Your mastery of the timeline exceeds mine, Christopher. Thank you.
Spoilers PIC: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack Review Thread
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The Typhon Pact exists as a small trading alliance in the Star Trek Online novel The Needs of the Many. I like the idea that it was on the table as such in the novelverse until Destiny came along and they decided to expand it's scope a hundredfold.
That just doesn't fit with what Destiny and A Singular Destiny established. The whole idea was that it was a reaction against President Bacco browbeating the smaller powers into cooperating against the Borg. After that, they realized they weren't strong enough separately to rival the Federation's political clout and so they formed an alliance of their own. The idea was supposed to be that they were doing the same thing the Federation's founders had done 220 years earlier, but in order to compete with the Federation on its own terms.
Well, the Borg were never destroyed in Star Trek: Online too as they are still a major galactic threat. Destiny explicitly never happened in that setting, too, because Risa is still a place you can visit.
Plus, the role of "alliance of races hostile to the Federation teaming up to form their own cosomopolitan organization" role is taken up by the Klingon Empire that's many times more antagonistic to the Federation due to Martok's death in the setting. There, the Gorn are Klingon clients along with the Orion, Nausicaans, and so on. So it's Typhon Pact-ish in spirit.
I always felt the TP was one of the best novel ideas.
Yes, that's my point -- that it doesn't make sense to include the Typhon Pact in a continuity where Destiny never happened. And as far as I can tell, there is no Pact in the actual STO, just in that tie-in novel, some of whose interpretations were strictly its own.
Good lord, that's not it at all. So many people miss the whole point of the Typhon Pact -- it wasn't about being just another black-hat enemy to fight the Federation. The original thinking behind the Pact was that it was an opportunity to do what Worlds of Deep Space Nine had done -- to take deep dives into the cultures of a half-dozen Trek civilizations, but this time focusing mainly on ones that were still underdeveloped after a long time in the background, like the Breen, Tzenkethi, and Gorn, or at least ones like the Romulans and Tholians that hadn't already been covered in WoDS9. It wasn't about making them evil enemies, but about exploring their depths and nuances, showing that they had as much legitimate reason to form an alliance as the Federation's founders did -- not just to fight an enemy, but to pursue their own political, economic, and strategic goals in a way that was about themselves, about what they could achieve together so that they wouldn't just be pawns of the existing superpowers anymore.
In other words, it wasn't just "We hate the Federation." It was that "We hate that everything in the quadrant's politics is dictated by the Federation and the Klingons and we want the political clout to set our own course." There was meant to be as much potential for peace with the Federation as for conflict with them, because the underlying motives were actually beneficial and not just about war or conquest, just independence. Although some factions within the Pact certainly tried to subvert it to aggressive ends, and the novel narrative was largely about the conflict between those factions and the more peaceful factions, their battle for the soul and future of the Pact.
And it certainly wasn't about being "clients" to some dominant empire -- good grief, no. The whole point was not to be that, to form an alliance of theoretical equals. So what you're describing is not even remotely "Typhon Pact-ish."
Well, I play Klingon Empire and believe we are awesome!
My Gorn First Mate loves being conquered. Right, S'Tass?
"Yes, captain. Sure."
My Gorn First Mate loves being conquered. Right, S'Tass?
"Yes, captain. Sure."
When the novels first started introducing the Pact, I was afraid they were just setting them up to lead to another big war, so I was very happy when they ended up taking things in a more interesting direction.
Just finished my review of the book. Will tweek it a bit before I put it up on Booknest.EU but I think it summarizes my feelings.
My Review
5/5
Babylon Five was our last best hope fo...oh wait, wrong franchise. It's actually an Abraham Lincoln quote but that's what the title of this book reminded me of. I should note that I am an enormous Star Trek fan. I am enormous Star Trek fan that is also a fan of Star Wars. I am a double-agent of both franchises and cannot be trusted because I have violated the sacred taboo of loving both. However, I will say how much I love the fact that both franchises are still going strong. While not without its flaws, Discovery was awesome and I was tickled when I got to see Picard. I watched that television show three times.
