• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers PIC: To Defy Fate by Dayton Ward Review Thread

Rate PIC: To Defy Fate

  • Outstanding

    Votes: 4 50.0%

  • Above Average

    Votes: 3 37.5%

  • Average

    Votes: 1 12.5%

  • Below Average

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Poor

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    8
Avro Arrow

Avro Arrow

Vice Admiral
Moderator
To-Defy-Fate.jpg


Blurb:
A thrilling new adventure based on the acclaimed TV series Star Trek: Picard!

2401: Just weeks after defeating a devastating joint attack by rogue Changelings and remnants of the Borg Collective, Starfleet and the Federation face a long period of recovery that requires replacing lost personnel and ships. While touring the U.S.S. Titan-A, which is just beginning an extensive repair-and-refit process that will take nearly a year to complete, newly promoted Captain Seven of Nine and her first officer, Commander Raffi Musiker, experience a bizarre temporal event which renders them both unconscious and sends Seven into a deep coma.

In the aftermath of this inexplicable attack, Admirals Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher are surprised by the appearance of Crusher’s son, Wesley. Now a Traveler capable of traversing through all of space and time, he warns them that forces he cannot identify are working to disrupt time for unknown and potentially catastrophic reasons. Reality as they know it is in jeopardy and, despite their initial best efforts, the effects are not contained but instead continue to escalate.

Picard, Crusher, and Musiker join Wesley in hunting through time to stop whoever or whatever seems hellbent on rewriting history. But what is their unknown adversary’s ultimate objective? Left unchecked, their efforts might well erase from existence those Picard and his friends hold most dear. What could justify attempting to defy fate itself?

About the Author:
Dayton Ward is a New York Times bestselling author or coauthor of more than forty novels and novellas, often with his best friend, Kevin Dilmore. His short fiction has appeared in more than thirty anthologies, and he’s written for magazines such as the NCO Journal, Kansas City Voices, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Star Trek magazine, and Star Trek: Communicator, as well as the websites Tor.com, StarTrek.com, and Syfy.com. A native of Tampa, Florida, he currently lives with his family in Kansas City, Missouri. Visit him on the web at DaytonWard.com.


_______________________________________________________

I haven't had the opportunity to pick this one up myself yet, but it looks like it's available at at least one local Indigo, so time for a review thread!

Time travel is probably my favourite SF subgenre, so really looking forward to this one!
 
The Kindle and Google Books e-books are still on pre-order until Tuesday.
 
Yeah me too, I thought it was coming later in the year, like October or November.
 
I don't mind travel in the story if a story is really good.I've enjoyed the other novels Dayton Ward wrote that had Mistral and Roberta Lincoln Tos novels. I really enjoyed those books alot.
 
Forgot I pre-ordered it. Just got an Audible notification that it's in my library. I know what I'm doing tonight!
 
Picked it up today, from a B&N that's a 20-minute drive from my office. Each way. And got back with just enough charge to get home. About all I know about it beyond author, title, and milieu is that the dust jacket designer (and the printing plant executing the design) did a really nice spot-varnish job on it.
 
A question about the book but obviously involves spoilers
So why did the Romulans want to cloak their star system again AFTER both Nemesis and the Dominion war? Thus causing their own supernova. This idea was taken from the IDW comics but in those comics the attempted cloak of the Romulan system was DURING the Dominion War, which ultimately led to the supernova--at least trying to cloak your system during a war makes sense. In the case of this book, trying to cloak it AFTER the Dominion war makes no sense at all. Did I miss something?
 
Yistaan said:
A question about the book but obviously involves spoilers
So why did the Romulans want to cloak their star system again AFTER both Nemesis and the Dominion war? Thus causing their own supernova. This idea was taken from the IDW comics but in those comics the attempted cloak of the Romulan system was DURING the Dominion War, which ultimately led to the supernova--at least trying to cloak your system during a war makes sense. In the case of this book, trying to cloak it AFTER the Dominion war makes no sense at all. Did I miss something?
Click to expand...

