Dumb and Bizarre Trek Novel Moments...

[foravalon]

Awesome point middyseafort and a good examples, both. I did think that the crew's personal BBS on the Ent in Spock's World was funny, but then I thought, why not?

 

[ATimson]

And did they REALLY need Moira? A 'sentient' computer? As the deux ex machina? Couldn't the plot have been resolved without a petulant games computer?

Dunno about plot-wise, but given her presence in earlier books by Duane, yes, she needed to be there.

 

[Kirk1980]

Ah, this would be the only Duane book I've read.

The only other one I have is her TNG book, Dark Mirror.

Makes sense now

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Ah, this would be the only Duane book I've read.

The only other one I have is her TNG book, Dark Mirror.

Makes sense now

speaking of Dark Mirror why was there a talking dolphin in it again, I thought that was Seaquest's thing.

 

[Christopher]

speaking of Dark Mirror why was there a talking dolphin in it again, I thought that was Seaquest's thing.

Communication with dolphins has been a theme in quite a lot of science fiction for decades, including Larry Niven's Known Space universe, Anne McCaffrey's Pern universe, Johnny Mnemonic, the Illuminatus trilogy, the Hitchhiker's Guide series, and most famously, David Brin's Uplift series. Real dolphins possess high intelligence and a sophisticated vocal communication that qualifies as language, and can learn to comprehend spoken English. The main fictional conceit in these stories is simply the technology to communicate both ways or to allow dolphins to use tools or function in space, although some fiction probably exaggerates their intelligence (or at least its cross-compatibility with human intelligence) for dramatic purposes.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Ah, this would be the only Duane book I've read.

The only other one I have is her TNG book, Dark Mirror.

Makes sense now

speaking of Dark Mirror why was there a talking dolphin in it again, I thought that was Seaquest's thing.

I wasn't sure that Hwiii was actually an Earth dolphin, though delphine in type...

Though if you want to see some of Duane's imaginings with Earth dolphins, check out Deep Wizardry.

 

[Christopher]

I wasn't sure that Hwiii was actually an Earth dolphin, though delphine in type...

Indeed, Hwiii is identified as being an alien dolphin, though I woudn't be surprised if that were a change Roddenberry or Richard Arnold asked for, something that got added to the manuscript in revisions, because it certainly feels like he was written to be an Earthly dolphin.

Though if you want to see some of Duane's imaginings with Earth dolphins, check out Deep Wizardry.

Yep. In fact, the Song of the Twelve, the ritual from Hwiii's culture that he discusses in Ch. 8, is lifted directly from Deep Wizardry.

 

[JoeZhang]

Someone lent me a copy of the first in the New Earth series leaving aside the bizarre fixation with the uniform swop-over from TMP to TWOK, the odd characterizations - the whole book is full of WTF moments - the first one is when Chekov goes off the bridge and Kirk gets a cilivan to man weapons - a console that the individual is question mentions a couple of times he has never seen before.

It seems a minor thing but it pulled me right out of the story - where's the rest of the crew?

 

[Christopher]

Someone lent me a copy of the first in the New Earth series leaving aside the bizarre fixation with the uniform swop-over from TMP to TWOK, the odd characterizations - the whole book is full of WTF moments - the first one is when Chekov goes off the bridge and Kirk gets a cilivan to man weapons - a console that the individual is question mentions a couple of times he has never seen before.

It seems a minor thing but it pulled me right out of the story - where's the rest of the crew?

Maybe the same place the rest of the Defiant crew was when Sisko ended up putting cadet Nog and erstwhile enemy agent Garak in charge of key bridge stations.

 

[Garm Bel Iblis]

Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

What are some of your OMG WTF trek lit moments? I gotta go with the Great Bird in the NF novels.

Also Kai Kira really gets me irritated.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

The gay love/mind rape scene between Kirk and Spock in the ships' botanical gardens in the first edition of Killing Time.

