Spoilers Coda: Book 3: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack Review Thread

[thribs]

I always hated that line. The idea that beings as powerful as the Q would be worried about the Borg is ridiculous.

I think the idea there is that the Q don’t want to annoy the Borg that they might destroy/assimilate a civilisation because of them. While our Q likes to annoy the the crews of TNG and Voyager, the others don’t want to interfere with the progression of the universe. They’re like the Ancients in Stargate.

 

[captainmkb]

I always hated that line. The idea that beings as powerful as the Q would be worried about the Borg is ridiculous.

and here we are discussing a book where the Borg manage to, when provoked, splinter the universe itself creating innumerable unstable timelines that leave all of creation vulnerable to attack.

which means that beings as powerful as the Q should indeed, at the very least, be concerned about provoking the Borg

 

[thribs]

Did the novel also imply how Picard gets the Irumodic Syndrome; with his actions resetting the timeline and living all those experiences at once had done some neurological damage to all the remaining Picard’s?

 

[Christopher]

Did the novel also imply how Picard gets the Irumodic Syndrome; with his actions resetting the timeline and living all those experiences at once had done some neurological damage to all the remaining Picard’s?

I doubt that. "All Good Things..." explained that the Picard of 2371 already had a small structural defect in his parietal lobe, probably something he was born with, that could potentially produce a variety of neurological disorders later in life. It led to Irumodic Syndrome in the AGT future timeline and to a similar but distinct disorder in the Prime timeline of Picard.

 

[thribs]

But this is all “timey whimey” stuff. He could have always had that disorder because of what some Picard would do in some fractured timeline.

 

[Christopher]

But this is all “timey whimey” stuff. He could have always had that disorder because of what some Picard would do in some fractured timeline.

Why? Just because the syndrome was introduced in a time-travel episode doesn't mean it has any connection to temporal phenomena. You might as well suggest that the time travel made him bald -- it would be just as great a non sequitur.

 

[thribs]

Why not? It could work. I’m just speculating.
I didn’t mean he got the syndrome from All Good Things but this.

 

[Thrawn]

I haven't read any posts in this thread yet; my suspicion is that this book has been mostly loved. I did not love this book - I found it fundamentally and fatally disappointing. I wish that I weren't, but I find myself quite angry about this whole Coda thing. Not angry about TrekLit ending, which was something I always knew would happen and didn't come as a shock, but angry that given such an opportunity to end it in style, these three authors so thoroughly squandered the chance. If reading about that opinion will harsh your enjoyment of what felt to you like an incredible celebration of TrekLit and an amazing story, please feel free to ignore this post. But I've loved TrekLit so much for so long that I'm gonna write this last review. For me, it is as much a love letter to the stories that came before as it is a disappointment in this one; I hope that even those of you who disagree strongly will take it as such.

I would like to start, though, in the interest of fairness and credit where credit is due, by saying that David Mack really is a hell of a writer. Moment to moment, scene for scene, this is one of his finest works, arguably the first since Destiny to live up to his early big swings in Wildfire, Reap the Whirlwind, the Shinzon story in Tales of the Dominion War, and Destiny. The language is poetic, the characters are sharply and sympathetically drawn (unlike some cynical oversimplification that crept into a few of his recent works, particularly Collateral Damage), the action scenes are thrilling and varied and inventive and scary, and the two vignettes at the end are beautiful. This does not suffer from the generic blandness of Moments Asunder, nor from its structural incompetence. It does not suffer from The Ashes of Tomorrow's lack of continuity with earlier works or its oversimplification of its characters. Everyone in this book is a live wire, even the ones who have no arcs. K'ehleyr, Luc, Ezri, and Saavik of the Mirror Universe worked in a way those characters never have for me before, capping off arcs with subtlety and complexity. The choice of the moment of divergence of the First Splinter is inspired, feeling inevitable in hindsight, and the use of that choice to bring back the Borg and the threat they pose to Picard gave him one of his finest heroic fights of the character's long and storied history. Worf and K'ehleyr getting together was profoundly satisfying, paying off a series of tragedies in Worf's life in a moment of grace and warmth. Almost everyone's death was powerful in its own way, even (and perhaps especially) the ones like Sisko and Geordi that died accidentally, for no particular narrative purpose. The settings of assimilated San Francisco and the gigantic Devidian artifact concealed in the wormhole were epic and memorable.

