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Spoilers Coda: Book 1: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward Review Thread

Rate Coda: Book 1: Moments Asunder

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    Votes: 21 28.4%

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    Votes: 29 39.2%

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    Votes: 14 18.9%

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    Votes: 2 2.7%
  • Total voters
    74
Thrawn said:
Heyyy, here I am 5 and a half hours into a 11 and a half hour long book, and I think something might actually be about to happen that involves the main characters in some way in the story!

I'm extremely confused why, with only 300,000 words left in the entire 20+ year storytelling endeavor that is the Star Trek Litverse, Dayton decided to spend about 50,000 of them killing off people I couldn't possibly care less about and having all the main characters just... like... chill? (Truly: was "the fate of Juel Ducane" on anyone's "top 10 things I hope the epic Litverse finale addresses"? Was it on anyone's top 10,000?) It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the first book in the epic Liverse finale trilogy would contain a single Litverse main character making some kind of decision at some point in its entire first half. Right?

Either way, here we are; I hope the second half is better.
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I thought when listening to the audiobook that maybe I was just imagining how interminably long the Relativity part was. Most of the story it seemed fait accompli that Ducane and his crew were doomed, and yet I thought, there must be some reason we are seeing the play-by-play of this.
 
ToddCam said:
I thought when listening to the audiobook that maybe I was just imagining how interminably long the Relativity part was. Most of the story it seemed fait accompli that Ducane and his crew were doomed, and yet I thought, there must be some reason we are seeing the play-by-play of this.
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No kidding.

And then he did it again with the other Enterprise! I was thinking "oh cool this is going to be some kind of meaningful payoff for the story in Headlong Flight ... is this Enterprise going to travel back in time as well, is that going to be important?" Nope, two whole chapters of just them all laboriously dying also. Again.
 
I'd just say for me, when you are showing scenes in peril, and a number of deaths, you are naturally going to be more engaged with characters you have an investment in. Juel Ducane and the crew of Relativity were not interesting. I remember Ducane vaguely from the Voyager episode and from the DTI novel, but he didn't make that much of an impression with me. Since it felt like 'these people are all going to die' from the beginning, and I didn't care that much about them is going to make their drawn out demise somewhat tedious.

I thought the alt-Enterprise crew was more interesting for me because, even though they were technically characters I'd never encountered before (I didn't read the other story), they were kind of familiar.
 
Tuskin38 said:
I don't see the issue. I enjoyed it. It upped the stakes, introduced the mysterious enemy.
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That is the issue. If you want to establish a wide-ranging threat across time and alternate realities, you have to have vignettes of people being threatened in other times and alternate realities. Unlike Destiny, where there were decades worth of locations and secondary characters to briefly cycle through the most intense moments of destruction, there's a more limited palette of other time periods and timelines that are related to the Litverse (and discounting any that might be needed later in the story, so can't be obliterated early on to establish the situation). Aside from going the "Q&A" route of briefly inventing a bunch of new characters and situations only for them to die to establish scope, they were honestly pretty lucky that they'd just recently (relatively speaking) had lengthy novelverse encounters with an alternate timeline and spent some time in the Voyager Time-Cop future.
 
F. King Daniel said:
It's big blockbuster over-the-top silliness. In Cold Equations #3 I felt a similar universe-ending catastrophe (not so long after Destiny's Federation-razing Borg invasion) feat. Wesley was too much, but this is literally the very end, so it's fine.
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Considering that Cold Equations was written as a potential "very end", it makes sense that it went to similar heights.

I was hoping for something more adventure than action, but alas that doesn't appear to be what we're getting. But it was well-written for what it is. The book went into more gruesome detail with the deaths than I expected, though. At times it felt more like a David Mack book than a Dayton Ward book.
 
Just finished the book. I’m enjoying it enough that I finished it quickly enough but got to admit I’m a bit disappointed. I think it’s a lack of interesting villains. The Devidians just aren’t doing it for me at all. Everything feels very one sided with only a few lines of dialogue from them and even that was generic.

