A gap in other readings break led me to turn to Trek material on my bookshelf purchased before but left unread since Destiny switched me off the hobby, so I’ve started a burn-off. First up, a much-belated read of the final Strange New Worlds volume, SNWX (gesundheit).
Gerri Leen, The Smell of Dead Roses: I quite liked this one; I’m not sure if I’d give it the top prize, but it’s certainly up there. This isn’t the story that, at first glance, would seem likely to appeal to me, revolving around minor characters of a series I’ve never cared for, but Leen’s age progression schema really got me to care about Perrin. In building towards its tragic end, the story is touching without being maudlin, affecting without being manipulative; characters and circumstances flow organically. I had been worried that we would get, at the end, some kind of trite celebration of emotional exhibitionism, but the author makes her point while still permitting the characters and the Vulcan culture to be true to itself, and is a much better story for being understated this way. My only complaint would be that there’s a lack of imagination on the world-building: end of the 23rd, beginning of the 24th century (I’m not quite sure what the timeline is specifically), and not only to we still have assholes who think it’s alright to beat on their kids, but nobody—not the wife, not friends/neighbours/teachers, not even the kid herself who seems otherwise bright—thinks to call child services? It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a while now, this unfortunate tendency that just projects the people of today into a future setting without asking how people themselves might change. (Incidentally, the author's name seemed familiar, and some quick checking confirmed that we’ve shared a table of contents in the anthology Desolate Places. Her story there too is quite good.)
Rick Dickson, The Doomsday Gambit: Although initially intrigued by the premise of Q(s) watching over the derring-do of TOS-era captains, I didn’t much care for this story. Partly, because it felt like the short had no arc, but was rather a series of snippets; there’s not much thematic unity, and all the most poignant moments occur ‘off-screen’, so not much of a structure either. And partly, because the author’s style seemed to me to be distractingly manic and exclamatory—which, perhaps, was meant to complement Decker (who seems a few pecans short of a fruitcake), but seems rather out of place when an ageless entity like Q suddenly starts ooh-ing and ahh-ing over humanity.
David DeLee, Empty: This is probably one of those cases where actually caring about the characters would come in handy. Essentially plotless, the whole ‘story’ is a post-episode, pre-decommissioning conversation between McCoy and Kirk that reads too much like a vignette on a fanfic site, from Kirk going all emo to McCoy giving his captain’s ego a verbal handjob. It wants to have pathos around Kirk’s decision to accept promotion, but is ultimate too aware of future events, too clearly on McCoy’s side, to make it seem like there was ever much of a debate.
Aimee Ford Forster, Wired: A decent enough planet-of-the-week type of story. At first I was excited by the prospect of a Trek spin on transhumanist fusion of biology and technology, but the story soon became a fairly typical enhanced vs. non-enhanced scenario. The tale raises a lot more issues than its length can address, which is a bit frustrating—in particular, I wish Troi hadn’t stopped Data from revealing he was an android, as the resistance seemed to have some biases of their own that ought to have been confronted. Oh well.
Paul C. Tseng, A Dish Served Cold: This story is about the Pakleds when they met the Borg and other people. This story was funny and made me laugh. I liked this story.
Muri McCage, The Very Model: For all that’s been said about the undesirability of resurrecting Data via B-4, here’s a story that shows that it’s all in the execution: done well, as it is here, such a plot need not be cheap, nor cavalier with the subject matter. The process is justly slow and melancholy, and the device of using a holographic representation of Lal to spur Data’s final ‘coalescing’ delivers the unexpected emotional punch that ties it all together. It even brings a solution of sorts to B-4’s existence by storing his memories within Data—something which I suspect would not answer all the ethical questions the audience might have, but, thinking about it, that’s a secondary question: the real issue is whether it is right from the characters’ perspectives, and the story does a credible job of showing the characters to be convinced.
