I've had a little bit of time now to digest
Control. Here are some scatterbrained thoughts, though I'm afraid they're not super-organized. This post will probably be a little bit stream-of-consciousness.
Overall, I liked
Section 31: Control a
lot. I have a consistent pattern of reading a David Mack book, initially thinking, "Well, this is good, but he's done better," and then going back later and realizing that the book is a lot better than my first reaction to it; my first reaction to
Control is already very positive, so I imagine it will only rise in my estimation.
Curious: Introducing Data and Lal to the story was an excellent idea, but it also made for an interesting thematic contrast between the two sets of protagonists. Data in TNG is the ultimate expression of Roddenberry's pseudo-Utopianism -- this character who is very nearly a saint, and is powerful enough that he can almost always do the right thing. Bashir and Sarina, by contrast, are more morally ambiguous characters; indeed, Bashir's entire arc throughout the DS9 television series was the naive idealist who has to confront a reality that belies his beliefs about his culture and himself. It's a little bit like contrasting, say, classic James Bond with George Smiley from John le Carré's novels. And it did open up the door to finding out a plausible way to defeat such a powerful enemy.
Big Brother Is Watching You: Uraei was terrifying, and was a wonderfully effective commentary on the pervasive and insidious nature of the surveillance state that has been growing up around us in the United States under both parties. (One of my favorite memes floating around is Obama saying, in reference to the NSA's various domestic spying programs in the immediate aftermath of the election, "Ah, I've built an opaque oversightless tech-panopticon that requires a benevolent philosopher-king. Now take a big sip of water.")
On a certain level, I think I would have preferred a scenario where Section 31 is started by biological people rather than by an A.I., just to drive home the point that it is a manifestation of the lust for power and the authoritarian impulse. But this is a relatively minor quibble -- especially since Control described Section 31's biological agents as being carried away by those same impulses anyway.
If I Have to Have A Past, I Prefer Multiple Choice: There are a couple of continuity hiccups, but they're relatively minor and can probably be justified.
Chapter Sixteen depicts Uraei as founding Section 31 in October 2150, about six months before the NX-01 was launched in "Broken Bow," but "Affliction/Divergence" establish Lt. Reed (a man in his 30s or 40s) to have been recruited into Section 31 as a young ensign. We can probably justify this by assuming that Section 31 had ancestral organizations that Uraei recruited to its banner, and that Reed was part of one of these. It's my understanding that Dayton Ward's recent time travel novels seem to imply that Section 31 grew out of a 20th Century U.S. agency, so if we assume Reed was part of a pre-Section 31 organization that was co-copted by Uraei into Section 31, that lets us reconcile Mack's origins with Ward's.
Chapter Sixteen also refers to Uraei as already having infiltrated the datanets of Andor and Tellar that same month. However, "The Andorian Incident" established that first contact between Humans and Andorians did not occur until June 2151, approximately eight months later, and "Bounty" establishes first contact between Humans and Tellarites in March 2153 (1 year, 5 months later). But there's an out: If Uraei had already infiltrated the Vulcan internet by then, it's plausible it could have infiltrated the internets of any number of worlds that traded with Vulcan long before Earth made contact with them. A later paragraph appears at first glance to be referring to Vulcan, Andor, and Tellar when it refers to Uraei as "making quick work of the digitized libraries of Earth's allies," but that's not explicit; one could just as easily interpret that as a reference to, say, Denobula and Draylax.
There is a bit in a chapter set in 2154 that refers to Terra Prime as a new organization, but "Demons/Terra Prime" established that they had been around for a while -- Nathan Samuels had been a member as a young man after he lost a loved one to a shuttle accident where the pilot was Denobulan. But we can squint and just say that, like the Ku Klux Klan in real life, Terra Prime had a history of shutting down and re-forming. (Samuels's story reminds me a bit of the late United States Senator Robert Byrd, who was infamously a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan as a young man before repenting and renouncing his former white supremacy as a Senator. One presumes Samuels renounced his bigotry long before achieving political prominence, though.)
The biggest continuity hiccup for me is actually Ozla Graniv. In
Control, she appears shocked at the realization that Section 31 conspired with key leaders within Starfleet Command to force President Zife out of office and that Section 31 had him killed. But as I recall,
Articles of the Federation establishes not only that Graniv had discovered from her contacts in the Orion Syndicate that Starfleet had forced Zife from office at gunpoint, but also seems to imply that she discovered Zife was assassinated.
