Spoilers Coda: Book 1: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward Review Thread

I loved this book. Possibly my fav Trek book this year after the Picard Riker novel in Jan.

 

By the end of this book, have there been any timeline changes earlier than 2387?

 

in the book itself? No but the whole timeline is still finished anyway.

 

True. But before the new timeline overwrites or replaces the current one, are there any changes pre 2387?

 

Having read it yourself, what do you think?

 

What do you mean? The Avatar-Destiny-Coda novels are incompatible in many ways with Lower Decks, Prodigy, Picard and Discovery. Hence why Coda is giving us fans a close-out.

 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0zDtc2oTls0xCKm2KGG8Yt

David Mack has made a playlist for CODA that I am so glad to have found.

 

If I never finish the third book this all doesn't have to end, right? I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

 

Just go back and read the end of Collateral Damage and pretend it ended there, if that’s your thing! And the final VOY book. Both more or less feature the ships sailing off second star to the right and straight on till morning. Alas DS9 gets left at a loose end, but anyways.

 

DS9 really got the shaft in the last few years which is sad because it started this whole thing!

 

As others have said the entire storyline of Coda would seem to lend itself to impermanence w/r/t Picard or anything else.

Certainly Dax and Taurik's 'deaths' weren't depicted the same as Elfiki's, for example, where others are noted to have seen her crumble into dust or whatever it is. For Dax and Taurik we got their own perspectives, so maybe that's just how death/erasure is, or maybe they really aren't dead even within the context of Coda.

(Bowers definitely acts like Dax is capital-D dead, so I imagine the same 'dusting' happened to her from his viewpoint)

 

Mr. Ward, now that your book has been out for a while, will you be posting any annotations?

 

The idea of something like Batman's death in Final Crisis or Tim Drake's death in Detective Comics has occurred to me, that someone outside of time is removing people and placing them elsewhere for reasons we don't understand yet. In which case, the Devidians and the Naga are just a sideshow and we haven't seen the real villain yet. Or we have and don't realize yet that the villain is the villain.

Spoiler

If the villain turns out to be Wesley, driven mad and using the Devidians and the Naga to prune timelines so he can salvage the one, true timeline from destruction, I want it on record that I posted it here. Which is very Loki, but what can you do?

 

What makes me think that Ezri Dax might be alive is that, from her perspective, we had an extended experience. We did not have her consciousness shut off immediately as she was killed. Rather, we had an extended experience, one in which the Dax symbiont had enough time to respond to whatever was happening and in which Ezri herself was able to notice people reacting to everything that was occurring on the bridge. That is something that even Taurik did not get, his perspective stopping abruptly as the Naga coiled around him.

It is this description, more so than the centrality of Dax in the Trek universe, that makes me think that what happened to Ezri Dax on the bridge of the Aventine might not have been her death. All of the other characters who died, even Taurik, got decisive and sudden endings. Ezri Dax did not get that.

 

The Aventine is also on the cover of book two, so perhaps there's still more story to tell with that ship.

 

There are.legitimate questions. How could Ezri Dax have survived, almost a thousand light-years and four millennia away from her native time and space?

Spoiler

Jadzia Dax was one of the first corporeal beings to enter the wormhole, alongside the Sisko. I have to think that the Prophets have some capability to intervene in this multiversal crisis. We do know that DS9 characters will start to be introduced in the next volume. She had the best chance of anyone introduced in the first book of having any useful connections.

 

I really hope Ezri is not dead

 

Maybe a parallel Ezri?
I still think the Krenim are the main villains. YMMV.

 

Voyager is bound to play a role, I think. Beyer's last book set that ship in reserve, allowing it to catch up to the rest of the novelverse in its conclusion.

 

Dayton is ice-cold on the Ranjea question. Doesn't give anything away. Total poker-voice.