Spoilers Coda: Book 2: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow Review Thread
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It took me a while to read this one (between books 1 and 2 my wife gave birth to our first child! I’ve been fitting this in one chapter at a time for days…) and I honestly expected to come in here and see a lot more posts like this one. I’m glad I’m not the only one that feels this way; I 100% co-sign both of your posts.
Honestly, I’m pretty disappointed with this book. It’s not as bad as book one - at least Swallow did what he was trying to do much better than the sterile, plodding, poorly structured, generic slog of book one - but I’m still so confused about what this trilogy is trying to do in the first place. We sure do have a threat that’s serious enough for lots of main characters to die while fighting it. And … that’s it? So far? Like, Destiny was also a novel trilogy about an existential threat, but there was so much else in it. Four whole crews, 2.5 of which were brand new, full of characters with arcs and intriguing perspectives. 3/4 of them, in book 1, weren’t even interacting with the Borg invasion. Book 2 spent a lot of time on other stories and explorations. There are other examples, too … I’m used to these authors being capable of thinking based on not just plot but also character and theme, looking to new horizons and creative ideas, involving the complex political realities of the Typhon Pact etc, WHILE exploring the main thrust of the story (which has often been this kind of large scale threat; this might be bigger and badder but this kind of story has been done in TrekLit a few times). So why did they just give up on any other kind of storytelling goals for the first two entire books after coming up with the bad guy and the heroic deaths? These guys are better than this.
Like - one thing this book clearly is NOT trying to do: organically wrap up the ongoing character arcs from the LitVerse. The Titan crew is ignored, and by inference all have become morons, having recently seen Riker acting weird in Takedown and apparently learned nothing from it, spending the whole book not realizing that’s a possibility. The entirety of all the ongoing DS9 stories are ignored too, and/or flatly contradicted (Sisko’s mission, Ro/Quark’s relationship, and Kira/Odo’s relationship are all explicitly contradictory to where DRG3 left them, to say nothing of all the plot work he did that would’ve fit right into this story - Endalla, Rebecca - that was never mentioned at all). In a book filled with continuity references, to have DRG3’s work so soundly nullified felt less like simplification and more like deliberate slight. Did he do something to you guys to piss you off?
And not to harp on this too much but Destiny clearly shows that this is not a trade off you have to make for such a big crossover story. The Titan crew had a lot of interesting character work in that trilogy, despite being Lit-only characters.
There is also no focus on any of the complex galaxy-scale plotting that has been such a highlight of the lit verse. I’d much rather have had the Typhon Pact making life difficult amidst this climactic invasion with a competent Federation president trying to work out the complicated tangle than the dearth of creativity that establishes her as an idiot and has Riker play the traditional “I’m out of ideas and need plot filler conflict that just takes up space” role of Asshole Admiral Who Gets In The Way For No Reason. If the story needed additional conflict to raise the stakes, it could have built that off of all the actually interesting conflict that 20 years of stories have already established instead of character assassination for lazy cliches to fill space.
They just didn’t choose to focus on any of that LitVerse richness at all in Coda, which I’m pretty disappointed by, since that’s ostensibly the entire point of Coda? To pay tribute to and conclude all the 20 years of stories in this thriving universe? It’s weird to do that by completely ignoring most of it! There’s a stupid false conflict with Ro too. After all that time together no one would trust Ro with a phone call and a “I’d like to keep this on the down low but can we borrow a runabout without setting off mass hysteria”? All the added conflict here is artificial, none of it feels connected to the last 20 years of characterization.
Instead, we spend all our time with TV show mains and … Sam Bowers, which is cool, but why he is the only lit character with any focus seems pretty random. We give many of the DS9 characters heroic endings, which are strong writing and genuinely touching, but they’re ends for the characters in general without really being culminations of those characters’ stories. The Ro/Quark scene, for instance, would’ve been no less effecting if their relationship were back to just good friends like DRG3 established. The fact that that character work was ignored made the whole thing feel artificial just when it was trying to be its most human and emotional. And we have a lot more of that same goddamn fight scene against the Nagas! How many times have we had that same fight scene now? Ducane, alt Enterprise, Aventine, Enterprise, Aventine again, Robinson, Gorkon, Nog’s ship, Deep Space Nine / Aventine again… I get it! They’re scary! Can we do literally anything else now? Again: this isn’t an unreasonable ask; Destiny could have been 19 identical Borg fight scenes, each of which was terrifying but ultimately repetitive, and it sure wasn’t. If they could have better ideas then, why so uncreative now? For instance, there’s a whole Book 1 subplot here about the wormhole going nuts and Kira and Ro teaming up to manage the resulting Bajoran cultural / religious crisis that would have felt VERY DS9 relaunch. Leaving all of that for book 2 and then not showing us any of the DS9 crew reacting to the situation is a bizarre oversight.
