Spoilers DSC: The Enterprise War by John Jackson Miller Review Thread

Hopefully more people take pictures, so we can figure out which.

 

Finally finished. The end to the conflict was in the spirit of Trek. The need to span that length of time and seemlessly flow into S2E1 is not a strong point.

 

I'm going with Average. It's certainly better than Desperate Hours, which is the only other Discovery era novel I've read. I thought the Pike characterization was much better, but I still didn't connect to any of the characters. There's 70+ chapters and they all just whiz by without stopping to let the story breath. Spock spent almost a year in isolation and there's barely two paragraphs about it. Una is joined to a crazy hand species but it's skimmed over. Just left me wanting more.

 

THE ENTERPRISE WAR is a prequel to the second season of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. What was the Starship Enterprise up to during the Klingon War during the first season? What happened between the events of "The Cage" and "Brother."

John Jackson Miller does an impressive job of both creating an intriguing adventure as well explaining the discrepancies between "Desperate Hours" by David Mack and the second season. While it's handled subtlety, it's implied that the acrimonious relationship between Michael Burnham and Spock is the result of the latter's emotional breakdown. I really liked that. The rest of the story deals with a pair of alien races locked in a life-or-death struggle that the Enterprise has unwittingly wandered into it.

I really appreciate the use of the Star Trek Pilot's cast with Una ("Number One"), Colt, Pike, and Spock plus a number of original characters. JJM does an excellent job with them and while they feel a bit dated, that's deliberate. The ending was a bit too pat for me but I feel it was still in the Star Trek theme.

8/10

 

I love continuity, but inevitably things are going to change as new on-screen material comes along and the writers of the novels do a great job collectively to make everything work.

At the same time, I remind myself that there are non-fiction (supposedly) books on the shelves that somehow manage to tell completely different versions of the same events in history...right up to events that happened mere months ago. And plenty of real-world history books that contradict earlier works because there is simply more information available to draw from.

It's not hard to adopt a philosophy that a long-running franchise consists of a multitude of examples of historical fiction written over a range of time in the future.

I also enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought I would at first. The ending was classic Trek.

 

Congrats to John Jackson Miller for his Dragon Award nom for best media tie-in novel.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3832661583413910&id=100000103171014

 

What makes a Pike era novel be Discovery or TOS?

 

Because it's a book on the Discovery sublicense, using versions of characters and situations as appearing in Discovery.

 

In this case, it’s because this novel was a direct prequel to Pike’s appearance in Discovery, things leading up to the Enterprise’s appearance at the end of the season one finale, what the Enterprise was doing in the course of the war with the Klingons that made up the first season’s main plot and why they weren’t involved in that fight.

Going forward, I’d be willing to bet that if a novel features the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike will carry the label of Strange New Worlds, even if it takes place prior to Discovery or even The Cage.

 

Probably. Titles are about marketing as much as anything else. You want to appeal to the audience for the current shows, because that's probably a bigger, less niche audience.

Although since SNW is reportedly a more episodic show than DSC or PIC, it might have more room for novels that take place during the series, rather than having to be prequels.

 

Watching Discovery with HDR even in 1080 is better then watching it on BR in SDR. So for me, streaming is better then on disc unless the disc is UHD/HDR.

 

No it isn’t. Streaming is so compressed, that it doesn’t even compare to Blu-Ray. Streaming is like watching over cable/satellite.

 

So show us a picture of the BR version and the 1080p/HDR streaming version so we can compare.

 

I’m not going to do that because I would be adding another layer of compression to the image on both, so it wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
Also with streaming the quality fluctuates in terms of how good your internet connection is, bandwidth as well as how many people are accessing the internet in your area through your internet provider. Also, most streaming services like iTunes and Netflix cap their 1080 files (either HDR or non HDR) in the 6 to 10 Mbps range (that’s the DVD bitrates!), whereas most Blu-Rays (just 1080p) use about a 25 Mbps data rate, that can go up to 40 Mbps. And for 4K, it’s even worst! In October 2020, Netflix cut its 4K (HDR & non HDR) files bitrate in half—-where their 4K used to stream in the 15-20 Mbps range, that is now down to between 7-10 Mbps. Other streaming services like iTunes, max out at 25-30 Mbps range. 4K Blu-Ray averages between 80 and 128 Mbps!.
1080p/4K Streaming is like comparing in the 1990’s a VHS SLP recording to a Laserdisc (Blu-Ray/4K Blu-Ray)! At best, 1080p HDR & 4K HDR is comparable to 720p Blu-Ray.

 

Nonsense. It's true that streaming quality is more variable and is not typically as good as physical media at the same video resolution (and that lossless audio blows lossy audio out of the water), but bitrate doesn't tell the whole story when you're using different file formats with different compression efficiency. Also, while there may be less data in a streaming stream than off physical media, the question of whether there's a perceptible difference in quality comes at the user end and involves size and quality of equipment as well as distance from equipment. If you can't perceive a difference between the same show from different sources, then all the tech talk is just specs.

 

Sorry but it’s not nonsense. It’s also physicality, since even with various file formats and codecs, when you squeeze 4K video into something as small as an 8Mbps data stream, the computer is physically destroying data, a lot more data than is destroyed going to Blu-Ray. The end result on playback is interpretation of the remaining data during the decompression and how it gets reconstructed, which results in lower quality video and audio. Streaming is like VHS SLP: it may claim to be 1080p or 4k, just like VHS SLP claimed to be 480i, but is not like Laserdisc 480i, but streaming 1080p or 4K is not like 1080p/4K Blu-Ray, just like 1080p/4K Blu-Ray is not like the studio masters that use bitrates of up to 900 Mbps.

 

A 4k Netflix stream is 15.25Mbps. An HD Netflix stream is 5.xxMbps, With Disney+, you need 5Mbps for HD and 25Mbps for 4k. Amazon says the same as Disney+.

You are talking about data rates that are no longer in effect. Those cuts were because some idiot in the EU government suggested that there was a need to cut the data rates for streaming because of the lockdown so there would not be a problem for people working from home. That was rubbish but there was no way to get the streaming services to listen to reason.

Question, can you spot a quality difference between Discovery streaming from Netflix in HD/HDR/Dolby Vision vs the BR/SDR? Does the BR look noticeably better or is the Netflix stream better?

 

Please take this argument to one of the other forums, it's not even vaguely related to Trek or Lit.

If you do start a thread in another forum, I'm happy to move these posts.

Regardless, back to the Enterprise War.

 

I've finished listening to The Enterprise War. It's narrated by Robert Pektoff who does an excelling job narrating. He does voices and they really work well.

So if you want to try a Star Trek audiobook narrated by Robert Pektoff, I think you'll enjoy it.