Brian Seidman, So a Horse Walks Into a Bar…: Vic Fontaine has never been a favourite of mine; I’ve never understood his appeal, and always thought there was something faintly off-putting about the glamourized setting he inhabited. It also had bugged me that here was a sentient hologram and nobody in a group of scientists, engineers and explorers ever made an issue of it. This story goes a way towards answering those questions, finding good balance by contrasting Vic’s obsequiousness with Zimmerman’s abrasiveness and hard-nosed approach, and tracking in Vic an origin that makes sense within the context of the series (addressing another dangling thread in the process). I think the author made Zimmerman a bit too irascible and one-minded to make his sudden change of heart at the end believable, but otherwise I liked the story.
Jim Johnson, Signal to Noise: This is a story that basically started from an interesting concept, and then ran it into the ground. Its length, scope and devices become too unwieldy to support, and comes to obscure the plot that’s actually there; the quick payoff at the end simply doesn’t justify the temporal- and reality-twisting arabesques that the story goes through in order to get there. It was fun to see the Jack Pack again, as well as Benny and the asylum (it would have been curious to see a kind of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Trek-ified) but I do wish the story had been shorter and less recursive.
Rob Vagle, The Fate of Captain Ransom: I’m ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, the device was interesting; on the other hand, it felt too similar to what Voyager had already done with regards to aliens and near-death experiences, such that we now have to think there’s two species out there pulling these stunts. I think I would have preferred to see that VOY material drawn on for this story, particularly since the tone and thrust of the story as is eluded me. Ransom at the end is pretty much like Ransom at the beginning, suicidal over his actions; confessing to the illusion of his wife brought about no great change. Are we meant to admire Ransom’s guilt-ridden refusal to grab what happiness he can and face a self-imposed justice, itself interesting to watch though frustratingly fruitless, or be creeped out by his longing for oblivion? I’m not sure. Perhaps that was the point?
L.E. Doggett, A Taste of Spam: I have no idea what happened here. I’m not usually one to criticize proofreading, but there were a lot of errors in this story, typos, missing words, sentences so similar to each other I suspect one of them was meant to be deleted—and this, even into the author’s blurb (“collage education”?). It might have been only an annoyance if it had been a good story, but even the rest felt off. Humour, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and I actually did find the first couple of pages funny, but a kind of pat, expository style, tin-eared, uncharacteristic dialogue and a plot whose twist ending contradicts the story itself, made this short story feel rather long indeed.
Laura Ware, Adjustments: A ‘meh’ story that has nothing particularly objectionable about it, other than perhaps being too cutesy and condescending for its own good, but nothing terribly stirring either. It’s a story that makes you want to go “Aw…”; and since I don’t care for stories that make you want to go “Aw…”, it made me want to go to the next tale.
M. C. DeMarco, The Day the Borg Came: I liked this story; the mild technical innovation of a sequence of first-person narratives, presented from a similar frame, without overt identification but clearly personalized, is well balanced with the amount of story and rewards the long-time fan of the franchise. Particularly interesting is the way the author crafts each ‘I’-voice to the distinct character, such that even without the textual hints you could recognize who was speaking from the methods of expression alone. The testimonies nicely convey the varied horrors of assimilation, and the main narrative lines actually makes one want to cheer for so degenerate a character as Admiral Janeway.
Robyn Sullivent Gries, The Dream: As with Empty, this stories comes off very fanfic-ish; by the means of what is, quite frankly, either a cheap or underdeveloped plot device of some form of ghostly visitation, Tucker goes on a tour of the ship and cast like some kind of cheesy “It’s a Wonderful Life” routine, with the expected will-to-live-makes-him-live resolution. And I’m pretty sure I recall that Tucker was at Sim’s funeral, so there’s an error where the story says Tucker never knew about Sim.
Carolyn Winifred, Universal Chord: Unlike most of my generation, I’ve never been musically inclined… which is perhaps why this story left me cold and not a little confused. I assume it got in, and won third prize no less, on the basis of the stylish prose, itself reflective and rhythmic; but there’s not much story here, and what there is gets further obscured by the not exactly linear train of the narrative, particularly the dialogue, full of dangling referents. At the end, I was left feeling as though I had missed a lot of stuff, but without an obvious key to decrypt the text, had no choice but to shrug and move along.
