Spoilers Coda: Book 3: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack Review Thread

[Quinton]

This novel's as good as it can get. What I mean by this is that it's at turns heartbreaking, endearing, gut-punching, revering, apocalyptic, and yet - yes - hopeful.

Would I have preferred dozens of further adventures with such wonderful characters? Absolutely. I would hazard a guess that the authors would as well. But being able to say goodbye, that's something that didn't have to happen. In fact, I feel like it's a minor miracle it did happen.

Here's to the finest crews in tie-in fiction. :P

 

[jaime]

It was a lot darker that I think people would have preferred. There was definitely a lack of the optimism that typically exemplified Star Trek of old. But I think given the context that’s understandable, it is the end of the universe after all. And our view of our world and our reality is a lot darker than it once was a decade or two ago. It’s only natural that our literature would mirror that.

I don’t believe that I am afraid. TNG was airing when the Cold War was still a thing for a start. This is just the same testosterone overdose that slowly creeps into things in recent years. Grimdark for the sake of it.
There’s no reason why — for instance — we couldn’t have had a story where everyone succeeds in stopping the Hobus supernova for instance, using the Wormhole and the tech on the Bajoran moons, setting apart the timeline in a *good* way, but someone like Q (or the newly beloved Wesley) congratulates the crew, and points out that as a side effect, their universe is now cut off from all others. Put a few ‘mirror’ characters in as part of the story who now realise they can never go home. (Sort of how Spock Prime is handled in the JJverse. Heck, bring the JJ crew in to be those characters if you like, their continuity is also going bye bye)

Just something more than ‘here’s five minutes with O’Brien, now let’s dead the fecker good, by the next book his best friend will be yelling Worfs name in his death throes anyway’.
There was no celebration in these books, but then, outside of the Voyager books, there’s been very little of that for about a decade anyway. Even Data’s return left me cold a fair few years back.

 

[David cgc]

Well, I just finished smashing through the book. It was, as promised, a story about valor, and hope, and faith in others to carry the torch when you no longer can. I think this novel was more deft with the metafictional aspect of the story than the other two were; while it's not what I would've done with the last great First Splinter epic (I'm always going to wonder if we would've gotten a more rounded farewell with the impractically-long mega-series that was described as being mooted early on), as someone who got very, very frustrated with Discovery's second season and hopped off the TV train, I very much empathized with Lal's plaintive, existential question, "But what if we stop our stories and then the new TV Star Trek really sucks?" I feel there's a whisper of an implication of the novelverse continuing out there, somewhere, in the boundless realms of imagination (or maybe just AO3) in the tour of possibilities near the end, and a duplicate of the Prime Universe having also been a doomed splinter. Though, yes, I will cop to being wrong in the earlier threads when I said fictionalizing the production realities was too obvious a play.

I did well up a bit more than a few times, and had a good laugh at Geordi teasing Worf about his captaining abilities, but the last page, where the end of the old novelverse threaded into the beginning of the new, felt like David Mack reached into my chest and gave my heart one good hard squeeze. I've been trying to articulate exactly what the emotion was, and I think I've landed on it; it felt like being dumped (amicably) and then seeing the first photo of them with their new beau on the socials. Star Trek novels and I have shared some great times over the past... (was it Rogue Saucer or The Final Fury? They were both 1996) ...twenty-five years, but they belong with a new continuity now, and hopefully we can all remain the best of friends, though we're no longer "continuing storyline" and "committed reader." And we are still friends! To stretch this belabored and deeply weird metaphor past its breaking point, Star Trek books still have all the stuff I love about them, and I can be civil towards their new, TV-based epic ongoing storyline and just grit my teeth and hope AA-Trek's weird fixation on apocalyptic robot-tentacles coming out of wormholes doesn't rub off on them too much.

(I don't think anyone is going to continue this weird and personal string of imagry, but I thought of a really good wordplay about "Always the tie-in, never the tied," and I want to make sure I get that written down for posterity.)

 

[Campe]

“A life only has meaning… when we make it mean something. So go make ours… mean something.”

Don’t tell me even in the hard tragedy that is this tale that there isn’t hope. Because if you really believe that, I have no desire to know you.

 

[Quinton]

Well, I just finished smashing through the book. It was, as promised, a story about valor, and hope, and faith in others to carry the torch when you no longer can. I think this novel was more deft with the metafictional aspect of the story than the other two were; while it's not what I would've done with the last great First Splinter epic (I'm always going to wonder if we would've gotten a more rounded farewell with the impractically-long mega-series that was described as being mooted early on), as someone who got very, very frustrated with Discovery's second season and hopped off the TV train, I very much emphasized with Lal's plaintive, existential question, "But what if we stop our stories and then the new TV Star Trek really sucks?" I feel there's a whisper of an implication of the novelverse continuing out there, somewhere, in the boundless realms of imagination (or maybe just AO3) in the tour of possibilities near the end, and a duplicate of the Prime Universe having also been a doomed splinter. Though, yes, I will cop to being wrong in the earlier threads when I said fictionalizing the production realities was too obvious a play.

