Just finished it!! The story gives good background into the characters and their motivations while telling an awesome classic trek story. David goes into just enough detail to explain the differences in tech and uniforms without forcing the issue and integrates some classic characters seamlessly into the plot. I think I enjoyed this novel more than the first 2 episodes. 5 stars from me. I say celebrate the differences and be thankful that the latest Trek is on air at all. After all there is IDIC
Spoiler That'd make sense. The old style uniforms appear to be more a comfort/non-threatening look (i.e. non-militaristic) while Discovery uniform appears to be efficient if stiff (i.e. military style).
Spoiler So this is essentially a 'Early Voyages' era crossover? Brilliant! It does pose the question of wether this will eventually mean Spock/Pike/the Enterpise on screen, if not this season then in the future
I'm going to start reading this later on. As always, when people do this, I am rather amused by all the comments in spoiler tags, even though the thread as always for a book review thread has, spoiler in the title.
This book just got shipped. I cant wait to dive into it. I'll have to put my DS9 post-series book reading on hold.
I think the fact that they did it in a book suggests that they have no plans to do it onscreen. After all, if they did intend such a big event to happen onscreen, they'd steer the books away from doing it first. Of course, plans -- and showrunners -- could always change over time. But for now, I wouldn't hold my breath.
This just showed up in the mail today during lunch. So i started it during my lunch break. I'm so glad this released after i've seen the first two episodes. Because i can picture and hear Georgiou, Burnham and Saru in my head now. I'm already getting sucked in.
TrekCore interviewed David Mack http://trekcore.com/blog/2017/09/interview-david-mack-star-trek-discovery-desperate-hours/
Since people are still getting into the book... Spoiler: Desperate Hours and the Pilot I can see what Mack meant about DH having minor spoilers for the episode (I figure it was specifically the Sarek/Burnham mind-meld, since pretty much everything else would be a "premise spoiler" and not really something intended to be surprising), but given how it played out on both sides, I'd almost say that the episodes spoiled the book and not the other way around. Well, it's not the first part of CBS's release strategy for DSC I've second-guessed. I hadn't understood that Michael was actually the victim of two childhood terrorist attacks (so unlucky), I'd assumed her in the destroyed learning center was either the attack where her family was killed, or a figurative vision combining both memories we saw earlier. The book didn't seem to specify that the explosion on Vulcan was an attack by Klingons which is... interesting (and having her be the victim of two Klingon attacks within a few years when the Klingons were essentially off the board would be weird). Maybe there's more to come on that. Spoiler: In Jokes I spotted a couple in-jokes that I enjoyed. Georgiou's helmsman signaled their ETA to the colony while she was first talking to the governor with a hand-signal, which I took as a bit of a nod to Tyler holding up seven fingers to tell Pike they were at speed in "The Cage," presumably because he didn't want to shout to be heard over the theme music. And then there was a definite nod when the landing party is first investigating the Juggernaut and Burnham asks Saru to process it's signals to see if they're intended for something underwater, using almost the exact same phrasing to Kirk asking Uhura to analyize the Whale Probe's message in TVH. And it's not exactly an in-joke, but I liked seeing something I'd speculated on/hoped in the space-battle near the end where they revealed the Enterprise's shrill, solid-beam phasers were terrifyingly overpowered compared to Shenzhou's Kelvin-style pew-pew phasers.
Not necessarily... Spoiler: show and book The teaching computer in the first episode referred to the destruction of Burnham's colony as a "Klingon terrorist attack." Terrorists are usually not state actors, but rogue elements; after all, if they represented the state, they'd have a whole military at their disposal and wouldn't need to use terrorism. And we know the Klingons are a divided people at this point, not following a single unified policy. Terrorism thrives in regions where there isn't a strong central authority to suppress it (although there are "legitimate" governments that tacitly support terrorist groups for their own purposes, such as Saudi Arabia). So just because the Klingon state isn't an active astropolitical player at this time, that doesn't mean that independent Klingon factions couldn't be staging their own small-scale raids on Federation and other worlds, pillaging and destroying to bring wealth and glory to their own Houses or to fund their ongoing feuds against their rivals within the Empire. Indeed, I posited a similar situation 90 years earlier in Rise of the Federation -- even though the Klingons' official policy after the Earth-Romulan War was to turn inward and deal with their internal strife, there were still rogue Klingon ships operating as pirates, such as Captain Lokog's SuD Qav. Although that was smaller-scale stuff than established in the show and book, which fits with the idea that the Klingons have grown even more fragmented in the interim.
I had no idea this book would be a crossover. Sounds great, will have to pick it up when I get the chance.
Spoiler: Number One I like how this book continues the use of the name Una for Number One that was established in the Legacies trilogy last year. If the show ever refers to Enterprise's Number One, this makes me wonder if they'll refer to the Una name.
I'm a little more than half-way through and pretty underwhelmed by it. I would've preferred a story that stood on its own without the Enterprise and Spock.