Who the hell cares? It doesn't matter if her points were valid. The problem is that she expressed them in a petty, vindictive, juvenile temper tantrum.
I think they were. I would’ve rather seen Enterprise go in the direction Carey was writing it, than the garbage we ultimately got. And I read her novelization before seeing the actual episode and I found the episode was a poor, weak version of the book.
With Archer musing about what a moron he is, and Trip and Malcolm snarking about how trite and derivative alien planets are?
I didn’t really have a problem with the characters in this. Sure Bateson was irritating sometimes, his heart was in the right place and he did have some good points.
I think they are - I was only ever able to read the book once, so my memory is a bit sketchy, but have always been a CS Forester fan, and Hornblower in particular!
I'm a fan of Ship of the Line (Picard watches TOS episodes and fanboys over Kirk segments aside). And Red Sector. Fight me.
Some of my issues with Ship of the Line: Carey’s prose. There’s a line something like, “The horror of the moment thudded to the floor.” Trying a bit too hard to be dramatic there. And elsewhere. There’s about one minute of canon TV Trek about Bateson and his ship. Carey isn’t consistent with anything in that one minute except Bateson’s name. He’s relaxed and he has two female officers. Carey’s is fleeing the Klingons and he has no female officers. Picard doesn’t know how to be a captain until he watches Kirk in the holodeck. When you know how much Carey hated TNG, at least early on, that seems like both insult and injury. Carey includes her own sailing diaries in the book. Too self-indulgent for my taste.
I didn't read it like that. He just lost another ship and he was shaken up, doubting his abilities as captain. I actually found the Kirk stuff rather interesting; explaining how Picard's attitude between the TV show and movies are different.
Also, Picard's log entry tells us four times that the Typhon Expanse is an unexplored region in the 24th century, but Carey makes it a heavily populated Federation territory along the Klingon border 80 years earlier.
When I was a young lad, and read SOTL for the first time, I was quite impressed. I didn't know anything about good writing. Years later, after rereading it, I realized it was just about the worst fanfiction ever, where the author doesn't try and write a good story, but glorify several characters she loved. In the mean time, she can't keep her facts straight. And the dialogues are just shaky. No, this one will forever remain in the bottompart of my bookshelfs, never to be read again.
All I really remember from reading this book was the forced jolly banter of the all human,male crew of the Bozeman. Wasn’t there some sort of alien mascot thingy as well?
There's also some other cracking continuity issues in the book, such as Picard's line to Gul Madred which is something along the lines of "after you the Borg got a hold of me", and from memory I'm sure it's set before the Klingon/Cardassian war, yet Worf is on DS9. He must have snuck away during Way of the Warrior...
While I haven’t read the book yet - I will someday - the cover art itself is amazing. The Enterprise-E in action and Frasier/Bateson looking impressive in latest-style uniform.
Just posted my review of this novel. I've been putting off reading it for a long time, and finally got around to it. And... yeah. Probably should just read my review. I wasn't impressed.
I just finished reading Ship of the Line and I don’t see that a review thread has ever been posted about it, so I’m starting one now. My review will be below. David Young Brandon, Florida
(Copy of review posted to my personal Facebook page, which is why I include a lot of stuff that people here would already know.) (And this review includes plot Spoilers.) I finished reading last night the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Ship of the Line (1997), by Diane Carey. This is one of literally hundreds of Star Trek novels that I bought when they first came out. (I basically was collecting all of the Star Trek novels from the mid or late 1980s until 2010 or so, carefully making sure I never missed buying one to have them all, with the intention of reading them eventually. Well, eventually finally came for Ship of the Line.) Why, of all of the hundreds of Star Trek novels would I pick Ship of the Line to read at this time? Well, the most recent Star Trek novels that I’ve read have for the most part been tied into the current Paramount+ television series “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Picard”. I also recently read a more recent Star Trek (The Original Series) novel, Agents of Influence, by Dayton Ward. After several nonfiction books, I was ready to jump back into some Star Trek fiction again and this time I was feeling like a bit of “The Next Generation”. However, I still had to narrow that down so I decided to start with novels immediately following the film Star Trek Generations so that I’d be reading the stories that take place after the television series and after the launch of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E. Which brings me finally to talking about Ship of the Line. It’s touted right on the cover as “The First Voyage of the Starship Enterprise 1701-E!” And it is, I suppose. But it’s more other things than that. An aside. Diane Carey wrote over thirty Star Trek