Spoilers Section 31: Control by David Mack Review Thread

I liked Prometheus Design

 

My thoughts exactly.

It is my understanding that @Christopher did not write that.

 

I never heard such a thing mentioned before.. where did you hear that?

 

Here probably, many many moons ago. @David Mack, am I right in thinking you wrote the epilogue to Greater than the Sum to better tie in with Destiny?

 

The acknowledgements makes it clear that there were quite a bit of collaboration and sharing of notes between them. It seems unlikely that Mack would write a dozen pages that read a lot more like Bennett's style than his own, rather than just making a few suggestions.

 

So I could be wrong then.

 

I guess I should clarify - not "worst" in terms of prose quality. A lot of pre-Relaunch Era novels were all but shovelware, and if their plots were stupid, they existed in isolation, never to affect any works that followed.

Perhaps "most crushingly disappointing," given the author's talents and prior works, would be more appropriate? It read like a burned-out Mack on autopilot/Mad Libs. The only spark of creativity was the chapter written in code.

Virtually all of the previously-established characters had adopted the same personality by the three-quarters mark, all "smirking" and sarcasm with no subtext or subtlety. I'd loved Bashir on the show, and the relaunch had employed him well - Abyss in particular is an all-time favorite. And I never bought what he became in Mack's hands, from Zero Sum Game to A Ceremony of Losses to Disavowed to Control. He'd been hollowed out long before that book's conclusion. And to what end? (The less said about Mack's "fleshing out" of Sarina Douglas's personality across those books, the better.)

This isn't to say that Mack can't write strong books with those characters, stories with depth, surprise, and resonance - I liked Ceremony a great deal and loved Disavowed, along with the first two Cold Equations novels. Even flawed books like Zero Sum Game and The Body Electric had moments of wonder - Mack somehow took the contradictory TV treatment of the Breen and built a fascinating social structure for them that justified all of the contradictions (one of the best ret-cons I've ever seen), and the idea that the Big Bad in Electric is pursuing a great work of art surprised me in the best possible way.

But Control goes off the rails, drowning in cynicism and cliche, to the point where I put the book down, bored, during the final confrontations. (The last page made me exclaim out loud, "Oh, for Christ's sake.")

You can still do scale in Trek novels post-Destiny, and I respect Mack's ambition, but the whole book felt like a terrible miscalculation. How many more times do we need to see the concept of the Federation mutate? The Dominion War shook it up effectively on television. The Destiny series did the same for the book line. Even the concept of the Typhon Pact, if not the execution of the novels under its heading, had real potential - in the sense that a clash of ideology holds interest, much more so than "how will the Federation face down this terrible power???" in the wake of the Borg/Caeliar saga. Perhaps we will re-examine our beliefs, discover new things, emerge better for our troubles!

But a lot of what was interesting in the TP books ended up abandoned (how are the Gorn doing?) or rolled back (bye, Andorians! Hi, Andorians!). The Fall didn't work, and replaced a rich and interesting set of characters at the head of the Federation with individuals who haven't established any kind of coherent presence in the novels yet. The novels kept going back to the same well of "let's shake things up!!" with diminishing returns, and doing so in such a way that other, more interesting story paths were neglected or damaged. (What ended up happening to the Titan line sums up just about everything: it began with strong novels and a fascinating mission, got thrown off its course by the crossover demands of Destiny, and has since been tossed back and forth purposelessly. Which characters who were on the Titan at its launch have received any lasting development since, say, Over a Torrent Sea? You could argue that Riker's promotion counts, except it was arbitrary and abrupt, a plot mechanic that hijacked a character - and his personality hasn't changed. By the end of it, the Titan's just another ship, caught up in an ACTION-PACKED!!! adventure.)

To seek out new life and new civilizations enthralled me. I'm exhausted by "Federation thrown into disarray" bullshit. We've put up with it for eight (going on nine, going on ten!) years in the book line. Mack keeps writing books, and with each successive one seems like he's getting more and more bored. (The last year, with Control, Desperate Hours, and Fortune of War was particularly unkind. Go back and read A Time to Kill and A Time to Heal. That was Mack, tearing at the Federation's fabric, but doing so in a revolutionary way. Then read his prose in Control or Hours, and you'll see the autopilot.)

