Finally read this...
The Chimes at Midnight: A very interesting exploration of the movie era, filling in a lot that wasn't explored in the films. In a way, this reminded me of my own
Places of Exile, because, like PoE, it contains a number of scenes that explain or fill in things from the main timeline as well as the alternate one. For instance, the scene where Morrow talked to the Marcuses about sending the
Grissom to Genesis, and where Carol declined to join it, probably unfolded pretty much the same in both timelines. And presumably David's role in developing the Genesis effect was much the same in both as well. Plus it fills in new information about Andorian history and climate, describing events that predate Spock's childhood death and are thus presumably the same in the main timeline.
The main thing I kept wondering, though, was: With no Spock, why didn't V'Ger destroy Earth in 2273? Without Spock, the
Enterprise wouldn't have fixed its warp drive in time to intercept V'Ger and wouldn't have deciphered its comm signals in time to avoid being digitized. My best guess is that, since Kirk never served with Spock, he wasn't pushing for a Vulcan science officer on Decker's ship, and so someone other than Sonak was chosen for that role and that person came aboard at a different time, so he or she didn't die in a transporter accident and was able to achieve the same sciencey stuff Spock did. And somehow they were able to find out enough about V'Ger even without Spock's mindmeld.
But if someone else could do what Spock did in TMP, why couldn't someone else have gone back in time and retrieved some humpback whales?
A Gutted World: Well, I couldn't quite get the full effect of this since Keith pretty much told me the whole story in one excited rant at the New York Comic-Con a few months ago.
Still, it was good, if awfully dark for me. Luckily it didn't dwell too much on any of the tragedies, since it had so darn many of them to cover. Although they weren't entirely tragedies, because the characters pretty much always succeeded in completing their missions before dying horribly. I think we should call this the Pyrrhic Universe.
But I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the
First Contact portion. So two
Enterprises from two different timelines both went back to a time before their histories diverged, both restored the same history, but then came back to the same two separate timelines they started from? Yeegh. I'm usually good at rationalizing these things, but this one threatens to give me a headache.
Brave New World: I liked this one; in fact, it's kind of similar to an idea I was considering if Marco ever went ahead with my
Myriad Futures suggestion of extrapolating forward from the 24th century in different ways (except mine would've used holograms instead of androids). It's nice to see a story where transformative new technologies introduced in one episode are kept and elaborated upon, as they realistically would be, rather than forgotten in order to preserve the status quo, which only happens in episodic TV. (
Chimes of Midnight was in a similar vein, come to think of it.) This novel brought aspects of the "transhumanist" trend popular in mainstream SF literature to the Trek universe. It was a bit hard to explore the full range of possibilities of that literature within the confines of the Trekverse, but this novel struck a good middle ground between a Trek story and a transhumanist story.
I did catch the unsettling aspect of the epilogue -- "Do you remember when we had the Prime Directive?" I do kind of wonder why the android/Upload society would've abandoned that principle. I like it that it's ambivalent -- not a perfectly happy ending, but not an overtly horrible one.
One thing I wondered was why Worf would transfer to DS9 in this timeline. In the main timeline, he transferred there for two reasons: because the
Enterprise-D had been destroyed, and because the Klingons invaded Cardassia. Neither of those happened in this timeline, so it's hard to see why he would've transferred there. On the other hand, it's an established trope of alternate Trek timelines that the same people tend to follow similar life paths and end up in the same places, all probability to the contrary. I tend to assume there's a sort of quantum-probability resonance between different timeline copies of the same person.
I didn't much care for
Brave New World either. The use of the Iconian gateways was interesting, except for one big no-no: giving the technology to *everyone*, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, etc. I didn't think they would seriously put the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction to use!
MAD works with nuclear bombs, but not with something like this - Iconian tech can be used 'sneakily', i.e. you can get a garrison of troops into your enemy's capital *without their ever knowing* until the last minute. Giving it to everyone, friend and foe alike, seems extremely irresponsible.
I don't understand why people keep describing it in MAD terms. We're not talking about a weapon, we're talking about a transportation/communication technology. The analogy isn't to nuclear weapons, it's to airplanes. Having air travel would give you considerable military superiority over a nation that lacked it, because it lets you deliver troops and drop bombs, but that doesn't mean aircraft are weapons or that sharing that technology worldwide would in and of itself lead to a Cold War stalemate.
Besides, presumably a society that could figure out how to build Iconian gateway projectors could also figure out how to detect or shield against them. When we build airports, we build them with control towers and security checkpoints. Every new technology carries risks, but those risks can be guarded against.
Sorry about that.....