Also I’m annoyed at the lack of reaction from Worf about Dax. Not even a mention before the book ended…
 
As a big fan of "future of the Federation" glimpses, the sections set aboard the Relativity were a highlight for me. In particular because there was implied character development, with novel-Ducane appearing more heroic, and having become a fully-fledged captain.

The only other 29th century Wells-class crew heavily featured in Trek are Captain Benjamin Walker and Commander Nereda of the USS Pastak from STO, which appear in various in-game missions, ST: Magazine short stories, and lore blogs. Captain Walker has a blue command uniform rather than Braxton's purple, and Ducane's uniform was mentioned to be command blue as well. Perhaps a coincidence.

Meanwhile, this is not the first appearance of the USS Tempus. Memory Beta link: https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/USS_Tempus
 
I didn't enjoy this one as much as I'd hoped I would. The pacing was rough. Which is not to say that I dislike slow burns - rather, so much of the early fare involved a slow burn I didn't feel particularly connected to, and once the tempo picked up and there were more pieces on the board I care to see, a lot of stuff felt rushed instead.

This is by no means a bad book IMO. Just not a great one.

Hoping I dig the other two installments more!
 
David cgc said:
That is the issue. If you want to establish a wide-ranging threat across time and alternate realities, you have to have vignettes of people being threatened in other times and alternate realities. Unlike Destiny, where there were decades worth of locations and secondary characters to briefly cycle through the most intense moments of destruction, there's a more limited palette of other time periods and timelines that are related to the Litverse (and discounting any that might be needed later in the story, so can't be obliterated early on to establish the situation). Aside from going the "Q&A" route of briefly inventing a bunch of new characters and situations only for them to die to establish scope, they were honestly pretty lucky that they'd just recently (relatively speaking) had lengthy novelverse encounters with an alternate timeline and spent some time in the Voyager Time-Cop future.
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Again, I'm reminded of the first issue of 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' where Earth-3 and the Crime Syndicate universe was destroyed by the anti-matter wave. It was used as a means to show how deadly/powerful this new threat was that even that worlds most powerful beings couldn't stop it.
The same goes for the Enterprise-D of 'Headlong Flight'. To show an Enterprise that had been upgraded with quantum torpedoes was unable to stop a temporal incursion.
 
Whilst I'm at it...
I can't help but feel a lot of rage in the brutal deaths of so many of the litverse original characters.
Like, these are our creations - watch as we burn them all to dust.

Quite to the contrary of some others here, I think I was more invested in them than I ever was in the from-tv characters. We've had them forever, and they'll all pop up again on TV eventually.
The others... We only had long enough to care for them as bright new sparks in the Trek universe.

I find myself feeling pretty hollow and broken in the aftermath of finishing the audiobook. Hurts, man. It hurts.
Which, of course, is probably intended and so must be taken as it was offered - As a form of mourning for a timeline some of us grew up reading.
 
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Serin117 said:
Quite to the contrary of some others here, I think I was more invested in them than I ever was in the from-tv characters. We've had them forever, and they'll all pop up again on TV eventually.
The others... We only had long enough to care for them as bright new sparks in the Trek universe
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What's to say new versions of the novelverse characters won't show up in post-Coda novels? We've already had Christine Vale appear in the second Picard novel on the USS Titan.
 
thribs said:
It’s going to take a lot more than just them to make it not.
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I empathtically disagree with your statement so not really much point in arguing the point. However, I was merely pointing out what would benefit the novels set in the Nu Trekverse.
 
F. King Daniel said:
What's to say new versions of the novelverse characters won't show up in post-Coda novels? We've already had Christine Vale appear in the second Picard novel on the USS Titan.
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Yeah she did.
As a harsher version of herself, seemingly bought in to the hardline anti-Romulan stance of the fuck-up-Federation post Utopia Planitia.
(yeah yeah, I know you can take it as her playing devils advocate XO)

Its funny, prior to Coda being announced, I was really looking forward to them popping up in the Picard books. Now its like... Ouch, my heart
 
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