At the end, we've rocked the Federation yet again. Big fucking deal. And in doing so, we're going to...taint Jean-Luc Picard? That's the fascinating new direction?

What is left of the Federation I loved watching on television and reading about in novels? Which characters still have distinct personalities and are left to like? What's the last good thing we've seen the Federation achieve? What is the point of any of this if it's all just nihilism and brutality? How is any of this consistent with the universe we all fell in love with? Why do we keep tearing at it, and tearing at it, and tearing at it, instead of expanding and improving it? And why do we keep doing so in such boring, cliched fashion?

The only good thing about the break in the novel's publication is that nobody had to follow up on this trainwreck.

TL;dr - Bad character choices, boring plot choices, exhausting thematic choices, God-in-the-machine cliches...I don't remember what I expected when I opened Control, but it wasn't this. It's the only time I've felt angry at the end of a Trek book.

 

I don't disagree fundamentally with any of your critiques, though I do in how much they bother me. The repeated upend-the-status-quo events were tiresome, and I agree that "The Fall," in particular, while a fine event in its own right, hasn't paid off long-term with the loss of Bacco creating a hole that hasn't really been replaced in the dynamic (same with Piñiero and Choudury's deaths in "Cold Equations." Šmrhová is fine, I guess, but the most memorable thing about her remains that you absolutely should not google how to spell her name where people can see your screen. Konya's cool, and keeps CLB's "Put the 'secure' in 'security officer'" concept on the E-E, but he's been around all the way back to SCE, and "older characters are better-developed, so focus on them more" isn't really a solution to the novelverse shedding interesting material without creating new stuff that's equal or better to fill the gap).

The past eighteen endless years have certainly made me open to the novelverse moving in a "History is just one goddamned thing after another" direction (never mind that that's the trend in serialized fiction; it's been a long time since it was in style for dramas that weren't specifically procedural to not regularly blow up their own premise to some extent or another), but I agree that the large number of events and large number of series have made it harder for there to be much ongoing development with characterization and non-event plots. I haven't tried a front-to-back reread of the DS9 relaunch yet, but I can't imagine that the time skip won't play better without years-long gaps between installments (I think I wrote a post somewhere where I checked the numbers and found that there have been fewer or the same number of DS9 novels post-Destiny than there in the relaunch pre-Destiny, and the latter half was spread over thrice as long a period of time).

Still, there are a few unpleasant realities we need to face; the several series are all popular, so there's no way someone (or anyone) isn't going to get left out. Events sell books. And, when the novels fire up again, there's practically zero chance that it won't kick off with "Countdown to Prose," (barring developments with the new TV Trek projects that are rumored), either overtly, or something like the "do it without doing it" idea Dayton developed last year and mentioned in a Literary Treks interview.

 

I did write the entirety of Greater Than the Sum. Dave sent me info about Destiny so I knew what I had to set up in the epilogue. I may at one point have said that I wish he had written the epilogue, since that sort of material comes more naturally to him than to me. But he didn't.

 

I do agree with you guys that the constant big galaxy shifting events did start to get annoying after a while, but it did seem like we were moving away from that back to smaller stories the last few years.

 

I just googled Šmrhová. It’s what I guessed.
I have mixed feelings on event stories. One one side I like having Grand stories that affect the universe as a whole, but on another, I like the smaller stories and events usually take resources away from those.
If you take away Typhon Pact, The Fall and the various trilogies, there’s only a few novels left in the post Nemesis era.

 

Okay.

In that case I have to generally agree with you.

Not much to add really.

 

I strongly disagree that Mack was working on autopilot when he wrote Control.

I see where you're coming from re: TrekLit's general direction. TrekLit was basically on a deconstructionist kick for a long time, especially Mack's work. This is probably best exemplified in Vanguard, Destiny, and Typhon Pact. I think this is mostly a reaction to three basic things: the inherent creative limitations of the Roddenberrian archetype; the writers' desire for more thematically complex storytelling; and the deeply-troubled post-9/11 era of the past two decades.

But I also think the books have been consciously trying to shore up the Roddenberrian archetype for a while now, post-The Fall. The Seeker novels are deliberately constructed to work like episodes of TOS; the most recent TNG novels post-Fall are, to my understanding, a return to traditional TNG-style story structures; and the novels of Kirsten Beyer and Christopher L. Bennett (especially his Rise of the Federation novels) are very specifically structured to affirm rather than deconstruct the traditional Roddenberrian archetype for the Federation. And I don't think those novels get nearly as much attention as the deconstructionist stuff.

