what's that supposed to mean
Spoilers Coda: Book 3: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack Review Thread
- Thread starter JoeZhang
- Start date
I just finished the book.
Wow what a ride.
Poor Bashir, but he got a great death, even though that stings me.
But what really hits me in the gut was the death of Troi and Natascha because I have a six year old daughter, and the idea to lose her fills me with fear.
Too bad this is the end of the great litverse.
I prefer It over Star trek Picard and Discovery.
Wow what a ride.
Poor Bashir, but he got a great death, even though that stings me.
But what really hits me in the gut was the death of Troi and Natascha because I have a six year old daughter, and the idea to lose her fills me with fear.
Too bad this is the end of the great litverse.
I prefer It over Star trek Picard and Discovery.
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Some thoughts:
* * *
One of the things I think is pretty smart about how both New Frontier and Coda are constructed, in my view, is that you as a reader can essentially decide that the events of New Frontier are still part of the Prime Timeline if you want. (Well, unless a future episode contradicts it, of course!)
There were literally people making the same complaint about the depiction of Picard in the Destiny trilogy back in 2008.
To be completely honest with you, the events of Coda don't feel fundamentally different to me from that experience of watching everyone die one by one at the end of Six Feet Under. Both stories captured what it is like to lose someone, and the inevitability of death coming for us all.
I absolutely did not get that impression at all. I also think part of the point of that final chapter is that there are a lot of different versions of Picard out there in the multiverse, including versions who made choices that he later deeply regretted and whom other versions of himself would regret, but they're all still Jean-Luc Picard.
I love DIS and PIC, but I agree: The First Splinter Timeline novels are my favorite version of Star Trek.
This I strongly agree with. I'm sad that this version of Picard is one we're losing. On the other hand, I think the Picard we see at the end of S1 of PIC is one who has reached a similar emotional place: he has embraced his role as Soji's and Elnor's surrogate father figure, in the same way that Picard post-Destiny embraced his role as a father and husband.
I fundamentally disagree here. In fact, I think that the emotional journey Picard goes through in S1 of PIC has a lot of parallels to the emotional journey he goes on in Destiny.
- Overall I liked it. It was very bittersweet, but I really appreciated the way Oblivion's Gate insists that life is meaningful in spite of the inevitability of death, that we have an obligation to create meaning and do what we can to preserve and perpetuate life even when our own lives are doomed.
- I do think that Coda and Oblivion's Gate suffer a little bit from being a bit of a retread of themes of mortality and meaning that author David Mack already explored in the Destiny trilogy.
- I also think that Destiny was able to make those themes work a bit more viscerally because "any army is coming to kill everyone" is just easier to internalize as a reader (at least for me) than "evil time monsters are coming to eat your soul."
- On the other hand... you know, I didn't mind all the deaths. I found them thematically appropriate. And I also think it's really important that almost every major character who died, died a hero. They were all working to save other people, people they would never even be able to meet.
- I don't particularly object to the idea that the Devidians would subscribe to an ideology of denying the personhood or equality of other life-forms -- to be honest, it makes sense that a parasitic species might develop an ideology like that. Certainly we Humans today don't suffer an overabundance of empathy for the cows and chickens and lambs that we eat. And the simple irrationality of imagining you can perpetuate your species indefinitely after eating every other life-form that has ever existed in all the permutations of time is notable, but no more unrealistic than the modern belief of contemporary capitalism that an economy can grow endlessly on a world with limited resources. But there are Humans today with that empathy, and Humans today who recognize the environmental unsustainability of modern economic systems, so I would have liked to see some indication of a faction of Devidians who opposed their rulers' genocidal aims.
- Mack makes a very good argument on the Virtual Trek Con YouTube video interview for why we should see the Devidians as more frightening than we commonly do. I don't disagree, and I do like the way the Devidian design was nicely creepy and un-human. But I think the fact that "Time's Arrow" was such a relatively light-hearted story with this high-concept, just-shy-of-camp guest starring role for Mark Twain, kind of obscures how scary the Devidians canonically are in my memory. I kind of wish the TNG writers had used them in a scarier context on the show, given that.
- Observation: At the end of of Rise Like Lions, the Galactic Commonwealth's legislature was known as the Commonwealth Assembly, and its head of government was styled the Chairman. In this installment, the legislature is now the Parliament, and the head of government is now the Prime Minister (though it's Michael Eddington both times). Was this change made to make the Commonwealth leader's title non-gendered? Not a super-important detail, but I noticed it.
