Dang. My brain totally didn't register that phrase. Sigh. Sorry about that, @Stevil2001 ......
Reading Marathon: The Typhon Pact... and Beyond!
- Thread starter Stevil2001
- Start date
Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow
Released: October 2021
Time Span: July 2387 (nine months since Section 31: Control, which was Oct. 2386 according to my notes)
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. But maybe I am wrong. Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.
That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.
It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene were they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.
If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)
Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")
I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.
This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)
My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.
Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.
Continuity Notes:
Released: October 2021
Time Span: July 2387 (nine months since Section 31: Control, which was Oct. 2386 according to my notes)
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. But maybe I am wrong. Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.
That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.
It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene were they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.
If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)
Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")
I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.
This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)
My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.
Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.
Continuity Notes:
- Because of the way the novels have jumped around in time, you end up with weirdness like Rugiero being Sisko's first officer for (arguably) longer than Kira was. You'll never make me believe it.
- Here we learn Tom Paris is on Akaar's staff. Tom was in Moment Asunder, but I thought just because he had experience with this kind of malarkey thanks to "Year of Hell"; if he was working for Akaar there too, I missed it.
- Here we learn what nickname Wesley has for his half-brother René. Was this preestablished? I can't remember any meaningful interactions between the two in earlier books, but perhaps it was in Cold Equations.
- There is a dog on Picard's vineyard (c.f., Picard season one). It's funny, because I think of the "novelverse" as so separate from the modern shows, it was quite jarring every time there was an explicit reference to them: for example, that Boreth is a source of time crystals (as seen in Discovery). The most effective one is probably when you realize part of Riker's motivation is this feeling that he ought to have two kids and live in a cabin in the wilderness (Picard: "Nepenthe"); I wish the book had leaned into that more, it could have made evil Riker work.
- Given how many books were referenced here, it struck me as quite pointed that the book makes sure to establish that Saavik and Spock are good friends and great colleagues and no more, contradicting Vulcan's Heart and Vulcan's Soul, even though those books have been previously referenced by other Destiny-era books.
- Alexander and Spock previously met (for some reason) in the Prometheus trilogy. I didn't detect any reference to that here, but I also didn't notice any explicit indication they hadn't met; their first meeting here seems to be between scenes.
- When did Odo resume being constable on DS9? Is this something that happened in another book that I forgot about?
- Look, the Andorian transporter duplicates were dumb. I appreciate this book wrapped that plotline offhandedly, but it should have done so in a way that made it clear what a dumb plotline that was to begin with.
- I didn't buy how little Picard seemed to know about Bashir (p. 287). Surely there was a lot of information on him in the Section 31 files released at the end of Control, and surely Picard would have read all about him!
- Counselor Hegol dies in book I of Coda but pops up here. Whoops.
- Why is the adjutant of the Federation ambassador to the Klingons a Klingon? That didn't make any sense to me.
- At the beginning of the book, a former disciple of Admiral Dougherty (from Insurrection) gets a lot of setup, but I don't really know why, because he promptly vanishes from the story in favor of the "evil Riker" approach.
- There is a Nick Locarno joke here. James Swallow beat Lower Decks to the punch!
- Jake calls Rebecca his "stepsister" (p. 151), but that's wrong, she's a half-sister.
- Endalla being destroyed in gory detail without a single reference to the "what's up with Endalla" plotline that ran through DRG3's DS9 novels interminably just feels like trolling.
- Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?
Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?
Ohh, I get it! It's what they always said in Blake's 7 after teleporting. Which is actually a pretty good policy.
I spent all of the threads on the first two books arguing there was a twist coming and Coda wasn't what it first appeared.
Anyway...
I do think that this one hit the series' stated themes and goals right in the bullseye (which is ironic, because they've said that of the three authors, Swallow wasn't as on-board with the premise and had to be talked into it a little). The Boreth vignette, especially, does everything that the series was supposed to be about, effectively and affectingly. Ro and Quark's "we'll be young and beautiful forever" scene hits me right where I live. Nog's death... is kind of sideways in a way I can't articulate without talking about the final book, since it reflects the major flaw with that one.
That aspect also ends up being muddled and incomprehensible in light of the overall project.
IIRC, the aim was to thread the needle, so it could be read that they're a lightly-estranged married couple that have been apart for years for people familiar with Vulcan's Soul, while also not being that for people who aren't fond of that particular relationship, but I see how not specifying either makes it look like it's definitely the latter.
If there's a hundred people annoyed we never found out what the deal was with that damn moon, I'm one of them. If there's one person, then it's me. If there's no one who still wants some pay-off for Endalla, I'm dead.
Oh, I forgot this bit:
BOOKS REMAINING: 1
ESTIMATED DATE OF NEXT BATCH: March 2026
ESTIMATED DATE OF COMPLETION: September 2025
Yes, the different methods I use to estimate these stats are throwing up contradictory results now that I have one book left. I'm leaving it as is because I'm curious which one will be more accurate.
