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

What you and David suggest here actually excites me. Tie-in fiction seemingly has to be fairly safe. While I’m not 100% convinced ALL are going to die here (I think we’ll know better after book 2), I think knowing that no one is safe makes the next two books very suspenseful. If you kill off some of the biggies, if I ever meet you all, I might owe you several drinks.

 

Finished this a few days ago and it still hasn't settled with me. it seemed to confirm to me what my worse fears for this trilogy were going to be - just scene after scene of the characters we have come to love and know being killed off. Towards the end I even lost any investment in the story as I was just waiting to see if each character was going to die and didn't particularly care how or why.

At this point i am not even sure if I will get the other novels in the series. I am sort of happy leaving the litverse behind with the previous books where Voyager went off beyond the galaxy and Picard and Worf went off in the Enterprise to explore. At the moment this book has turned the last twenty years of stories into a bitter taste in my mouth.

I haven't voted yet but at the moment I am hovering around Average.

 

So the future ship from Armageddon's Arrow... was from the Picard/prime/whatever universe?

 

I’m hoping that ends up making more sense because currently it’s just confusing. There needs to be an explanation as to why the cube crossed timelines just by trying to travel back in time.

 

I think just about anything can be justified in "the timeline is collapsing."

 

I thought it was an open-and-shut case of the Poklori gil dara crossing universes when it travelled back in time, with its home universe still having active Borg in the 25th century.

 

For me it's kind of the opposite. Who will die?! is just not a selling point. I now fully expect on Titan to see several deaths coming. That limits suspense for me. I hope, if done well, we can at least experience some good character work, because death in and of itself is not compelling.

 

I suspect Ezri isn't quite fully dead yet, if only because the Aventine is on the cover of book 2.

 

I always think about Data's head in "Time's Arrow." When Kirk and crew are walking around San Francisco looking for Humpback Whales, Data's head is there, under the ground. When Sisko and crew travel back in time to the Bell Riots, Data's head is there, under the ground. When Zefram Cochrane takes his first warp flight, Data's head is there, under San Francisco's streets.

And when the Kelvin is prematurely destroyed, Data's head is buried under the San Francisco streets. When the Enterprise-D assists the Enterprise-C near Narendra III, Data's head is under San Francisco. In these cases, it's an artifact of a timeline that never was and never would be, made by someone who may or may not exist, filled with memories from another timeline entirely.

Thinking in this way leads in directions more Doctor Who (the overused "timey wimey," anyone?) than Star Trek, but the DTI surely has a repository of artifacts from the never wases and the never will bes.

My point is, time is weird. And weird, as Janeway once said, is what Starfleet does.

 

Do you mean Available Light?

 

No, that was the one with the giant colony ship. He's thinking of Armageddon's Arrow.

(I feel like, to do the meme right, I should've picked another Dayton novel that wasn't the correct one and pass the baton to someone else, but my love for classic Internet Vaudeville bits is outweighed by my love of providing accurate information.)

 

Ahh right.

 

You might get your wish. The blurb for book 2 states “…and the catastrophe’s true cause is revealed.”

 

Basically, what Rachel Grey experienced in Marvel, crossing over from Earth-811 to Earth-616 in her own time voyage.

I would note that we know nothing else about that timeline. For all we know, it may be a timeline like that of Picard, where the Collective apparently did not respond to Janeway's transwarp hub attack with a general blitz on the Federation et al. Alternatively, it may be one where the offensive in Destiny was completed, the Odyssean Pass simply being overlooked until the planet-killer was revived. Or, it might well be from a timeline with other characteristics.

 

David Mack referenced Rogue One. It’s an unpopular opinion but I was not particularly fond of that one because I gave zero fucks about the characters. They died. Cool. What do I know about them? Very little. Because the filmmakers gave me no chance to really care. Of course, YMMV. He referenced K-2SO as a character we feel compassion towards as he was killed. I personally think a better comparison would have been Wash’s death in Serenity. Oddly enough, same actor.

I’ll be honest and say that I’ve not read a lot of the novelverse. At the same time, I found the death of T’Ryssa Chen to be absolutely heart wrenching. And honestly surprising. Throughout the few books I’ve read, I’ve gotten to know some of the novelverse TNG and DS9 casts. Not knowing who they’d kill is something else. I have watched every episode of Star Trek. The idea of killing off O’Brien or Kira or Seven or Tuvok or Riker or even Picard (yes, I know) is on one hand absolutely heart wrenching. On the other hand, it’s, in a way, exhilarating. It brings an element of surprise and yes, dread, into the equation. I myself would rather be surprised by what occurs as opposed to knowing that everyone is always safe, which until Ezri’s death in Moments Asunder was never really in doubt. Sure, there could be some sort of deus ex machine out there and all of our heroes will be fine in the end. Who knows? I’m finding the ride interesting.

Of course your mileage again may vary.

 

I voted Average.

The first half is, as Thrawn mentions, appallingly paced. It’s not just that watching the Relativity and the alternate Enterprise-D get wiped out has zero emotional stakes: it’s that struggling through those sequences makes it harder to be interested later on when similar ones feature characters we actually care about.

The second half is stronger. I don’t really think “those aliens from Time’s Arrow” make for a great ultimate villain, but the whole notion of a comic-book style time apocalypse is so outside the usual Trek framework that I don’t know what would have worked better. It’s hard for me to care much about the character deaths, both because they’re not written in an emotionally affecting way and because they’re obviously only happening because this is no longer the “real” timeline so we might as well go out with a bang. It’s like trying to get emotionally invested in “Year of Hell” or “Course: Oblivion.” That said, there is a real air of urgency and desperation beginning to emerge, and I’m curious to see what the subsequent books will bring.

 

Oh, God, I just realized, we're on course for the entire novelverse becoming an example of one of the far-too-frequent times the best episodes of Star Trek are the ones that unhappened. "Course: Oblivion," "The Visitor," "Twilight," "All Good Things," "Yesterday's Enterprise..."

Okay, I've had that thought before, but it just occurred to me that if we picked some kind generally-accepted database of ratings, we could actually determine, (social-)scientifically, if Star Trek stories that unhappen are, on average, better ones that are "real."

 

I’m reminded of David Sluss’s remark in his review of “Course: Oblivion”: