So What Are you Reading?: Generations
- Thread starter captcalhoun
- Start date
Of course, I'd read the Captain's Table novels, and the follow-up anthology, when they first came out. I just don't recall what I'd just now commented on Re: the Janeway story, from reading it the first time.
In some ways, it reads like a "Piper" story. To the point where sometimes Janeway seems like Piper in a Janeway suit.
Not that I don't like the two Piper stories, and not that I don't wish that whole Piper series had survived the "Richard Arnold Reign of Terror."
In some ways, it reads like a "Piper" story. To the point where sometimes Janeway seems like Piper in a Janeway suit.
Not that I don't like the two Piper stories, and not that I don't wish that whole Piper series had survived the "Richard Arnold Reign of Terror."
Well, in that both characters probably drew on Carey's personal experience as a crew member on sailing ships, that's not surprising.
Is there anything Diane Carey ever wrote that didn't draw on her peronal experience as a crew member on sailing ships, one way or another?
I mean, Piper, both as a subversion of the Mary Sue trope, and as a total motormouth, in a Janeway suit.
I mean, Piper, both as a subversion of the Mary Sue trope, and as a total motormouth, in a Janeway suit.
Is it bad for an author to draw on personal experience? Heck, is there anything Hemingway or Twain wrote that didn't draw on their real-life backgrounds? I don't understand why people say this about Carey as if it were a negative. Sure, she could get a little self-indulgent about it at times, but it's hardly an intrinsically bad thing.
Piper was nothing of the kind. She wasn't Mary Sue, she was "Lower Decks." The idea was to tell a Star Trek story from the fresh perspective of the junior officers, something that was quite innovative at the time. It wasn't just a normal Trek story with a guest character taking over, it was a new kind of Trek story where someone other than Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were the main characters, where those guys were the guest stars in a story focusing on Piper, Sarda, Scanner, and Merete. If anything, Kirk was the Mary Sue in Piper's story, because he was the impossibly perfect and brilliant supporting character who outshone the lead characters.
As I define the "Mary-Sue" trope, it is (1) an author-avatar or author-surrogate character, (2) inserted by an author in a shared milieu that author had no hand in creating, who (3) continually upstages the milieu's continuing protagonists, by (4) being brilliantly and obnoxiously right, and making the aforementioned continuing protagonists look like idiots.
Wiktionary defines it as
At any rate, Wesley Crusher is not an example of the trope, because he is one of the continuing protagonists of TNG. Likewise for Kes and Seven in VOY. Schaeffer is arguably a Mary-Sue, in Death's Angel, and Tail-Kinker to Ennien likewise in Uhura's Song, but I would argue that neither one is sufficiently obnoxious.
I argue that Piper is a lampshaded subversion of the Mary-Sue trope, in that she is brilliantly and obnoxiously wrong, at least as often as she's brilliantly and obnoxiously right.
And even in the Piper stories, Kirk could not possibly be an example of the trope, because he's regular cast, not an author insertion.
Wiktionary defines it as
and Wikipedia defines it as
At any rate, Wesley Crusher is not an example of the trope, because he is one of the continuing protagonists of TNG. Likewise for Kes and Seven in VOY. Schaeffer is arguably a Mary-Sue, in Death's Angel, and Tail-Kinker to Ennien likewise in Uhura's Song, but I would argue that neither one is sufficiently obnoxious.
I argue that Piper is a lampshaded subversion of the Mary-Sue trope, in that she is brilliantly and obnoxiously wrong, at least as often as she's brilliantly and obnoxiously right.
And even in the Piper stories, Kirk could not possibly be an example of the trope, because he's regular cast, not an author insertion.
What too many people misunderstand about the original intent of the term "Mary Sue" is that it didn't just mean a guest star who dominated the story more than the main characters -- since such things were actually common and encouraged in '60s and '70s TV dramas that aspired to an anthology-like flavor -- but an example of that type of character done badly, given the spotlight without deserving it. By that standard, Schaeffer in Death's Angel is one of the two most textbook Mary Sues in all of professional Trek Lit, along with Sola Thane in Triangle (the archetypal trope also requires the main characters to fall madly in love with the guest character and be written badly out of character in doing so). But Evan Wilson/Tail-Kinker is a textbook good example of a dominant guest character, the kind who genuinely is a rich and interesting and impressive enough character to deserve being the center of attention.
