Whatever Happened to Diane Carey?
- Thread starter RonG
- Start date
Why did you bump a 16 year old thread?
Presumably because she wanted to comment on the topic.
To talk about her DS9 novels, while I actually liked her novelization of "The Search", despite the strangeness of reading about Jem' Hadar eating and drinking at Quark's, i hate her version of "Way Of The Warrior". Especially her scenes with Dukat and Garak were abysmal, with referencing 20th century history and culture by the Cardassians. Took me out of the story the entire time!
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Precisely. The usual restrictions on posting to old threads don't apply here, presumably because people regularly have first encounters with books that have been out for decades (and might very well be out-of-print, and only available used).
I've said this before, and I'll probably say it again, but I find her Piper and April novels quite entertaining and quite memorable, and entirely re-readable, despite her tendency to promote hard-libertarian, borderline-anarchist agendas (some of Sarda's lines are particularly egregious examples of this). But my understanding is that she basically blew it, big time, with her novelization of "Broken Bow."
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As far as I could tell back in the day, her main supporter at Pocket was John Ordover, who left Pocket a a year or two after Broken Bow. Maybe after Enterprise went off the air the Broken Bow thing would have blown over, but there wasn't necessarily anyone left who was interested. Why extend a lifeline to someone whose officially licenced books show how little she thinks of some of the Star Trek series and who wants her own spinoff that's a rejection of everything the Federation and Starfleet stand for?
To be fair, that actually happens in the episode itself.
I read and enjoyed one of her historical novels, one that was published after the last post in this thread -- Banners, about the War of 1812 and the making of the Star-Spangled Banner. It's not a perfect novel by any means, but it really hit the Star Trek buttons for me. (One of the plots is about a captain of an American ship.) If she wrote more Fighting Sail fiction, I'd buy it. But, from the last conversation I had with Dave Galanter about Carey, she's retired from writing.
Maybe I've forgotten something, but I just remember the Jem'Hadar standing and sitting around at the bar, not eating and drinking. Kinda like in the beginning of the sixth season.
I also felt uncomfortable with her addition of Kassidy outright killing members of the Klingon boarding party on her ship - it felt way too cold-blooded for it to just happen and have her go on like nothing happened.
Then there was her describing Boreth as reminding Worf of Viridian III, when the Boreth monastery was shown in an icy and frozen location, while the Enterprise crashed in a rather temperate and green location. Plus having Worf’s entire motivation in the episode being his uncertainty of remaining in Starfleet, while having one of the first scenes from his point of view have narrative text to the effect of “it was good to be in a Starfleet uniform again.”
And in general in regards to her DS9 work, I don’t feel she was all that... I’ll be generous and say comfortable with writing for Kira - I remember her Dominion War books basically reduced her arc in Rocks and Shoals to a handful of paragraphs, and while I know that condensing six episodes into two books means some things had to fall by the wayside, I definitely think that deserved to have been kept.
Last run through her novelizations, so often the thought going through my head was that things sound ALMOST right, but just off enough to feel like it’s a distorted mirror, that it’s not just her prose version of the episodes but also her narrative critique of the episode, not matching her exact standards, and trying to force things into her mold and style, even and especially when it’s by design not meant to fit that particular shape.
IIRC, Quark specifically mentioned serving them drinks in The Search.
...but created by the Dominion.
Why would they change the behavior of the Jemmies and/or their metabolism for a simulation about how the main characters would react and deal with the situation of the Dominion slowly taking over the Federation?
Especially considering that Ben and the others were captives and most likely about to replaced by changelings. In the case they were to be released, they could have been easily get mindwiped.
I'm actually puzzled why the Vortas didn't do this at the end of the episode.
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What is it that you find perplexing? The plot, characters, their actions, etc?
To throw people off, take false intelligence home. It’s a stretch but it works.
It's really a stretch, considering how much the DS9 crew learnt about how the Dominion operates in this episode.
Well, it was early days weirdness in regards to the Dominion. The Search Part 1 shows a Jem'Hadar personally attacking Odo, while later DS9 establishes the Jem'Hadar should instantly recognize him as a Founder and revere him. Granted, a few weeks later in The Abandoned we have a Jem'Hadar who doesn't realize what Odo is until he witnesses him shapeshifting which could explain the actions of the one we see in The Search, though it's certainly inconsistent with how they are later portrayed. And that's before we get into the Vorta's telekinetic abilities that disappeared after their first appearance.
Eh, whatever. Star Trek is never known for its consistency.
Eh, whatever. Star Trek is never known for its consistency.
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