Re: Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock Review Thread
I don't think the lack of detecting dawned on me at any point while I was enjoying the read, but it is kind of like the series Twin Peaks (where Agent Cooper's murder mystery is ultimately solved by his dream, not his detecting) although Lucsly and Dulmer worked out more pieces of the puzzle than poor Cooper ever did.
True, I have seen some detective stories where the detective character didn't really live up to the name (like
The Ruby in the Smoke, at least the TV version -- supposedly the first of "The Sally Lockhart Mysteries," but all Sally did was stand around while her supporting cast figured out all the clues). But I think Lucsly, Dulmur, and the rest did a good job at deducing things insofar as they had the information to do so. Past a certain point, yes, their only possible sources of information (about events that often literally hadn't happened yet) were temporal operatives from uptime, but seeing the pattern in the fragments they did have, and even realizing that some larger strategy was playing out at all, was a pretty solid piece of analysis, I'd say. And on page 461-2, it was Lucsly who recognized the key piece of evidence that let them resolve the whole crisis.
Still, my model wasn't so much "mystery" as "procedural." If you look at something like
Law and Order, finding the culprit is often just a matter of talking to the right witness or getting the right piece of forensic evidence, rather than the result of some clever deductive leap. In mysteries, the story is fundamentally a puzzle to be solved, or a battle of wits between criminal and detective. In procedurals, as the name implies, it's more about the mechanics of the job.
If had he succeeded with the most elaborate scheme in all of Trek history, he still wouldn't have a leg up on any of his peers (it's like having a plan to blow up the entire Berlin Wall - there's no way to restrict the benefits to yourself). He doesn't personally reap any more than anyone else in his century.
Well, yes he does, because the defense grid is a tool of the Accordists as well as their primary means of preserving their own existence. The analogy you want is not the Berlin Wall (which was not a military defense so much as a means for the Eastern Bloc to prevent its own population from fleeing), but the DEW Line, the distant early warning radar system to warn the US and Canada of incoming missile attacks. Or whatever equivalent system the Soviets had to warn them of attacks from the West. Taking out one side's key line of defense would definitely give the edge to the opposite side.
Yes, technically, the temporal defense grid protects the Interventionists' history as much as it protects the Accordists' history. The difference is that without the grid, the Accordists
wouldn't try to attack the Interventionists by altering their past, because their whole driving philosophy is that the past shouldn't be altered, for better or worse. So the Interventionists' past is safe either way (and indeed they may not
want that, because they'd want the freedom to modify their own history to their advantage), whereas the integrity of the Accordists' past depends on the defense grid. Thus, preventing the grid's creation would definitely shift the balance in the Interventionists' favor.
I think the book worked great with Lucsly and Dulmer as the main characters. It's just the indirect nature of their involvement that got me wondering about that. If they're so dependent on the uptime characters, they are kind of in a Daniels/Archer relationship, where Archer is clueless and Daniels could have picked any upper echolon officer in Starfleet to solve his problem. So, for your plot, Jena Noi could have potentially been visiting Picard or Calhoun or Nog and you could tell the same story.
It wouldn't have been the same story, because the story wasn't
about the Temporal Cold War, it was a procedural novel about the Department of Temporal Investigations. I didn't start off thinking "How do I explain the TCW?" and then decide "Oh, I'll do it from the DTI's point of view." I started off thinking, basically, "What if Lucsly & Dulmur were stars of their own procedural show with a whole supporting cast who had their own subplots?" -- using that format as a way to explore the full range of the Department's activities and responsibilities, from the mundane to the profound -- and it followed that, alongside stuff like dealing with temporal anomalies and negotiating with other governments and counseling temporal displacees, there should also be a plotline about Lucsly & Dulmur dealing with the shenanigans of time agents from the future, and it made sense to tie that into the TCW. But that was only ever meant to be one of several parallel plotlines following the various agents. However, it ended up dominating the novel more than I initially intended, with all the subplots except the Axis of Time turning out to be facets of it.
Or what if....the story was told from the point of view of the 29th century nosey old lady who lived in the apartment next to FG?
That could be fun. What if Future Guy had just been some time-travel nerd in his mom's basement? Of course, now that you've suggested it, I couldn't use that idea anyway. (Although I'm wondering what the 29th-century nosy lady is doing next door to a guy who lives in the 28th century...)
