Spoilers TOS: The Captain's Oath by Christopher L. Bennett Review Thread

In the uk, you can get the book with same day shipping with Prime.

 

^That's because places in the UK are closer together.

 

Obviously.
I’m sure if Amazon places their depots in the correct spots, America could also have that in some areas.
I just finished the book and I really enjoyed it. It’s funny that the book I read before this was the new Obi Wan/GUI Gon book and its ending was very similar to a part in this. It made me think of that book and I was like, “I bet that happens here as well.”
I haven’t seen WNMHGB in awhile but is Kelso the chap who gets strangled by Gary? If so that makes the stuff about him here more depressing.
I suppose the next logical story to this is a follow up on Rhen, unless that’s already been done.

 

Yeah, Kelso's not long for this galaxy.

And Rhenas Sherev is original to this book, so nothing else has been done with her yet.

 

Might just be a pure coincidence, but it suddenly hit me that the recent 2018 Star Trek: Discovery Annual comic book from IDW also featured a Pike-era U.S.S. Somerville (albeit with a totally different NCC-registry from the one in Christopher's novel):

 

I'm pretty sure they do, you just have to pay extra for it. I can't remember if they actually did it, but I think I remember hearing something about a 1 hour shipping option if you are close enough to a warehouse.

 

I’m currently reading this book. Boy did the frog-people section (around Chapters 7-9) ever feel like a re-hash of “Patterns of Force”.

 

Never even occurred to me. I just wanted to flip the script of alien-invasion movie tropes, as well as government alien coverup tropes.

 

I don't see it. Patterns of Force is about a society turning into literal Nazis due to the misguided ideals of a historian who thought he could improve them, while this is a government fabricating alien attacks as an excuse to abuse the populace. If anything, while reading that portion, I viewed the head of state as some sort of weird combination of Winston Churchill and Donald Trump.

 

The Nacmor thing was actually one of my oldest unused TOS story pitches, an idea I originally called "Invasion of the Humans!" In fact, I may even have conceived of it as an original story idea before I adapted it for Trek. So it's been in my head for quite a long time. Current events just happened to make it more topical.

 

It wasn’t the Nazi part. But it was the whole unfolding of the story where the away team is revealed to be aliens, captured by the government, escape by getting help from a resistance movement, help the resistance movement and then break-in to the government to recover someone/thing.

 

That's just structure. You could fit more TOS episodes than "Patterns of Force" into a similar template. If the Nacmor story reminded you of a TOS episode, then I succeeded, because that's exactly what it was meant to do. It was about exploring how the younger Kirk and the Sacagawea crew would deal with a classic TOS-style situation.

 

Latest episode of Literary Treks is up, wherein Bruce and I talk about The Captain's Oath:
Literary Treks 271: To Thine Own Self Be True. Thanks to @Christopher for providing answers to some questions we sent his way!

 

About 100 pages in. Only thing that I do not care for is the jumping of timeframes. A TOS envelope sandwiching the past in time order would be better.

 

Thanks for the publicity, and the kind comments! Some interesting insights.

 

anyone give me an opinion of the Audiobook ?

 

Yeah, I have to admit that's one thing that bothers me a bit. It's making it a bit hard for me to keep things straight. At one point I was thinking why the crew was doing something and realized that was a different time period. I get what Christopher was trying to accomplish (something is happening on the Enterprise that reminds Kirk of a prior mission basically).

I don't mind the multiple storylines. It's sort of an anthology of missions that center on how Kirk developed his command style and what makes him tick. It's not really one 'single' story per se (except that it's focused on Captain Kirk). But the time jumping is an added complexity that sometimes makes it hard to remember which story we are focused on at the moment.

 

That was something I cited myself, as the only reason why it missed an "Outstanding."

 

Annotations are up, and can be accessed from the link at the bottom of the main book page here:

https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/home-page/star-trek-fiction/tos-the-captains-oath/

(I don't like to link directly, because of the risk of accidental spoilers.)

 

It's interesting to see an uptick in Gold Key Comics references when the Bantam novels never get any sort of callback.