I have to disagree. I thought it was rather good. It was not the happy peppy Star Trek book we are used to, but it is good.
Well, that took a while! I mean, I knew it would, but I didn't except over two years. But now it's time for me to return to the Destiny era once again with my next batch of five: Phase Seven: 2385 (continued) 31. Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg 32. Titan: Absent Enemies by John Jackson Miller 33. The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang 34. Deep Space Nine: Lust's Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann 35. Prometheus: The Root of All Rage by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg (translated by Helga Parmiter) Published: August 2016 (German original); December 2017 (English translation) Time Span: 29 October–16 November 2385 I am in the somewhat unusual position here of having experienced this book before. Back in 2018, Big Finish Productions released an audiobook read by Alec Newman, which I reviewed for Unreality SF. I did not like it very much, either the novel qua novel or as an audiobook. But I wanted to actually read the book in its chronological context, so here I am giving it a second go. It is a bit odd reading it here; it picks up right from The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms. That novel ended on 27 October with zh'Tarah being elected president of the Federation; this opens on 29 October with her inaugural speech. But that book also ended as a sort of send-off to the political thriller aspects of Star Trek novels and continuous galactic crises... and this book plunges us straight into another political thriller and galactic crisis. Alien terrorists are suicide bombing Federation (and, later, Klingon) facilities in what surely must be an even less subtle 9/11 allegory than Enterprise's Xindi arc. So if you have space politics fatigue when it comes to Star Trek novels, this is not the one for you... On top of that, the space politics are not very interesting. There are occasional chapters devoted to what the Klingon High Council or Federation Council is deliberating; this is pretty much never interesting, as characters we don't care about have conversations about things we already know. The scenes seem primarily used to make it clear that the authors did indeed read Articles of the Federation, but serve no real purpose in the actual story. That is a criticism you could aim, in fact, at a significant portion of this book. The authors love to write chapters about irrelevant characters learning or doing things (e.g., a retired Romulan spy, a sneaky Ferengi, Martok, twice Miradorn mercenaries, a Federation communications office on a starbase); these characters are pretty much never interesting. Meanwhile, the actual main characters don't seem to do very much at all. Captain Adams of the Prometheus talks to Ro on DS9 about the inauguration... but why? A group of Prometheus characters watch Quark dither with a broken viewscreen... but why? I think you could lop the first seventy-seven pages off this book and begin with the current chapter seven, and no one would have even noticed. Even after that point, it drags. Basically one thing of importance happens in this book: the Prometheus does some investigating, and some members of its crew are captured, and they get away and learn one interesting thing in the process. That's a few chapters, not an almost 400-page novel. Part of the issue seems to be that the writers of the book aren't quite sure what it wants to be. Is the Prometheus trilogy a single story about a galactic crisis? Or the pilot for an ongoing set of adventures about the USS Prometheus? (Similar to how the first four New Frontier novels worked.) If it's the former, the scenes of characters around the galaxy kind of make sense... but the scenes of the Prometheus crew do not, as they don't really add anything to the story. We learn about the tactical officer's love life, and the engineer's heritage, and how one guy really likes juice, and so on. But if this is meant to set up the cast of the Prometheus as a ship, it fails there because these people are utterly uninteresting as characters, and because nothing they do really seems to matter. I was vaguely hopeful that divorced from Alec Newman's plodding, mispronunciation-filled reading I might like this more... but to be honest, I didn't think I would, and I didn't. The main benefit of reading it myself is that it didn't take me eleven hours to get through it. Continuity Notes: The book often reads like it was written by Roy Thomas, with the characters taking pains to think about or mention totally irrelevant continuity points, like the Ferengi on Alpha Eridani II who has to think about the fact that before the planet became a Romulan subject world, it was an Earth colony terrorized by the Redjac entity because that was mentioned in "Wolf in the Fold." There are a lot of deep cuts here. When O'Brien meets the Prometheus's Kirk-descended chief engineer, he mentions that another Kirk descendant once served on DS9, referring to a one-off Malibu comic from twenty years prior. Other Notes: Alexander Rozkenko is in this book. I couldn't tell you why; he doesn't do anything. Also the authors seem to think that the Federation ambassador to the Klingons is someone who works for the Klingons. On top of that, Spock is here too. But, again, who knows why.