BOOKS REMAINING: 1
ESTIMATED DATE OF NEXT BATCH: March 2026
ESTIMATED DATE OF COMPLETION: September 2025
Yes, the different methods I use to estimate these stats are throwing up contradictory results now that I have one book left. I'm leaving it as is because I'm curious which one will be more accurate.
Interesting! I did try to read it with that in mind, but there was some specific wording that made me think it was unlikely.
I ordered this book at work... and then got it about two weeks before the on-sale date. I blitzed through it in about five hours -- it was gripping -- and when the thing with Nog happened...
I had to put the book down.
My favorite Nog scene of all time comes in the second Millennium book. The Defiant has been pulled into the future, the crew is on the Starfleet ship of that time, and the older Nog of that time gives Worf a hug.
Nog gives Worf a hug.
Even twenty-five years ago that just hit me in the feels.
Nog gives Worf a hug.
Nog saving Jake -- and, IIRC, Nog doesn't even know that Jake is there on the other ship -- hit me in the same feels.
Nog is the poetic soul of the Ferengi. Nog is made of love.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
It must be in the next book.
I found Book 2 the best of the trilogy (though it's not a high bar for this series). The characters seemed more active in trying to deal with the issue and the deaths hit better than in the other books.
It is possible I as I went through Book 1 I felt it was going to be a trilogy of death so my mood went down, and then my mood went up again in this one as it felt there was a bit more hope to positive outcome to problem, and then Book 3 brought me down again.
It is possible I as I went through Book 1 I felt it was going to be a trilogy of death so my mood went down, and then my mood went up again in this one as it felt there was a bit more hope to positive outcome to problem, and then Book 3 brought me down again.
We would all be shocked if you did anything else.
This is why I end up DNFing so many tie-in fiction books. I buy it because I'm interested in reading stories about characters I have grown to love via their TV show, but if the story isn't good enough to keep me going, I'm done. The good news is that I have at least 50 Trek novels that I've bought over the last two years that have been sale, so I feel less bad DNFing a book I only paid $1.99 or $2.99 for than one I paid $20 or more for.
Tie-in fiction is a weird animal. One tie in book that did surprise this year was the sequel to the original V miniseries by the guy that wrote the original miniseries. He wouldn't put his name on the sequel miniseries, and he wrote a book about how he'd like the story to end. I finished the book out of curiosity, but I didn't much care for it. However, I also binge watched all of the Alien Nation, and it's movies by the same writer. And I enjoyed all of them.
What I'm learning is that I actually prefer tie-in short stories and novellas. I'm less likely to not finish, and I get to enjoy a good story. I really enjoyed the fiction coming out of that new Trek magazine that ended.
Anyway, I'm enjoying reading your reviews, and I'm building up a Trek TBR based on it. And for Big Finish, there is so much on Spotify these days that I'm not buying anymore.
The thing about tie-in novels is that I never DNF them because you can read a Star Trek book in two days; by the time I realize it's not clicking, I'm typically three-quarters done, so why give up? Original fiction is a different beast. A bad sf doorstopper is a whole week you could have spent reading something else!
I do like Doctor Who short fiction a lot, at least from the writers who don't try to squeeze a 1970s four-parter into fifteen pages. I remember finding the old SNW anthologies more miss than hit, but I did buy all the Explorer anthologies in the going-out-of-business sale, so I look forward to reading those in 2040.
Well, that was quicker than I expected. Beginning today!
Phase Twelve: The End
61. Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack
Phase Twelve: The End
61. Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack
Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?
*yup*
Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack
Published: November 2021
Time Span: July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor. The former book is about how to use political power appropriately and trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it. Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other, and disrupts the urgency of it.
I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel, David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.") But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with it?
If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky, aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be characters who don't believe this, but come to.
This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which began back at the beginning of book two and continues for a distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married to its themes.
The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) can come across as having quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.
Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called "novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded (especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from big event to big event. But I feel like even if you were a big fan of everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But what Coda does is cut it all off. To the extent that there was one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead everything just blows up. The problem is, that without Coda, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.
Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.
On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?
Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be satisfying. I think this is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could write both books... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity? There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that. Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.
On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.
Continuity Notes:
Published: November 2021
Time Span: July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor. The former book is about how to use political power appropriately and trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it. Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other, and disrupts the urgency of it.
I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel, David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.") But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with it?
If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky, aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be characters who don't believe this, but come to.
This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which began back at the beginning of book two and continues for a distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married to its themes.
The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) can come across as having quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.
Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called "novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded (especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from big event to big event. But I feel like even if you were a big fan of everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But what Coda does is cut it all off. To the extent that there was one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead everything just blows up. The problem is, that without Coda, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.
Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.
On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?
Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be satisfying. I think this is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could write both books... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity? There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that. Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.
On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.
Continuity Notes:
- The Defiant is in this book a lot... but did either book II or III of Coda even mention any of the various DS9/Defiant crew that David R. George III created for his post-Destiny novels? I get, no one thinks those characters were more boring than I do, but it is kind of weird to totally exclude them from a novelverse wrapup.