Star Trek: Picard is a sequel series to The Next Generation era of TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. It's been decades since Star Trek: Nemesis both in and out of universe with the supernova of Star Trek (2009) forming a major part of the plot. Romulus has been destroyed, the Federation didn't do much to help its refugees, Data is dead, and synthetic life-forms have been banned after the Federation's equivalent of 9/11 that ended up destroying Mars. It's a solid series and while people think I'm criticizing it by saying it reminds me heavily of Mass Effect, I love Mass Effect and enjoyed its complicated plot of secret societies, synthetic lifeforms, and post-War on Terror politics.
There's a lot of unanswered questions about Picard, though, that are primarily the result of how we got from Point A to Point B. As much as I loved the series, I felt like the best possible opener would have been a two part episode that pretty much depicts this book's exact series of events. I wanted to see Admiral Picard at the top of his game, evacuating Romulans by the thousands, and non-sentient synth labor on the verge of automating Federation labor to the point the Singularity was one step closer. I wanted, somewhat sadistically, to see all of that torn down in order to lay the foundation for the events of the show.
This book delivers and more.
I'm a huge Una McCormack fan and consider her Cardassian novel, The Never-Ending Sacrifice, to be one of the highlights of all Trek literature. She had a really formidable task ahead of her with the job of addressing all of the questions that fans of the show had about events. She had to detail the politics of the Federation, Romulan Empire, and the galaxy as a whole while telling an interesting story. In a very real way, this is a novel that consists entirely of running the logistics of a large-scale evacuation. There's no pew-pew and it's almost entirely characterization that show-watchers will know is destined for the mother of all downer endings. The fact she also has to keep track of continuity across movies, series, and a few books makes the task seem nearly insurmountable. Yet, she manages to pull it off.
The very concise and not at all spoilery summary of the story is as follows: The Romulan star is going to go supernova. This is a slight retcon from Star Trek (2009) but simplifies the physics tremendously. The Romulan Empire has an incredible effort ahead of it but is, begrudingly, willing to let the Federation assist in the evacuation of some of the citizens. Well, close to a billion of them. Captain Picard, overwhelmed with the sheer scale of the problem, reluctantly accepts a promotion to Admiral in order to supervise the effort. This means saying goodbye to the Enterprise but will allow him to do as much good as virtually anything else he's done in his lifetime. Unfortunately, the Federation barely has the resources to evacuate a billion people even if it throws everything at the problem. This is, after all, an organization that lost virtually its entire fleet at the Battle of Wolf 459. It does not possess millions of ships and even then it's a matter of having some place to settle them.
Jean Luc Picard is confidant that everything will work out for the best with sufficient grit and determination. For the most part, he has no real reason to think otherwise. The Federation isn't entirely happy with the Romulan Free State and there are people upset about having to empty their pockets to help a billion "enemy" refugees. However, the Federation is not the people of 21st century Earth nor are the Romulans the wartorn we too often turn out backs against. Unhappy as they may be about emptying their pockets, empty their pockets they do. Geordi and Bruce Maddox also set out to find a science-based solution to the infrastructure problems they face as is typical in Trek. There's a couple of scheming politicians and Romulan nasties who stand in the way in the greater good but it's nothing our heroes haven't dealt with before.
But it's all going to go horribly-horribly wrong. The greatest twist of this book is that it is not a twist at all. Picard the series is based around Jean Luc Picard's greatest failure. Even moreso than being taken by the Borg really. Both times, it's not really his fault but the end results are catastrophic beyond belief. It's essentially that moment when Kirk fails to raise the shields in The Wrath of Khan because he's handled this a dozen times, only a thousand times worse. It's not that the Federation didn't try to do its part, its not that the heroes of the book (using the term loosely with professional creep Bruce Maddox) didn't do their best, it's just that the scale of the disaster is beyond anything that can be dealt with before the supernova goes off. To crib from Babylon Five again, "It was our last best hope for peace. It failed."
