I forget what happens (or where things currently are). Shelby, Calhoun, Kat Mueller, and of course Soleta were my favorites. The remaining cast were mainly unbelievable weirdos and just 1 note characters. -- Lefler, Mchenry, Si Cwan, Burgy, and the She/He. Want to show those folks to the nearest airlock
The last New Frontier was the three part ebook The Returned in 2015. I haven’t read it so don’t know if it wraps up the series. If I were a writer or editor I would leave it open enough to allow for further instalments.
The Returned didn't truly wrap up the series. There were no big announcements or personnel changes. However, based on reaction here, I don't know that it'll come back...
It certainly wasn't definitely wrapped up, but it's hard to see it coming back both from a practical and storyline view. Shame, as even though PAD's writing is not what it once was, I'd still take it over most modern Trek fiction.
The Returned was weird, and ended on the most bizarre and tone-deaf cliffhanger since the first and only Challenger book ended with the Captain, having had months marooned on an alien planet to figure out a way to keep his best friend from being executed on trumped-up charges by an ally, came back and told the ally to go ahead and kill the guy. Personally, I think NF is a properly wrapped up series, it's just that the wrap-up was Stone & Anvil. Everything after that (except the Shelby Capatin's Table story) felt off, repetitive, and like all the plates that had been throughout the series were just set down delicately so we could look at them for one scene every book to confirm they were still there (I'm looking at you, Moke, because apparently no one else is). And how many times can the Excalibur have to fight aliens in a pocket universe?
I was so disappointed in the last few books that I never even bothered with The Returned. Yeah, everything after time jump was kind of a mess. I think the biggest mistake he made was just spreading the cast way too thin. One of the biggest highlights of the series was the cast, and things really went down hill once he started spreading them out to a million different locations.
New Frontier was at its best when it was a series about a ship, it's captain and his crew. It was still good even after they gave Shelby the Trident, but it did lose a little bit of its close knit family feel. But after they promoted Shelby, and Ci Swan and Robin left the ship, and Selar... returned to Romulus? I honestly can't even remember much of anything about those stories.
I am going to be as non-spoilery as I can, but the Returned was a missed opportunity for a relaunch as it was used to tie up old storylines rather than as a relaunch after years away. It ended with most of the popular surviving characters together again and with a cliffhanger development in the personal lives of some characters. So ironically another book would be a perfect relaunch point if ever approved, as the characters would be free to start new plots on a Federation mission.
I wasn't a fan of when the series jumped forward a number of years and the crew seemed to have fallen apart.
I'll second this. I've read some of the stories set after it, but Stone and Anvil works wonderfully as an end-of-series story and the works set after it IMO failed to capture the spirit of the preceding ones. And this. It's a bit of how I feel about the current state of DS9 as well, which is not a happy thought.
I came to this thread to make a joke about how Restoration was the perfect wrap-up for the series. I did enjoy some of the post-Restoration books though. I stopped reading after Missing in Action, and I agree that Stone and Anvil seems like a natural end in retrospect. On a particularly grumpy day, I'd say it should have ended with Dark Allies.
Things did get a bit more inconsistent after the Excalibur trilogy. Cold Wars was a mess, but the Beings books were good, and Stone and Anvil was great. I covered my thoughts on the later books in my earlier post. I have to admit, I kind of wish they would bring the NF characters back as recurring characters in some of the other series. I don't know if I'd want more whole books devoted to them, but I wouldn't mind seeing them pop up in some of the TNG, Titan, or DS9 books to help out in a crisis or something along those lines.
^ The best part of "Before Dishonor" was the guest appearance by the Excalibur (and the only time they felt right since "After the Fall"). And it was fun hearing second-hand about them in "Destiny." I think the NF crew would probably work best going into semi-retirement as floaters a la the Aventine. It'd be nice to see more of the da Vinci along those lines, too, come to think of it.
Yeah, I like the Da Vinci idea. We did see some of them in A Singular Destiny and I think at least Gomez might have popped up in Indistinguishable From Magic.
Oh right, I always forget Conlon was originally an SCE character. I'm up to Pocket Full of Lies, so I'm familiar with her role in the Full Circle Voyager book.