novels (both original novels and tv episode novelizations) from 1986 to 2001. She was a very popular Star Trek author during this period, especially for her Original Series novels Final Frontier (1986; not to be confused with the film, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) and Best Destiny (1992), both of which I recall enjoying very much. Carey’s non Original Series Star Trek novels, however, could be a bit more hit or miss, and, unfortunately, Ship of the Line is more miss than it is hit. While a Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, it spends the first part of the book back in the era of Captain Kirk, Spock, and the U.S.S. Enterprise (as depicted in the 1980s films), detailing what Captain Morgan Bateson and his crew of the U.S.S. Bozeman were doing (fighting it out with some Klingons, it turns out) just prior to travelling through a temporal anomaly, transporting them eighty years into the future and catching them in an endlessly repeating temporal causality loop, colliding again and again into the U.S.S. Enterprise-D, destroying the latter vessel (as seen in the Next Generation episode, “Cause and Effect”). It is a bit interesting to learn more about Bateson and his crew (although Carey writes Bateson as basically a Star Trek version of actor Kelsey Grammar’s Frasier Crane character; Grammar played Bateson in his brief scene in “Cause and Effect”), but the conflict with the Klingons was a bit old hat even back in 1997 when Ship of the Line first came out. Then, at a climactic moment in the battle with the Klingons, they get transported into the era of Captain Picard and the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. We see a few scenes detailing this (including a recreation of the moment they both see each other for the first time over their viewscreens, just after breaking the repeating “loop”. Next comes another time just to the *main* time period of this book, which is about a year after Star Trek Generations. Picard, Riker, and the rest of the crew are on duty but not assigned to a ship in the aftermath of the loss of the Enterprise-D. There is some question as to who the about to be sent on her shake down cruise, U.S.S. Enterprise-E’s, captain will be, whether Captain Picard, Riker, or... Well, it turns out to be neither of those two. Picard is sent instead on a mission into Cardassian space to recover captured Starfleet officers (prisoners of war). Riker is assigned to serve as first officer aboard the Enterprise-E for its shakedown cruise. And the captain assigned to the Enterprise-E is none other than Captain Morgan Bateson, having been working behind the scenes on the development and construction of this new ship. Riker, resentful that the new ship has been given to Bateson, the same man who had come through to their century just a few years prior, over Captain Picard and himself, begrudgingly accepts his orders. The rest of the former Enterprise-D bridge crew get split up. Data, La Forge, and Troi to the Enterprise-E (although Bateson, a man from an era without official ship counselors, insists on Troi serving as a member of the ship’s medical staff and not as a counselor). Dr. Crusher and Worf go with Picard on his mission to Cardassia. However, we don’t really see much at all of Crusher or Worf for most of the book. (Worf is at this time serving on Deep Space Nine and Picard says they will be “borrowing” him from Captain Sisko. Once they get into Cardassian space, though, we only see Worf and Crusher briefly during one key scene and neither speaks.) Instead, once Picard boards a private (non Starfleet) ship on their mission into Cardassian space, the novel starts jumping from them, back to the Enterprise-E, and, third, to the Klingons seeking revenge on Bateson. The Picard portions take place mostly on a holodeck aboard the merchant vessel where, undergoing doubts as to his continuing to serve as a captain in Starfleet due to the loss of a second ship under his command (first the U.S.S. Stargazer, then the Enterprise-D), Picard takes Riker’s advice and spends time watching two incidents that occurred aboard the original U.S.S. Enterprise, Captain James T. Kirk in command. The holo Kirk, based on later interviews with the real James Kirk, is programmed to not only recreate what happened in those incidents for Picard but also to answer any questions Picard might have into what Kirk was thinking and feeling at the time. A training hologram for future Starfleet Academy cadets and officers. Picard observes Kirk first during an encounter with a hostile cloaked Romulan ship in the Neutral Zone (original television series episode “Balance of Terror”), and then, second, after Kirk had been accidentally split into two separate versions of himself due to a transporter accident (“The Enemy Within”). Over the course of the chapters covering Picard’s time on the holodeck observing and interacting with holo Captain Kirk, he comes to whatever necessary realization necessary to get out of his funk and lead the mission to retrieve the prisoners of war from the Cardassian, Gul Madred (the same Cardassian interrogator who tortured Picard in the episode, “Chain of Command Part II”). I’m not going to go into specifics here about Picard’s scenes with Madred and his rescue of the Starfleet officers Madred had been putting through war exercises (other than to say that these scenes are strangely short and not very