Spoilers PIC: The Dark Veil by James Swallow - Review Thread
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Micro-tattooing. One too many Romulan ales and it sounded like a good idea.
Any attempt to remove it would wipe away her entire body due to science!
Come to think of it, did any of us novelists ever explicitly state that Christine Vale didn't have blue skin? Maybe we could say this was how she looked all along, and it just didn't come up. (The "I joined Starfleet to study moss" thing might be harder to reconcile, though...)
Honestly, Christine Vale sounding like Vanessa Marshall? I'm down with that.
Honestly, Christine Vale sounding like Vanessa Marshall? I'm down with that.
You've done a lot more interesting canon welding!
Besides, there's always the fact these could be the officers of the Night Shift!
Besides, there's always the fact these could be the officers of the Night Shift!
This one's $1.99/99p right now
This one's $1.99/99p right now
And if you prefer softcovers, the paperback edition is out on the 7th...
Helek was interesting to me in this way; the contrast between her and the other Romulans, many of whom had no idea why she was reacting so, was noteworthy.
And what a terribly poor reward she got for all of her fervent belief at the end.
IIRC the figure of 900 million relates only to the people that the Federation could gave evacuated had its plans gone well. We are given to understand the death toll may amount to billions beyond that. The Star Empire failed catastrophically.
This book builds up on the hints in The Last Best Hope that what happened to the Romulan star was not natural. If so, and if so in this way, wow. Will it be long before the shows explore this? It seems too big a point not to come up, and equally too big a point to be brought up in the novelverse without good reason.
I do not think we have to assume this.
In the Dark Phoenix saga, what happens to the D'Bari star does look quite a lot like a core-collapse supernova. The star in question simply no longer has enough radiant energy to counteract the effects of gravity, leading to the collapse of the outer layers of the star on the core and a very violent explosion. It does not matter so much that the D'Bari star did not run out of fusable material, that instead the energy it produced was simply sopped up wholesale in an orgiastic fit of telekinesis by a god-like entity gone mad. It did not matter, even, that the D'Bari star was a star like our own, only slightly hotter than Sol. The only thing that mattered, really, was the effect produced by mechanisms very much like the core-collapse supernovas normally experienced only by much more massive stars.
Would it be wrong to call what happened to the D'Bari star a supernova? It does not seem obviously wrong, at least if the immediate causes are the same as more natural catastrophes. The term "supernova" seems to be one that does not have to fit the situation described badly. It does not look like other natural processes that aqwould happen to Sun-like stars.
The Orion's Arm collaborative universe has a list of supernova types that includes the artificial ones that a sufficiently advanced civilization can induce even in naturally supernova-immune stars. Late 24th Trek has developed to that point: Soran could have destroyed the Veridian star with a trilithium weapon, while the Dominion could have done something terrible to the Bajoran system with a protomatter device. The main difference between those attempted attacks and what may have been done to Romulus' sun (as hinted in the novels, at least) is that the latter took years to produce an explosion, not mere minutes. (IMHO the longer time seems less implausible to me given the scale of stars.)
Perhaps an effort at cleanup, sparing if not the Romulan system then adjacent ones?
Agreed otherwise.
And if you prefer softcovers, the paperback edition is out on the 7th...
I will be getting the hardcover. (I like my sets.)
Yes, that's explicitly the intent of it in the film, but the point is that it's physically absurd to suggest that it could do that. The radiation and superhot gases are already spreading outward from the star, the former at the speed of light, the latter nearly as fast. Nothing you do at the place they started from will magically suck them back inward. They're already far away from it and getting further every second. They're way beyond the reach of any black hole, natural or artificial. It's like trying to tag a runner at first base when they've already rounded second.
It's a great idea that the blue-skinned Titan XO is Christine Vale. She dyes her hair, it's not too far-fetched in the late 24th century that people go for extreme/temporary body colors.
However, during her appearance she states moss got her into Starfleet, while Vale was inspired by law enforcement action. I guess, unless the new Titan XO, a novel or so could reconcile that.
The only thing I can suggest is that supernovas and like events in Trek seem to have superluminal effects, perhaps related to subspace. The reignition of Epsilon 119 needed to be conducted with a ship capable of high warp if anything went wrong, the Amargosa supernova had immediate effects across a sector, and the Dominion strike against the Bajoran sun would have made relatively less sense if the multinational fleet had been able to escape. There seem to be some effects that have faster than light implications in Trek, and energetic supernovas are as good candidates as any for a natural phenomenon we know of that might have effects in subspace.
We know red matter behaves oddly. Maybe it somehow has connections with subspace, such that it can interact with supernova debris? I dunno.
IIRC the origin story of Vale had her join Starfleet after it helped her track down a serial killer on Izar, who was also a friend. I can see her, at that LD moment where she was facing death, opting to tell a different story.
The only reason the eeeeeevil villainess isn’t twirling her mustache is because she doesn’t have one. This was terribly, terribly disappointing. And having one of the Starfleeters intone “We’re better than that” flashed me all the way back to Wesley’s “We’re Starfleet. We don’t lie.”
I don’t expect Trek to be subtle. That’s not it’s thing. But I do prefer it not to be THIS unsubtle.
Poor.
I don’t expect Trek to be subtle. That’s not it’s thing. But I do prefer it not to be THIS unsubtle.
Poor.
To be fair, sometimes I think Trek goes overboard with its villains just being misunderstood or able to be reached rationally. The Zhat Vash are a crazy cult of extremists and of course will act crazy. Best to portray that realistically.
I grew up in a crazy cult. The one thing I can confidently say about real crazy cultists is that they DON’T sound like Snidley Whiplash. They're far more subtle than that.
The Zhat Vash were embarrassingly hokey onscreen (part of an unfortunate whiff of cheesy conspiracy thriller in the first season of Picard) and the one in The Dark Veil was the one major downside of a pretty strong novel. The only thing that could have made her bearable as a screen character would have been a top-notch performance; on the page there was just no hope.
Robert Petkoff generally turns in strong performances for the audiobooks. But he was defeated by the character on the page.
I usually like Swallow’s Trek books. But this one didn’t work for me at all.