Spoilers VOY: To Lose The Earth by Kirsten Beyer Review Thread

Although, to be sure, it did deal with several PIC-exclusive subjects/characters that have only (to date) appeared on that particular show, including

Spoiler: PIC: The Dark Veil

the Zhat Vash, and the depth of their infiltration of the Romulan military, as well as Thad Riker's early life, and the likely cause of his eventual death a few years later. Laris and Zhaban also show up alongside the retired admiral, and we get to see Ambassador Spock preparing to embark upon his mission to prevent/mitigate the Romulus supernova-event (in addition to dialogue references to red matter from the 2009 film).

For myself at least, there were more than enough PIC-elements to make it seem like a unique, proper tie-in novel for that series, while also serving as a "spiritual" sequel to the early TTN novels (thanks to folks like Christine Vale, Ranul Keru, and Karen McReedy appearing).

 

Yes, exactly. It makes little sense to try to segregate the tie-ins into "Picard novels" and "not Picard novels." Part of the nature of tie-ins is that they can also tie things together, unite elements of the universe that can't be united onscreen due to the passage of time. You can see this in the various Discovery novels that tie together elements of DSC with elements of TOS, like Desperate Hours bringing Spock and Pike together with Burnham and Georgiou (in a way the show later contradicted), Drastic Measures putting Georgiou and Lorca on the scene of the Tarsus IV massacre, and so forth. Or in all the Big Finish Doctor Who audiobooks that reunite later incarnations of the Doctor with earlier companions or vice-versa. Tie-ins are a great way to make disparate productions feel more like parts of a unified whole.

 

Where did you watch the first two seasons?

 

On FOX.
Unfortunately, we don't have that channel in Scandinavia anymore. Don't ask me why because I don't know. It was just taken off the air over here.

 

^Did you know that season 3 doesn't even exist yet?

 

No, I didn't.
I thought that some other network ad taken over the series since Fox obviously don't have the rights anymore.

 

Been reading this since last month, and I've been enjoying it, but I'm having trouble getting a clear mental picture of what exactly the Edrehmaia are supposed to look like.

 

It's going to be on DIsney+ in Canada, might be the same where you are if your country gets Disney+.

 

Hulu will have Orville season 3 when it comes out in March 2022 next year too.

 

Just finished reading this, and I loved it.
The Edrehmaia were a highlight, they were a fascinating new race. The way the book tied things up with them was very unexpected, and while it was a pretty satisfactory ending for this era of Voyager, I'm disappointed we'll probably never get a follow up to it.
I was a little how they ended things with Harry, Conlon, and their daughter, I was really hoping it would end with them all together as a family.
It gets an outstanding from me.

 

Hello, my friends.

First, thanks to all who read the book and came here to share their thoughts. It is always a treat to hear from those who I think of as the most hard core of Trek fans. Whether this one worked for you or not, I appreciate you taking the time.

It may seem strange to see me dig up this thread a year and a half after the book was published to make the following statement. I actually wrote most of this statement within weeks of the book’s release, as soon as I saw comments come through that began to describe the book and its immediate predecessor as anti-abortion propaganda. And while, as you will see below, literally nothing could be further from the truth, I debated taking issue with the comments because I felt that as important as it might be to set the record straight for this community, it was probably more important to protect my privacy.

It's a powerful word – privacy - and my guess is we’ll all be talking about it a lot for the rest of our lives. You see, one of the many things that happened six years ago when I was given a job that means that when I speak publicly about anything at all, I am no longer just speaking for or as myself, but as a representative of something much bigger than myself, I decided that every public interaction I had from that point forward would have to be weighed. Folks who have been here longer than a few years may remember a time when I spoke openly and often about my personal beliefs as they related to my stories. It was during one such discussion that I was dubbed Kirsten Mother Fucking Beyer, which I took then and still wear proudly as a badge of honor. But I have since questioned how important it is for people who I can never know more deeply than a brief conversation on an internet message board, or a facebook post, or a tweet to really know me. People are complex and their beliefs are a product of years of lived experience and none of that translates completely in exchanges such as these. We don’t have the time to go deeper than that. People will read my words and make assumptions and many times they will be wrong because they lack basic knowledge of who I really am and what I believe. They will put those assumptions into the public discourse because they can. If I spent any time at all correcting even the most egregious of these, I would feel the need to correct all of them. My life’s work is creating stories. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do that, let alone be a wife, mother and friend to those I hold dear. Add correcting the “public” record to my list of responsibilities and I will break under the strain.

So I remained silent. I allowed readers to believe whatever they wanted believe and take whatever they found of value from my stories, so that I could protect myself and my time.