I remember that it didn't interest me enough to continue on to the other two books. The only specific I've retained is I thought it was odd for the crew to be so bitter, angry, and unforgiving about the Dominion War, but they were totally fine with the Klingons, who they'd also fought a violent and brutal war with a year earlier. Maybe I'd just watched "Apocalypse Rising" too recently when I read it so the wrong war was fresh in my mind.
Jamie Kirk! A character I would love to see return, but also a character who frankly didn't do anything of significance in that one-shot appearance.
Titan: Absent Enemies by John Jackson Miller Published: March 2014 Time Span: November 2385 And we're back to the ebook novellas, a format I have come to appreciate: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet. This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo. The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage. It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City (but see below). This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now. Continuity Notes: Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm... Other Notes: I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience. I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral. Full disclosure: I have never actually gotten around to The City & The City. But I have never read anything by Miéville that wasn't good and interesting, so I am sure it is good and interesting. I am working my way through winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; at my current rate I should get to The City & The City in 2052, so I'll report back then.
Thanks to the magic of eBooks you missed that, originally, this book assumed Vale was on the Enterprise, but off-screen, during NEM. That happened in at least one more novel, which was also corrected in the eBook edition after it was mentioned on the board. I don't know why it is that Vale deciding to go on vacation by herself rather than go to Riker and Troi's wedding stuck in my mind so much, but it did.
Yeah, I saw on Memory Alpha there were a couple issues: a crew transfer Miller missed, getting the Son'a and the Ba'ku backward. But they were all correct in the version I read. (Vale does go to Riker and Troi's Earth wedding, she just skips the Betazoid one.)
This kind of stuff is really the editor's job to catch. The author should obviously try their best, but they have a narrower view of just their own work to concentrate on. The editor exists to be the safety net with the broader view who can spot these inconsistencies before they go to print. And frankly there's been too many of these things slipping through over the last few years. They're lucky e-books accept updates to correct them. .
The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang Published: July 2014 Time Span: November 2385, plus copious flashbacks (including to September 2384, immediately after Cold Equations) When The Light Fantastic came out, Jeffrey Lang had been absent from Star Trek fiction for eight years, since his short story in Constellations (2006). By the mid-2010s, he was no longer in the Star Trek fiction "stable." But suddenly he was back: it feels like a bit of compensation. "Well, Jeff, we heavily mined your novel Immortal Coil for a trilogy, but of course you don't get anything for that. Would you like the chance to write a new novel at least?" If this is what happened, I don't mind the results, because I like Jeff Lang's writing, and the editors must not have minded either, because they would invite him back for a DS9 novel as well. Cold Equations brought Data back to life, of course, but one of my big complaints about that trilogy was that it actually didn't really do much with him as a character. Data was rarely a viewpoint character, and when he was, things were usually plot focused. It was hard for me to tally this coldly Lal-obsessed person with the inquisitive, friendly android we'd known before he died. I'm pleased to say that one of the big strengths of The Light Fantastic is how it joins the dots here and makes this work. Data has permanent emotions now, and he is still learning how to handle them, and not altogether certain about how to express them. The book really benefits from pairing him with Geordi La Forge, who as Data's best friend, can both empathize with him and call him out when he's going into dark places. The main plot of the book is that Professor Moriarty, confined to the Daystrom Institute in a memory module with the Countess Regina, has figured out a way to reach out of his prison—and now he wants a real body so he can really explore the universe, as he was promised by Picard and Data. Since Cold Equations, Data and Lal have settled down on Orion Prime, where Data manages his father's casino (among other things) while Lal explores her newfound life. Moriarty kidnaps Lal to force Data to assist him, and so Data and La Forge travel the galaxy, looking both for clues as to where Moriarty is and for leads on what can give him a real body. Like Immortal Coil, it loops in a number of previous Star Trek stories about AI: most notably this time, "I, Mudd," "The Most Toys," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", and most notably "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Plus, it features appearances by Star Trek's two other most famous holograms, Voyager's Doctor and Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine. In the abstract, there's a real