I haven't read the book yet, but...
It's common enough in real life for people to escalate their defensive measures after something bad has already happened, in hopes of preventing it from happening the next time -- note all the escalation in airport security after 9/11/2001. So it's hardly implausible that the Romulans, a people known for their paranoia and defensiveness, would get even more defensive after the Dominion War, not less. They'd see it as preparing for the next war.
 
Yistaan said:
A question about the book but obviously involves spoilers
So why did the Romulans want to cloak their star system again AFTER both Nemesis and the Dominion war? Thus causing their own supernova. This idea was taken from the IDW comics but in those comics the attempted cloak of the Romulan system was DURING the Dominion War, which ultimately led to the supernova--at least trying to cloak your system during a war makes sense. In the case of this book, trying to cloak it AFTER the Dominion war makes no sense at all. Did I miss something?
Click to expand...
Christopher said:
I haven't read the book yet, but...
It's common enough in real life for people to escalate their defensive measures after something bad has already happened, in hopes of preventing it from happening the next time -- note all the escalation in airport security after 9/11/2001. So it's hardly implausible that the Romulans, a people known for their paranoia and defensiveness, would get even more defensive after the Dominion War, not less. They'd see it as preparing for the next war.
Click to expand...

Much like the naval arms race immediately after World War I.

Japan with its "Eight-Eight" fleet.
America with its "16-16" fleet, and
Great Britain with its G3/N3 program.
 
Ronald Held said:
Started earlier than normal. Maybe too early for spoilers but there was an Omnichron from the First Splinter.
Click to expand...


Wesley answers 'Yes and no' when asked if he built it, I wonder if that's hinting that he learned of it from the First Splinter timeline, or if maybe all versions of travellers from across the multiverse are linked in some way.


Oh cool, Certoss mention
 
Last edited:
Yistaan said:
So why did the Romulans want to cloak their star system again AFTER both Nemesis and the Dominion war? Thus causing their own supernova. This idea was taken from the IDW comics but in those comics the attempted cloak of the Romulan system was DURING the Dominion War, which ultimately led to the supernova--at least trying to cloak your system during a war makes sense. In the case of this book, trying to cloak it AFTER the Dominion war makes no sense at all. Did I miss something?
Click to expand...
Cloaking a solar system makes no sense at all. There are star charts. The star can still be seen from a distance due to lightspeed limitations. The star itself creates a gravity well that can be measured. The star produces heat which can be seen in the infrared. This doesn't hide a star, it just makes it invisible the visual band in local space.

Maybe the Romulans are dumber than we think.
 
Allyn Gibson said:
Cloaking a solar system makes no sense at all. There are star charts. The star can still be seen from a distance due to lightspeed limitations. The star itself creates a gravity well that can be measured. The star produces heat which can be seen in the infrared. This doesn't hide a star, it just makes it invisible the visual band in local space.

Maybe the Romulans are dumber than we think.
Click to expand...
You can't hide the existence of the star system, but you could use a cloak to confound enemy surveillance of your in-system military activity and defenses. We've seen that 24th-century technology allows for subspace telescopes powerful enough to spy on ground installations from many parsecs away, so these could be used to gather intel on a system's defenses and offenses and plan for an invasion. A systemwide cloak would prevent this, and would also prevent potential enemies from monitoring in-system communications. Lightspeed observation would only reveal what the system looked like years in the past, which would provide no current intelligence.

Besides, there is canonical precedent for cloaking a planet, specifically Aldea in TNG: "When the Bough Breaks." The episode ignored the fact that the planet should have been detectable by its gravity well's influence on other objects in the system and on the Enterprise itself, so we must infer that the Aldean cloak was somehow able to negate the effect of the planet's gravity (although logically this would have insulated it from its star's gravity as well and sent it flying out of the system).

Also, cloaking technology in general must be able to magically conceal an object's infrared signature, or cloaks would never work at all. Every spaceship generates waste heat, so that's as important to cloak as its visible light, and arguably more so (since it's easy enough to turn off a ship's lights and be effectively invisible because space is dark, but it's still going to radiate heat no matter what).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Avro Arrow
  • Poll
Spoilers SNW: Ring of Fire by David Mack Review Thread
2 3 4
Replies
68
Views
7K
jamesteakirk
J
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top