- One notes that Mack makes sure to establish that the Borg can exist independent of the specific origin he ascribed to them in the Destiny trilogy.
- Totally random cameo from the mirror Kadohata. Why not, I guess.
- I found this book's seeming claim that K'Ehleyr was the real love of Worf's life honestly kind of weird. They had a nice fling, I guess... and then she systematically kept information from him for years! Why not the woman he actually built a life with? Surely that's what love really is. Spending so much time on this plot was another thing that felt misjudged about the emphases of this novel.
- I thought the scene where René goads all the mirror universe characters into dying for no reason very improbable. Look, I know people in the mirror universe are kind of dumb in general, but one kid calls you a coward, and that's it, you sacrifice your lives pointlessly to prove him wrong?
- I also really hated making Wesley inadvertantly responsible for the Devidians via a bootstrap paradox. First, those kind of things are often dramatically inert; it means people take action for no other reason than that the plot requires them to take action. And second, why put all this on Wesley's screwup?
- I don't really get what was up with the "René gets old" subplot now that we've got to the end of the trilogy. Like, what did it add?
Maybe because otherwise we have to read how a little kid dies?
That didn’t help Natasha.
And Rebecca Sisko implicitly dies too. (It now occurs to me that if Coda were going to do weird time shit with a captain character's kid, surely it ought to have been the captain character's kid who already had weird time shit going on? Though that would have required the people writing this series to engage with David R. George's DS9 novels, though, which clearly was not a priority.)
I think of New Frontier as beginning the novelverse but not a part of it, if that makes sense. It showed that "original to novels" material on an ongoing basis, with its own continuity, would work with readers and the marketplace, but it was also such a unique vision that it was Peter David's playground in its own Klein bottle, not unlike the bottle universe in Lawrence Miles' Dead Romance. The Calhoun and Mirror Calhoun we saw in Novelverse works was like PAD Calhoun, and they had many similar adventures, but they weren't the same, and while the First Splinter is gone, there are threads in the multiverse where PAD's New Frontier continues to exist and the Shatnerverse continues to exist.
I forgot, It has been a while sinds I have read those books
Great reviews, as always. I wrote my own thoughts in the original review thread at such length that I don’t think I ought to elaborate further, but it does not surprise me that your review was more erudite and insightful all the way through.
In general this thread has been full of lovely criticism and analysis, thank you for taking the time. I’ve been excited to read each new review the whole while, and you’ve provoked many new thoughts on my own relationship to these works.
In general this thread has been full of lovely criticism and analysis, thank you for taking the time. I’ve been excited to read each new review the whole while, and you’ve provoked many new thoughts on my own relationship to these works.
I began this journey back in June 2017... it only took me just over eight years to complete it! (The books I read came out over an eleven-year span, though, so I guess it could have been worse. I was reading faster than they made the books, though I don't think that would have been the case if not for the coming of Picard.) I have in mind a series of wrapup posts, but for now I want to revisit my periodic estimates of how long it would take. Back at the beginning, I wrote:
On the other hand, by November 2020, I was halfway through, though a few books had been added to the list.
What slowed me down? Well, 1) I moved states and got a real job, 2) I had a kid, 3) there was a global pandemic, and 4) I had another kid. So yes, one or two things got in my way. Also my original 2017 estimate wouldn't have taken account of how reading all the Hugo finalists every summer means I spend some time not making progress on my reading list, since the first time I did that was 2017.
After that, though, my pace must have began to pick up because I started to beat my estimates. In June 2023, I wrote:
Near the end, I began providing regular estimates of how long it would take. In August 2023, I almost nailed it:
At that point, the most recent books were Control/Hearts and Minds, which I actually got to in December 2024, some five years after my prediction. Only a little bit off!
On the other hand, by November 2020, I was halfway through, though a few books had been added to the list.
I actually read Collateral Damage in July 2025.
What slowed me down? Well, 1) I moved states and got a real job, 2) I had a kid, 3) there was a global pandemic, and 4) I had another kid. So yes, one or two things got in my way. Also my original 2017 estimate wouldn't have taken account of how reading all the Hugo finalists every summer means I spend some time not making progress on my reading list, since the first time I did that was 2017.
After that, though, my pace must have began to pick up because I started to beat my estimates. In June 2023, I wrote:
I beat that by a whole year!
Near the end, I began providing regular estimates of how long it would take. In August 2023, I almost nailed it:
By May 2024, though, I'd grown less optimistic, the completion date creeping out a little:
December 2024 brought things in a little closer, only one month later than I actually finished:
Which was also true of my most recent estimate.
I have a very complicated system for picking things off my 682-item reading list; one of the slots I rotate through is (basically) "'recent' releases," which is mostly tie-ins that have piled up. I look forward to finally getting to read something else in this slot! (The next few things coming up: Michael Moorcock's Doctor Who novel, a bunch of The Clone Wars tie-ins, and then the "Kelvin timeline" novels and comic books.)
Similar threads