danger that this kind of thing could feel gratuitous, but I think the novel just about gets away with it. Each of the returns comes across as a natural extension of what we've seen so far, and serves to deepen the novel's exploration of what kind of rights one has to exist when one is "merely" a program. I liked the return of Kivas Fajo, for example, and Alice—one of the Mudd androids—is probably the novel's best original character. The one thing I would cut is that the conversations with Vic and the Doctor felt redundant; we probably could have done just fine with only one of them. Lang's novel feels like an actual novel, not an ersatz tv episode; it jumps around in time and focuses on the characters and their thoughts, not the actions. I really enjoyed the story of Moriarty and his growing disillusionment with the universe. His is a tragic tale, and he ultimately makes a strong antagonist. The story of Alice and Mudd is good, as I said. The character of Albert Lee is a fun one, though I did have to look him up to see if he was from a TNG episode I'd missed! I enjoyed Data here, though I still occasionally found him off-puttingly strange. I like, for example, him posing as a fry cook and him struggling to work out parenthood, but his single-minded ruthlessness as a parent didn't always ring true. I get characters in the novels have to evolve beyond what we see on screen, but there's a balance to keep in that they also have to feel like those screen characters, and I think Lang got this most of the time, but not all. That said, La Forge calls him out on some of it near the end, and that helped me. The weak point of the novel is the ending, which is abrupt. I didn't totally get where Moriarty was / where he had brought Lal and Alice to, and Data's deception of him seemed surprisingly easy. I did like, on the other hand, that Moriarty ultimately didn't suffer for his decision. I did not like the way the characters cavalierly treated Alice. Given the whole book focused on the consequences of how even Data could disregard the sentience of another AI, it seemed weird for them to repeat that mistake with Alice, in allowing her to become reenslaved to Harry Mudd. There is some fun dialogue here, and some snappy cons and heists, which I always enjoy. Lang is good at small moments that show character and don't necessarily relate to the big plot while also not feeling gratuitously wodged in because the author suddenly realized their characters should be people, like Moriarty trying not to stare at Alice's legs, or Mudd thinking he can still con Uhura. The stuff about color in Moriarty's world is a nice detail, very evocative. Kivas Fajo becoming a Data fanboy was a logical development (not so keen with what his release implies about 24th-century mental health). It's not as good as I remember Immortal Coil being... but then, I harbor a suspicion that Immortal Coil might not be as good as I remember Immortal Coil being! I am not convinced that what I valued in Star Trek fiction in 2002 still holds true today. On the whole, though, this is fun with some interesting moments, and I am happy to see the return of Jeff Lang's voice after an eight-year gap. Unfortunately, though this book sets Data up to be his own person and even gives him a new mystery to investigate, and though Data would turn up in some more novels, he was never a main character again as far as I know. I would have liked to see where he would have gone next. Continuity Notes: An engineer named "Lee" is mentioned, but does not appear in, "All Good Things..." during the 2363 flashbacks. I guess this must be Albert; the character is really named after Jeff Lang's dog! There are multiple references to Indistinguishable from Magic here, a book that seemed kind of glossed over in earlier Destiny-era novels. Suddenly La Forge is in a relationship with Leah Brahms again; he thinks briefly about Tamala Harstad, but agrees with me that she's too boring to be bothered with. There's also a reference to the apparent death of Captain Scott in that novel, though Picard speculates he might return some day—as, indeed, we know he must from Engines of Destiny. Interestingly, the book would seem to be incompatible with basically any post-"I, Mudd" stories we've ever seen, as it establishes Harry Mudd was trapped with the androids on their planet for decades. No Mudd in Your Eye, no "The Business, as Usual, during Altercations," even no "Mudd's Passion"! This idea would be invalidated by the Short Treks episode "The Escape Artist"... at least, if you buy my arguments about that story's chronological placement! Vic says Miles was pretty busted up when Data died. But at that time, O'Brien would have been living on Cardassia Prime, and nowhere near Vic! Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "The galaxy is on high alert for small, fast vessels thanks to a galactic terrorism crisis. Doesn't that make your ship a bit suspicious, Mr. Data?" Hmmmmm... Other Notes: There's a weird scene at the beginning of chapter 15. The scene is captioned "Aboard the Archeus" (that's Data's ship), where Data and La Forge are, and they are comm-linked to Lee back on Earth. All of Lee's dialogue is in italics, the Star Trek fiction convention for people who are speaking on a communicator. But the scene is told from Lee's perspective, describing his thoughts and actions throughout; nothing in the scene is actually narrated from the perspective of anyone on the Archeus! It's very odd and off-putting.