interesting. Picard’s confrontation with Madred is made into a very tiny part of everything else going on in this novel when it should have been a novel of its own (and written by someone better attuned to the Next Generation characters than Carey was). And, again, Crusher and Worf are pretty much non existent other than as set dressings. (“Two humans, one male and one female, and a tall Klingon beamed in.” That sort of thing.) I’m also not going to go into great detail here about Riker’s bickering with Bateson aboard the Enterprise-E, the Klingons hijacking the ship, and Bateson, Riker, and Montgomery Scott’s (yes, “Scotty” is aboard, too, at Bateson’s request) retaking the ship with unarmed and nonlethal “guerilla” tactics (other than to say that is gets rather silly the ways they are able to outwit dozens of Klingon warriors). There are some interesting scenes in this novel, however, I must admit that it is not an older Star Trek novel that ages well, largely due to the writing style of Diane Carey. First off, her strength is clearly the characters of the original Star Trek series (Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc.), not Picard, Riker, Data, La Forge, and company. Her depictions of Picard and Riker therefore seem way off base at times, even for how the characters were being portrayed in 1997. The thing that seems the most out of character are the scenes where Picard is observing Kirk on the holodeck. I’ve seen many readers call into question these scenes of Picard having to learn from the mighty James T. Kirk how to be a Starfleet captain (despite Picard having been shown to be an excellent captain over the course of the seven seasons of Next Generation), and I have to agree with them. Riker fares a bit better than Picard but still has moments when he seems way out of character. (For one thing, he acts like he does not understand how Klingons think and fight, conceding to Bateson’s greater experience with Klingons of his time. Riker, though, spent an entire episode of Next Generation, “A Matter of Honor”, serving as first officer aboard a Klingon ship, something not mentioned once, I don’t think.) And the rest of the Next Generation regulars get very little “screen time”, especially once the Klingons hijack the ship. (Kudos for the way they incapacitate Data, though.) Of course, things end just as one would predict. Riker and Bateson retake control of the Enterprise-E. Then, Bateson cedes command of it to Picard. Then another time jump to the opening scenes of the film Star Trek: First Contact, when the Enterprise-E is put on the sidelines while the rest of a fleet of Starfleet ships attempt to stop of Borg ship from reaching Earth. One of those ships confronting the Borg is the U.S.S. Defiant (commanded by Worf). And another, according to dialogue heard in the film, is the Bozeman. The novel gives the impression that this is the U.S.S. Bozeman II, commanded by Bateson. As in the film, Picard listens to the battle over the coms for a few minutes and then takes them, against orders, back to Earth to assist in the fight. End of Ship of the Line. To be honest, the scenes where Carey recreates actual scenes from the tv episodes and movies, although not that many, are probably the best ones in this book. And the first part of the book aboard the Bozeman prior to their going through the temporal anomaly are interesting, aside from Carey’s predilection to insert old time naval terminology and history in from time to time, even when it seems forced to do so. And I also did enjoy some of the debating of old ways versus new ones between Bateson and Riker. However, the already stated mischaracterizations of Picard and Riker, the stereotypical “must destroy them to claim a glorious reputation” Klingons, and the built up to but then quickly resolved Cardassian prisoner of war camp sub plot all make this at best an bit less than average Star Trek: The Next Generation novel. I would have given it two and a half stars out of five on GoodReads but they don’t allow half stars, so I had to give it a two star rating. (P.S.: Another thing I found a bit “off” was the use of the term “destroyer” as a type of vessel Starfleet would commission. Picard himself announces that Bateson’s newly assigned ship, a destroyer, would be rechristened the U.S.S. Boseman II. These days, I would find it very surprising to hear the writers have Picard or anyone else in Starfleet refer to one of their ships as a “destroyer” class vessel, preferring to use much less military sounding terms because Starfleet, while pseudo military in regards to its command structure, is almost always depicted in newer Trek television shows, movies, and tie-in fiction, as an organization with exploration, support, and defense as its core reasons for being. I can’t really fault Diane Carey specifically for this, though, as much of the Star Trek tie-in fiction of the 1980s and 1990s described Starfleet in more military like terms (destroyers, frigates, etc.), thanks largely to the popularity of Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which Meyer intentionally emphasized naval military elements in how Starfleet vessels like the Enterprise operated. Carey, though, as I already stated, loved to insert naval terminology and anecdotes more so than most other Star Trek novelists, though, due to her own personal background as a historic sailing ships hobbyist.) —David Young Brandon, Florida