I really liked the depiction of Romulus in this book as it doesn't really shy away from the fact it's a totalitarian dictatorship. Trek fans are naturally optimistic but real life has unfortunately shown that authoritarian governments are disinclined to deal in good faith or surrender any power for the benefit of others. The Romulan government would benefit greatly by sharing the data about how screwed they are with its people. They would benefit greatly from not just asking the Federation for help (which they never do, they just reluctantly accept it) but asking everyone else in the Alpha as well as Beta Quadrants. Grand Nagus Rom would only charge slightly above cost, much to the horror of his people. Martok might even lend a shuttle. However, that would mean showing weakness and the Romulan government would rather most of its race go extinct than allow that. Real life shows that this is all too realistic.
If I had any complaints, I would say that I do kind of wish there was a way that this could have been reconciled with novel continuity. That is impossible, though, because the events of Star Trek: Destiny preclude any reconciliation with the TV version of Picard. The Romulans in the books are also in a far better place alliance and leadership wise than the ones who stupidly lead their people to ruin in the books. Still, I really would love to see how the Typhon Pact would deal with the sudden destruction of Romulus. Another issue is that we don't see how Spock was dealing with the issue or how his use of Red Matter affected things. I like to think he saved countless billions of lives on the Romulan colonies but I think both the homeworld as well as Remus are out of luck. Bruce Maddox is also a creep, as mentioned, and I would have much preferred Doctor Jurati's perspective on all this.
In conclusion, if you have watched Picard then you should read this book. If you haven't watched Picard and are planning to then this is a great book to read beforehand. It's a darker and grittier Trek but not because of the characters. They're as idealistic and good as they've always been. It's just this time it isn't enough. I feel Una also cleared up a lot of mistakes from the 2009 movie and created a realistic (for a bid budget sci-fi universe) problem that is a marathon rather than a race to solve. I could rate this a 4.5/5 for the Bruce Maddox parts and lack of Spock but I'm giving it the whole enchilada because it affected me that much.
My Review
5/5
Babylon Five was our last best hope fo...oh wait, wrong franchise. It's actually an Abraham Lincoln quote but that's what the title of this book reminded me of. I should note that I am an enormous Star Trek fan. I am enormous Star Trek fan that is also a fan of Star Wars. I am a double-agent of both franchises and cannot be trusted because I have violated the sacred taboo of loving both. However, I will say how much I love the fact that both franchises are still going strong. While not without its flaws, Discovery was awesome and I was tickled when I got to see Picard. I watched that television show three times.
Star Trek: Picard is a sequel series to The Next Generation era of TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. It's been decades since Star Trek: Nemesis both in and out of universe with the supernova of Star Trek (2009) forming a major part of the plot. Romulus has been destroyed, the Federation didn't do much to help its refugees, Data is dead, and synthetic life-forms have been banned after the Federation's equivalent of 9/11 that ended up destroying Mars. It's a solid series and while people think I'm criticizing it by saying it reminds me heavily of Mass Effect, I love Mass Effect and enjoyed its complicated plot of secret societies, synthetic lifeforms, and post-War on Terror politics.
There's a lot of unanswered questions about Picard, though, that are primarily the result of how we got from Point A to Point B. As much as I loved the series, I felt like the best possible opener would have been a two part episode that pretty much depicts this book's exact series of events. I wanted to see Admiral Picard at the top of his game, evacuating Romulans by the thousands, and non-sentient synth labor on the verge of automating Federation labor to the point the Singularity was one step closer. I wanted, somewhat sadistically, to see all of that torn down in order to lay the foundation for the events of the show.
This book delivers and more.
I'm a huge Una McCormack fan and consider her Cardassian novel, The Never-Ending Sacrifice, to be one of the highlights of all Trek literature. She had a really formidable task ahead of her with the job of addressing all of the questions that fans of the show had about events. She had to detail the politics of the Federation, Romulan Empire, and the galaxy as a whole while telling an interesting story. In a very real way, this is a novel that consists entirely of running the logistics of a large-scale evacuation. There's no pew-pew and it's almost entirely characterization that show-watchers will know is destined for the mother of all downer endings. The fact she also has to keep track of continuity across movies, series, and a few books makes the task seem nearly insurmountable. Yet, she manages to pull it off.
