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Spoilers Section 31: Control by David Mack Review Thread

Rate Section 31: Control

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And now I'm wondering why it has a plural name when it's a singular entity. Maybe the rhyme with "your eye" was intentional, given that it was made to watch everything?
Or one of the ancient Egyptian myths refers to it as the "Eyes Of Ra", meaning both the upper and lower lands of Egypt. In the novel it might've been meant to represent Earth and Mars in the early days, and then Earth and the Federation.
 
The English language needs new tenses to deal with a time that is the past of a fictional future for which we are even further in the past.

While the above is certainly not much of a spoiler for anybody who has read the first chapter, I'd have still put it in spoiler tags.
But that's just me.:biggrin:

Wasn't there an ep called Past Prologue? :p
 
Yeah, but like it says, it's two asps, the plural form of the name. (And it's the Greek form of the original Egyptian name.) So it's weird to have a plural name applied to a single entity.

It's strongly implied she's having a bit of a Xoanon (doctor who) moment, and the symbolism mixed and the ending strongly implies she is a multiple personality AÍ.
 
Finally cracked mine. . . . It seems I misspoke here: when I got home last night, I realized that the epilogue-as-prologue was Chapter 1, and that I'd finished through Chapter 3, and was looking ahead into Chapter 4.
Is it just me, or did the contrivances needed to bring first Bashir and Sarina in, and then (especially!) to bring Data in (at least, I think it's Data who's about to be brought in: a computer expert who is both the best of the best of the best, and impeccably ethical), get deliberately "lampshaded"?
 
Is it just me, or did the contrivances needed to bring first Bashir and Sarina in, and then (especially!) to bring Data in (at least, I think it's Data who's about to be brought in: a computer expert who is both the best of the best of the best, and impeccably ethical), get deliberately "lampshaded"?

No. Graniv knew of Bashir because he is famous throughout the Federation for defying Ishan and saving the Andorians, and Graniv was familiar with him. She probably also inferred he had inside help in getting the Taurus meta-genome to the Andorians. Meanwhile, going to Data and Lal when you realize there's a nearly omnipresent super-A.I. monitoring an entire interstellar society is just common sense.
 
I just finished this one. It was a quick read and very intense. Once I got about half way through I had trouble putting it down. I stayed up way later than I had expected. Definitely outstanding.

I find the idea of an AI being behind Section 31 makes their pervasiveness much more plausible.

I read the part in chapter 7 where it said that:
Oversight of the project had been transferred out of the university's lab, to some department at Starfleet headquarters whose designation no one would share with him.
to mean that Section 31 of that era appropriated Uraei and that later Uraei appropriated/re-formed Section 31. That is the only way I can reconcile the timeline with regards to Reed's recruitment and the reveal of 31 being around in the 20th century in "From History's Shadow."

I wonder if the mention of a U.S.S. Discovery during the Uraei code chapter was intentional or just coincidental...
 
to mean that Section 31 of that era appropriated Uraei and that later Uraei appropriated/re-formed Section 31. That is the only way I can reconcile the timeline with regards to Reed's recruitment and the reveal of 31 being around in the 20th century in "From History's Shadow."

This will be addressed in Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference.


I wonder if the mention of a U.S.S. Discovery during the Uraei code chapter was intentional or just coincidental...

From the timing, it'd have to be an earlier ship of the same name. Although it couldn't be Discovery NX-04, since that was the first NX-class ship to be lost in the Romulan War, more than 8 years before the scene in question.
 
This will be addressed in Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference.
As if I needed more reasons to look forward to that one :)

From the timing, it'd have to be an earlier ship of the same name. Although it couldn't be Discovery NX-04, since that was the first NX-class ship to be lost in the Romulan War, more than 8 years before the scene in question.

That makes sense. Starfleet does have a habit of recycling starship names.
 
I read the part in chapter 7 where it said that: to mean that Section 31 of that era appropriated Uraei and that later Uraei appropriated/re-formed Section 31. That is the only way I can reconcile the timeline with regards to Reed's recruitment and the reveal of 31 being around in the 20th century in "From History's Shadow."

31 wasn't around in the 20th century (or even the 21st), at least not in a form recognizable as the Section 31 of the 22nd-24th centuries. My thinking was always that - while their missions are similar, at least in the broad sense - S31 was several steps removed what you see in From History's Shadow and Elusive Salvation, and that having S31 be a direct descendant of Project Sign in 1947 is a bit too simplistic. There's a huge span of time between those two points, with lots of room for adding in juicy details. :)
 
I just got the book yesterday, and read it in one go. In entirely unrelated news, my latest earworm song has been the Pet Shop Boys' "Integral".

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If you've done nothing wrong
You've got nothing to fear
If you've something to hide
You shouldn't even be here
You've had your chance
Now we've got the mandate
If you've changed your mind
I'm afraid it's too late
We're concerned
You're a threat
You're not integral
To the project


I am still in the "Wow" reaction mode.
 
No. Graniv knew of Bashir because he is famous throughout the Federation for defying Ishan and saving the Andorians, and Graniv was familiar with him. She probably also inferred he had inside help in getting the Taurus meta-genome to the Andorians. Meanwhile, going to Data and Lal when you realize there's a nearly omnipresent super-A.I. monitoring an entire interstellar society is just common sense.

I do wonder how it was so easy to get to Data...even his friends can't just waltz up, and Bashir does precisely that after meeting him for ten minutes over a decade ago.
 
I do wonder how it was so easy to get to Data...even his friends can't just waltz up, and Bashir does precisely that after meeting him for ten minutes over a decade ago.

I don't remember -- is there a reason his close friends can't just waltz up on him?

I would assume that Data was aware Bashir was on his way before he actually encountered him.
 
31 wasn't around in the 20th century (or even the 21st), at least not in a form recognizable as the Section 31 of the 22nd-24th centuries. My thinking was always that - while their missions are similar, at least in the broad sense - S31 was several steps removed what you see in From History's Shadow and Elusive Salvation, and that having S31 be a direct descendant of Project Sign in 1947 is a bit too simplistic. There's a huge span of time between those two points, with lots of room for adding in juicy details. :)

Also, realistically, the fictional trope of a vast conspiracy that endures in secret for centuries, like the Illuminati or Marvel's Hydra or Timeless's Rittenhouse, is utter felgercarb. Secrets don't last forever. Statistically speaking, the more people who are in on a secret, and the longer they keep it, the more inevitable it gets that someone will either slip up and give it away by accident, or have a pang of conscience and give it away on purpose. Eventually, any conspiracy's exposure becomes inevitable unless it ceases to exist, and the bigger and more widespread it is, the shorter its life expectancy. So a conspiracy can be securely hidden or it can be large and sweeping -- it can't be both, not for long.

That's why what Dave posited in Control is such a good idea -- it's the only possible justification for Section 31 continuing to exist for more than two centuries without being exposed. But it depends on the existence of an entity that wasn't "born" until 2141. So whatever government secrets may have existed in the 20th century can't really be more than the spiritual ancestors of 31.
 
Also, realistically, the fictional trope of a vast conspiracy that endures in secret for centuries, like the Illuminati or Marvel's Hydra or Timeless's Rittenhouse, is utter felgercarb.
Or Marvel's Illuminati.... Although they didn't exist for centuries, right?
 
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