Spoilers PRM: Feuer gegen Feuer / Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg Review Thread

Just started part 1 of the English Kindle version. FC year should be 2063.

 

Someone remind me: has a Trek novel(s) clarified whether more than one sun is easily visible during daytime from planetside in the Alpha Centauri colony?

Tell these plebs to move to Jupiter or Saturn. *snicker*

 

I'm not sure (I may have mentioned it in The Buried Age), but astronomy (and the Celestia simulator) tells us that either Alpha Centauri A or B would appear as an extremely bright pinpoint from a planet orbiting the other component, up to several thousand times brighter than the full Moon as seen from Earth, though too distant to have any effect on the planet's temperature. At its closest, A would appear about 1/85 as bright from B as Sol appears from Earth, while B would be dozens of times dimmer as seen from A. So yes, you could see both the A and B stars in the daytime sky, if the planet were on the far side of its orbit from the other star, though only one would have a visible disk and the other would be a bright pinpoint. If the planet's orbit were between the stars, then the more distant star would only be visible at night.

Proxima Centauri would be too dim to see in daytime from either A or B, and wouldn't even stand out much in the night sky, because it's really dim. But from a planet orbiting Proxima, the A-B pair would look a few times brighter than Venus looks from Earth, so it would probably be dimly visible in the daytime sky.

 

Hypothetically, would it still be unsafe to look at the farther star with the naked eye from the planet surface?

 

I'm not sure. You could look at it without discomfort, and I'd guess the UV at that distance would be attenuated enough not to be dangerous; plus, both stars are cooler than Sol and would give off less UV anyway, particularly B. So I suspect it would be fairly safe, at least if you didn't stare too long.

 

5/5 great Trek book. New characters are interesting, please keep writing.

 

Just got through the prologue. Liked the references to Vonda's Enterprise. Why is this reminding me of the aggressivorous entity from Day of the Dove? And why does Starfleet keep losing ships named "Valiant"?

 

Speaking of the Valiant, the narrator of the German audiobook version had such an awfull pronounciation of Valiant that I genuinly thought he was saying Reliant for half the book. And, but I guess that isn't really the narrators fault, no one told him that the EMH MKII isn't supposed to sound like a that robot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

 

Well he’s Andy Dick. Would be close.

 

Am I to presume that the various new names in this novel are meant to be pronounced in the Germanic manner? Like "Jassat ak Namur"?

 

Hmm. The authors here seem very diligent about continuity (even with novels most Pocket authors have been ignoring lately), even though they're with an entirely different publisher. Refreshing, although, at times it begins to approach the fine line between excellent attention to continuity, and continuity porn.

After the prologue, and up until the first terrorist attack, the tone seemed unusually light-hearted and fun (especially in the chapter set in Quark's bar), even with the acknowledgment of the Bacco assassination.

I would, however, say that there are some places where the English translation could have benefited from the attentions of a good copy-editor and one or more good proofreaders. Shades of "The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten."
* * * Later * * *
Hmm. Caitans are mostly vegetarian?!? That seems a bit odd, given that they're felinoid, down to having retractable claws, and all Terran felines are obligate carnivores.

And when did Ezri grow her hair out to shoulder-length?!? During the series, her short-and-sassy (as in Dorothy Hamill) hairstyle was a small but significant part of her identity.

* * * On finishing the book * * *
Remarkably light in tone, given that the subject is a terrorist group that, if they existed in real life, could eat Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS for breakfast, committing atrocities that -- again, if they'd happened in real life -- would make the WTC atrocities of 2001 seem like a liquor store hold-up.

And yet somehow, I didn't find the light tone objectionable.

I'd have much rather they'd spent more time fixing the awkwardness in the translation, and maybe issued the English versions of the whole trilogy in consecutive months. Instead, once again, I left myself a note summarizing the situation at the end of the book. If the translation weren't so awkward in places (and didn't seem to be deliberately using the most obscure words -- what's this "creatress" business near the end? Are the Renao going to turn out to be a manufactured species, rather than one that reproduces the usual way?)

 

It doesn't. Well at least we didn't invent another one. This "Valiant" is the one that was mysteriously lost in the "Star Fleet Technical Manual". http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Valiant_(NCC-1709)

I would say there is no right or wrong here. Since the Renao are aliens we don't know how they pronounce their own names. But, yes, of course we wrote the names with the German pronounciation in mind.

"Most Caitians preferred a vegetarian diet and were not carnivorous." (FASA RPG module: The Federation) http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Caitian We found no source that says otherwise. I think it's part of being a highly evolved civilisation to try to avoid killing other beings (even animals) for food. (By the way: My parent's cat doesn't eat meat either. It just eats dry food. )

Yep, that seems to be a mistake. But perhaps Christian, who translated all of the DS9 novels (up to "The Fall") during the last years, knows more than me.

 

Hmm. Until other non-canon sources started assigning different numbers to the Valiant of Eminiar VII, the general assumption was that that was the lost Valiant to which Schaubelt referred. (He certainly couldn't have been referring to the Valiant of Where No Man Has Gone Before.)

 

Perhaps, but since then a lot has happened and now the Eminiar-VII-Valiant is a totally different ship. It's not even a Constitution-class any more but a Ranger-class. (Because it couldn't be one, as Memory Beta states: "For years, it was assumed this could have been a Constitution-class vessel based on a ship list provided in the The Making of Star Trek, but the timeframe of its loss predates that ship type by many years." / http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/USS_Valiant_(NCC-1223) ) And so we gave this poor ship named Valiant that had no purpose any more a new life.

 

I see. Thanks for the clarification.

I do like the German-style pronunciation of "Jassat ak Namur". It has a nice ring to it.

 

Speaking of maps, since the Lembatta Cluster was invoked as the venue, I went to whitten.org again, and set up the following:

Center of map co-ordinates: x: -140, y: -20, z: 0

"Zoom": x-y: 40 lightyears, z: 160 lightyears

I know that's a longish ways along the galactic "vertical", but since I only have x-y plane co-ordinates for the Lembatta sectors...

(So looking forward to GAIA Data Release 2 at the end of April...)

http://whitten.org/index.php?x_c=-1...ormal&image_size=2400&max_line=0&trek_names=1

 

Or maybe he liked Dax’s hairstyle on Cross Cult’s cover for Destiny Book 1 (and the Destiny omnibus) where Dax has a longer hairstyle.

 

Are the English translations on this series good? I'm debating picking them up due to the drought of releases this year, but want to be sure I'm not going to be turned off by the translation.

 

I've read the first 2 English translations of the Prometheus books and thought they were good.