The very concise and not at all spoilery summary of the story is as follows: The Romulan star is going to go supernova. This is a slight retcon from Star Trek (2009) but simplifies the physics tremendously. The Romulan Empire has an incredible effort ahead of it but is, begrudingly, willing to let the Federation assist in the evacuation of some of the citizens. Well, close to a billion of them. Captain Picard, overwhelmed with the sheer scale of the problem, reluctantly accepts a promotion to Admiral in order to supervise the effort. This means saying goodbye to the Enterprise but will allow him to do as much good as virtually anything else he's done in his lifetime. Unfortunately, the Federation barely has the resources to evacuate a billion people even if it throws everything at the problem. This is, after all, an organization that lost virtually its entire fleet at the Battle of Wolf 459. It does not possess millions of ships and even then it's a matter of having some place to settle them.
Jean Luc Picard is confidant that everything will work out for the best with sufficient grit and determination. For the most part, he has no real reason to think otherwise. The Federation isn't entirely happy with the Romulan Free State and there are people upset about having to empty their pockets to help a billion "enemy" refugees. However, the Federation is not the people of 21st century Earth nor are the Romulans the wartorn we too often turn out backs against. Unhappy as they may be about emptying their pockets, empty their pockets they do. Geordi and Bruce Maddox also set out to find a science-based solution to the infrastructure problems they face as is typical in Trek. There's a couple of scheming politicians and Romulan nasties who stand in the way in the greater good but it's nothing our heroes haven't dealt with before.
But it's all going to go horribly-horribly wrong. The greatest twist of this book is that it is not a twist at all. Picard the series is based around Jean Luc Picard's greatest failure. Even moreso than being taken by the Borg really. Both times, it's not really his fault but the end results are catastrophic beyond belief. It's essentially that moment when Kirk fails to raise the shields in The Wrath of Khan because he's handled this a dozen times, only a thousand times worse. It's not that the Federation didn't try to do its part, its not that the heroes of the book (using the term loosely with professional creep Bruce Maddox) didn't do their best, it's just that the scale of the disaster is beyond anything that can be dealt with before the supernova goes off. To crib from Babylon Five again, "It was our last best hope for peace. It failed."
I really liked the depiction of Romulus in this book as it doesn't really shy away from the fact it's a totalitarian dictatorship. Trek fans are naturally optimistic but real life has unfortunately shown that authoritarian governments are disinclined to deal in good faith or surrender any power for the benefit of others. The Romulan government would benefit greatly by sharing the data about how screwed they are with its people. They would benefit greatly from not just asking the Federation for help (which they never do, they just reluctantly accept it) but asking everyone else in the Alpha as well as Beta Quadrants. Grand Nagus Rom would only charge slightly above cost, much to the horror of his people. Martok might even lend a shuttle. However, that would mean showing weakness and the Romulan government would rather most of its race go extinct than allow that. Real life shows that this is all too realistic.
If I had any complaints, I would say that I do kind of wish there was a way that this could have been reconciled with novel continuity. That is impossible, though, because the events of Star Trek: Destiny preclude any reconciliation with the TV version of Picard. The Romulans in the books are also in a far better place alliance and leadership wise than the ones who stupidly lead their people to ruin in the books. Still, I really would love to see how the Typhon Pact would deal with the sudden destruction of Romulus. Another issue is that we don't see how Spock was dealing with the issue or how his use of Red Matter affected things. I like to think he saved countless billions of lives on the Romulan colonies but I think both the homeworld as well as Remus are out of luck. Bruce Maddox is also a creep, as mentioned, and I would have much preferred Doctor Jurati's perspective on all this.
In conclusion, if you have watched Picard then you should read this book. If you haven't watched Picard and are planning to then this is a great book to read beforehand. It's a darker and grittier Trek but not because of the characters. They're as idealistic and good as they've always been. It's just this time it isn't enough. I feel Una also cleared up a lot of mistakes from the 2009 movie and created a realistic (for a bid budget sci-fi universe) problem that is a marathon rather than a race to solve. I could rate this a 4.5/5 for the Bruce Maddox parts and lack of Spock but I'm giving it the whole enchilada because it affected me that much.
Well, Trek has been inconsistent about that. TNG said the loss of 39 ships at Wolf 359 was crippling, but DS9's Dominion War episodes routinely showed armadas of dozens of Starfleet vessels with names like "the Seventh Fleet," meaning there must have been hundreds.