Edgar Governo, You Are Not in Space: An interesting character piece undermined by a weak resolution. Hoshi Sato is a character I felt was under-appreciated both on the show and sidelined in the subsequent books; there was something about the way she thinks, and the cute kind of hesitancy, that made her easy to relate to. So I’m happy to find a story illustrating her working through a thorny problem, largely giving credit to her ambiguities as the insecure genius, both in the way she works and interacts with the other crewmembers. Though unschooled in linguistics, I found the problem intriguing… which, to an extent, is why the resolution seems rather pat, with the expected flash of inspiration that comes from the seemingly irrelevant conversation (sometimes object); and, while I certainly wasn’t expecting a lecture on language, the source of the problem—a negation and somewhat poetic expression—seems underwhelming considering how long it stumped someone of Sato’s caliber. I was looking for more of a payoff here.
Jerry M. Wolfe, Time Line: Gary Seven meets Khan. Although it can’t rival Greg Cox’s masterpiece—which, after all, introduced me to these characters in the first place—this alternate take on it is still a rather entertaining story in its own right, with snappy character interactions and a brief but interesting moral dilemma: what to do with genetically-augmented sociopaths… who are also just children. Seven makes the only choice really available to him, which of course taps the tragedy angle of the no-win scenario. The mysterious, un-sourced appearance of the bombs is probably the biggest flaw in the story: it presents a conflict without identifying the players, and since this will never be revisited, it’s a somewhat frustratingly vague lack of denouement. Despite that quibble, it is still a very satisfying tale.
Randy Tatano, Echoes: A story largely driven by the interesting concept of merging several of Trek’s most illustrious figures into one entity, and of promising a resolution to the issue of the Borg. The exposition is sometimes clunky, or perhaps I’m just easily annoyed by stories that keep repeating that there’s a secret here but the characters keep mum about what it is (I’m looking at you, Dan Brown), but the character work on Sam Farragut is intriguing—you can’t help but try and picture the man, and whose mannerisms may be surfacing at any given point. The author also resists making the uber-Captain into a godly kind of hero; just as he himself is a team effort, so too does the final mission ultimately depend on the short’s original character; something of a bold move, and I don’t know if we get to know Rush well enough for it, but the effort is appreciated if nothing else. And, perhaps redundant to say, I much prefer this resolution than the one we eventually got in Destiny: the Collective is liberated, but without all the despair and destruction, and best of all the solution lies in ‘human’ ingenuity and determination, through careful combinations of various elements of Trek history rather than introducing a new player—although I did wonder how they got to an apparent Borg homeworld so easily, even with a cloak. I’m not entirely sure I would have given it second prize on account of the sometimes lack of finesse, but a quite good story nonetheless.
Rigel Ailur, Brigadoon: Of all the conceits to get multiple shows/generations together in this volume, this is probably the most interesting—in part because it’s something we’ve already seen in Trek and other sci-fi settings before (time passing differently from location to location), but the familiar plot is given new life by the retrospectively obvious yet presently clever use of the tactic to bridge the various series’ timeframes into one story. The execution doesn’t always play off as well—the TNG portion doesn’t serve to advance the story much, and the final solution of using Voyager’s bio-gel feels a bit shoehorned (hardly the only ship to be equipped with those, though I understand Seven not being around to generate the plan)—but it winds up feeling pleasantly like an episode where a different cast gets rotated in between each commercial—far more a ‘Valentine’ than ENT managed. Characterization is brief but good, and I was amused by the way the author cherry-picked their VOY-R continuity: Chakotay in the captain’s chair, Seven at the think tank, but also Janeway being useful (and alive) and Torres not being crazy in some monastery. Between the concept, characters, and the dual sense of sacrifice and success, this is a story firing on most if not all cylinders.