 

If I may just focus on this small element of the discussion...

I got the impression that The Fall was very much designed specifically to put an end to that mode of storytelling in the TrekLit universe. As you say, the books have been in this deconstructionist political intrigue mode for a while now, basically ever since Bacco was introduced as a character. We never had such a consistent window into the Federation government before her, and whatever events happened in the TrekLit universe, we always saw them through that perspective as well as that of our regular crews.

I always thought that The Fall was intended to put an end to all that by killing her off both literally and figuratively, and the books would henceforth move away from that type of story and back to the new-worlds-new-civilizations mode, where we don't worry about what's going on at the centre of Federation government anymore and just focus on our crews out there in the galaxy. That's why Bacco hasn't been replaced by any substantive equivalent character in the ongoing TrekLit - because she's not supposed to be, because we're just not doing that kind of story anymore.

As for where Control fits into that, well I guess that was more that there was an already established and as-yet-unfinished storyline that needed finishing, regardless of the wider philosophy governing the books line at the time.

.

 

But... I really liked Bacco.

I get your read that "The Fall" was intended to do to galactic political intrigue what "Destiny" did to the Borg, but while it makes sense to Borg the Borg up to eleven before clearing them out, that's pretty counterintuitive for politics. I don't see how I was supposed to walk away from "The Fall" feeling like the politics had gotten too politicky and now we're all politicked out for a while. If anything, it should be even more politicky than before as the Federation tries to figure out how to keep a deranged con man from taking over the government again, rather than ignoring it and inviting it to happen again.

It would've been less jarring simply not to go up to the President's level anymore. The VOY relaunch doesn't have a problem with keeping Bacco in the back pocket. Likewise with movie-era books with Roth and Ra-ghoratreii. Now we still hear of the President, but they're a cypher. The scope has not narrowed so much as thinned.

 

I think there is a big difference between a deconstructionist text and a politics story. Articles of the Federation is a deeply Roddenberrian story with a small deconstructionist subplot, for instance; Articles is all about reaffirming how awesome the Federation is and how cool a progressive interstellar democracy would be.

I would not correlate the rise of a deconstructionist tendency in TrekLit with Bacco; I would correlate it with the publication of novels like A Time to Kill/Heal by Mack or Hollow Men by Una McCormack. And for that matter, I don't think the books are saying we're not going to be doing Federation politics anymore; I fully expect that they're gonna keep drawing on the Palais as part of their universe. I don't even mean that there aren't going to be deconstructionist Trek novels anymore; they're still making DS9 and DISC novels and DS9 and DISC are nothing if not deconstructionist.

What I mean is that, I think TrekLit is moving way from having deconstructionist novels be the driving force of the line the way it was particularly from about 2008 (with the publication of Destiny) to 2013 (with the publication of The Fall). Novels in the deconstructionist vein like Control or Enigma Tales are still getting published (or at least they will be once Pocket gets the line going again) -- they're just not the driving force of the line anymore.

 

And to think -- when The Fall came out, I found it implausible that the Federation government could be so easily taken over by a fraud and subverted into a proto-fascist state with so little resistance. Now it seems prophetic.

 

I think you totally missed my point there, but...

In real life, Europeans were technologically inferior to the Far East and the Middle East up until a few centuries ago, but they adopted knowledge from those cultures, used it as the basis for colonial expansion and industrialization, and ended up rapidly surpassing those other cultures and dominating them politically and economically. It was because they started out comparatively backward and resource-poor that they were so driven to compete with and surpass other cultures.

Also... "taking over the universe ten years after WW3?" Obviously no. The Mirror Terrans' aggression started in that year, when they took over the T'Plana'Hath and began reverse-engineering its technology to serve their expansion. By 2155, some 92 years later, they'd built a fair-sized empire, but one that was evidently still modest in size and tenuous in its hold on power, since the rebellion threatened to destroy it. (Archer claimed the Empire had endured for centuries, but that was probably propagandistic distortion, or else the Empire had existed on Earth for some time before expanding into space.) They then obtained 23rd-century technology from the Defiant and were able to use that additional technological boost to secure the conquest of a much larger empire by the 2250s.