The way I've always rationalized it is that Starfleet probably keeps the majority of its ships out on the frontier most of the time -- after all, I doubt the British Empire kept the entire Royal Navy in the Channel or the North Sea -- and so it was only the core fleet, the smaller number of ships kept close to home, that was able to reach Wolf 359 (the third-nearest star system to Sol/Earth) in time to face the Borg. But over the much longer span of the Dominion War, they had time to call their ships back in from the frontier and assemble a larger unified force.
That actually makes a lot more sense than what we typically hear. That also explains the wide variety of ships that we've heard and seen depicted as being involved in the battle. All of your top of the line ships are out on the borders and exploring, whereas you second and third tier ships are going to closer to home.
I actually had a different perspective, obviously not as informed, but I just figured that the Battle of Wolf 359 resulted in the Federation devoting its resources to dramatically expanding Starfleet. To protect against the Borg's return versus the Dominion but which allowed them to fight the latter more effectively. Obviously, the Defiant was one of these ships but plenty of standard ships are presumably produced as well.
An army that puts itself on a war footing, especially in a post-scarcity one like the Federation, would be able to make a vast Navy in a relatively short amount of time.
Maybe it would also reduce it's Navy after the events of the war as well.
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That's surely part of the explanation; it's just not enough of one by itself, since there are only 7 years between Wolf 359 and the first time we saw one of those ginormous Federation fleets in "Call to Arms." I have a hard time believing they could've built that many ships in just 7 years, especially when so many of the ships seen in DS9 are older classes like Excelsior. Sure, a military "on a war footing" can build ships very quickly, but Starfleet wasn't actually on a war footing until the Dominion War began. After Wolf 359, it's certainly true that they were preparing for the potential threat from the Borg as they rebuilt their fleet, but that's a far, far cry from being in a declared state of war and devoting your society's full resources exclusively to military production.
And it is Wolf 359. There is a 459 in the Wolf catalog, but it's a totally different, more distant star.
I always should look these things up and it's just a wiki away but I gamble on my Star Trek knowledge.
*sigh*
I'd be terrible at Dabo.
*sigh*
I'd be terrible at Dabo.
Concerning the "inconsistency" between the 39 ships at Wolf 359 and then the hundreds in the Dominion War a few years later, I've always chalked it up to getting the space frames out of mothballs after Odyssey was destroyed in the Gamma Quadrant and deployment of Defiant to DS9 and Command realising a war was on the cards. Very few "new" ship classes are seen in those big fleets.
All Starfleet engineering needed to was install/enhance the engines, armaments and life support with a skeleton crew on each.
All Starfleet engineering needed to was install/enhance the engines, armaments and life support with a skeleton crew on each.
That was my justification for Star Trek Online. I just had this issue of Starfleet having these massive space docks that are just parking lots full of older ships because why dismantle something that could be useful later. Then they kept the frames and updated the computers as well as equipment.
We saw a starship "graveyard" in Unification full of older ships. It's safe to assume that there are a few of these dotted around Federation space full of ships that could be retrofitted in a few years.
If the ship scenes were redone now, some Disco era ships could show up in the same way that one showed up in the Picard Short Trek.
That would explain the stacks upon stacks of Miranda and Excelsior classes that we saw in the big fleet battles. Old space frames with skeleton crews that had had some semi upgraded systems thrown in. Obviously not upgraded enough given how easily a lot of them were destroyed.
I was watching "Relics" and thinking, "Yeah, the Miranda was cutting edge in your time but they're probably still out there charting comets."
It's not like the metal is getting any tougher from the 23rd to 24th centuries.
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There's no need to pit the different explanations against each other, since they're all plausible and not in any way incompatible with each other. It's plausible that they ramped up ship construction after the Borg, it's plausible that they refitted mothballed ships, and it's plausible that there were a lot of ships out on the frontier too distant to make it to Wolf 359 in time. They can all be the right answer.
Literally no one is doing that, I just put my theory as to why Starfleet struggled to garner a fleet at Wolf 359 and then had hundreds of ships a few years later.
Just because it disagrees with your pet theory, doesn't mean anyone is "pitting" theories against each other.
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