- I found myself thinking that the Federation government's decision to go into denial about the imminent threat posed by the Devidians was an allegory for the U.S. and world governments' denialism about the threat posed by climate change. It works to some extent, but there is a point where it started to seem so fundamentally nonsensical that it took me out of the story.
- To be fair, there's a lot of massively nonsensical stuff going on in real life right now, but I suppose I just wanted the characters of TrekLit to be a bit less irrational than real life.
- Similarly, I was a bit disappointed in the depiction of the Commonwealth Parliament in Oblivion's Gate. Mack spent so much time setting up the idea of the Mirror Universe establishing a real democracy in The Sorrows of Empire and Rise Like Lions that I really wish the Parliament had reacted to Spock by authorizing the jaunt ships to come to the CSS Enterprise's aid. I think it would have been both a better payoff to the energy invested in the idea of building a democratic Mirror Universe in those previous novels, and it would have given Spock's role in Book III a greater sense of catharsis. And it would have just generally felt like a more pro-democracy plot element at a time when we need stories that emphasize that democracy can and does work.
- In fairness, given our irrational and self-destructive Congress, I do understand the impulse to depict politicians as too self-interested to function.
- Minutiae note: While Mack constructed the narrative such that Parliament needed to authorize sending the jaunt ships to assist the CSS Enterprise, in real-life parliamentary systems, prime ministers and defense ministers have the legal authority to make ship deployment decisions without authorization from their parliaments.
- Minutiae note: Mack joins other Star Trek authors, including William Leisner in A Less Perfect Union and Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin in The Good That Men Do, in depicting characters as addressing the head of government in a parliamentary system as "Mister Prime Minister." In real life, prime ministers are almost always addressed in English simply as, "Prime Minister." (This isn't an error, mind you; styles of address can evolve.)
- It was a very bold choice to stick to the idea that the First Splinter Timeline would get wiped from existence. Up until the end, I kept expecting there to be some kind of omniscient god-figure to appear and give Our Heroes a reassuring life-goes-on pat on the back. But they didn't. They just died. The closest we get is the vision of the other versions of Picard's life we see, but that's it. That's a very bold choice... and to be frank, it feels honest for me. I didn't get a catharsis when my mother died or my grandmother. There wasn't a sense of resolution. They just died. Death is not the resolution of life, merely its termination. So that was a very bold, and very honest decision, and I appreciated it.
- And indeed, I appreciated what this trilogy -- like Destiny before it -- was saying about how to find catharsis, and meaning, and resolution in the face of the inevitability of death: It's an act of choice. We have to imbue our lives with meaning, because the meaning is not present by itself.
- As I noted, I lost my mother in August, and I lost my grandmother a little over two years ago. There were scenes in these books that were hard to read, but I wouldn't change them one bit. There are times I feel some sadness about the course my mother's life took -- but @David Mack , your words here once again remind me that the meaning to be found in my mother's life was her meaning to construct for herself and that my place is to cherish and remember that, rather than to feel sadness for the meanings I cannot impose on her life. Thank you for reminding me of that.
* * *
One of the things I think is pretty smart about how both New Frontier and Coda are constructed, in my view, is that you as a reader can essentially decide that the events of New Frontier are still part of the Prime Timeline if you want. (Well, unless a future episode contradicts it, of course!)
There were literally people making the same complaint about the depiction of Picard in the Destiny trilogy back in 2008.
To be completely honest with you, the events of Coda don't feel fundamentally different to me from that experience of watching everyone die one by one at the end of Six Feet Under. Both stories captured what it is like to lose someone, and the inevitability of death coming for us all.
I absolutely did not get that impression at all. I also think part of the point of that final chapter is that there are a lot of different versions of Picard out there in the multiverse, including versions who made choices that he later deeply regretted and whom other versions of himself would regret, but they're all still Jean-Luc Picard.
I love DIS and PIC, but I agree: The First Splinter Timeline novels are my favorite version of Star Trek.
This I strongly agree with. I'm sad that this version of Picard is one we're losing. On the other hand, I think the Picard we see at the end of S1 of PIC is one who has reached a similar emotional place: he has embraced his role as Soji's and Elnor's surrogate father figure, in the same way that Picard post-Destiny embraced his role as a father and husband.
I fundamentally disagree here. In fact, I think that the emotional journey Picard goes through in S1 of PIC has a lot of parallels to the emotional journey he goes on in Destiny.