No, the problem is not the way the scenes were written, but which scenes were written.

To pull back for a moment, across the entirety of this trilogy, these are all the story arcs from TrekLit's 20 years of stories that I think got some kind of conclusion, or if not a conclusion, were in some way uniquely essential to the plot:

- The Mirror Universe, in its full complexity. Oblivion's Gate paid off years of development - societal development, technological development, and arcs of many individual characters, as well as featured cameos from many more.
- Wesley Crusher's potential, his travels, and his devotion to his family.
- Worf's love life.
- Nog's pursuit of the ideal of duty and sacrifice.
- Kira being named the Hand of the Prophets.
- Ro and Quark's relationship, if you ignore the previous book that resolved that relationship differently.
- Picard's mentorship of Chen, if you really squint and read a lot more into those scenes than Dayton Ward actually put on the page.
- Picard's guilt at Data sacrificing himself for him in Nemesis (incidentally, also the centerpiece of the Picard TV show's emotional climax).
- Sam Bowers getting a command when Ezri dies, and coming to terms with it.

A bunch of other characters also showed up and died heroically, but not for any particular gain. Rene aged, became mature, and then ... just died like everyone else in a big blind alley; the Titan crew showed up, had another long blind alley of a plot, and also just died like everyone else; Sisko died, Data and Lal died, Bashir died, but if you cut any of them out of the story it would've worked just the same (sans some other way to calculate a bunch of stuff really quickly in the climax). Bashir in particular is awoken from a trauma caused by people he loves dying by... another person he loves dying, only for him to see another person he loves dying, and then decide to die. I think his story would've been better served if he hadn't appeared at all. I also didn't put Taurik's vision of the future, because while that was technically resolved, its resolution didn't make any sense, was completely incidental, came after he already died, and had no bearing on the plot. Swallow also amusingly implied a solution to the Andorian transporter clone thing, which I liked, but which was also totally incidental to the story.

Here are some things from TrekLit's 20 years of stories that this trilogy didn't touch:

- A character (any character) from Titan going through some form of character development of some kind. (Yes, Titan did ostensibly play a major role, but that plot was a two-book-long blind alley that told us nothing about anyone on the crew, changed no one, relied on no one's unique characterization, and provided nothing to the plot.)
- A character (any character not named Sam Bowers) from Aventine going through some form of character development of some kind (see my review of Moments Asunder for some obvious possibilities here).
- A character (any character not named T'ryssa Chen) from the Enterprise's lit-crew going through some form of character development of some kind. (Again, see my review of Moments Asunder lamenting the missed possibilities here.)
- Any species from the Typhon Pact appearing and paying off in any way the complex development of those cultures.
- The Dominion, or anything in the Gamma Quadrant.
- Anything in the Delta Quadrant.
- Voyager's return from another galaxy.
- Any other lit-only characters from Voyager's fleet appearing in any way.
- Any of Christopher L. Bennett's complex temporal worldbuilding (universe-building?) and background developed in the DTI novels. (Two DTI agents appeared in Moments Asunder, but you've already forgotten anything they said or did, and one of them had died already in another novel... oops!)
- Sisko's daughter.
- Sisko's ship and crew.
- Sisko's mission in the Gamma Quadrant.
- The Endalla falsework specifically, and the development of the Bajoran religion in general.
- Any workings of the Federation government (aside from the President becoming an idiot for clumsy plot reasons) and any payoff to the political maneuvering we've seen over the years.
- Shar, Prynn, Kadohata, Calhoun, Smrhova, and any other character I forgot whose Mirror Universe version appeared but not the real one.
- A chance for the Gorkon, SCE, or New Frontier crews to impact the story in any way.
- The development of Cardassia and/or Garak's leadership of it.
- I know this is a pretty specific one, but Katherine Pulaski has been kicking ass in the novels lately and it would've been cool to see her.
- And finally: any attempt at theme, moral, inspiration, optimism, or complexity - the defining characteristics of why the last 20 years of stories meant something to me.

