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

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Since Trek book arrivals are now no longer predictable for Australia (thanks Covid), I downloaded the audiobook and have been listening in 90-min or so chunks. Enjoyed it as much as so much tragedy allows. Thanks for all your efforts @Dayton Ward, and also for the Afterword (or is that an AfterWard?).

Great use of Wesley Crusher. I was able to imagine him being played by the now-matured Will Wheaton.

Robert Petkoff does a great job with the narration. For people who have not yet tried the unabridged audio novels, I encourage you to give this one a go. (I did find the old abridged novels easier to commit time to, so this has meant a bit of a reshuffle in my time. I guess Sydney's prolonged Lockdown - since the end of June - has given me some flexibility. Sigh.)

Looking forward to what the next two volumes will bring.



I got the feeling that Dax enjoyed the idea and challenge of being a captain, not Ezri.



Huh? When have these three authors ever been "careless" about their Trek writing?

Will Wheaton is probably as old as Patrick Steward was when TNG premiered.
 
Patrick Stewart was born in 1940 and was forty seven when he was cast as Jean-Luc Picard.

Wil Wheaton was born in 1972 and was 15 when he was cast as Wesley Crusher. He's forty-nine now; two years older than Stewart when he was cast.

I still wish Will would appear as a Older Crusher. Its never gonna happen but maybe they can dragoon him into Lower Decks.

PERHAPS HE IS THE SECRET RULER OF THE PAKLEDS!
 
Another thought that happened in this grey mush that supposedly inhabits my head was that...
It can be really difficult to separate what we know about the context of this trilogy, the reason it was written and the why of the litverse all going away, from the story itself.
And I rather think we'd be better off just experiencing the story without the context, and perhaps also without the sizable spoilers all over the advertising about Coda.

I feel like it's a waste of the opportunity if this just ends up fictionalizing the real-world case of the novelverse carrying the Trek torch, but being disposed of once a more "important" story comes along to supplant it, and I don't think that's what's actually going to end up being the case. It's being heavily foreshadowed and implied that the novelverse characters and storylines are getting kicked to the curb within the narrative to the benefit of some other timeline, just as they were in actual reality, but that's got to be a red herring. The whole reason for this is so we don't walk away feeling like the last twenty years of storytelling was expendable and unimportant, and while it's possible the way they're going to do it is by establishing the novelverse versions of the characters and events to be the secret heroes who all died/unhappened so the CBSAA versions could carry on and be turned into quantum robots so they can have multiple attempts at having a decent death scene or whatever, that sort of shaggy-dog chain-yanking feels very out of character for the authors. To be fair, I've thought this before and have sometimes been wrong, where it turned out the story actually was doing the bad obvious thing, and it looked like it was building towards a terrible conclusion because it actually was, but I guess we'll be sure in two months.

Though an interesting thing that occurs to me is that, as a "temporal" apocalypse that's happening throughout history simultaneously in a very Doctor Who kind of way, that there's already a version of the novelverse narrative that extends well into the 29th century, at least. And maybe the reason for this exotic disaster is just to clear up the continuity snarl of trying to end the universe in 2387 when you've already had flash-forwards into the 25th century and beyond, but maybe there's more to it than that. Though that also reminds me of the Millennium trilogy, where there was a part where O'Brien realized he'd met time-travelers from the distant future, so the universe couldn't end in the year 2400... and yet, it did (before it got better).
 
We already know where this ends right? The whole timelines got to die. Wesley already suggested the possibility of destroying novelverse to keep the Devidians from 'working the way to the root timeline' or something like that. Put me in the 'no one is making it out alive' camp.
I'm in the "one person makes it out alive" to the Picard universe and remembers the novelverse. I'd predicted T'Ryssa though:lol:
 
Prediction:

The heroes manage to reboot their timeline after it is destroyed and then find that they are all alive and living on a parallel timeline (double points if they call it a "Pocket" timeline--incredibly lame pun deliberate) that exists parallel to one that has replaced the original and they look upon it from their reality, happy and content that they saved everyone.
 
The heroes manage to reboot their timeline after it is destroyed and then find that they are all alive and living on a parallel timeline (double points if they call it a "Pocket" timeline--incredibly lame pun deliberate) that exists parallel to one that has replaced the original and they look upon it from their reality, happy and content that they saved everyone.

So, we were thinking wrong all along. It's not Crisis on Infinite Earths, but the "Five Years Later" Legion. Rene Picard is Superboy and he'll be replaced by Mon-El. Or Supergirl, and replaced by Laurel Gand. :rommie:
 
So, we were thinking wrong all along. It's not Crisis on Infinite Earths, but the "Five Years Later" Legion. Rene Picard is Superboy and he'll be replaced by Mon-El. Or Supergirl, and replaced by Laurel Gand. :rommie:

Basically, I am of the mind there's no reason they can't write a happy ending for our heroes. It'll just be in their own little corner of the multiverse.
 
The idea of a multiverse does seem to be engrained into the DNA of Trek. I think a scenario in which the multiverse collapses altogether is unlikely. The only question is whether the novelverse will survive as a component of this.
 
Prediction:

The heroes manage to reboot their timeline after it is destroyed and then find that they are all alive and living on a parallel timeline (double points if they call it a "Pocket" timeline--incredibly lame pun deliberate) that exists parallel to one that has replaced the original and they look upon it from their reality, happy and content that they saved everyone.

It is Crisis on Infinite Earths - Rene is Alexander Luthor aged to adulthood so he can use the traveller powers he has to move them to a sealed pocket University.
 
Well, Wesley is just pretty much Cable from X-Men now, so I guess Slim and Red might end up time travelling. I mean… Jean Luc and Beverly. Probably not Beverly, she doesn’t get much to do at all really.

What are the odds on the Prophet machines near bankruptcy being lifeboats, and whatever handful of people that don’t get dusted end up living in the celestial temple?
 
I agree with Campe above. If there are problems with this book, that’s worth discussing, but to anyone saying ‘This isn’t the ending the Litverse deserved’, or refusing to ever read the trilogy as a whole, we’ve only seen a third of it. We have no idea what is still to come. So there’s no judging the trilogy as a whole.

Respectfully, the only thing they could really do is click their fingers and go "oh, these folks are all alive now", which would be the cop-out of the century and would double down on the "not the ending it deserved" status.

While it's true we haven't seen the rest of it, from what we've heard it isn't getting any better.
My gut is screaming "this is them burning everything down and making it all 'compatible' with Picard".
 
Respectfully, the only thing they could really do is click their fingers and go "oh, these folks are all alive now", which would be the cop-out of the century and would double down on the "not the ending it deserved" status.

While it's true we haven't seen the rest of it, from what we've heard it isn't getting any better.
My gut is screaming "this is them burning everything down and making it all 'compatible' with Picard".

The thing is we all know no one would be satisfied with that ending either.

And it's time travel. There's no reason anyone should ever remain dead in a time travel story.
 
The thing is we all know no one would be satisfied with that ending either.

And it's time travel. There's no reason anyone should ever remain dead in a time travel story.
The only thing that actually happened in this book was a whole bunch of people dying. There's not much here to begin with, and that's most of it. If that all gets reversed, that'll make this book even more pointless.

You're barking up a really weird tree with this line of reasoning. I'm tempted to literally bet you cash that all the dead people aren't coming back to life; it seems so obvious to me that's not what's going on here.
 
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