Spoilers KEL: More Beautiful Than Death by David Mack Review Thread

At the beginning of STID, when Pike is brow-beating Kirk about letting the natives see the Enterprise when he rescued Spock (and possibly for preventing the volcanic eruption at all), Kirk defends his record by pointing out that not one member of the crew has been killed since he assumed command of the ship. It's a little obvious, knowing that restriction, that the Enterprise personnel that got attacked by the aliens in the book were originally written as having been killed, not rendered comatose, especially how in the last chapter there's just one quick line that McCoy figured out how to revive them all off-screen after the main action of the book had concluded.

 

Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that line in Into Darkness. I was thinking it was something more abrupt.

 

Continuity error! P.79 Sulu's sitting in the Captain's chair when Into Darkness establishes he never sat in the chair before the mission to Kronos.

Book is ruined

 

Corrigible for the second printing! But what about the audiobook? :-)

 

His subsequent head injury leaves him with amnesia, and he forgets sitting in the chair. Fixed.

 

Awe, no way. I haven't started the book yet and now it's all ruined.

I can't even look at another David Mack novel now

 

If you want to know what @Greg Cox's book is about, you can actually find out already. I can't remember which, but I believe he repurposed at least some of what he had planned for it for one of his TOS books that has already come out. @Christopher did the same thing, so it's pretty doubtful we'll see the other two Kelvin books get released.

 

Well, yes, as you say, we just repurposed some of the material into stories that were mostly new and rather different in focus. And Greg reused less than I did, I'm pretty sure.

 

Would they be different enough to make publishing the Kelvin books worthwhile, without being repetitive? I had thought they were mostly the same as the Kelvin books, just with changes made so that they'd work as TOS books.

 

Christopher could probably give you more info on his particular story, but I do recall reading somewhere that both have said they would require substantial revisions to be consistent with the 2 later movies (particularly with STID IIRC).

Whereas I read that David Mack's novel was written with the Kelvin verse particularly in mind to the point that he was unable to really repurpose it as a purely original series story (which just reading the blurb makes sense, the entire story sounds like it needs the destruction of Vulcan to be a story).

I don't think "The Unsettling Stars" would really have worked in the original series either. A major premise of that book is them proving themselves after their rapid fire promotions.

 

No, that's not the case. The majority of The Face of the Unknown is new material. A lot of the broad plot structure and set pieces are recycled from Seek a Newer World, but with heavily altered context, characters, and dialogue, and it's a considerably longer book overall, so the new material outweighs what's reused.

But honestly, I wouldn't really want Seek a Newer World to see print now. It was a weaker, more superficial story than my usual, since I had so much less to work with in terms of established characterization and history for this timeline. And there was a subplot in it that, in retrospect, I don't think was very good. I tried to do something clever that didn't turn out well, so I had to revise it into what ended up being too much of a cliched "hostile superior officer clashes with Kirk" story.

Really, nearly all the best parts of SaNW are in The Face of the Unknown, and the one really fun part I couldn't fit in there is in The Captain's Oath (in fact it's the teaser excerpt at the very front of the book). So you're not missing anything important. If I were to get the chance to publish something set in Kelvin, I'd want it to be a whole new story, something taking advantage of two more movies' worth of insight into that version of Trek.

 

Could you give me a hint, the eBook doesn't include the teaser page.

 

The early part of Kirk's dialogue exchange with the Klingon Grnar, from Kirk's hail through "a Klingon's default state." Although with some Kelvin-specific references replaced with Kirk's bluster about Alexander of Macedon.

 

Suffice it to say that playing "the dozens" with a Tellarite or a Zaldan is a good way to make friends, but if you start "ranking" on a Klingon, it's likely to escalate to armed combat.

 

I was a little late to the game on this one but I just finished this novel and rated it above average. Like "The Unsettling Stars" this one also deals a bit with Kirk's rapid fire promotion. This one also is a story I could only see in the relaunch universe. Much of it's plot relies on things that happened in Star Trek (2009) and it'd be difficult to see how this story could be repurposed into a prime-universe story.

It has a 2 story structure, which can either be a good thing or bad thing. In this case it worked well. In this case they weren't given equal standing. The Akiron storyline was clearly the primary, with the L'Nel storyline the secondary, but each story was handled well, with neither overwhelming the other (which can lead to bad dual storyline books). While this and "The Unsettling Stars" were two completely different stories, both touched on the inexperience of the crew and Kirk's brashness at this younger, less refined stage of his career (which also undoubtedly follows a different path from his 'stack of book with legs' prime-universe counterpart).

As a horror movie fan, I also liked the concept of the malevelont wights. And that leads me to the one element that made me drop it from excellent to above average. I would have liked to have learned more about this malevelont force and the universe it came from. The story was handled well overall, but there wasn't much about the wights themselves other than the mythology surrounding them created by the Akirons. As Spock would note, many legends have some basis in fact, and it would have been intersting, if a bit morbid, to find out more about them. That was the only disappointment for me.

Probably in keeping with the line in STID that Kirk lost no crew up to that point, we see no deaths among the Enterprise crew. Not sure if that was one of the modifications Mack made to bring it in line with STID (I'd be interested to know what changes he had to make to make it consistent with STID). Someone else pointed out that in STID it was noted Sulu had not taken the center seat before, while in the novel he is in charge 2 or maybe 3 times. But those were significant plot points in the novel so I'm not sure how Mack could have revised that without significant changes to the book, so you just have to let that go. Otherwise it seems pretty consistent with Star Trek (2009) and STID (Beyond likely didn't factor in since that's a few years later and probably irrelevant to this story).

It was nice to see these two novels see a release and finally see some original fiction based on the Kelvin timeline. It'd be nice to see more novels, including some post-STID novels that go into their version of the 5YM that they start after STID.

 

I read the book and I enjoyed it. one thing that bugged me was Tpring's character.

In TOS I found her kind of funny and even enduring, not maliciously harmful in anyway to Spock or Kirk.

In this book she is straight up evil. I did not like that all that much.

 

I guess seeing your planet destroyed around you can change you.

Also, I think you meant "endearing" (evoking warm feelings), not "enduring" (strong and lasting). Although "enduring" could work for this version, since she outlasted her planet.

 

Oof! I respect your opinion and your impressions, but you and I watched "Amok Time" through a *very* different lens!

 

Not the first time T'Pring ended up as the "big bad." Diane Duane handled that particularly well in Spock's World.

 

I have to admit I didn't see that coming until about a chapter or two before the reveal. I usually pride myself in my ability to pick up on some plot twists based on hints authors tend to give you ahead of time. But this one caught me unawares.

A bit ironic too because early on in the book, when "L'Nel" asked Sarek about approaching Spock to be her mate, I thought of T'Pring and wondered what happened to her. But honestly, I just didn't give any thought at that point that she might in fact be T'Pring

Yeah, she wasn't exactly all sweet and nice in "Amok Time." After all, she manipulated 2 best friends into a fight to the death so she would have Stonn regardless.

Perhaps you can argue in "Amok Time" she wasn't outright evil. In the novel she really went to a dark place. But as Christopher noted, she, like all Vulcans, experienced an incredible trauma and she just didn't handle it all that well.

Perhaps evil still isn't the right word though. Just very disturbed.