Jeremy Yoder, Reborn: If you stop to think about it, this is a story that doesn’t make much sense, with Q-power and temporal mechanics that serve plot logic and little else. That said, Yoder does his damnest to make sure you don’t stop to think about it, propelling the story forward with relentless, manic energy, sending the reader spinning across characters, locations and timeframes as though caught in a pinball machine. I don’t know if it would hold up to a re-read, but the sheer breathlessness of it is contagious on first being thrown in, always braced to see where and when the next twist in this cosmic melodrama will take us. I have no idea what this Lazarus person or an anti-matter universe refers to, but ultimately the specifics are less important in a story where the clip pacing is really the star.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
Gerri Leen, The Smell of Dead Roses: I quite liked this one; I’m not sure if I’d give it the top prize, but it’s certainly up there. This isn’t the story that, at first glance, would seem likely to appeal to me, revolving around minor characters of a series I’ve never cared for, but Leen’s age progression schema really got me to care about Perrin. In building towards its tragic end, the story is touching without being maudlin, affecting without being manipulative; characters and circumstances flow organically. I had been worried that we would get, at the end, some kind of trite celebration of emotional exhibitionism, but the author makes her point while still permitting the characters and the Vulcan culture to be true to itself, and is a much better story for being understated this way. My only complaint would be that there’s a lack of imagination on the world-building: end of the 23rd, beginning of the 24th century (I’m not quite sure what the timeline is specifically), and not only to we still have assholes who think it’s alright to beat on their kids, but nobody—not the wife, not friends/neighbours/teachers, not even the kid herself who seems otherwise bright—thinks to call child services? It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a while now, this unfortunate tendency that just projects the people of today into a future setting without asking how people themselves might change. (Incidentally, the author's name seemed familiar, and some quick checking confirmed that we’ve shared a table of contents in the anthology Desolate Places. Her story there too is quite good.)
Rick Dickson, The Doomsday Gambit: Although initially intrigued by the premise of Q(s) watching over the derring-do of TOS-era captains, I didn’t much care for this story. Partly, because it felt like the short had no arc, but was rather a series of snippets; there’s not much thematic unity, and all the most poignant moments occur ‘off-screen’, so not much of a structure either. And partly, because the author’s style seemed to me to be distractingly manic and exclamatory—which, perhaps, was meant to complement Decker (who seems a few pecans short of a fruitcake), but seems rather out of place when an ageless entity like Q suddenly starts ooh-ing and ahh-ing over humanity.
David DeLee, Empty: This is probably one of those cases where actually caring about the characters would come in handy. Essentially plotless, the whole ‘story’ is a post-episode, pre-decommissioning conversation between McCoy and Kirk that reads too much like a vignette on a fanfic site, from Kirk going all emo to McCoy giving his captain’s ego a verbal handjob. It wants to have pathos around Kirk’s decision to accept promotion, but is ultimate too aware of future events, too clearly on McCoy’s side, to make it seem like there was ever much of a debate.
Aimee Ford Forster, Wired: A decent enough planet-of-the-week type of story. At first I was excited by the prospect of a Trek spin on transhumanist fusion of biology and technology, but the story soon became a fairly typical enhanced vs. non-enhanced scenario. The tale raises a lot more issues than its length can address, which is a bit frustrating—in particular, I wish Troi hadn’t stopped Data from revealing he was an android, as the resistance seemed to have some biases of their own that ought to have been confronted. Oh well.
Paul C. Tseng, A Dish Served Cold: This story is about the Pakleds when they met the Borg and other people. This story was funny and made me laugh. I liked this story.
Muri McCage, The Very Model: For all that’s been said about the undesirability of resurrecting Data via B-4, here’s a story that shows that it’s all in the execution: done well, as it is here, such a plot need not be cheap, nor cavalier with the subject matter. The process is justly slow and melancholy, and the device of using a holographic representation of Lal to spur Data’s final ‘coalescing’ delivers the unexpected emotional punch that ties it all together. It even brings a solution of sorts to B-4’s existence by storing his memories within Data—something which I suspect would not answer all the ethical questions the audience might have, but, thinking about it, that’s a secondary question: the real issue is whether it is right from the characters’ perspectives, and the story does a credible job of showing the characters to be convinced.
Brian Seidman, So a Horse Walks Into a Bar…: Vic Fontaine has never been a favourite of mine; I’ve never understood his appeal, and always thought there was something faintly off-putting about the glamourized setting he inhabited. It also had bugged me that here was a sentient hologram and nobody in a group of scientists, engineers and explorers ever made an issue of it. This story goes a way towards answering those questions, finding good balance by contrasting Vic’s obsequiousness with Zimmerman’s abrasiveness and hard-nosed approach, and tracking in Vic an origin that makes sense within the context of the series (addressing another dangling thread in the process). I think the author made Zimmerman a bit too irascible and one-minded to make his sudden change of heart at the end believable, but otherwise I liked the story.
