than the torpedo schematics, if only because that was the more critical information, and relied a lot more on happenstance than the development of those torpedoes. I was expecting Picard to leave Riker with a sealed file with directions to the Caeliar planet and instructions to open if and only if the Borg ever arrived in force.
I think it's because the torpedoes are concrete enough that they are less likely to be affected by any further divergences. The caeliar may not be there...the Borg may have a different origin...at the other end, with changes to the admiralty, Janeway and Voyager may never go to the badlands. A warning about the dominion may have been more useful.
Now how does that work? That would be like having an alternate universe where humanity evolved on Andor and Andorians evolved on Earth. I mean, it's one thing to have timelines stay somewhat similar even after a divergence, it's another entirely to have timelines move arbitrarily far apart from one another, and yet somehow come back to more similarity down the line. The former might push a little on scientific believability a little, but the latter would really strain narrative believability to me.
I'd be okay with an alternate Borg origin in general, as in just presenting an alternate like people did for a while before Destiny. But not with having two different origins within the same multiverse, any more than I'd be okay with having two different origins for humanity within the same multiverse.