That's still missing the point of the Piper books. They were basically the first attempt at a Trek Lit spinoff centered on characters other than the main cast, like New Frontier or S.C.E.. Mackenzie Calhoun wasn't a Mary Sue in a book about Picard, because he was the lead character and Picard was the guest star. The Piper books were basically "What if Star Trek were told from the perspective of junior officers instead of the bridge crew?" They were like Teen Titans or Young Justice vis-a-vis Justice League, or the new Marvel Rising animated series vis-a-vis The Avengers. They were a spinoff where the sidekicks -- or in this case, the background extras -- became the main characters.
After all, the Piper books are written in the first person. That automatically makes Piper their lead character. This is the story of her life, a life that has her serving under the legendary Captain Kirk. It was that novel attempt at telling a Trek story from a different perspective -- both first-person and focused on someone other than the bridge crew -- that made the Piper books so innovative and different in their day, and people miss that when they just lump them into the pre-existing "Mary Sue" category.
Still in the "Janeway" CT novel (Fire Ship): the whole business of the Lumalit/"Menace" species having a biological imperative to either breed like flies, or drop like flies, vaguely reminds me of something similar with the "Moties" from Pournelle and Niven's The Mote in God's Eye. (I don't think I was even in high school when I received that as a gift from a relative who apparently knew either Pournelle or Niven personally. I finished it, but didn't care much for it; at the time, my science fiction experience began and ended with TOS reruns and maybe TAS.)
Oh, and Mr. Bennett, on the matter of Schaeffer being poorly-written (probably the worst-written character in what was otherwise one of the better Bantam outings), and of Tail Kinker being very well-written (in a really good book), and about Triangle being generally poorly written (what do you expect from Marshak & Culbreath?), I am in complete agreement.
Oh, and Mr. Bennett, on the matter of Schaeffer being poorly-written (probably the worst-written character in what was otherwise one of the better Bantam outings), and of Tail Kinker being very well-written (in a really good book), and about Triangle being generally poorly written (what do you expect from Marshak & Culbreath?), I am in complete agreement.
Just posted my review of Academy: Collision Course by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. I enjoyed this one more than I thought I would! Mixed feelings about having now finished all of the "Shatnarrative" novels, for sure.
Still reading I.K.S. Gorkon: A Good Day to Die by Keith R.A. DeCandido. I'm loving the dynamic of the Klingon crew. Can't believe it took me this long to read these novels!
Still reading I.K.S. Gorkon: A Good Day to Die by Keith R.A. DeCandido. I'm loving the dynamic of the Klingon crew. Can't believe it took me this long to read these novels!
I still have the Gorkon novels ahead. Something I will tackle after I have finished the Prey novels and TOS The Latter Fire. Whenever it will be.....
Wow. You weren't kidding. I'm almost a chapter in (Calhoun's first visit), and his first encounter with (I presume) the Captain of the Titanic ("damn iceberg"). (I could have sworn he showed up earlier!)
Oh, and getting back to Piper (a character I am very fond of, in case anybody took my comments to mean otherwise), who says the POV character is necessarily the "star" in first person fiction? The four novels and 53 out of the 56 short stories of the Sherlock Holmes canon (so far as I'm aware, the first use of the term "canon" to describe a body of fiction, rather than a body of scripture) say otherwise: Holmes is the star, but there are only two short stories (both in Casebook, as I recall) told from his POV, and one told in third person. All the others are ABOUT Holmes, but from WATSON's POV.
Holmes and Watson are the stars. That series has always been about the pair of them. And the point is not about Watson vs. Holmes. The point is that the fact that Watson's narrating stories about himself and his consulting-detective friend is how you know it isn't a series about Inspector Lestrade and the brave men of Scotland Yard. By the same token, the fact that Piper is narrating stories about herself and her crewmates Sarda, Merete, and Scanner is how you know that they aren't books about Kirk and the bridge crew, at least not centrally.
The choice to tell Dreadnought! (and later Battlestations!) from the first-person perspective of a junior officer and to center it on her experience was an experiment in a new kind of Star Trek storytelling, the first novel that centered on a different cast of characters than the TV leads, even if the TV leads were supporting cast within it (because of course she couldn't diverge too far from the norm in the initial experiment, since audiences wouldn't have been ready for that yet). And it was a whole cast, four new characters as junior surrogates/parallels for Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scott (sort of like that early proposed idea for TAS that never got off the ground). It was a story about that whole team of junior officers, centered on Piper but dealing heavily with her relationships with that group, especially Sarda (the Spock to her Kirk), and only secondarily with her interactions with Kirk and the TOS regulars (though there was more of that in Battlestations!). Piper's foursome were the heroes, Kirk & co. were their mentors. And the mentors in such a story always end up taking the back seat (or dying, a lot of the time) so that the young heroes can rise to the occasion on their own.