Jim Johnson, Signal to Noise: This is a story that basically started from an interesting concept, and then ran it into the ground. Its length, scope and devices become too unwieldy to support, and comes to obscure the plot that’s actually there; the quick payoff at the end simply doesn’t justify the temporal- and reality-twisting arabesques that the story goes through in order to get there. It was fun to see the Jack Pack again, as well as Benny and the asylum (it would have been curious to see a kind of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Trek-ified) but I do wish the story had been shorter and less recursive.
Rob Vagle, The Fate of Captain Ransom: I’m ambivalent about this one. On the one hand, the device was interesting; on the other hand, it felt too similar to what Voyager had already done with regards to aliens and near-death experiences, such that we now have to think there’s two species out there pulling these stunts. I think I would have preferred to see that VOY material drawn on for this story, particularly since the tone and thrust of the story as is eluded me. Ransom at the end is pretty much like Ransom at the beginning, suicidal over his actions; confessing to the illusion of his wife brought about no great change. Are we meant to admire Ransom’s guilt-ridden refusal to grab what happiness he can and face a self-imposed justice, itself interesting to watch though frustratingly fruitless, or be creeped out by his longing for oblivion? I’m not sure. Perhaps that was the point?
L.E. Doggett, A Taste of Spam: I have no idea what happened here. I’m not usually one to criticize proofreading, but there were a lot of errors in this story, typos, missing words, sentences so similar to each other I suspect one of them was meant to be deleted—and this, even into the author’s blurb (“collage education”?). It might have been only an annoyance if it had been a good story, but even the rest felt off. Humour, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and I actually did find the first couple of pages funny, but a kind of pat, expository style, tin-eared, uncharacteristic dialogue and a plot whose twist ending contradicts the story itself, made this short story feel rather long indeed.
Laura Ware, Adjustments: A ‘meh’ story that has nothing particularly objectionable about it, other than perhaps being too cutesy and condescending for its own good, but nothing terribly stirring either. It’s a story that makes you want to go “Aw…”; and since I don’t care for stories that make you want to go “Aw…”, it made me want to go to the next tale.
M. C. DeMarco, The Day the Borg Came: I liked this story; the mild technical innovation of a sequence of first-person narratives, presented from a similar frame, without overt identification but clearly personalized, is well balanced with the amount of story and rewards the long-time fan of the franchise. Particularly interesting is the way the author crafts each ‘I’-voice to the distinct character, such that even without the textual hints you could recognize who was speaking from the methods of expression alone. The testimonies nicely convey the varied horrors of assimilation, and the main narrative lines actually makes one want to cheer for so degenerate a character as Admiral Janeway.
Robyn Sullivent Gries, The Dream: As with Empty, this stories comes off very fanfic-ish; by the means of what is, quite frankly, either a cheap or underdeveloped plot device of some form of ghostly visitation, Tucker goes on a tour of the ship and cast like some kind of cheesy “It’s a Wonderful Life” routine, with the expected will-to-live-makes-him-live resolution. And I’m pretty sure I recall that Tucker was at Sim’s funeral, so there’s an error where the story says Tucker never knew about Sim.
Carolyn Winifred, Universal Chord: Unlike most of my generation, I’ve never been musically inclined… which is perhaps why this story left me cold and not a little confused. I assume it got in, and won third prize no less, on the basis of the stylish prose, itself reflective and rhythmic; but there’s not much story here, and what there is gets further obscured by the not exactly linear train of the narrative, particularly the dialogue, full of dangling referents. At the end, I was left feeling as though I had missed a lot of stuff, but without an obvious key to decrypt the text, had no choice but to shrug and move along.