Those people must have been very picky.
Picard was just like him in Generations there. When he found out about his brother a nepthew
I think some folks just really react badly to the idea of seeing Captain Jean-Luc Picard falter, fail, and withdraw. Which is funny, because given the decade or so that transpired between the destruction of the Stargazer and his assuming command of the Enterprise-D, I think the idea that Picard sometimes falters and withdraws for long periods of time is almost built into who he is.
There's no way you read book 3 in the 50 minutes between your post in the book 2 thread, unaware #3 was even releaed yet, and this one.
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That poster’s two posts to date are lightly edited versions of Amazon reviews of the two books by two different people. See https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1I75CRK4KRCTC and https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R35XIUQ2LDCIXV.
David_Chang was a spam account. I nuked it from orbit as a spambot.
If you could remove the spam link for dissertation help from the fake sig in his post that you quoted, that would be appreciated. I'm not a mod in this forum, so I can't edit it out myself. Thanks.
Thanks @Locutus of Bored !
As luck would have it, I am!
I've removed the spam link from @F. King Daniel 's quoted text.
Teamwork makes the dream work!Thanks @Locutus of Bored !
As luck would have it, I am!
Damn that was depression. I just finished Oblivion's Gate and it left me really sad.
All along I kept hoping we'd see an ending where the litverse universe would just continue exploring new worlds. I know we'd likely never see another book or story take place in the litverse, but I was still hoping for an ending that allowed them to sail off into the sunset to explore and seek out new life, even if we never saw another book in that timeline.
But the ending we got, not only is that universe forever ended, it basically never happened. I can't help but feel like what was the point? What is the point of looking back at the litverse because in a sense it never happened now. The end of the Borg, the end of Section 31, the Andorian reproductive crisis...all of it wiped out.
I know intellectually that nobody's coming to take my relaunch novels away. Someday I hope to revisit those stories, though I don't know if I could ever read the Coda Trilogy again. It was just so damn depressing. The litverse characters were some of the first to fall, followed by our heroes.
As for this particular novel, despite the depressing end, was well written from an action standpoint. Perhaps at times there was too much going on. All 3 novels did a good job trying to bring in all angles of the continuing litverse, even if they couldn't resolve every lingering thread.
I just sit here thinking to myself what was the point of all those storylines? The resurrection of Sisko, the Ascendants, Voyagers trip outside the galaxy. None of that happened now.
I guess it's just not the ending to the litverse I was hoping for. That's on me of course, others may and probably do feel differently. I hoped for a final good-bye that left the litverse universe intact, even if we never saw another story in that universe again. If Collateral Damage was the last novel in the litverse from a timeline perspective, I probably would have been content with that. Basically the Enterprise continues under Captain Picard to do what it does best. The Voyager novels did much the same with To Lose the Earth, even if that was a few years previous (of course that left DS9 without a finale but I guess you can't have it all).
I suppose part of my difficulty here is I actually like the litverse timeline more than the Picard timeline. I know that don't mean squat. Picard is ok, but I've found that I like the version depicted in the novels more. I don't know. But in any event I find myself looking forward to reading the new DS9 book, just to read an old fashioned beginning to end novel without universe changing implications.
I'm not even sure what to rate this novel yet. I'll hold off for a while til I figure that ouit.
All along I kept hoping we'd see an ending where the litverse universe would just continue exploring new worlds. I know we'd likely never see another book or story take place in the litverse, but I was still hoping for an ending that allowed them to sail off into the sunset to explore and seek out new life, even if we never saw another book in that timeline.
But the ending we got, not only is that universe forever ended, it basically never happened. I can't help but feel like what was the point? What is the point of looking back at the litverse because in a sense it never happened now. The end of the Borg, the end of Section 31, the Andorian reproductive crisis...all of it wiped out.
I know intellectually that nobody's coming to take my relaunch novels away. Someday I hope to revisit those stories, though I don't know if I could ever read the Coda Trilogy again. It was just so damn depressing. The litverse characters were some of the first to fall, followed by our heroes.
As for this particular novel, despite the depressing end, was well written from an action standpoint. Perhaps at times there was too much going on. All 3 novels did a good job trying to bring in all angles of the continuing litverse, even if they couldn't resolve every lingering thread.
I just sit here thinking to myself what was the point of all those storylines? The resurrection of Sisko, the Ascendants, Voyagers trip outside the galaxy. None of that happened now.