The lazy tendency to fixate on Piper alone and lump her into the familiar, tired "Mary Sue" category is missing the larger stylistic experiment and failing to recognize how very new and precedent-setting the Piper novels were. Nobody had ever done a professional Trek novel centered entirely on a book-original cast rather than the TV leads, let alone in first person. Dreadnought! was anything but a mere continuation of an already-hackneyed trope. It was the first step toward New Frontier and S.C.E. and all the book-original series that followed.
Indeed it did not continue the Mary-Sue trope. It set the reader up to expect the trope, then it subverted it, turned it on its ear, played with it, poked fun at it, and finally hung a lampshade on it. And that's what's so delightful about the Piper books, and what makes me wish that the subsequent ones hadn't been suppressed.
You're still making the flawed assumption that "Mary Sue" refers to any example of a guest character who gets more attention than the leads, rather than just a bad example of that trope. Again: 1960s-70s television aspired to an anthology flavor. The classiest TV shows of the '50s had been the anthologies, which featured original and adapted stories by some of the most prestigious playwrights and screenwriters around. So even shows with continuing casts aspired to an anthology-like flavor, and the regular leads were often just there to provide entry into the guest characters' story of the week, e.g. when The Fugitive's Richard Kimble wandered into a different town and took on a different assumed persona that got involved with the guest stars' lives. The lead characters stayed the same from week to week, but the guest stars were allowed to have major, life-changing stories, so it was with the guest stars that the real drama lay.
Everybody today assumes that when Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the stars," that meant he wanted it to be a space Western. But Westerns were a dime a dozen on TV at the time. There were countless other shows he could've named if that were all he wanted to convey. He chose Wagon Train because it was an acclaimed drama with an anthology flavor, a show where every episode centered primarily on a different guest star, to the point that almost every episode was titled "The [Guest Character] Story." That was what he wanted Star Trek to be, a show where the drama centered on guest characters and the leads were there to be involved in their journeys. You can see this in a number of early episodes. "Where No Man" is largely Mitchell & Dehner's story even though they were never intended to survive the episode. "The Corbomite Maneuver" is largely Bailey's journey. "Mudd's Women" and "Charlie X" are blatantly named for their central guest characters who get more story focus than the leads. "Balance of Terror" is largely a dramatic showcase for Mark Lenard as the Commander. And so on.
So there's nothing wrong with a guest character taking the lead in a story. Just writing a story that centers on a guest character does not imply an intention to tell a Mary Sue story, because the Mary Sue trope was specifically a parody of the ways in which fan fiction tended to do such stories badly. So to say that doing a well-writtten guest-centric story is "subverting the trope" is getting it backward. The trope is the failure to do a guest-centric story well. Just doing it well is not subverting the trope of doing it badly; that's an absurdly convoluted way of looking at it. That's like saying that a competent basketball player is making fun of people's expectations that he'll be a bad basketball player. No; he's just playing basketball.
Started on the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey novel by Gordon Doherty. It'll probably be a while before I try the game, but this novel uses Kassandra as the main character.
It's interesting so far, though I assume that there are spoilers for the game.
It's interesting so far, though I assume that there are spoilers for the game.
I finished up the last VOY: Distant Shores story I was going to read right now, @Christopher's Brief Candle. I really enjoyed this one, the Harry/Karah stuff was good, and I liked the extra little bits it added around Barge of the Dead.
I also read Isabo's Shirt before that, and that one was good too. As a Full Circle fan it was nice to get context behind the mirror.
I'm now reading, Star Wars: Smugglers Run: A Han Solo & Chewbacca Adventure by Greg Rucka. I'm about half way through and it's been pretty good so far.
I also read Isabo's Shirt before that, and that one was good too. As a Full Circle fan it was nice to get context behind the mirror.
I'm now reading, Star Wars: Smugglers Run: A Han Solo & Chewbacca Adventure by Greg Rucka. I'm about half way through and it's been pretty good so far.
Read Corona by Greg Bear over the weekend. It's one of those weird early Pocket novels that almost seems like it's in an alternate universe.
Yesterday, I finished Maurice Leblanc's The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. I was expecting something similar to E.W. Hornung's A.J. Raffles stories, but Leblanc's stories are much more farcical. Raffles steals to support his lifestyle. Lupin steals for the challenge. Last night I started the second book, Arsene Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes. The nice thing about a program like Calibre is that I was able to quickly edit the ebook to change "Herlock Sholmes" to "Sherlock Holmes" throughout. 
Similar threads
