This post and a number of others have really emphasised to me that I probably won't read
Coda, namely I don't want to read how everyone dies - and it is not the end I think the novelverse deserved or should have. An end where things 'carried on into the sunset' - a
What We Leave Behind or
-30- or
Everyone's Waiting or
Sleeping in Light/Deconstruction of Falling Stars for the novelverse franchise - would have been ideal, one that maturely set the scene for 'unseen' aging in which this amazing galaxy the authors have created endures and carries on - that's what I hoped for, ellipses rather than a full stop.
But something which
carelessly blasts it apart, that just removes the joy from it, that's rubbish. That's really rubbish and something I haven't got the stomach to read.
Someone brought up
Ultimatum - if this is indeed anything like that, it's just depressing, as that was such a failure of editorial and authorial imagination. Taking good things and just bitterly chewing them up. Death is important - we all die, often in really sad ways - but death is also meaningful, has a huge impact on the people we care about. When there isn't the chance to reflect on that, it slides into meaninglessness.
The novelverse wasn't at its best when it blew things up with cosmic threat, in general - beyond Destiny, some of its weakest moments were those kind of FUBARS - the third
Cold Equations book,
Before Dishonour, etc. For me, the novelverse was at its best with slow and heartfelt characterisation (much of the early DS9 relaunch, for example, was this - and even its 'finales' like
Unity still were character-led), with optimism (
Articles of the Federation,
A Singular Destiny, etc), with great, enduring worldbuilding (Una's works, Kirsten's Voyager novels, Rise of the Federation, etc), or the dense political chessgame of the dense world you writers all built up together - which had very well-drawn characters within it.
The novelverse was at its absolute best when it aspired to more than death or casually disposing of characters. Maybe books 2 and 3 will have less 'death death death' - but
@David Mack seems to intimate otherwise in his comments in this thread, which is disappointing.
Thrawn's long post is useful in its own way for discussing the technical merits of this book, and is well-written as critique, but perhaps less focused on the issue I have feared about
Coda since it was announced and Dayton and David intimated it would be death-heavy. Except for emphasising the careless nature of those deaths, if indeed his comments about Chen are true.
Anyway, I just keep fearing Coda is turning into that thing we do as kids when we write, where our stories end with 'and everyone died' because we can't do another, perhaps more interesting, ending. Now I doubt that is the case - I hope that James Swallow and David Mack has something better in mind, I really hope that. But if it carries on as it? I just can't quite deal with that.
Sorry for the long ramble, I just feel so dispirited that - so far - this is what is being placed on the table
