Shards and Shadows review thread (SPOILERS)

[David Mack]

Glad to hear you enjoyed "For Want of a Nail," Trent! And your suspicions are correct—even as I wrote that story, I had a plan in mind for Rise Like Lions...

 

[DevilEyes]

I just finished Nobunaga during one of my breaks and lunch, and I really enjoyed it. It was really good character based story. I especially liked the end, which does actually bring up a spoiler question

Spoiler: End of the story

is T'Pol a Rebel?

I hope so. I was less than happy with what they did with her in Age of the Empress, where she

Spoiler: AOTE

goes back to the warm bosom of the Empire just because of a conflict with T'Pau.

And that's far from the only problem I had with that novella... "Nobunaga" does undo some of the damage by making Hoshi and her minions really scary again, rather than the lesser of the two evils compared to those nasty aliens, as AOTE made them seem.

The Terran Empire was brutal, sure, but the Alliance was (arguably) worse. It makes my blood boil the way they enslave humans like that. Slavery is universally abhorrent, an absolute evil; the way the Alliance thrives on it, makes me long for their fall.

Why was Terran Empire better? Because it is nicer when humans are those doing the enslaving?

I've only read the first 5 stories in the book, a few months ago when I started reading the Mirror Universe fiction in chronological order (which I took a break from to read some other novels). I liked "Black Flag" the best (despite not knowing the characters), followed by "The Greater Good". "Ill Winds" was OK but nothing special, and in that case it did hurt that I was unfamiliar with the characters. "The Traitor" was completely pointless.

 

[KRAD]

Glad you liked "Family Matters." The story was pretty experimental, and I wasn't 100% certain the experiment succeeded when I turned it in.

 

[Jim Johnson]

Jim Johnson, A Terrible Beauty

I wonder if this story was hamstrung by being set after the events of Saturn’s Children but before Rise Like Lions—it felt more like an interlude than a progression of the MU’s overall narrative.

I don't think I felt hamstrung when I wrote this story, but I do admit remember kinda feeling my way through it a bit since I really had no idea what was going to come next. This was really meant to be more of a "What was Keiko up to during all that time" sort of story than a "let's move the storyline forward" sort of story.

Thanks for the comments, Trent! Much appreciated.

 

[Christopher]

...but rather a hungry, bottom-up, Darwinian emphasis on extreme competition...

Which has nothing to do with what Darwin actually wrote, but is more something that some rather venal political and social movements attributed to Darwin in order to pretend their actions were scientifically justified. But that's another discussion.

By this time Spock’s plan is finally in effect, so nominally there’s a protagonist to root for, although her methods—like her patron’s (and, from what I recall, her “616” counterpart)—take a very long view of morality;

The term in use these days to designate the mainstream Trek timeline is "Prime."

Christopher L. Bennett, Empathy: My reaction to this story was a bit odd, and reminded me of how I felt reading Greater than the Sum, insofar that I was more interested in what was happening in the background of the story—in this case, revisiting the curious ecology of Irriol, this time subject to the experiments of the Alliance—and in the particular character psychologies sketched out than in what’s happening in the foreground with those characters, along the plot. The characters make this tale, particularly Vale and Jaza.

I take that as a compliment.

Vale is a strangely compelling portrait of pragmatic self-loathing self-interest as a woman who seeks not to change the status quo, but to secure a position within it that is comfortable, and damn the rest. One imagines there must always be such individuals who willingly support their own oppressors, but it is morbidly fascinating to ‘meet’ such a person.

I'm not sure I'd agree with "self-loathing," beyond the fact that she shares her master's low opinion of the human species (which, as I remarked earlier in the thread, is understandable given MU Terran history). But otherwise you're basically right. Not everyone's a revolutionary. Most people just accept the world the way it is and try to make the best life they can for themselves and their existing or potential families. Vale did what women and other nominally powerless individuals throughout history have done: work the system to try to ensure that their children can have a better life than they did.

Given all this, I felt like the ball was dropped when it came to Riker, who is little more than a brutish thug. It’s not Riker’s morality that bothered me, however, but his simplicity: the character is a cobbled cliché of the violent flunky, without depth, who never does anything unexpected, and when he predictably dies, the only question is how—considering his consistent, unthinking aggression—it hadn’t happened earlier. Perhaps there was a point to making Riker this way: that sometimes people are just brutes without the layering that goes into the cruelties of psyches like Vale and Jaza, or that just because a character is important in our universe doesn’t mean they can’t just be a nobody on this side, but it feels like a waste of a character.

As I remarked before, my goal was to explore the consequences to Riker of the absence of Deanna and the absence of what she represents, empathy. So Riker is, symbolically, a person whose life is devoid of empathy, who never received any and never learned to give any. Yes, he's less of a person, shallower and emptier, than the rest, but that's the idea. All he has are aggression and ambition, with nothing to balance them. The brutal circumstances of his life, the lack of emotional warmth or connection with other people, has left him a sociopath.

A nice point about Empathy is the way it touches of a number of plot threads that arose earlier—the Alliance’s research into telepathy, the history of the Trois, Tuvok’s role in the resistance—so that it feels like something of a capstone for the anthology, even though nothing is concluded yet.

Interesting. Except that I wrote this before I knew "The Sacred Chalice" was being written; in my original proposal, Ian had never married and Deanna had never even existed. So I had no idea that the history of the Trois would be set up as a prior thread.