I didn’t sleep well last night. A few hours after I drifted off, I woke up and my head was pounding and the first clear thought I had was, “You are less of a person today than you were yesterday.” Technically, that’s not entirely true. The ruling has not yet formally come down. It will be days, weeks, perhaps even a few months before it is the law of the land. But all we’re doing now is running out the clock on my personhood. For all but the first few years of my life it has been the law of this nation that my right to privacy included bodily autonomy within certain limits. When the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, that ends. From that moment on, I am less free. My daughter is less free. From that moment on, it is an open question among every state in this nation as to whether or not I have the freedom to do what I believe is right, best, or necessary for my body. Others will decide. And she and I will have to live with their decision whether we agree with it or not. As a country, we apparently are unsure how much freedom anyone who isn’t a straight, white male should have.

To wake to this certainty is a trauma. It is physically painful. Constriction in my stomach, my heart, my lungs and my throat. Incandescent rage. An inability to think clearly. I have things I need to do today to ensure that I and my family survive, and I am incapable of doing any of them until I process these feelings. But more than my time has been taken from me. A primal sense of security has vanished. I am no longer safe, nor is anyone else who dares to believe that the right to privacy enshrined in our constitution will protect them from the whims of the political moment. There is no such thing anymore as “settled law.”

I am not at all sure how I am going to proceed from this moment forward. It’s a lot to process. What I do know is that the ability to remain silent as I have until now was a privilege I no long enjoy. I can no longer remain silent. I can no longer assume that it doesn’t matter if a few random strangers mis-read my words and attribute thoughts and feelings to me to either shore up their own positions or label me incorrectly.

So, for anyone out there who has any question at all about my intentions in the writing of Architects of Infinity or To Lost the Earth as it relates to my thoughts on women’s rights, allow me to make this perfectly clear.

I would take to the street with a blowtorch, if necessary, to defend the rights of women to choose what to do with her own body.

That a story I created could and apparently has been read as anti-choice is both fascinating and deeply frustrating.

I keep trying to figure out how that conclusion was reached by the evidence at hand. So I’m going to take a moment, if you’ll indulge me, to sort through this.

First, stories are stories. Everybody sees something different in them and I don’t believe for one second that every character in every story anyone writes is meant to represent directly an author’s point of view. I’m tracking I don’t even know how many major to somewhat major characters in these last ten novels and while a lot of them share similar basic values of those who find themselves in Starfleet in the 24th century, in other ways they are all over the place, depending upon their own personal journeys. None of them are me. All of them have their own specific points of view. Nor do I write these stories to reflect my personal preferences, although of course, they cannot help but permeate them. I don’t know a lot of writers who create stories that are not informed by their experience of living.

I think one of the reasons I enjoy writing in this universe so very much is because by default, most of my main characters already share many of my values; a thirst for knowledge, a willingness to proceed into the unknown with curiosity and humility, determination to meet those who are different and find pieces of common ground, a spirit of generosity, compassion, and a healthy sense of awe and wonder.

It’s also helpful that many of the issues that currently divide people, particularly social ones, have been settled in this future in ways that bend toward inclusion, respect for diversity, and personal freedom. I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but I do hope that’s where we’re all headed eventually. For me, Trek has always lived on the more progressive end of the spectrum and while I know there are those out there who will disagree, that’s certainly where my head and heart have always been.

Because I consider these kinds of issues settled in the Star Trek universe, I don’t tend to spend a lot of time on conflicts centered around them. What would be the point? Star Trek moves humanity forward, not back.

So how did we get here? I’m not entirely sure.

When Nancy Conlon found herself unexpectedly pregnant and uninterested in carrying that pregnancy to term, no one argued that there was any question about her right to make that choice. Because I can’t imagine that anyone would. Yes, Harry Kim wanted her to make a different one, for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that once becoming a father became an actual real possibility in his life, he found it was something he very much wanted to do. For me, this tracks with my understanding of his character, but your mileage may certainly vary. For the record, despite his deep personal preference, even he never questioned Conlon’s right to choose. Only Seven’s response to Kim’s clearly troubled feelings might be read as a projecting any sort of bias, but a slightly more nuanced reading might suggest her frustration that his feelings were not being given the weight she felt they deserved. As Harry’s friend, rather than Conlon’s, I believe that reaction is defensible rather than indicative of any firm belief on the issue of Nancy’s right to choose.

Neither Harry nor Conlon ultimately made the choice to save the child. That decision lay in the hands of the doctors who were treating Conlon. Circumstance, fate, if you will, determined the course of those events and while you might read that as my personal determination to save the child at all costs because LIFE, I would suggest to you that there was a deeper issue I was interested in exploring there.

I honestly don’t care what any of my characters may think of any given issue in the abstract. No one knows what they really believe about anything until they are forced by choice or circumstance to confront it in their own lives. And for what it’s worth, I don’t believe any woman or man with any degree of emotional maturity confronts an issue as complicated as how to deal with an unplanned pregnancy lightly. It’s a big damn deal that stirs strong emotional reactions, some of which are quite primal.

