I read it and thought it was entertaining. I’m usually more interested in the characterizations than I am in the action or ship descriptions. It’s too bad that they demand that the writers fit a formula instead of letting the authors do more with the character background. I would have liked to know more about the Valkeya character. I’m guessing the name has some significance. Poor, sweet Spock.
Spoilers SNW: Ring of Fire by David Mack Review Thread
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I just finished it. It is a tribute to Mr. Mack that I finished it so quickly, even during NYCC.
TBR. Looking forward to it after Picard:Firewall, but I want (though I suppose don't _really_ need) to get through the remaining SNW here; hit them in order you understand. Have done my best to keep up to date etc and tackle titles in that way. Alas, might be a bit til I get to it (needing to read ref and research many nights, these Frankenstein things don't write themselves), but looking forward to the time during some dark and stormy nights ;-)
Just finished it. Mack's work remains compulsively readable (a strong contrast for me, since the last book I read was an anthology so I was never able to build up any momentum).
First things first, illustrations are always fun, and I liked the era-appropriate Franz Joseph-esque style of this one. The illustration of the station seems far bigger than it read as (give or take the lengthy run through one of the outer fan-blade sections at the end), but I guess that can be chalked up to most of its volume being equipment. It's not unprecedented in SNW, that fuel station in season two used the DSC starbase as a foundation and then was expanded further, so it was even larger with fewer people aboard.
Pike's arc seemed to build on his uncomfortably long dramatic pause during the season two cliffhanger, along with his reputation as the introspective Trek captain from our only exposure to him being "The Cage" for so long. Ortegas as his acting first officer was an interesting pairing, and the way he was hanging back a bit and letting her handle the nuts-and-bolts orders was a realistic touch that isn't often present in Star Trek (feels mostly like an early TNG thing, with Picard giving a general directive on the bridge and then Riker filling in the details). The on-station plot was appropriately twisty. The mirrored temporal echo plot device now has me wondering if that's a more common trope that I wasn't aware of, because I'd only ever seen it once before, in the Back to the Future video game, though I feel a little slow in retrospect that I didn't consider that the established-to-be-mysterious Sven and Valkeya might've been from the past-version of the mystery ship. I am a little surprised that it turned out that the station security chief actually was just an incompetent dink, a couple of his blunders really did feel like he must be hiding sabotage under a veneer of buffoonery.
Another small thing, I did enjoy all the more-than-full impulse powering around the Enterprise did. Maybe it's The Hunt for Red October, maybe it's watching old Space Shuttle launches (where, due to design revisions after the engines were rated, the standard launch throttle setting was 104%), maybe it's that scene in BEY where the ship has the warp engine plugged straight into the impulse drive and Sulu says they're at full impulse when it really looks like they're doing more than full, but it's a tech-touch I've wanted to see in Star Trek.
I did notice a few typos or odd omissions. The big one was that the first temporal quake was five thousand meters under the station during the scene on the Enterprise, but when the Klingon agent got the report from the station computer about what knocked him out, it was five hundred meters away (I assume that whichever number it was supposed to be would give context when they mentioned the ship-grabber could only extend so many meters because of damage). There were a few scenes where it felt like important information wasn't brought up or seeded until late in the process, like during Pike's flashback there was no mention of the captain or first officer until after it was over (which reminds me, I liked the surprise reveal the other ship also had the third-in-command running night watch during the encounter). Similarly, during the scenes where the fan-blade sections of the station were being jettisoned in chapter 23, Uhura is talking to Una on the Enterprise, and then a few pages later, Valkeya is talking about needing to restore communications with the Enterprise, but there's no beat where the communications are actually disabled.
Last couple odds and ends, I liked the acknowledgement that fire on a ship is bad, and the explanation that Pike's kitchen was a special favor to induce him to get back into space after his little time-crystal crisis. The mention of foreign nationals enlisting in Starfleet to earn citizenship felt a little too contemporary. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the word "earn" made it feel more transactional than aspirational. I liked the meta joke about how Scotty couldn't figure out how old M'Benga is, along with the one about Pelia having known a proper miracle worker (much less awkwardly phrased than the Doctor Who reference in the actual show). I know it was established on-screen that it exists in this era, but it still feels weird for the Daystrom Institute to not have been named posthumously (how old would Daystrom have even been in ~2245, and have not just been the wunderkind inventor of duotronics but also the founder of a scientific institute that can build giant space stations over black holes to snatch lost timeships? Oh, MA has an answer: 26. Jeeze, I need to start getting up earlier in the morning).