And that's if we stick to the 24th century alone. Rise of the Federation, Vanguard, Seekers, the Enterprise-B crew, Stargazer, the Enterprise-C crew, a bunch of wild shit in the Lost Era that's still been only hinted at... Destiny incorporated past stuff, and in a tale about infinities of timelines being eaten and temporal shenanigans, it's not a stretch to say some of those places could've been visited. For some fucking reason we spent FOREVER on Juel Ducane, so don't tell me there wasn't space.

And look, I'm not an idiot, I know that no one was going to be able to tie off everything perfectly. No matter what they wrote, someone would've made a list like that. But I ask you honestly - from that whoolllee looonnnggg lissstttt - would ANYONE's first priorities have been the Mirror Universe, Sam Bowers, Worf's love life, and some DS9 stories that disregard their own prior continuity?

Apparently yes: those were Dayton Ward, James Swallow, and David Mack's priorities.

Or maybe they weren't - maybe this is all due to some editorial oversight or interference, where they were given a list of a bunch of stuff that was off limits or already contradicted by onscreen Trek that they had to ignore. Maybe someone told them that they could only focus on TV show main characters so the trilogy would be accessible to people who weren't TrekLit fans. Maybe their hands were tied, and this really is the best they could do. I don't know why, and it doesn't really matter; these books ignored, overwrote, discarded, or destroyed without examination everything that made TrekLit great in my mind. If I'd made a list of 10 things that I thought would definitely play a role in any half-sane TrekLit concluding trilogy, no question, this series contained none of them. Zero.

And for what?

A chance for main characters (and for some reason literally everyone in the Mirror Universe) to die fighting the Devidians. A race of beings from the future and also the past and also the present but out of sync, who are hiding in a black hole in the present-day galaxy but still need to send their attacks through the Bajoran Wormhole which for some reason is a problem in the prime timeline but not even worth mentioning in the Mirror Universe, and which was irrelevant because reality started falling apart anyway. A species so evil that it's not even worth trying to understand, negotiate, or redeem them, like TrekLit has done with the Borg, the Typhon Pact powers, the Dominion, etc. An enemy that features two (2) methods of attack - dudes in suits and floating snakes - that kill anything on physical contact, an understanding that never evolves or leads to a meaningful evolution of tactics (I mean they did eventually put up some shields, I guess?). An enemy with no thematic resonance for a single character or ongoing TrekLit storyline. An enemy that provided these novels with approximately 10 identical fight scenes, one really cool space station, and a big box of magic plot flobotanum to justify ending the universe.

Oh, and an hour-long gorgeously written fond farewell to Jean-Luc Picard. You know, the one character in the entire trilogy that has a whole canon TV show just devoted to developing their character, including different versions of a couple of moments of catharsis that this very novel centers around.

Oh, what could have been. A competent Federation and a competent Typhon Pact uniting in the face of a crisis, paying off decades of diplomacy. Surprising combinations and connections between the brilliant, diverse, complex crew members of at least four and arguably eight different 24th century crews. Examinations of Cardassia and Bajor in the face of this new crisis that demonstrate the cores of their cultures. Riker growing into a leadership role for real, leading an armada of crews and characters that would've put David Mack's rando Mirror Universe cameos to shame. And if you want to make Picard the center, have him come unstuck in time and bounce between worlds and ships and take us on a grand tour, truly saying farewell to all that is coming to an end.

I only care because I loved those stories so much, and I wish it didn't, but it hurts that three of the very authors that crafted them seem to care so little for what mattered so much to me.

I will never not be sad about what this trilogy could have been, and what it was instead. I will never not be insulted that these three authors seemed to think I, as a reader, wouldn't find an enemy with moral complexity scary enough or that I would only care about the TV show main characters in the end. I will never not be offended that these authors looked upon the vastness of an entire universe that they were given the responsibility of ending and completely ignored basically every prior work they didn't themselves write in favor of their own pet projects.

I could never have imagined, literally never even considered the possibility, that I would've been so disappointed by this trilogy.

I'm sorry, y'all; I wish I could be celebrating.