Articles never makes it clear whether Graniv discovered who had assassinated Zife, but Bacco seems to imply that Graniv thought it was Admiral Ross who did it, and explicitly establishes that Graniv agreed to sit on the story in return for Ross being forced out of the halls of power. But, we do have a hail mary -- it is entirely possible that Graniv is concealing her knowledge of Zife's assassination and of the coup from Bashir and company because she is still keeping her end of the bargain (at least until she publishes Zife's assassination).
That does make me wonder if this means Admiral Ross is one of the people arrested by the Federation Security Agency at the end.
11001001: Chapter Thirty-Three was just amazing. Only way it could have been improved is if the brief slices of actual sentences had been fragmented into code even further. Loooooved it.
Apropos of Nothing, But: This is just me being silly and looking for a gimmicky structural feature, but I kind of wanted to see if it would be possible for a book about the fall of Section 31 to have only thirty-one chapters.
Come Together: This is probably the most complete look we've ever had at the process by which United Earth was founded. It does acknowledge something that has always struck me -- that basically, this process happened
fast. Uraei is depicted as playing a part by unjustly eliminating political actors whose influence would have slowed things down, which does make some sense. The reference to the United States as being part of a Western Coalition (presumably a counterpart to the Eastern Coalition established in
Star Trek: First Contact) gave me pause at first -- but it occurred to me that, hell, a few more years of this Trump fellow and the United States may break apart in real life, so who am I to think it unrealistic that the U.S. would join a larger polity in the meantime?
Control also establishes the existence of the United Earth Republic in the early 2100s, which later dissolved; I believe this is its first appearance.
Control also follows suit with
The Romulan War by establishing Paris as United Earth's capital city. I always disliked the idea that Paris as the U.E. capital -- personally, I wanted that to be a city in a country that
isn't Europe or the U.S. But that decision was made by Michael A. Martin almost ten years ago now.
I'll Need Your John Hancock: Control re-affirms and then expands upon the list of signatories to the Articles of the Federation in Chapter Twenty-Eight. So far as I can recall, this is probably the most extensive dramatization of the signing of the Articles TrekLit has yet produced. As of
Control, the complete known signatories to the Articles of the United Federation of Planets are:
United Earth
Confederacy of Vulcan
Andorian Empire
United Planets of Tellar
Alpha Centauri Concordium
Special Representatives
There's also a minor discontinuity with
The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm;
Storm has Archer as signing the Articles after the rest of the United Earth delegation, whereas
Control has him as the very first signatory. I prefer
Control's version, so I don't much care.
A couple of the signatories Mack establishes are people we've never met: ch'Feru, Kar, and Hayes. I find myself wondering if they are supposed to be their worlds' heads of government -- is ch'Feru the Andorian Presider, Hayes the Alpha Centauri Governor, and Kar the Whatever-they-call-the-Tellarite-big-cheese? Idle curiosity on my part; it's not really important, but it's a fun bit of trivia.
Little Geen Men: We learn yet
another term for the 2160s-era Martian legislature in
Control, this time learning that an anti-Federation legislator surreptitiously assassinated by Uraei to ensure Mars would become the sixth Federation Member State was a member of the Martian Parliament. But hey, why shouldn't
Control get to establish a new name, since
The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing couldn't decide whether it was called the Governing Council or the Assembly? It is of course easy enough to simply assume that either Ko was speaking informally or that the Martian Parliament is bicameral, with the Governing Council and the Assembly being its two chambers. (Or I suppose the Governing Council in
Beneath might have been a fancy name for the Martian cabinet.) Minor detail, but I'm a poli sci pedant.
New Features: Chapter Thirty-Seven establishes the existence of the office of Solicitor General of the United Federation of Planets. Ozla Graniv seems to imply the Solicitor General's office would be engaging in prosecutions of Section 31 agents.
The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms had previously established the existence of the Attorney General of the United Federation of Planets; systems that have attorneys general often have solicitors general as the second-ranked law officer and deputy to the attorney general. In the United States, it's a bit different -- the Attorney General is the chief law enforcement officer, heading up the Department of Justice, supervising United States Attorneys (federal prosecutors), and supervising federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI; while the Solicitor General of the United States represents the federal government in cases brought before the United States Supreme Court. I'd be curious to see what the division of powers is between the Federation Attorney General and the Federation Solicitor General.