Anyway, I’m glad that the thrilling heroics are working for so many of you, but there’s no thematic or character or political work here to give me something compelling to grab on to, and so all of it just feels like noise to me. Sound and fury without subtlety or purpose. Only the main character death scenes rose above, providing some true moments of catharsis and heroism, and even those were annoyingly tainted by the total elision of DRG3’s storylines. I think my favorite moment in the book was the one line reference to the transporter clones, which should’ve just been a cute aside.
Unfortunately, I think I’m not going to get what I’m looking for from book 3 either. Could not give less of a fuck about the Mirror Universe. Maybe Mack will prove me wrong, but it seems like the mission statement of this trilogy was to give all the TV show main characters a chance to fight something really scary for three books and often die, and not to actually do any kind of culmination, of character or theme or plot, of the 20 years of storytelling it is ostensibly tribute to. So far, the whole thing feels like a clumsily executed massive missed opportunity; this universe and these characters deserved more.
Man, I loved the book... but everything above is also very true for me.
I don’t fault most of your criticisms, Thrawn. But getting this trilogy at all covers a multitude of sins in my mind. So I still love it.
I feel similarly. These are entertaining books, I devoured each one in hardly any time, but in the Afterwards for both books, Ward and Swallow say a motivating factor for this trilogy was to provide closure to the Litverse fans as opposed to Star Wars, which ended the Legends continuity abruptly and abandoned it for the new tie-in continuity overseen by the Story Group. As a few of us said in the thread for Book 1, I still don't see how this is preferable. Star Wars may have abandoned the Legends continuity with no closure, but its fans can still pretend those characters and versions of the movie characters in that continuity are still having their adventures, we're just not hearing those stories anymore. Meanwhile the closure the Star Trek Litverse is providing for its fans is that everyone dies or has their career destroyed before the universe ends. Star Trek is the franchise with the reputation for optimism and positivity, and while that is often misinterpreted by fans, as is the idea that anything less than Feel Good Utopia is "anti-Trek," if I'm being honest the way Legends was abandoned and walked away from is far more uplifting and comforting than the wholesale slaughter and destruction that the ending to the Litverse is turning out to be. Collateral Damage or To Lose the Earth would have served far better as Litverse finales, IMO.
I wouldn't have expected to agree with that before reading them; I've been quite impressed with TrekLit's handling of darker themes in the past. But this is just so damn shallow that I'm finding it hard to find fault with your words. It isn't that it's dark, it's that it's meaningless.
I’m also baffled as to why this trilogy feels like this. I can see the logic behind doing a temporal shenanigans story to explain the litverse’s relationship to new canon. I don’t really feel like it was necessary, any more than I saw the necessity for the 2009 movie to set up an alternate timeline; anyone who cares about this stuff already knows about parallel universe theory. But I get the logic. What I don’t get is why it all feels so superficial. In places this book really does feel more like an extended outline for a (mediocre) event movie rather than a novel. It’s almost as if having the litverse become incompatible with canon destroyed the authors’ will to write about it with any depth. People complain that having to fit in with the TV shows will prevent new books from telling interesting stories, but The Dark Veil is much smarter and deeper than anything Swallow does here, extending Picard’s themes while telling a rewarding story of its own.
I haven’t been reading the DS9 novels, so I wasn’t aware of the discontinuities with DRGIII’s work, but anyone can see how much the book rushes over weighty matters in favor of another streak of Naga attacks. (On the plus side, Swallow allows the killed-off characters to achieve things with their deaths, instead of just getting randomly dusted the way everyone in Moments Asunder did.) Closing the wormhole has enormous practical and spiritual implications, but Kira and Ro both just jump happily on board with killing their gods. Kira is a bit shell-shocked afterward, but no effort is made to put the reader inside that anguish. I understand the Prophets wanted this to happen, but that shouldn’t make it feel this easy. An apocalypse has no dramatic value if the only problems it poses are logistical ones.