Top that one

(also search "Dumb and Bizarre Trek novel moments" for the last thread along these lines, full of mind-boggling clangers)

 

[Dayton Ward]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

"Dayton, this is John Ordover at Pocket Books. Want to write a Star Trek novel for me?"

 

[Thrawn]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

Here's the link to the thread that KingDaniel mentioned, if you don't want to search:

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=78709

My favorite post was this:

But for sheer idiocy, I'll go for Spirit Walk, particularly the scene where Chakotay summons a black jaguar out of thin air to attack a changeling while his sister's fatal wounds are held together by the ghost of her dead boyfriend.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

I gotta go with the Great Bird in the NF novels.

I sort of let that one off the hook, because it's a moment for the characters, too.

For me - and this isn't really fair to the author because he wasn't held to anyone else's interpretations and his style is his own- it was the portrayal of Enabran Tain in "Oblivion". Overall I liked the "Stargazer" series- it was a nice change of pace, had a unique style and while it would never be anywhere near the top of my favourites list, it was perfectly enjoyable in a light-hearted way. But having read "A Stitch in Time" and having loved it intensely (it's my favourite novel, Trek or otherwise), I just couldn't accept Tain as he appeared in "Oblivion". He was just a thuggish, selfish bad guy. He was intelligent of course, but compared to the complicated, almost utterly selfless, unintentionally twisted dark philosopher of "A Stitch in Time" he was crushingly disappointing. Not that "Oblivion's" portrayal of the secretpoliceman is flawed, but this isn't any old (or young ) secretpoliceman, this is Tain. This isn't the usual police state, either- this is Cardassia. Between "Oblivion" Tain and "We are the night people" Tain, there's no contest; the latter wins. I'm glad "The Art of the Impossible" contradicts Tain in "Oblivion", forcing me to pretend it's a different "Enabran Tain" if I'm to retain continuity. Maybe that's the Cardie equivalent of "John Smith"? Who knows if it's even his real name?

Again, it's not that "Oblivion's" interpretation is a problem in itself or in relation to the TV show for that matter, but having read "A Stitch in Time" I couldn't help but personally scream "Wrong!!" at this Tain.

So, somewhat unfair and personal, but there we are.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

After having a read though some of the last thread, I need to belatedly apologize to (the poster currently known as) Semilatus Rectum for somehow getting the Uhura nude bit all wrong. No idea how that happened
Hope you enjoyed the book anyway.

In other news, I still can't believe that they excused humans not recognizing Romulans as being Vulcanoid in The Good That Men Do by having THE LIGHTS OFF during the raid on the Romulan ship to rescue the Aenar. Dumb dumb dumb!

 

[Julio Angel Ortiz]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

Killing off Janeway...













... No, I'm kidding.

First thing that came to mind was the Great Bird of the Galaxy from NF. Thankfully, TrekLit hasn't had too many of those types of moments (at least, from what *I've* read).

 

[DevilEyes]

There is nothing Communist about the way Earth is portrayed in Star Trek. Honestly, I've heard this accusation before, and it makes no sense whatsoever. Communism is state ownership of, well, everything important and citizens' most important duty is service to the state, and workers/laborers are the lifeblood of a nation. None of that describes the Federation even a little bit.

Actually that's socialist dictatorship, which Marx intended as a step toward communism. Th7eoretically, communism is a stateless society in which every individual is independently productive and individually ethical, so that there's no need for any higher institution in charge of the economy or law or anything. In Marxism, an industrial capitalist society is meant to be replaced by a socialist dictatorship whose function is to redistribute the wealth in an egalitarian way and re-educate all the people out of their hierarchical capitalist habits, teaching them to be independently productive and highly moral toward their neighbors, ultimately reaching a point where everyone can take care of themselves and each other without any need for a state, at which point the state is supposed to evaporate with a true communist society, a stable utopian anarchy, finally having been achieved.

