Noticed a trend with wise Yoda-esque mystery women in some of Bennett's work. Did not work at all in "Brief Candle" (she made me want to eat a gun), but it generally worked here.
Sorry Marika didn't work for you, but I'm wondering what you think the "mystery" was about her. And "Yoda-esque" bewilders me in this context. Marika was just a woman who'd been through a hard life and didn't have a lot of time left to hide behind excuses and rationalizations. She's really me critiquing my own tendency to hesitate and procrastinate and let opportunities slip me by.
Loved loved loved that Picard got another command between Stargazer and the Enterprise. That was the #1 thing I wanted to see in this book.
Actually I was trying to avoid that, since canon always suggested that the
Stargazer was his only prior command. But since the story required him to command a ship, it had to be a classified mission.
Loved the details regarding the Battle of Maxia. Loved how it was pretty much a fire that did in the ship.
That was established in "The Battle," and like so much about that episode, I had to bend over backward to come up with a sensible way to explain it.
Did not see the need to translate Picard's delirious behavior from the episode to his reaction time during the actual battle. I always took that to be the effect of the mind probe
That wasn't what I was doing. I was simply trying to explain his rather awkward and silly dialogue at some points, like his repeated demands to know "Who are they?" when he should've known no answer was forthcoming.
(don't recall the ghost crew matching up with the bridge officers seen in the long running book series).
Again, it took some effort to identify the "ghost crew" with familiar SGZ characters or justify the absence thereof. Ultimately, I was only able to match two of them with pre-existing characters, Ben Zoma and Asmund, with the other two being new characters (and Vigo's death as depicted by Michael Jan Friedman in
Tales of the Captain's Table: "Darkness" enabled me to justify the presence of a human at tactical). Even so, it was a hell of a stretch to come up with excuses why the guy standing at tactical would be giving engineering status reports or the woman at the helm would be giving tactical reports or whatever. I was tempted just to chalk the whole thing up to the Ferengi device mixing up Picard's memories, but that would've been a bit of a cheat. I reconciled everything I could, the only remaining inconsistency being the "ghost crew"'s uniform colors (which I do chalk up to distorted memory).
Also enjoyed the space battle at the end of the book.
...Although a certain bias began to get annoying quickly: how come there were these detailed descriptions and spelled-out registry numbers for ships that had made an onscreen appearance, while only cursory mention of ships that had not?
(Okay, there was one exception as regards registry numbers, but still...)
Huh? If that happened, it was accident, not "bias." I usually try to avoid giving familiar ships or entities greater weight within the universe than unfamiliar ones. Or if there was any bias, it was toward involving characters I wanted to focus on (like Captains Zimbata and Sanders) rather than toward or against any of the ships, which are, after all, just ships. I'm also not aware of any "detailed descriptions" of ships beyond a passing mention of a
Miranda-class ship having the classic "rollbar" configuration.
Might be more the doing of MJ Friedman, really. According to Picard's onscreen ranting, Vigo was present on the bridge - it was Friedman's decision not to describe any of his characters in a way that would have matched one of those extras (say, the redshirt at the back, where the weapons console would have been).
No, that's not where the weapons console would've been. The console on the port wall was clearly labeled "TACTICAL":
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s1/1x10/battle075.jpg The "
redshirt at the back" was actually standing by the burned-out console against the starboard wall, whose label was illegible and which I decided (after discussion with Michael Schuster and Michael Okuda) to designate as the science station.
And I kind of wonder if maybe Friedman
did create Asmund based on the blonde woman at the helm in "The Battle." Aside from uniform color (which doesn't make sense for a helm officer anyway), there's a pretty clear resemblance.