I'm not crazy about the depiction of the Mudd androids as being sentient at all. As depicted in "I, Mudd," they weren't even separate beings, just drone bodies operated by a single central computer, and that computer was pretty limited and rigid in its programming, far short of true sapience.
Wow, I had completely forgotten Kivas Fajo was in that novel! Might repeat relevant portions to see how his personality aligns with or diverges from his other novel appearance.
He's in Picard: Rogue Elements, and also a Strange New Worlds story (the anthology, not the Pike series).
This was a short book; my hold up was not the book itself, but the fact that I decided to read a Charles Dickens novel and a Brando Sando novel between The Light Fantastic and this! Deep Space Nine: Lust's Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann Published: September 2014 Time Span: November 2385 This book finally brings an end to a depressing five-year gap without a Deep Space Nine book. Sure, we've had Deep Space 9 books, but not Deep Space Nine books, if you see what I mean. The last one was a moving epic about one young man with a backdrop of an entire civilization's rise and fall, so what's this one about? Well, it's about Quark trying to find some good porn. Uh, okay. Look, I know these novellas are trying to emulate a tv episode more than your average prose release from Simon & Schuster, and there are several Quark episodes this is clearly intended to remind you of, like "Who Mourns for Morn?" or "Rules of Acquisition." But the best Quark episodes were 1) actually funny, 2) had a somewhat serious core somewhere, and 3) were actually about Quark! That last one is where this all falls down for me. Quark tries to track down the rest of a Vulcan's Love Slave sequel, and goes to Wrigley's Pleasure Planet and battles with the Orion Syndicate, but basically none of his choices move the narrative at all. He gets himself out of no dangers, he does nothing clever or interesting. This is the dumb Quark of the worst DS9 episodes. At the end, we learn three other characters manipulated him and everything he did was pointless and then the book stops. He learns nothing, and we learn nothing. I was genuinely surprised when I got to the end: "That's it?" Like, that was all this book was for? On screen, Armin Shimerman might have made you believe in this stuff (he could do that with weak scripts on screen), but on the page this all lies pretty flat. Quark can be shallow, but this is ridiculously shallow even for him; it's like the tv show never happened. Quark gets a dumb "comedy" sidekick, and I kept expecting some kind of reveal about him, but no, he's just a dumb "comedy" sidekick, and his role would have been much more interestingly taken by just about any other character. Even at its short length, it's a joke that goes on too long. Continuity Notes: We're told in this book that since the dedication of the new Deep Space 9, business at Quark's has been totally dead. So what about that massive crowd there to watch the new president's inauguration in Fire with Fire, huh? Thank goodness the book specifically mentioned Photons Be Free, because I never would have remembered that Broht was a screen character otherwise. (Here we learn he publishes basically every significant holoprogram seen on screen.) Other Notes: Thankfully, for us font-watchers, the book maintains the DS9 relaunch logo, and doesn't Rotis Serifize it as the TNG relaunch logo was. If this book had a spine, it would look good on my shelf! One of the big problems about the Destiny time jump and then the lack of DS9 novels is that all of the characters seem to have been in stasis the entire time. It's been almost a decade since Quark and Ro first dated back in Mission: Gamma, and apparently their relationship has not progressed since. The writers keep confusing "vedek" with "vedic." Unlike all the errors in Absent Enemies, this one remains uncorrected eight years later.
Well, I liked it. I laughed out loud several times in public while reading it, I enjoyed the silly in-jokes about fandoms and conventions and bulletin boards exactly like this one. It was a fun, light-hearted romp with super-low stakes after so much sturm und drang lately. I do agree about Schmenge though, I didn't really get the point of his existence, I wondered if he was Pel in boy-drag again or something. That's why I replaced that character when I adapted the story as part of my DS9Continuing Season 14 stories.