I did well up a bit more than a few times, and had a good laugh at Geordi teasing Worf about his captaining abilities, but the last page, where the end of the old novelverse threaded into the beginning of the new, felt like David Mack reached into my chest and gave my heart one good hard squeeze. I've been trying to articulate exactly what the emotion was, and I think I've landed on it; it felt like being dumped (amicably) and then seeing the first photo of them with their new beau on the socials. Star Trek novels and I have shared some great times over the past... (was it Rogue Saucer or The Final Fury? They were both 1996) ...twenty-five years, but they belong with a new continuity now, and hopefully we can all remain the best of friends, though we're no longer "continuing storyline" and "committed reader." And we are still friends! To stretch this belabored and deeply weird metaphor past its breaking point, Star Trek books still have all the stuff I love about them, and I can be civil towards their new, TV-based epic ongoing storyline and just grit my teeth and hope AA-Trek's weird fixation on apocalyptic robot-tentacles coming out of wormholes doesn't rub off on them too much.

(I don't think anyone is going to continue this weird and personal string of imagry, but I thought of a really good wordplay about "Always the tie-in, never the tied," and I want to make sure I get that written down for posterity.)

Good stuff. I enjoyed this post immensely. I'm lucky, I suppose, since the new Trek TV fare and I get along fine overall. Yet still I find myself nodding along to almost everything you've written.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Of course, just because the First Splinter continuity is over doesn't necessarily mean that all the characters introduced in the First Splinter are gone.

Although conceivably, we could find that the Prime Christine Vale is a civilian who writes holonovels.

 

[E-DUB]

Still waiting for my copy to arrive by US Snail.

 

[Enterpriserules]

Well, I just finished smashing through the book. It was, as promised, a story about valor, and hope, and faith in others to carry the torch when you no longer can. I think this novel was more deft with the metafictional aspect of the story than the other two were; while it's not what I would've done with the last great First Splinter epic (I'm always going to wonder if we would've gotten a more rounded farewell with the impractically-long mega-series that was described as being mooted early on), as someone who got very, very frustrated with Discovery's second season and hopped off the TV train, I very much emphasized with Lal's plaintive, existential question, "But what if we stop our stories and then the new TV Star Trek really sucks?" I feel there's a whisper of an implication of the novelverse continuing out there, somewhere, in the boundless realms of imagination (or maybe just AO3) in the tour of possibilities near the end, and a duplicate of the Prime Universe having also been a doomed splinter. Though, yes, I will cop to being wrong in the earlier threads when I said fictionalizing the production realities was too obvious a play.

I did well up a bit more than a few times, and had a good laugh at Geordi teasing Worf about his captaining abilities, but the last page, where the end of the old novelverse threaded into the beginning of the new, felt like David Mack reached into my chest and gave my heart one good hard squeeze. I've been trying to articulate exactly what the emotion was, and I think I've landed on it; it felt like being dumped (amicably) and then seeing the first photo of them with their new beau on the socials. Star Trek novels and I have shared some great times over the past... (was it Rogue Saucer or The Final Fury? They were both 1996) ...twenty-five years, but they belong with a new continuity now, and hopefully we can all remain the best of friends, though we're no longer "continuing storyline" and "committed reader." And we are still friends! To stretch this belabored and deeply weird metaphor past its breaking point, Star Trek books still have all the stuff I love about them, and I can be civil towards their new, TV-based epic ongoing storyline and just grit my teeth and hope AA-Trek's weird fixation on apocalyptic robot-tentacles coming out of wormholes doesn't rub off on them too much.

(I don't think anyone is going to continue this weird and personal string of imagry, but I thought of a really good wordplay about "Always the tie-in, never the tied," and I want to make sure I get that written down for posterity.)

I am with you on this for the most part. Like you, I'm not a fan of most of what is happening on Trek TV these days, except for Lower Decks. So, the litverse ending has sucked for me. For the most part I like what they did here over what is canon. Only thing that could ameliorate this for me, have DS9 characters have a better story line in canon

 

[captainmkb]

Of course, just because the First Splinter continuity is over doesn't necessarily mean that all the characters introduced in the First Splinter are gone.

Although conceivably, we could find that the Prime Christine Vale is a civilian who writes holonovels.

Prime timeline Christine Vale and Ranul Keru appeared recently in The Dark Veil

 

[Orion's Belt 27]

Done a skim-through, will go back and read properly later. Still digesting it.

So ...

