Spoilers PIC: Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller Review Thread

I really enjoyed it too.

I also liked how JJM was shocked by one of his characters actions.

 

I may try get this one. I LOVED JJM's Discovery novel. I couldn't quite get through the first Picard novel, and I'm not sure the second one interests me, but I love this character and this writer.

 

I have really liked the Picard books so far, more than the show itself honestly.

 

I love the show but I feel like the show would have been better received with THE LAST BEST HOPE or something similar as a pair of episodes before the series. A way to show everything before it goes to hell like the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

I would definitely read a Rios series by JJM, though.

 

To me, the show really fell apart after about 3 episodes. It tried to do too many things and honestly a lot of the elements didn't work together well in my opinion.

 

Thank you so much! Really had a good time talking to John, as usual.

 

Eh, to each their own. I've watched it about three times and find new things to appreciate in the episodes every time.

 

Just finished it. Having Fajo and Iotians as central characters was a negative. Raffi,Picard, and Batinides was neutral.

 

Oh I love the Iotians. Fajo I could take or leave. Really, I think it would have been better to have an original Collector character there and a more permanent ending for them.

 

Bruce had the opportunity to talk about this novel with John Jackson Miller on the latest Positively Trek Book Club episode! Check out the interview! Personally, I enjoyed this novel a great deal. I feel like Miller really captured the voice of Rios, it felt just like the character from the show, which I enjoy immensely! I also would love to see Miller write more Rios.

 

Has anybody attempted something like a definitive watchlist to get all the references in Rogue Elements?

I checked Memory Beta (the Memory Alpha article is still a stub) and they list some episodes, but I feel like there are a lot more. For example they don't include The Undiscovered Country, which I would think is a very central reference.
And on the more obscure side, there are episodes like The Trouble with Tribbles, which introduces Sherman's Planet, or the DS9 episodes that gave us the Miradorns. (For a ubiquitous species like Ferengi or Klingons or even Nausicaans I wouldn't expect a reference, obviously. But until I looked it up I couldn't remember if the Miradorns were a species that we had seen on screen before or if JJM made them up for the book.)

 

On p. 43, Rios mentions the song "Sledgehammer"... which gave me a good laugh when I remembered the music video.

 

Oh, I'd forgotten that was the name of Rihanna's Star Trek Beyond end-credits song, as well as the Peter Gabriel song/video from 1986. I guess you can take the book reference either way.

 

It was alright. Doesn't really get interesting until about 250 pages or so when the mystery starts to get interesting. I think the issue I have is that I don't find any of the new characters in Picard particularly interesting. I was close to aborting the book until Fajo came into the picture. A book about Raffi or the murder girl would probably put me into a coma.
I think I would have preferred a story of Rios on the Ibin Majad. A familiar setting would have kept me more invested.
The reveal on who a certain character was interesting but I don't think it really added much to the story. It was just a nice canonical reference.

 

I voted Above Average. A little of the Iotians goes a long way, and there’s way too much stuff early on that tries to be comedy-laced action-adventure but isn’t particularly funny, particularly thrilling, or particularly relevant to the plot. I like a long book, but not when the result is something that creates no narrative urgency for half its page count. Once it properly gets underway, though, it’s a clever mystery that fits nicely alongside Picard both narratively and thematically despite being a pretty different type of story. The Picard novels have been more consistently thoughtful and rewarding than the TV series, and frankly more thoughtful and rewarding that what I’ve read of the recent novelverse, and this continues that trend.

 

Just completed this book finally. Had a lot of stuff going on including a bout with COVID (despite being vaccinated) and let me tell you, that's a nasty little bug. Fortunately it wasn't so bad that I felt I ever had to go to the hospital, but it felt like a really bad bout of the flu.

Anyway I rated this novel above average. Rios is one of my favorite characters from Picard. And this novel does some internal world building with how Rios got his ship and his start in the freighter business. Since the plot has been largely hashed out I'll just highlight some things I liked and the one or two things I didn't like.