There was simply no good answer here. And that was very much by design. Neither Nancy, nor Harry, were able to reach a compromise and there was no way to split the difference. They both couldn’t have what they wanted. It took Nancy a lot longer than many might have wished to admit that to herself, but for me, that’s life. Very few of us are self-aware enough at all times to know what we really want or how best to proceed when we are in crisis. And Nancy Conlon had been in crisis for a very long time. That she struggled with the choice, considering both her feelings and Harry’s, wanted one thing, got another, and then had to figure out how to live with that reality….that was the point. The journey was the point. That she ultimately chose to end her relationship with Harry and the child, for me, was the only way to honor her deepest truth. That she tried for as long as she could to maintain the personal fiction she was selling herself because it was so much easier than facing the hard truth is something I find quite, well, human.

I guess I feel like an anti-choice version of this story would have been one where she wanted to terminate the pregnancy but was convinced otherwise by other characters. Or perhaps one where she continued on in a relationship that was not truly what she wanted, simply for the sake of the child. Neither of those things happened here.

If you insist upon reading anything into the fact that once the child was born, Conlon had a genuine emotional reaction to its existence that wasn’t uniformly negative, I don’t know what to say to you. That’s my lived experience. Her life would have been easier if she could have felt nothing for the child. But easy doesn’t make interesting story for me. Complex, messy, conflicting and contradictory feelings fill my stories because they have filled most of my life. Hindsight grants clarity that is simply never present when one is living through difficult situations. But that might just be me.

Was it necessary to raise the question about keeping the child in order to perhaps cure Conlon’s illness? Wasn’t that, perhaps, meant to tip the scales toward the idea that all life has value? I mean….no. That particular notion came from a real world experience of a woman who is quite dear to me and remains, to this day, a really interesting question. A question, by the way, to which Nancy’s answer, was no. Not automatically no, because it was a thing that required a little thought. Weighing your own life against that of a child, the potential for salvation against the other possible potential that it did not succeed and you would be choosing to give birth to a child you would not live long enough to raise…those aren’t easy calculations. It should tell you something that Conlon’s desire did not change, despite this factor, but it sounds like, for at least some of my readers, it didn’t.

I must admit to being utterly gobsmacked by the notion that the other side of this story, Gwyn’s, could likewise be read as anti-choice. Looking at it now, I suppose that comes from the notion that she was capable of bonding with something our current understanding of life has difficulty classifying. If any of us knew the precise moment when life begins, the question with which we currently struggle might be easier to answer. But we don’t. I don’t. I have no idea when life begins. This is one of the reasons I feel as strongly as I do that this decision is the sole purview of the woman who has become pregnant. But surely the fact that Gwyn could bond with this small cluster of cells must mean I am taking a side here? Surely that means I believe live begins at conception?

Um. No. (Please see above where literally no one who weighed in on the issue suggested that the final choice about what to do with her pregnancy was anyone but Nancy’s.)

The story of Gwyn and her people was the story of an entire civilization that had repressed the desires of half of its population to determine their own nature and beings for the sake of becoming the mates of the other half of that population. The solution the women of Krios found to regain control of their lives and throw off the shackles of their society’s demands was, for me, empowering. Because whether or not those embryos were what any of us would consider “life” what they were, without question, were blank slates in terms of Kriosian bonding. For the first time, women were able to survive a biological imperative without losing their own identity. That’s progress for women. Not an argument about the sanctity of the embryos.

I don’t know what, if anything, all of this says about me or my abilities as a writer. Author’s intent becomes irrelevant once a story is out in the world. Everybody has the right to take from it what they will. I can’t and would never argue that point.

But because we live in a world where these kinds of reactions can be seen in real time and are blessed with the ability to respond to them and offer a little insight, I felt strongly that in this case, I wanted to do so.

It is altogether possible that the things about these stories that excited and intrigued me have led some of my readers to conclude things about my intentions or personal beliefs. Allow me to remind you now that in every case, this is a really dangerous assumption. You may argue whatever you like about the merits of how well I did or did not make the cases I have presented here in my stories. You may choose to conclude based on those arguments that you possess insight into my personal beliefs as a result.

In this case, you would be wrong. And that may be my fault. But it might also indicate beliefs and biases you, as a reader possess, that might require some deeper interrogation.

Just a thought.

Again, thanks to all who have come here to express their gratitude for my work on these stories over the years. It has been my pleasure. And to those who found themselves unsatisfied, I wish you many hours of happy reading of other authors.

In the interest of absolute clarity, this is all I have to say about this matter and whether or not it becomes a source of conversation or debate, I will not be commenting further on this, nor will I address questions or statements regarding any of my other work. I thank you in advance for your understanding.
KMFB