Just finished. Mr. Mack did a good job of using both crews. Interesting in providing background information. How much mind meld family information is to be considered canonical (or close to it)?
Spoilers DSC: Desperate Hours by David Mack Review Thread
- Thread starter Defcon
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Yeah I couldn’t follow what was happening when the Enterprise was using Shinzou for cover. The idea that Pike was just being cowardly didn’t occur to me, but I otherwise didn’t understand what was going on.
this was a great interview, I liked hearing David's insight in the show.
According to David Mack's explaination on Literary Treks, this book is not canon.
too bad, as it might help.
Not canonical, but written in close coordination with the show's staff, so it's as consistent as possible. So it's not like the early tie-ins to other Trek shows, which sometimes weren't very authentic to what the shows ended up being.
Technically, books never are.
As I told a friend who was a big fan of the Doctor Who universe, his view of Star Trek Lit is the following: "It's all canon, including the stuff that's no longer canon because reality is routinely altered by Q, time-travelers, and multiple timelines being merged together."
Then I said, "Well, they're imaginary stories but aren't they all?"
IMO, the best way to look it would be provisional (one way) canon.
i.e. it reflects the current canon on the characters, uniforms etc that appear, and it's reasonably likely that any tie-ins that follow it (particularly the 2018 DSC novel), but if the tv show feels the need, they can contradict it (which to be fair, they've been known to be with actual canon stuff).
i.e. it reflects the current canon on the characters, uniforms etc that appear, and it's reasonably likely that any tie-ins that follow it (particularly the 2018 DSC novel), but if the tv show feels the need, they can contradict it (which to be fair, they've been known to be with actual canon stuff).
Canons have always been free to contradict themselves -- e.g. The Wrath of Khan retconning Khan's followers to be younger and blonder, or DS9 and Voyager ignoring ST V's portrayal of trans-galactic travel as a matter of hours instead of decades. Or Dallas retconning away an entire season as a dream.
Finished this a few days ago. I thought the interactions between Burnham and Spock made the story.
I appreciated David Mack’s efforts to reconcile the two series visual styles. The show itself only accomplishes that task about 10% for me. After reading the book I’m still only about 70% pleased.
Now if only the upcoming comic can please me that much when it comes to reconciling the new and old Klingons.
I was quite pleased will all the nods to the Litverse. The ones I noticed were:
I appreciated David Mack’s efforts to reconcile the two series visual styles. The show itself only accomplishes that task about 10% for me. After reading the book I’m still only about 70% pleased.
Now if only the upcoming comic can please me that much when it comes to reconciling the new and old Klingons.
I was quite pleased will all the nods to the Litverse. The ones I noticed were:
- The Andorian naming system
- The Tellarite naming system
- Number One’s name from the Legacies trilogy
- Number One’s Illyrian heritage
- Pahkawa-thahns
- Chobliks
- USS Tereshkova from The Lives of Dax- Sins of the Mother.
That does make me wonder if we might actually see the show use the Andorian and Tellerite naming systems in. I know it doesn't mean they will, but with the amount of crossover we've been hearing about with Mack and the show's writers it does see more likely than if this was just another random novel.
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Nothing I have seen in any season-one scripts suggests to me that the writers' room on Discovery has any intention of utilizing the litverse's Andorian or Tellarite naming systems. Sorry.
Then again, we've already seen from the Rise of the Federation novels that Andorians and Romulans have multiple naming systems (as I'm sure most races do), so...no worries, really.
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I finished this late last week. The best part of the book is Saru. On screen he's probably my favorite character. I didn't like the implausibly unprofessional bickering he and Burnham participate in, but that's an accurate reflection of the television series, unfortunately. (I feel like you could write a rivalry that wasn't so immature-- its brazenness reflects poorly on both captain characters for not quashing it.) What Desperate Hours lets us do that Discovery itself has not yet done is let us see those parts of Saru that have nothing to do with Burnham; since the show is mostly told from her perspective, so far we've only seen Saru interacting with her. Here, we get Saru running his science lab on the Shenzhou, Saru contributing ideas that help save the day, Saru interacting with the Enterprise's Number One (who he kind of falls for, as the first human he's met who doesn't act like a predator), and Saru ruminating on his past (he was rescued from his planet, where his people lived in caves, by a Starfleet crew). I really liked the way the book handled Saru.
Number One was characterized well, though I was mildly grumpy that Mack calls her "Una"; however, I understand that originates from a Greg Cox novel. I know it's hard to work with an anonymous character like this in prose, but it just seems wrong, like translating Chewbacca's dialogue directly in print. I was a little sad to get almost none of the other Pike's Enterprise crew: Boyce has one scene, and Tyler, Garison, and Pitcairn make tiny contributions, but there's no Colt (who's my favorite), and the only "expanded universe" Pike crewmember I noticed was Caitlin Barry from the 1980s/90s novels by D. C. Fontana and Peter David. Give me some Mohindas or Burnstein or Dabisch or Nano or Moves-with-Burning-Grace or Carlotti! You shouldn't really take this complaint seriously, though, because ultimately this isn't a Pike's Enterprise novel, it's a Discovery (Shenzhou) one, and the focus is in the right place; I just really like Pike's crew.
I do wish we'd seen more of the various Shenzhou crew, though. Mack wrote biographies for them all, and named many of them (including Kayla Detmer, the only one to make the transition to the Discovery other than Burnham and Saru), but there's not much in the book to make you care about them: I want previous adventures for Danby Connor that make me even more sad when he bites it at the Battle of the Binary Stars!
(I wrote more than this on my blog if you're interested, but this is the gist.)
Number One was characterized well, though I was mildly grumpy that Mack calls her "Una"; however, I understand that originates from a Greg Cox novel. I know it's hard to work with an anonymous character like this in prose, but it just seems wrong, like translating Chewbacca's dialogue directly in print. I was a little sad to get almost none of the other Pike's Enterprise crew: Boyce has one scene, and Tyler, Garison, and Pitcairn make tiny contributions, but there's no Colt (who's my favorite), and the only "expanded universe" Pike crewmember I noticed was Caitlin Barry from the 1980s/90s novels by D. C. Fontana and Peter David. Give me some Mohindas or Burnstein or Dabisch or Nano or Moves-with-Burning-Grace or Carlotti! You shouldn't really take this complaint seriously, though, because ultimately this isn't a Pike's Enterprise novel, it's a Discovery (Shenzhou) one, and the focus is in the right place; I just really like Pike's crew.
I do wish we'd seen more of the various Shenzhou crew, though. Mack wrote biographies for them all, and named many of them (including Kayla Detmer, the only one to make the transition to the Discovery other than Burnham and Saru), but there's not much in the book to make you care about them: I want previous adventures for Danby Connor that make me even more sad when he bites it at the Battle of the Binary Stars!
(I wrote more than this on my blog if you're interested, but this is the gist.)
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