Spoilers TNG: Before Dishonor by Peter David Review Thread
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I voted poor. Resistance was bad in a forgettable kind of way. Before Dishonor was just flat out bad and sums up everything I dislike about David as a writer. Those two books in particular were what led to me eventually stopping with Treklit altogether.
I think this was the first book in the attempted TNG Relaunch that I actually enjoyed - and unfortunately led to the departure of several of the interesting new characters that we'd not really had the chance to develop, and which were more interesting than many of the characters that came after. It was interesting to see characters actually refuse to accept ambiguous orders and follow those of someone higher up.
Given that pretty much everyone will admit that BD is an atypical read among the books in that particular continuity, it seems silly to allow that to influence whether you read others.
Resistance at least was, as you said, bad but forgettable.
Well I'd been reading for years and was getting kind of burned out anyway. BD pushed me over the edge. The ongoing Borg story back then wasn't great for me, I think the last thing I read was Destiny which was cool but I'd had more than enough Borg at that point. I've started looking at the Lit board again recently, so maybe I'll get back into it again.
I have to admit, giving up Treklit after Destiny because you'd had enough of the Borg is kind of like giving up TNG after Season 2 because you'd had enough of Pulaski. 
I'd definitely recommend a return if that was the main cause of burnout. They're outright gone for good, not even a feint towards a reversal in the decade since.
I'd definitely recommend a return if that was the main cause of burnout. They're outright gone for good, not even a feint towards a reversal in the decade since.
I have to admit, giving up Treklit after Destiny because you'd had enough of the Borg is kind of like giving up TNG after Season 2 because you'd had enough of Pulaski.
I'd definitely recommend a return if that was the main cause of burnout. They're outright gone for good, not even a feint towards a reversal in the decade since.
Yeah I realize that the Borg are over in the Lit-verse after Destiny. I was just kind of burned out on Star Trek in general for a few years. I'll likely try some of the done in one TOS books again at the least. The ongoing TNG/DS9/VOY stuff is probably pretty much done for me though. Everyone has changed so much and there are tons of new characters I have little interest in at this point. If they ever get back to doing done in one TNG books set during the series I'll definitely jump on that.
Or something self contained like Vanguard which I loved.
I'm surprised lots of people didnt like this one. I thought it was a good ramp up to the Destiny trilogy. I don't mind that the characters introduced to the Trekverse in the novels act different to the characters from the series. I thought the eating Pluto scene was cool and Jellico's dry/shocked one liner was pretty good.
It's not just that. It's also that characters previously from TNG in Before Dishonor acted differently than themselves in the series. And characters introduced in previous novels acted differently than they did in the novels.
Plus something else I realized recently that bugged me about David's books is they all seem to rotate around this idea that every single good captain is a captain that literally never listens to anyone above them in rank, because David writes just about everyone of higher rank as always completely wrong in the worst possible way, and he also writes anyone who does listen to authority as usually wrong. His books are specifically structured such that the anti-authority authorities are almost always right in their approach, and it comes off as very forced to me. The shows had a tendancy towards that, sure, but at least they would occasionally set up moral quandaries between whether to obey authority for general good or risk disobediance for a more personal accomplishment. It was rarely outright the entire admiralty just being stuffed shirts shooting out orders for the sake of ordering around the brave cowboy frontier captains that know how things really are in the field.
He doesn't just buy into the pop culture Kirk myth of a rash, quick-to-act, quick-to-disobey captain, he paints that myth as the example all good captains should, and do, follow, even in the case of a character like Picard who never even came close to that.
Yeah, not a huge fan of the badmiral trope myself. This was a story where I was half expecting at the end Picard would be scolded with, 'You're a loose canon, Picard...but dammit...you get results!'
I mean, he almost literally was too. That whole "there is a new regulation that Picard can do literally whatever he wants when it comes to the Borg" thing.
So in the future, PIcard can butt into other captains' Borg encounters and say, "You're out of your jurisdiction! Hand over everything you know, I'm taking over this mission!'
That sounds like total hogwash and a simple fact check will see that he wrote several New Frontier stories post Before Dishonour as that was published in 2007.
A decade after reading this, I'm still not sure why it's universally hated. I think it's fun as hell. It's certainly better than the snooze-fest TNG relaunch books before it.
Because it's different, it seems a bit silly at points and the new characters differ from how they were portrayed in Q&A which was being written at the same time and released before hand.
Before Dishonor (and the TNG relaunch in general) was a Margaret Clark project.
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