It was nice to catch up with the Iotians and I mostly liked Miller's portrayal, that they largely continued in their gangster ways (which I prefer over the previous idea that they copied Starfleet because of the misplaced communicator). There were certain advancements and changes in Iotian culture as one would expect after a century, but they weren't just simple copycats. There were reasons they warmed to the gangster culture of the 1920s. And it was interesting to see in some ways it was a sanitized version of gangster culture. They were dangerous and sometimes thug-like, but it wasn't as malicious as real gangster culture was in Earth's past.

We also got to follow up with Kivas Fajo and find out that some leopards don't change their stripes.

I also really liked the character of Ledger. There seemed to be an attraction between her and Rios as the book went on but I was actually glad Miller didn't do the obvious thing and have them go to bed with one another. So many stories do that. Build up two characters that can't stand each other yet have some sort of attraction to one another that builds until they end up in bed. Miller took a different track. They did have a kiss which I thought was a perfect end to their relationship. That was a good move I thought. It was also interesting to see Rios with a sort of crew for a time, that he wasn't always alone.

Picard and Raffi do make brief appearances as well and we get a little additional world building as to what was going on in the early 2390s within the Federation and former Romulan Empire. Not a whole lot, which isn't surprising given that the show is still airing.

The main thing I didn't care for was the book seemed a bit too long. At times it seemed a chapter was added just to fill out space. There's no one major thing I would cut out but it seemed to me the book might have benefited by being a tad shorter. Some scenes just seemed to go on too long. And I didn't care a lot for the character of Arkko. A bit too cookie cutter villain to me.

Otherwise it was a good read. Just wish it hadn't taken me so long to read but it is what it is I suppose. Next up with be the Coda series which I've been looking forward to.

 

Yes, that certainly makes more sense. The original premise of the episode is anthropologically implausible and rooted in ethnocentric assumptions about why cultures adopt outside ideas. Just being blindly imitative makes no sense; who were the Iotians supposed to have imitated before first contact? Cultures adopt new ideas if it suits their own purposes, or at least those of a faction within the culture. I figure that some Iotian subculture that already had mobster-like customs latched onto The Book as "proof" that their ways were endorsed by a higher power, adopting its trappings to advance their own influence until their ways became dominant. And by a century later, those customs had become intrinsic to their culture, and they wouldn't have just mindlessly tossed them aside for no reason.

Really, the ending of "A Piece of the Action" makes more sense than some other Prime Directive stories, because it has Kirk accept that this is just the way the Iotians are now, and he works within their cultural norms to help them reform their society on their own terms, rather than saying "No, you must revert to the 'pure' culture you had before our 'contamination'" (which is nonsense, because every culture interacts with others and "purity" is a myth).

I wondered if that was sort of a metatextual nod to how the episode's gangster culture was toned down for '60s broadcast standards, with all the seedier sexual elements censored out.

 

Hmm, interesting question. I wonder of Miller has addressed that at all. I didn't really pick up on that before with "A Piece of the Action" but after reading the novel I realized that it was a sanitized look at gangster culture, basically the version you saw on movies and TV, highlighting the violence and minimizing the sexual exploitation aspects. Women were still objectified in the episode, but they were treated more as 'eye candy' than sex objects.

Yeah, definitely. The idea that after the communicator incident that they would suddenly copy Starfleet customs seemed absurd. I liked that Miller decided to take a different track, and even offered some explanation why they might have imitated mob culture in the first place.

Yeah, it was a creative solution. He managed to 'fix' the damage done by the Horizon a century before, but still do it in a way that respected the Iotian cultural norms. He couldn't just undo everything that happened after all.

 

Indeed not. The Iotians had their own reasons for adapting "the Book" to their purposes, or adapting themselves to the stylings of "the Book" and Miller made that clear. They weren't idiots, but they were probably trying to save themselves from their own worst selves. Not unlike humanity in our particular here and now.

But I digress.

 

Yeah, it seemed the Book just helped them organize their gangster tendencies. I get the impression their society was a bit more chaotic previous to the Book.

I don't recall, did the the Iotians end up joining the Federation at some point. Miller didn't talk a lot about the planet itself and I was curious if that came up. I can't remember.