I guess it's just not the ending to the litverse I was hoping for. That's on me of course, others may and probably do feel differently. I hoped for a final good-bye that left the litverse universe intact, even if we never saw another story in that universe again. If Collateral Damage was the last novel in the litverse from a timeline perspective, I probably would have been content with that. Basically the Enterprise continues under Captain Picard to do what it does best. The Voyager novels did much the same with To Lose the Earth, even if that was a few years previous (of course that left DS9 without a finale but I guess you can't have it all).
I suppose part of my difficulty here is I actually like the litverse timeline more than the Picard timeline. I know that don't mean squat. Picard is ok, but I've found that I like the version depicted in the novels more. I don't know. But in any event I find myself looking forward to reading the new DS9 book, just to read an old fashioned beginning to end novel without universe changing implications.
I'm not even sure what to rate this novel yet. I'll hold off for a while til I figure that ouit.
"It has happened! I watched it happen! I saw it happen! Don't tell me it didn't happen!"
But without the First Splinter Timeline and its denizens, all of reality would have been destroyed -- including the Prime Timeline. Every time you turn on an episode of Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Lower Decks, or Star Trek: Prodigy, all of those characters owe their continued existence to the sacrifices made by the inhabitants of the First Splinter. I think that's pretty important!
The First Splinter Timeline is my favorite version of Star Trek, too. But I think one nice thing about Coda is that you could interpret it as implying that there's another timeline out there that's virtually identical to the First Splinter Timeline that's still ongoing.
Yeah, I can appreciate that. I just wish they had found a way to save the multi-verse without erasing theirs from existence. I thought maybe when we found out Wesley was used as the cause maybe they'd find a way to prevent him from being used in the first place. In the first novel younger Wesley felt like his device was trying to prevent him from making the same mistakes he made before, and that was a whopper (though not his fault). Yes, they stopped the Devidians, I was just hoping maybe with that thrown in their maybe they'd find a way to not only stop the Devidians, but prevent them from doing what they did in the first place.
I expected this to be the last litverse novel story. Like I said, I was just hoping that it was going to end in such a way that all our heroes, Captain Picard and the Enterprise, DS9, the Titan....all of them....would have just sailed off into the sunset exploring strange new worlds and so on. That they would have faced down some calamity, found a way to defeat it, and things go on their merry way. Pollyannaish? Yeah, I'll admit that. But Star Trek is about us moving in a positive direction. Sure we face crises, but we find a way to overcome adversity and at the end of the day we end up in a better place than where we started. I guess that's what I'm getting at.
I just didn't like the idea that not only was that timeline ended, it was erased from existence. What was the point of finally defeating the Borg, bringing down Section 31 once and for all, preventing the Ascendants from going to war, all of it, if it was erased from existence? It all seems like what was the point now? None of that mattered to stopping the Devidians. Ditto for the mirror universe in the novels since they too were erased.
I suppose, but it's not really quite the same.
I guess it's a testament to all the authors that have written books for the relaunches over the last 20-25 years. They made me care about those stories and those characters, including characters just created in the books. I was shocked and saddened just as much about the death of characters like Chen, Elfiki, Vale and all the rest as I was about Sisko, Dax, Troi and all of them. I couldn't help but think of that as the 'prime' timeline. Part of that is because I prefer the events that occurred in those stories more than the events leading up to Picard. And yes, part of that is because I've been reading those novels for over 20 years. In the novels the last 8 or 9 years leading up to 2387 where they ended have been filled in extensively.
It did happen and the stories can still be enjoyed.
Saying otherwise suggests that whenever I re-watch Cause and effect it should only show the Enterprise detecting the rift, decompressing its shuttle bay and then escorting the Bozeman back to Starbase. I wouldn't watch that because its not a very exciting story.
Saying otherwise suggests that whenever I re-watch Cause and effect it should only show the Enterprise detecting the rift, decompressing its shuttle bay and then escorting the Bozeman back to Starbase. I wouldn't watch that because its not a very exciting story.
I admit this doesn't apply to everyone, but one way the litverse was meaningful was being able to experience it in real time. That may not apply to anyone who is coming to it now, but twenty years ago when it started we didn't know where it was going, so we got to experience it unfold in front of us. The destination may not appeal to everyone, but the journey was an experience.
At least, that is how I think about it looking back now.
At least, that is how I think about it looking back now.