I haven’t been reading the DS9 novels, so I wasn’t aware of the discontinuities with DRGIII’s work, but anyone can see how much the book rushes over weighty matters in favor of another streak of Naga attacks. (On the plus side, Swallow allows the killed-off characters to achieve things with their deaths, instead of just getting randomly dusted the way everyone in Moments Asunder did.) Closing the wormhole has enormous practical and spiritual implications, but Kira and Ro both just jump happily on board with killing their gods. Kira is a bit shell-shocked afterward, but no effort is made to put the reader inside that anguish. I understand the Prophets wanted this to happen, but that shouldn’t make it feel this easy. An apocalypse has no dramatic value if the only problems it poses are logistical ones.
Incredibly well put. Wish I’d said that myself. Absolutely hit the nail on the head.
Several criticisms of this trilogy have been things for which waiting for the next book proved to be the solution. I can’t imagine how things will look meaningless at the end of book three. The meaning will come with the resolution, in which I fully expect all that our heroes have suffered will count for something in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think Ro/Kira had it easy at all. Knowing their characters as well as we do, do we need more pages of exposition about how they don't want to nuke the wormhole but they really should? I think when you're juggling events/characters on a massive scale, some of the responsibility falls on the reader to infer a bit more. I appreciate the brevity of these novels and didn't need or want an epic length novel. In a perfect world, this wouldn't be an issue as the lit-verse would still be around and we'd get follow up in future stories.
Anyway, I just don't think it's realistic to be hyper-critical of something fo this scope and circumstance. Just my opinion though.
I think it’s entirely realistic to suggest that Swallow might have substituted a couple pages of internal monologue here and there for some of the trilogy’s many, many “oh noes a Naga is going to age something into dust” scenes. If the reader can be trusted to infer entire emotional states, why can’t we be trusted to infer that Riker has been compromised by the same thing that afflicted Worf, rather than having to sit through multiple repetitive scenes of it? Why did we need three separate sequences where Picard gets away from being captured by Riker? If this novel and its predecessor felt rich in relevant incident, I might be more forgiving of how shallow it is on an emotional and thematic level. But these are not concise, tightly-packed novels.
Speaking personally I don’t think this book solved any of my criticisms of the first book. It’s a less abjectly bad book, and of course it clarified some plot points, but that’s not the same thing. In any case, I think you’re misunderstanding the concern here. It’s not that there’s no possibility for the events described here to be meaningful; it’s that none of it feels meaningful because it’s being written about in a hollow, workmanlike way that’s below the usual standard of the novelists involved. The most likely way for these events to be meaningful in theory is already obvious; the litverse timeline will sacrifice itself to save the multiverse. But because the characters haven’t been show to grapple much with that, or with anything else, it doesn’t yet have any emotional weight. Mack may well do better on that front, but it won’t retroactively improve that aspect of these first two books.
For me, it’s a whole lot of, “Who cares about the Devidians?” I’m just waiting for another villain reveal. Maybe I’m not just looking at this as a “lit-verse finale”, but as a finale for the whole Rick Berman era of Trek, and thus far, it’s not quite delivering.
Perhaps books 1 and 2 are written to set up for an extremely active book 3?
I think each of these books is part of the other so I don't really think it is fair to judge each book till the story is complete. Honestly I don't think the issues I've seen here could have been addressed unless there had been a lead-in series that Dayton mentioned in our Literary Treks interview as well as having another book in the Coda series so it was 4 books instead of 5. There really was just too much story left out there.
Once again I echo Brendan Moody’s whole post. Well put as ever.
I don’t think we’re being hyper critical. I think we’re expecting the same level of quality that these authors have taught us to expect based on the skill they showed in their own past work. There have been several prior treklit entries with this level of scope and circumstance and none of them forgot to contain thematically rich and character rich storytelling.
Was that Nemesis or These Are The Voyages…? Because I was hoping for at least something a little more satisfying than those.
Although it continues the characters and settings, I wouldn't consider the novelverse to be Rick Berman-style Trek. The novels do things he'd never have approved of.
Is the problem some of the posters are having with the finale having to do with the format change in the book size?
What I mean is that with the gallery sized books the page count is less and the font size bigger than say, the 'Destiny' trilogy.
Are events and characters are being rushed through instead of giving a chance to breathe because of this?
If this were the old size format would some of these sequences/characters be expanded upon?
What I mean is that with the gallery sized books the page count is less and the font size bigger than say, the 'Destiny' trilogy.
Are events and characters are being rushed through instead of giving a chance to breathe because of this?
If this were the old size format would some of these sequences/characters be expanded upon?