I hope that these stories carry on; I hope that every once in a while someone curious gets their mind blown by Watching the Clock, or gets their philosophy rewritten by Children of the Storm, or finds their loneliness echoed and healed by Twilight. I hope that more people find Destiny, and experience a story at once an intricate piece of clockwork, a profound meditation on faith, and a transcendence from every restriction people think tie-in fiction labors beneath. I hope that the divergence point chosen in this story means that the worldbuilding of Vanguard and its clever knitting together of so many TOS threads into one of the grander sci-fi epics I've ever seen finds its way to some new readers and it shows them how to love TOS even if they never had before, like it did for me. This TrekLit universe was a hell of a thing, and everyone involved deserves credit for building it into something far grander and more fascinating than anyone could've expected (even the three authors that so unceremoniously forgot most of it existed and burned the rest to the ground at the end). Bad finales don't delete the stories that came before, and this wouldn't be the first long-running tale I loved that ended terribly. I'll still love the rest, and I don't regret reading any of it, even the stupid Andorian transporter clones one.

But I can't lie - I'd be much happier if Coda had never happened.

 

[thribs]

You’d be surprised. The majority are mixed about it.

 

[rfmcdpei]

I think the idea there is that the Q don’t want to annoy the Borg that they might destroy/assimilate a civilisation because of them. While our Q likes to annoy the the crews of TNG and Voyager, the others don’t want to interfere with the progression of the universe. They’re like the Ancients in Stargate.

Quite. But, also:

and here we are discussing a book where the Borg manage to, when provoked, splinter the universe itself creating innumerable unstable timelines that leave all of creation vulnerable to attack.

which means that beings as powerful as the Q should indeed, at the very least, be concerned about provoking the Borg

VOY established that not only were the Q potentially mortal and definitely not actually omnipotent, but that mortals equipped with suitable technology could in fact intervene in the affairs of the Continuum. A recurrent theme in TNG, meanwhile, was the idea that humans (and others?) could evolve to the level of the Q.

Of all the civilizations of Trek, the Borg stand out as the one that might most easily threaten even the Q. They are already a galactic civilization capable of rechannelling space. What else could the Collective do?

 

[Thrawn]

Oh and one last thing - it’s a cute trick using the epilogue to tell us this was a fitting end to a story of heroes, but what exactly is so heroic about knowing with absolute certainty that you’ll die in 24 hours and deciding to go out with a bang instead of sit on your ass and mope? In this story I’d have signed on to the mission just to have something to DO.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

"Mostly loved"? No. Even "mostly received favorably" might be stretching it. I found the trilogy riveting but harrowing, the way I found Saving Private Ryan riveting but harrowing. But to all the "armchair quarterbacks," I say, "Could you, given the challenge of ending the Novelverse continuity without 'doing a Lucasfilm,' have done better?"

And just because you would "have signed on to the mission just to have something to DO." doesn't mean that others wouldn't react to "knowing with absolute certainty that [they'll] die in 24 hours" by either going into denial, or "putting head between knees and kissing one's ass good-bye."

 

[14thDoctor]

If I knew with absolute certainty (and things were far from absolutely certain until close to the very end) I only had 24 hours to live I'd probably spend it with my loved once or embracing drunken hedonism and crossing the weirdest things off my bucket list, not rushing towards a far more painful and violent death in the very, very slight hope of saving some other version of reality where I might have died years ago.


As for the book, I appreciated the mix of "big damn hero" moment along with some of our heroes dying in depressingly mundane ways like plenty of nameless redshirts before them. The realization that these events had already played out and ended in failure in countless other splinter timelines was effectively ominous. And the ending was perfect.

 

[Thrawn]

"Mostly loved"? No. Even "mostly received favorably" might be stretching it. I found the trilogy riveting but harrowing, the way I found Saving Private Ryan riveting but harrowing. But to all the "armchair quarterbacks," I say, "Could you, given the challenge of ending the Novelverse continuity without 'doing a Lucasfilm,' have done better?"

And just because you would "have signed on to the mission just to have something to DO." doesn't mean that others wouldn't react to "knowing with absolute certainty that [they'll] die in 24 hours" by either going into denial, or "putting head between knees and kissing one's ass good-bye."