1st Splinter Timeline, huh? Seems the MB wiki has its work cut out to edit the pages of Rebecca Sisko, Rene Picard, and Natasha Riker-Troi to clarify that they only exist in that timeline and not in canon.

Not sure if Picard or Benny Russell is supposed to remember the timeline after canon is cemented at the end. That section is a bit confusing.

Holy smokes, you weren't kidding, @David Mack. All the deaths at the end wrecked me.

 

[SolarisOne]

Of course, just because the First Splinter continuity is over doesn't necessarily mean that all the characters introduced in the First Splinter are gone.

I choose to believe there's a T'Ryssa Chen in the Prime continuity until told otherwise.

 

[Christopher]

1st Splinter Timeline, huh? Seems the MB wiki has its work cut out to edit the pages of Rebecca Sisko, Rene Picard, and Natasha Riker-Troi to clarify that they only exist in that timeline and not in canon.

They never existed in canon. Canon isn't about timelines or continuity, it's about whether something is the original work as opposed to outside creations such as tie-ins.

I choose to believe there's a T'Ryssa Chen in the Prime continuity until told otherwise.

If the conceit is that the novelverse is an alternate timeline that diverged from Prime in 2373 (which I expect was chosen because New Frontier began in that year), then any character who was more than eight years old at the time of Destiny would putatively exist in both timelines.

 

[David cgc]

If the conceit is that the novelverse is an alternate timeline that diverged from Prime in 2373 (which I expect was chosen because New Frontier began in that year), then any character who was more than eight years old at the time of Destiny would putatively exist in both timelines.

From the TrekCore Interview with David Mack:

You can blame the inclusion of the Borg entirely on Dayton Ward! When Dayton was considering how far back he would need to rewind the continuity to address all of the many changes Star Trek: Picard was likely to inflict upon the continuity, he knew that doing the bare minimum likely would not be good enough.

He couldn’t simply find some way to rewind to 2385, the year of the synths’ attack on Mars in Picard. By that late point, there were too many major discontinuities between the history of Picard and that of the post-Nemesis novels. Just rolling back to Nemesis didn’t explain the discontinuities of the A Time to… novel miniseries, which was a prequel to Star Trek Nemesis.

So, not only did we need to go back farther in time, we also needed to find a plausible trigger for a temporal divergence event. Fortunately, Dayton had already found it: the Enterprise-E’s jaunt back through time in Star Trek: First Contact.

Set in 2373 — well behind any point the Picard producers were likely to muck about with — First Contact was an ideal candidate for a temporal event that could spawn our new unstable timeline. (We had to do some temporal tap-dancing and technobabble soft-shoe to explain how the Borg Earth of 2373 could still be visited after the events of the movie, but I think we pulled it off.)

Of course, once we agreed on that as the “original divergence event, or ODE,” it became obvious that we were going to need to make major use of it in the trilogy’s conclusion, as a key step to “doing what must be done.”

At first I bristled at the idea of having to use the Borg again, after all I had done to take them off the Treklit board in Star Trek Destiny. But I got over that and came to see it as an opportunity to let Picard face his greatest fear and foe one last time — a fitting last hurrah for his big send-off.​

 

[Airmandan]

It will be interesting to see the number of ways the timeline diverges. I’d be willing to bet at least that the whole Tezwa affair doesn’t happen in this new timeline, which I could see contributing to the current state of things.

One question about the book. So the Borg Earth timeline was the root cause of the splinter timeline. We saw and heard that multiple attempts had been made at the devidian core to destroy or alter it. Why was it that we didn’t see other representatives of alternative universes appear at the Borg timeline? If that was the focal point to the divergence, wouldn’t a multitude of crews have ended up there at the same moment?

 

[rfmcdpei]

The Prime Splinter may have been the only timeline where they realized what was going on and what had to be done.

 

[Airmandan]

The Prime Splinter may have been the only timeline where they realized what was going on and what had to be done.

The book opens with a slightly different team attempting and failing, so obviously this has been a known issue to a number of different timelines.

 

[Elwro]

Past the Prologue. What a jolly start!

 

[Charles Phipps]

I feel the book was unfair to Benny Russell. He should have sold the rights to his series to Rene Rodenstein in Hollywood. Become an executive producer who eventually gets a piece of that sweet-sweet Starship Vengeance money.

 

[Tuskin38]

The book opens with a slightly different team attempting and failing, so obviously this has been a known issue to a number of different timelines.

Maybe they didn’t have Kira in the wormhole in that one.

The prophets did say there was only one Hand of the Prophets in the entire multiverse.

 

[Airmandan]

Maybe they didn’t have Kira in the wormhole in that one.

The prophets did say there was only one Hand of the Prophets in the entire multiverse.

i understood that part. What I’ve been trying to figure out is is the Borg on earth timeline. That was the event that caused the splintering. So anyone that was trying to undo events would have to go to that moment.