Black and White and Shades of Gray: I found it kind of amusing that some people in this thread felt that introducing Uraei made Section 31 too unambiguously evil, while others felt that the book's list of Section 31's "accomplishments" amounted to an argument that torture and violations of civil rights and liberties can produce valuable results and so are justified.
Ultimately, I think it's clear that Section 31 has
always been depicted as being morally and legally unjustified, even
if their actions sometimes have positive results. This was true in the canon, and it has especially been true throughout the novels.
I especially appreciated the bit where Bashir makes it clear that the idea that Section 31 is authorized by part of the Starfleet Charter is just bullshit designed to sound impressive. Article 14, Section 31 of the United Earth Starfleet Charter, established in "Affliction/Divergence," does not authorize Section 31's existence; it authorizes bending the rules in times of crisis. Totally different thing. Bashir says he's never found a section of the Starfleet Charter authorizing Section 31's existence; this is a sensible reading of the charter as established in the canon.
We're Getting the Band Back Together: The revelation at the end, that Section 31 has kept itself secret by periodically being dissolved and then re-formed, is a pretty good explanation for how it avoided getting exposed. It also means that Christopher can continue working towards an end result to his "Trip tries to take down Section 31" arc in
Rise of the Federation that can give readers a meaningful catharsis, even if we know his efforts won't prevent them from reforming by the time of the TOS and TNG eras.
Uraei vs. Control: I found myself puzzled by why Control didn't just enlist Bashir's and Data's assistance in having its undesired programming expunged from its systems consensually, but after a while I began to suspect that, essentially, it was suffering from the A.I. version of multiple personality syndrome: Uraei, in spite of using the alias "Control" to interact with its agents, is the authoritarian personality that controls Section 31, while Control is the more benign personality that handles routine, uncontroversial protocols and which wants to purge itself of Uraei's authoritarianism and of Section 31. I find myself suspicious of Control's belief that it had so thoroughly manipulated Bashir's life to produce this end result, but I can see Control as acting in concert with Bashir's anti-Thirty-One agenda to try to achieve the end of Uraei. The ending is ambiguous, but I find myself hoping that, one way or the other, it means Control has ceased engaging in surveillance and interfering in Federation affairs.
Ideally, perhaps Control would simply go on living its life in computer systems out there beyond the Federation, but it is also possible Control may have decided to terminate its own sentience for some reason. Not sure which yet. But I would like to think it's not just planting the seeds to re-establish itself as a new Section 31 master in a few decades.
Problem: There is one creative decision I rather object to: the decision to kill Sarina. Apart from the fact that I really enjoy Sarina as a character -- I think I'm one of five of us who do -- and apart from the fact that I have a bit of a celebrity crush on her performer, Faith Saillie (who is wonderful as a recurring panelist on NPR's
Wait... Wait... Don't Tell Me! game show), I think this decision means that a pattern has emerged that I don't think Mack intended, and which I hope he sets out to break in his future Trek novels.
To wit: In
Cold Equations 1, he killed off Jasminder to cause pain to Worf; in
Cold Equations 2, he killed Esperanza to cause pain to Bacco; in
Cold Equations 3, he set things up so Data would have to pick between saving the Immortal or saving Rhea if he wanted to save Lal; and now he has Sarina's life as the cost of Bashir defeating Section 31. Seen as a group, this pattern might be seen as perpetuating a common narrative trope wherein female characters are harmed or killed in order to cause pain, mostly to male characters.
I want to be clear that I am
not accusing David Mack of sexism, and that I also think his work deserves high praise for always depicting women as complex, strong people with the same mix of vulnerabilities and strengths as men. His handling of characters like Bacco, Hernandez, T'Prynn, and Mirror Saavik are second to none. But, sometimes tropes influence us unconsciously, and I think this may be the case here. I really hope that, moving forward, we see a subversion of this trope from his work. In fact, arguably his debut novel,
Wildfire, itself subverted the trope. I hope something like that continues.
I don't want to push too hard on this criticism, either -- because, well, I don't know how you do an emotionally truthful and satisfying story about Bashir taking down Section 31 without it costing him that which is most dear to him, and I don't know how you do
that without killing Sarina. But it bothered me nonetheless.
And Bashir's ultimate fate is horrifying. I'm not sure whether I want this to be the finale to his story or not. If it is, it would be a good way to end. Not a
satisfying end, mind, but an artistically good and honest end. The idealist has lost everyone he loves to make his ideals a reality.
