Just read Crucible:Kirk - A question re: Kirk's actions (spoilers)

[Mr. Crane]

just finished reading the Crucible trilogy. The first book was awesome!

Crucible: Kirk, also came up with a clever way of un-duing Kirk's death from Generations, but I just couldn't buy Kirk's actions aboard the shuttlecraft. Here's what I mean...

So, if you recall, "Future Nexus Kirk" travels back to the 2293 via the Guardian of Forever and beams "Enterprise-B Kirk" off the Ent-B just before he enters the Nexus. "Future Nexus Kirk" then tells "Ent-B Kirk" that he must let everyone think he is dead, as history recorded, travel to the Guardian of Forever planet, and use the time portal to travel to the future to help a guy naed Picard stop a villain named Soran from destroying a planet "Ent-B Kirk" has never heard of ... (Veridian III). So, he would need to leave everyone he knew, let them think he was dead, to save this supposed "future"...

Now, from what I saw of Kirk in TOS, he was never the overly trusting type when it came to be tmysterious beings that swept him off his ship told him what to do - he was often suspicious and defiant at first (Example: "What does God need with a starship!?"). Yet here, "Ent-B Kirk" just goes along with what his "future self" tells him with very few question, all because the guy knows intimate details about his life. The Kirk I know would question whether this was an alien being who had probed his mind, and was attempting to manipulate him. Kirk was a survivor ... I think he would question why he is supposed to sacrifice his life to maintain a possible future chain of events that, from his perspective, havn't happened yet, all based on the story told to him by someone claiming to be his "future self". I think Kirk would argue that his destiny is not pre-determined, nor is the future.

Heck, I don't think most people would sacrifice their lives if some guy came up to them claiming he was from the future, and claiming that they needed to pretend to die to preserve the future, even if the guy looked exactly like you! - but, hey, maybe that's just me!

I really enjoy David George's writing, but I just found that idea hard to swallow.

What do other people who have read the book think?

 

[David cgc]

My main problem with it was just that it retconned it so the Kirk and Picard we saw at the end of the movie weren't the same Kirk and Picard that had their talk in the Nexus. And as unlikely as it would be for Kirk to listen to Kirk after popping up out of nowhere, I think it was really odd that Picard would just shrug it off and be grateful for the help if James T. Kirk just arrived out of thin air at a random moment.

 

[KingstonTrekker]

I found the "Kirk" entry to be, by far, the weakest book in the trilogy.

However, I LOVED the McCoy book!

 

[seigezunt]

My reaction was that there was some sort of sixth sense sharing between the two, that resulted in the younger Kirk's trust. I can't be sure that it's in the text, but it's what i came away with.

And frankly, anything that undoes that abortive mess which was Generations deserves an award.

Now, my reservations with the Spock volume were different...I thought that was the weakest, but I thoroughly enjoyed the other two. It was quite a feat. Crucible:McCoy got me reading Treklit again after a 20-year hiatus.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Sorry to interrupt, and I know this is slightly off topic, but continuing on from the two preceding posts, am I the only person who didn't much like the McCoy book? I loved the other two, but the McCoy story was one of the very few Star Trek books (and the only story by David R. George III) that I didn't enjoy. That said, it probably reflects more on my tastes than the quality of the novel, which I acknowledge was high (and no, continuity with other books wasn't the problem. I know Crucible was a project deliberately ignoring the modern continuity in order to achieve greater creative freedom and a "clean" entry for new readers. ). It was also certainly ambitious and well crafted, but I wondered: is there anyone else who simply didn't like it?

 

[seigezunt]

No. You are alone. ;-)

 

[Deranged Nasat]

No. You are alone. ;-)

I thought so!