Edgar Governo, You Are Not in Space: An interesting character piece undermined by a weak resolution. Hoshi Sato is a character I felt was under-appreciated both on the show and sidelined in the subsequent books; there was something about the way she thinks, and the cute kind of hesitancy, that made her easy to relate to. So I’m happy to find a story illustrating her working through a thorny problem, largely giving credit to her ambiguities as the insecure genius, both in the way she works and interacts with the other crewmembers. Though unschooled in linguistics, I found the problem intriguing… which, to an extent, is why the resolution seems rather pat, with the expected flash of inspiration that comes from the seemingly irrelevant conversation (sometimes object); and, while I certainly wasn’t expecting a lecture on language, the source of the problem—a negation and somewhat poetic expression—seems underwhelming considering how long it stumped someone of Sato’s caliber. I was looking for more of a payoff here.
Jerry M. Wolfe, Time Line: Gary Seven meets Khan. Although it can’t rival Greg Cox’s masterpiece—which, after all, introduced me to these characters in the first place—this alternate take on it is still a rather entertaining story in its own right, with snappy character interactions and a brief but interesting moral dilemma: what to do with genetically-augmented sociopaths… who are also just children. Seven makes the only choice really available to him, which of course taps the tragedy angle of the no-win scenario. The mysterious, un-sourced appearance of the bombs is probably the biggest flaw in the story: it presents a conflict without identifying the players, and since this will never be revisited, it’s a somewhat frustratingly vague lack of denouement. Despite that quibble, it is still a very satisfying tale.
Randy Tatano, Echoes: A story largely driven by the interesting concept of merging several of Trek’s most illustrious figures into one entity, and of promising a resolution to the issue of the Borg. The exposition is sometimes clunky, or perhaps I’m just easily annoyed by stories that keep repeating that there’s a secret here but the characters keep mum about what it is (I’m looking at you, Dan Brown), but the character work on Sam Farragut is intriguing—you can’t help but try and picture the man, and whose mannerisms may be surfacing at any given point. The author also resists making the uber-Captain into a godly kind of hero; just as he himself is a team effort, so too does the final mission ultimately depend on the short’s original character; something of a bold move, and I don’t know if we get to know Rush well enough for it, but the effort is appreciated if nothing else. And, perhaps redundant to say, I much prefer this resolution than the one we eventually got in Destiny: the Collective is liberated, but without all the despair and destruction, and best of all the solution lies in ‘human’ ingenuity and determination, through careful combinations of various elements of Trek history rather than introducing a new player—although I did wonder how they got to an apparent Borg homeworld so easily, even with a cloak. I’m not entirely sure I would have given it second prize on account of the sometimes lack of finesse, but a quite good story nonetheless.
Rigel Ailur, Brigadoon: Of all the conceits to get multiple shows/generations together in this volume, this is probably the most interesting—in part because it’s something we’ve already seen in Trek and other sci-fi settings before (time passing differently from location to location), but the familiar plot is given new life by the retrospectively obvious yet presently clever use of the tactic to bridge the various series’ timeframes into one story. The execution doesn’t always play off as well—the TNG portion doesn’t serve to advance the story much, and the final solution of using Voyager’s bio-gel feels a bit shoehorned (hardly the only ship to be equipped with those, though I understand Seven not being around to generate the plan)—but it winds up feeling pleasantly like an episode where a different cast gets rotated in between each commercial—far more a ‘Valentine’ than ENT managed. Characterization is brief but good, and I was amused by the way the author cherry-picked their VOY-R continuity: Chakotay in the captain’s chair, Seven at the think tank, but also Janeway being useful (and alive) and Torres not being crazy in some monastery. Between the concept, characters, and the dual sense of sacrifice and success, this is a story firing on most if not all cylinders.
Jeremy Yoder, Reborn: If you stop to think about it, this is a story that doesn’t make much sense, with Q-power and temporal mechanics that serve plot logic and little else. That said, Yoder does his damnest to make sure you don’t stop to think about it, propelling the story forward with relentless, manic energy, sending the reader spinning across characters, locations and timeframes as though caught in a pinball machine. I don’t know if it would hold up to a re-read, but the sheer breathlessness of it is contagious on first being thrown in, always braced to see where and when the next twist in this cosmic melodrama will take us. I have no idea what this Lazarus person or an anti-matter universe refers to, but ultimately the specifics are less important in a story where the clip pacing is really the star.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