The idea that I have to be better than someone else at something in order to criticize their performance is and always has been nonsense. I can say food tastes bad without being a cook, I can say an Uber driver nearly killed me even if I don’t know how to drive, and I can say a novel was unsatisfying even if I’ve never written one. That said, I’ve backed up all my criticism with what I’d have liked to see in its place, and I don’t think my expectations were any higher or much different from exactly what these authors have managed before in similar circumstances. Destiny is one of my favorite things ever, and did almost everything I wanted this trilogy to do. I wasn’t hoping for the moon. I was hoping for the authors to like and respect their own prior work as much as I did.

 

[jaime]

The idea that I have to be better than someone else at something in order to criticize their performance is and always has been nonsense. I can say food tastes bad without being a cook, I can say an Uber driver nearly killed me even if I don’t know how to drive, and I can say a novel was unsatisfying even if I’ve never written one. That said, I’ve backed up all my criticism with what I’d have liked to see in its place, and I don’t think my expectations were any higher or much different from exactly what these authors have managed before in similar circumstances. Destiny is one of my favorite things ever, and did almost everything I wanted this trilogy to do. I wasn’t hoping for the moon. I was hoping for the authors to like and respect their own prior work as much as I did.

How simpler for a very end, as another example, to have Picard give some remaining refugees from the trek lit 24th Century, even a whole worlds worth, or solar system tucked in another galaxy (like… the one where Voyager is) simple instruction to ‘stay out of history’s way’ as the universes are folded together. That’s literally a shower thought.

 

[VESATI]

The idea that I have to be better than someone else at something in order to criticize their performance is and always has been nonsense. I can say food tastes bad without being a cook, I can say an Uber driver nearly killed me even if I don’t know how to drive, and I can say a novel was unsatisfying even if I’ve never written one. That said, I’ve backed up all my criticism with what I’d have liked to see in its place, and I don’t think my expectations were any higher or much different from exactly what these authors have managed before in similar circumstances. Destiny is one of my favorite things ever, and did almost everything I wanted this trilogy to do. I wasn’t hoping for the moon. I was hoping for the authors to like and respect their own prior work as much as I did.

You "can" do whatever you want in this case.
I think the question remains whether or not your criticism is in good taste.
I was/am certainly not happy that the Litverse came to an end, especially with as many loose threads were still left unresolved (especially on DS9's side of the story), but I still think the three authors involved with Coda did a remarkable job considering the time they had to accomplish this and the limitations imposed on them by CBS (i.e. "don't involve Voyager or the Delta Quadrant").
We were lucky to get what we did, and while anyone is perfectly free to speak out against the story or the writing, anyone doing so should expect and accept their own views to be challenged in return.
For myself, were I ever fortunate enough to be able to sit with the authors and buy them a drink, I would have notes and questions about why they did certain things with their respective books, but not as criticisms... More from a perspective of trying to better understand why they did X instead of Y.
I am grateful to these authors for caring as much (if not more) about these characters and this continuity that I've invested so much time and emotion into for the past 20 years that they wrote this trilogy as a send-off.

 

[thribs]

Why wouldn’t Voyager be allowed for this story?
CBS are just weird when it comes to Star Trek

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I think the question remains whether or not your criticism is in good taste.

@Thrawn's criticism is more than fair, imho -- "This is what I liked, this is what I didn't like, this is what I hoped to see, this is why what I didn't like didn't work for me." He engaged with the work, it left him wanting, he argued his points honestly. There are even things that I, even though I am enjoying the trilogy (not finished with book three yet), can nod and say, "Yeah, I agree with that. I didn't think about that. I'd have liked that." Thrawn's review strikes me as fair and not in poor taste.

 

[Josh Kelton]

Is the Mirror Universe in the novels also a divergent timeline?

 

[David cgc]

Is the Mirror Universe in the novels also a divergent timeline?

Actually, the novel establishes that the mirror and not-mirror universes are definitely not diverging timelines, but a matched set that makes up one single timeline, which makes a lot more sense than the theory that there was a specific divergence at some point.