Pike's arc seemed to build on his uncomfortably long dramatic pause during the season two cliffhanger, along with his reputation as the introspective Trek captain from our only exposure to him being "The Cage" for so long. Ortegas as his acting first officer was an interesting pairing, and the way he was hanging back a bit and letting her handle the nuts-and-bolts orders was a realistic touch that isn't often present in Star Trek (feels mostly like an early TNG thing, with Picard giving a general directive on the bridge and then Riker filling in the details). The on-station plot was appropriately twisty. The mirrored temporal echo plot device now has me wondering if that's a more common trope that I wasn't aware of, because I'd only ever seen it once before, in the Back to the Future video game, though I feel a little slow in retrospect that I didn't consider that the established-to-be-mysterious Sven and Valkeya might've been from the past-version of the mystery ship. I am a little surprised that it turned out that the station security chief actually was just an incompetent dink, a couple of his blunders really did feel like he must be hiding sabotage under a veneer of buffoonery.
Another small thing, I did enjoy all the more-than-full impulse powering around the Enterprise did. Maybe it's The Hunt for Red October, maybe it's watching old Space Shuttle launches (where, due to design revisions after the engines were rated, the standard launch throttle setting was 104%), maybe it's that scene in BEY where the ship has the warp engine plugged straight into the impulse drive and Sulu says they're at full impulse when it really looks like they're doing more than full, but it's a tech-touch I've wanted to see in Star Trek.
I did notice a few typos or odd omissions. The big one was that the first temporal quake was five thousand meters under the station during the scene on the Enterprise, but when the Klingon agent got the report from the station computer about what knocked him out, it was five hundred meters away (I assume that whichever number it was supposed to be would give context when they mentioned the ship-grabber could only extend so many meters because of damage). There were a few scenes where it felt like important information wasn't brought up or seeded until late in the process, like during Pike's flashback there was no mention of the captain or first officer until after it was over (which reminds me, I liked the surprise reveal the other ship also had the third-in-command running night watch during the encounter). Similarly, during the scenes where the fan-blade sections of the station were being jettisoned in chapter 23, Uhura is talking to Una on the Enterprise, and then a few pages later, Valkeya is talking about needing to restore communications with the Enterprise, but there's no beat where the communications are actually disabled.
Last couple odds and ends, I liked the acknowledgement that fire on a ship is bad, and the explanation that Pike's kitchen was a special favor to induce him to get back into space after his little time-crystal crisis. The mention of foreign nationals enlisting in Starfleet to earn citizenship felt a little too contemporary. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the word "earn" made it feel more transactional than aspirational. I liked the meta joke about how Scotty couldn't figure out how old M'Benga is, along with the one about Pelia having known a proper miracle worker (much less awkwardly phrased than the Doctor Who reference in the actual show). I know it was established on-screen that it exists in this era, but it still feels weird for the Daystrom Institute to not have been named posthumously (how old would Daystrom have even been in ~2245, and have not just been the wunderkind inventor of duotronics but also the founder of a scientific institute that can build giant space stations over black holes to snatch lost timeships? Oh, MA has an answer: 26. Jeeze, I need to start getting up earlier in the morning).
Was finally able to get back to Indigo today (still prefer the name Chapters, TBH), and this time they had the book on the shelf, so I was able to snag myself a copy. I want to finish the book I’m currently reading first, but this one jumps to next in the list.
Yeah, I’ll own this one. I can fix it in eBook versions relatively soon; fixing it in hard copies will have to wait for the second and subsequent printings.
This one I refute: on page 244, after Valkeya says she needs to restore communications with Enterprise, Spock confirms the problem is because the station no longer has a working subspace transmitter, or a functional backup. It's not that big a leap to infer that the transceiver was lost in the accretion disk after the last status report was made to Una. Furthermore, Uhura confirms on page 247 that the station has “lost their subspace antenna, and their transceiver’s offline.”
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