Was a major fan of the line over the last fifteen years; always looked forward to the upcoming releases. But I lost interest in the books a while back, as bit by bit some of the series that interested me appeared to vanish (DS9), suffered from poor quality (ENT), or both (VOY). Then Destiny came along and swept the carpet out from under the rest of the 24th century, taking the universe as a whole in a direction I was repelled by. That was the straw (well, ACME anvil--whatever else might be said about Destiny, it's no lightweight) that broke the camel's back. The setting? I don't recognize this smoky ruin. Established characters? I don't know who half of them are anymore. The Trek line has passed beyond the point of requisite familiarity, for this reader at least. Utterly unfettered, it has gone off to do its own thing, bearing increasingly little similarity to the product that drew me into the fictional universe in the first place.
Apathy. Yes and no; once it was dislike at the direction, but apathy is steadily taking over. I have post-Destiny books on my shelves, bought before I actually discovered what this 'bold new direction' was, or else purchased by well-meaning relative; I've no interest in reading them. I do have some Trek works I'm nominally still interested in--books like
Soul Key and
Never-Ending Sacrifice--but the apathy I feel about the rest of the line is infectious, and these books keep getting de-prioritized over other subjects, shuffled back into the pile. Every so often I look at the reviews online to see if the line might be heading in a direction I might be more favourable to, but all I see is more of the same character destruction and bleak realpolitik. And where my objections before were, admitedly, intensely subjective, there seems to be a growing consensus that the line as a whole is growing anemic beyond the question of content. Thinning, quantitatively and qualitatively.
To be honest, though Destiny was the undeniable break-point, in retrospect I can see that my interest had been waning for some time. I only got to Destiny--the great event--over half-a-year after it was released, where once I was on this forum for every new book, scoping out when my fellows were finding their copies. I think back now to when it started to go pear-shaped, and I would say it was mid-2006. This was the period in which Pocket was full in the throes of its anniversarial fixation, and the schedule from mid-2006 to mid-2007 was almost entirely given over to TOS, a series I'd never followed. My purchases and readings went from nigh-monthly to nearly-nill, and I don't think my interest was ever peaked as strongly as it was before this exclusionary stretch. Perhaps, if every release after the drought had been as strong as
The Buried Age it might have been different, but we pretty much immediately were launched into the Borg arc as soon as the Year of TOS was over, complete with the highly varying quality of its entries, the editorial
faux-pas, and the overbearing overuse of the eponymous villain(s). That, combined with the silliness on the ENT side of things and the unfortunate stumbling about on the DS9 side of things, primed my abandon for when Destiny thundered in. A potential lesson for Pocket: never hold out on your addicts for too long, or they'll wander off to another dealer's corner.
Right now, Legacy Of The Force turned me off Star Wars so strongly that, despite reading every single published SW novel before LOTF book 6, I haven't read one since. That book was HORRIBLE. Don't know if I'll ever head back that way, but it could happen.
Ditto, though I didn't make it quite as far as as the sixth book (third or fourth, can't quite recall at the moment), and I have tried some of the stuff set earlier in the timeline (eh). I've abandoned quite a few franchises in the last few years. Legacy of the Force killed Star Wars for me. Destiny, Trek. I used to buy every trade set in Marvel's Ultimate universe, then they trashed the setting and slaughtered half their cast for no reason, and I haven't read a single issue of that continuity since. Battlestar Galatica, haven't bothered with any of the DVDs or spin-offs since the series finale took a giant dump all over the premise. Don't know if they ever plan to do more material for LOST, but if they did, I'd shun the hell out of it. I don't know if all these rejections are a result of a confluence of generic trends, the darker and grittier fad and the propensity for facile religiosity, or if I've simply grown less tolerant when it comes to my media. Certainly the amount of time I have to devote to pleasure reading has dropped significantly, so when I choose what I read, I'm more cautious in my choices, prioritizing works I feel more likely to actually give me pleasure rather than frustration.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