I think it’s inevitable that an ending where most of the litverse characters are killed off and then the entire timeline unhappens was going to bum some readers out, and I find the vehemence with which others are rejecting the legitimacy of that response a bit weird. The ending the writers chose was one that was unusual for Star Trek in many ways, and it’s reasonable that different readers disagreed on how well it worked.
Yes, that's true. From a real world perspective for sure. But from an 'in story' perspective the events of Coda basically erased the entire timeline of the novelverse from TNG: The Genesis Wave, DS9: Avatar, Voy: Homecoming, etc. from existence. They now basically never happened in universe.
I was a bit late to the journey. I started reading the relaunches around 2004 and then gradually caught up to real time and it was a great journey. I remember my first inkling to on ongoing continuity was probably when I read the A Time Too...novels when they referenced the previous The Genesis Wave novels, making those novels part of the continuity as well. Then later novels built off of that and I thought that was great that they were continuing all the spin-off series in the novels, since at that time we had no reason to expect those series to continue on screen. After 2005 Star Trek was effectively dead on TV for the foreseeable future and all we had were the Abrams movies, and they were in a different timeline themselves so the novels were free to continue exploring wherever they wanted.
One thing I would love to see is for one of the shows, Picard, Lower Decks, maybe even Prodigy, to give a nod to the litverse series. Maybe use a litverse character, or incorporate some plot thread or civilization. They don't have too certainly. But just one of those things that would be nice to see.
Yeah, I'm certainly in the 'bummed out' crowd. Obviously some loved what Coda did. That's fine as well. I'm one of the 10 people that liked Star Trek: Nemesis, so I'm certainly open to differing opinions
. I just wished things turned out differently than having the entire continuity erased from existence (again, in story). Typically I enjoy David Mack's Star Trek books (and Dayton Ward's and James Swallow for that matter). Many times I consider their books excellent in fact. This one just wasn't one of those. But I still look forward to their future novels. Oblivion's Gate was well written. Mack didn't write a lousy book or anything. I could even get behind the story itself for the most part. I just didn't care for the final resolution and how much death and destruction there was. That's what makes it so hard for me to rate this novel. I didn't like the resolution, but it wasn't a poorly written book. Not that it's the end of the world if I don't rank it (it's not like David Mack is anxiously waiting to see whether I see it as average, above average
), but I usually try to offer a ranking since it's a new book. I'll just have to consider it for a while. As an aside I do have to admit I was surprised at how the Krenim were just eliminated from the story. I thought something was being built up after To Lose the Earth with the Krenim, and they are master time travel manipulators. I thought originally the Devidians might have been a false clue and we'd find out the Krenim were behind what was going on. But they were swiftly swept under the rug. Granted there were a number of storylines that just couldn't be fleshed out. The Krenim, what ultimately happened to the Voyager fleet after To Lose the Earth, the unusual moon around Bajor. In a perfect world more TNG, DS9 and Voyager books would have been written to flesh out those stories. But Picard sort of nixed that.
Apparently, the Krenim were going to be involved somehow, hence the foreshadowing in the last VGR novel, but licensing vetoed that. I have wondered if there might've been other constraints on the project from licensing beyond what we've been told.
Dramatizing the literal truth of the First Splinter carrying the torch, and then being rendered superfluous and utterly destroyed by TV Trek seems like such a strange perspective to take, with no twist or anything beyond just "What happened to Star Trek in reality is also what happened in the fiction," that I've wondered if there wasn't some sort of condition that Coda was required to firmly establish the primacy of streaming Trek over the novelverse, and it couldn't just be a finale of a Star Trek story in and of itself. I was definitely expecting something that was more "Star Trek Six" than "Blake's Seven."
Dramatizing the literal truth of the First Splinter carrying the torch, and then being rendered superfluous and utterly destroyed by TV Trek seems like such a strange perspective to take, with no twist or anything beyond just "What happened to Star Trek in reality is also what happened in the fiction," that I've wondered if there wasn't some sort of condition that Coda was required to firmly establish the primacy of streaming Trek over the novelverse, and it couldn't just be a finale of a Star Trek story in and of itself. I was definitely expecting something that was more "Star Trek Six" than "Blake's Seven."
Hmm, I wonder why.
I don't know much about licensing I'll admit, but I'm not sure licensing would go so far as to say the entire litverse timeline had to be erased from existence. Just that at the end of the day it had to end up where Picard is. I suspect how they got to that point would be up to the authors.
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