Prometheus: The Root of All Rage by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg (translated by Helga Parmiter) Published: August 2016 (German original); May 2018 (English translation) Time Span: November 18-25, 2385 Okay, so here we have another Prometheus novel that felt like it could have been a third of a novel. Let's tackle this one a bit differently. I want to move through it in order, not quite chapter-by-chapter, but significant chapter by significant chapter. Chapter 2: A recap of where we're at so far, which is mostly characters talking about how they haven't actually learned anything yet. Chapter 4: A chapter set on the Klingon ship. On the one hand, these kind of feel like distractions; on the other hand, they almost read like they're by a different writer(s) to the rest of the book, because these characters actually have personalities and are trying to do things that bring them into conflict with one another. Chapter 5: For some reason, Lwaxana Troi is in this book. Chapter 6: The Klingon High Council meets to complain about how little is happening in this book. Chapter 7: One of the trilogy's ongoing subplots is about how women shouldn't be just having casual but enthusiastic sex all the time. Chapter 12: One of the very annoying things in the first book were a large number of chapters where boring people did boring things and then at the end they all blew up. Here's another one, alas, but thankfully it's the only one in this book. Chapter 13: The Klingon High Council meets to have the same conversation over again as in chapter 6. I don't think you need either of these two chapters, but you certainly didn't need both of them. Chapter 14: Over 150 pages into the second book in this trilogy, Captain Adams finally makes an interesting decision. The Klingon captain, Kromm, decides he is going to bombard innocent civilians in order to get some answers. Adams places Prometheus between the Bortas and the planet to stop him. How is Adams going to deescalate this situation and save the innocent civilians? Chapter 15: Don't worry, Captain Adams is in no danger of joining the pantheon of clever Star Trek captains. The showdown fizzles out when Lwaxana on Earth calls in a favor from Picard who calls in a favor from Worf who calls in a favor from Martok who orders Kromm to stand down. And that's it. Chapter 18: Another meeting where people complain about how little has happened, but in this case it's the Federation Council. So many interminable meeting scenes in these books. Chapter 19: Finally the characters figure out something that's been obvious the entire book, which is that some kind of external influence is making everyone more aggressive and xenophobic. Chapter 22: Lwaxana figures out that what's happening now is linked to the disappearance of the Valiant a century ago. I am not sure why she is making every significant plot breakthrough and not our supposed main characters. Chapters 24-5: The main characters do a lot of technobabble to figure out where the crashed Valiant is. It's a very undramatic way to climax your novel. Chapter 27: Spock is the one who makes a key breakthrough in the subplot on the Klingon ship. Chapter 30: Spock figures out that the cause of everything here is the entity from "Day of the Dove." This is doubly frustrating: one, the attentive reader could have figured this out six hundred pages ago from the prologue to the first book, and two, it's yet another breakthrough by literally anyone other than the crew of the Prometheus. And that's it, that's the book. A bunch of meetings, the main characters doing almost nothing, the Klingons, Spock, and Lwaxana Troi being responsible for most of what does happen. It could have been one-third as long. Continuity Notes: Not as reference-heavy as the first book, but the book does recap what we learned about the "Day of the Dove" entity from The Q Continuum, even carrying over the name that book gave it, (*). Stray Observations: Not sure what I think of a book whose moral is clearly "don't be a xenophobe" also having one of its few significant breakthroughs coming from gratuitous torture. And that brings me to the end of this batch of five Destiny-era novels. I average ten months between batches, so look forward to another post from me in January!
Sooner than January, thankfully! Phase Seven: 2385 (concluded) 36. Deep Space Nine: The Missing by Una McCormack 37. The Next Generation: Takedown by John Jackson Miller 38. Prometheus: In the Heart of Chaos by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg 39. Deep Space Nine: Rules of Accusation by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann 40. Deep Space Nine: Sacraments of Fire by David R. George III More DS9 books in this batch of five than in the previous thirty-five combined!