The communist state that arguably came closest to this ideal was ... Yugoslavia. Especially in the 1970s, it was a relatively decentralized country with active political debate that provided reasonably civil liberties and a decent standard of living for most of its population. Even then, the Yugoslav model's success required the country to take part in the wider world capitalist economy and in the end proved, paradoxically, to be too decentralized to transform itself any further in any direction.

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread only to answer to an off-topic post, but this is something I really need to answer.

Yugoslavia came NOWHERE NEAR the communist ideal society. The only reason that it provided a decent standard of living for most of the population were the foreign loans, particularly those from the Western countries, rather than any successes of its own economy. To put it simply, Tito knew how to play the political game, and his break with Stalin in 1948 and a refusal to align the country to either of the parties in the Cold War was a genius move. But the country's economy was always a joke. The money from the development loans didn't finance production and actual economic development, instead it secured relatively high salaries and pensions, and created the above mentioned high life standard. But the economy had to collapse sooner or later, and the inevitable economic crisis started in the 1980s.

Yugoslavian society was never anywhere near the communist ideal and wasn't going in that direction, because 1) the economy was not very productive, and 2) there was certainly no social/economic equality - quite the opposite, high-ranking members of the Communist party/state officials and managers of big companies (which is actually a tautology, since state official and managers of big companies all had to be members of the Party) were very rich, "the red bourgeoisie".

And active political debate? Are you serious? There were no democratic elections, there was just one Party, anyone who wanted a high political or managerial position had to be a member or a supporter of the Party, if there was any so-called debate it had to be within the Party, and there was very strict censorship in the media and the educational system: those relative liberties never went so far, and nobody was allowed to question the basics that the society was build on - Marxism, the superiority of socialism over capitalism, the Non-alignment movement, the role of Tito's Partizans in the World War 2 aka People's Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilačka borba), the Brotherhood and Unity of the peoples of Yugoslavia, and above all, Tito's personality cult. It's not just that these values were not to be questioned in any way - we were bombarded with all those phrases in school, in the media, in the movies, everywhere. Almost every fucking movie in the 1950s and 1960s and a big majority of the film and TV production of the 1970s and 1980s was about the Partizans, and in the primary school I had to learn every detail of Tito's childhood. People went to jail for anything that seemed to even hint at some sort of disagreement with the official policies - though this didn't happen often in the 1960s and 1970s, for the simple reason that auto-censorship was so deeply rooted by that time, people just knew that some things were not to be said in public, only in their homes and to their friends. (This period of "relative liberty", of course, only came after Tito consolidated power - the period between 1944 and the early 1960s was a whole different matter. See: Goli otok, for instance. )

 

[Starbreaker]

Woohoo... old threads!

Some bizarre things I've noticed from reading the TNG relaunch this month.

1. MJF shoehorns Carter Greyhorse and Pug into Death and Winter. He makes this huge deal about getting Greyhorse off of the penal colony, and then completely drops him as a character about 3/4ths of the way through. He gets absolutely no resolution in the story. I don't know if he was just forgotten about or what.

2. Picard suddenly leaping back into the role of Locutus in Resistance. He didn't even take time to think about it. Didn't care for this WTF moment.

3. Beverly making jokes about a gift shop on a tourist planet while the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM is in danger in Before Dishonor. Beverly would never do that.

4. I think this is just a typo, but in Ancient Blood, one of the expendable crewman or ensigns is killed and then is back in action a few pages later.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

3. Beverly making jokes about a gift shop on a tourist planet while the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM is in danger in Before Dishonor. Beverly would never do that.

I don't know, but I'd suspect, that PAD was riffing on the tenth Doctor's fascination with gift shops from Doctor Who. (See "New Earth" and "Smith & Jones.") The Doctor (Crusher) joking about gift shops, with death on the line.

 

[William Leisner]

Re: Trek Lit Face Palm Moments

"Dayton, this is John Ordover at Pocket Books. Want to write a Star Trek novel for me?"

Beat me to it.