I'm looking forward to a more detailed report. I couldn't get into tis book at all but I think I spent a lot of my time reading this thinking "And how is this a Star Trek book?". I'm wondering what you're finding in it.
So what are you reading now? (Part 3)
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I'm looking forward to a more detailed report. I couldn't get into tis book at all but I think I spent a lot of my time reading this thinking "And how is this a Star Trek book?". I'm wondering what you're finding in it.
Christopher: “That” was meant in jest.
Mostly.
I’m actually enjoying the novel quite a bit so far – the characterizations seem better than Kobayashi Maru et al.
And the reason I'm reading it is because I simply want to know how it turns out, even if I think this version of the Romulan war is based on a flawed premise (how are the Romulans planning to hold Earth once conquered? Surrounded by Vulcan, Andor, Tellar and Alphacent it’d be like trying to conquer Luxemburg without first conquering any other part of Europe. And hinging your entire war on a weapon which is bound to be countered sooner rather than later is just silly).
Who says they're planning to conquer and occupy Earth? They've already demonstrated with Coridan that they have no qualms about simple annihilation. Their goal is not to add Earth to their empire, but to neutralize it as an interstellar power. They could achieve that more easily by devastating the planet than by occupying it.
I finished The Help this morning. It's a great book and I loved every page of it. When I first started, I was actually a little disappointed by the fact that it was written in present tense (I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to these things), but I still had no problem with it.
Moving on to Oliver Twist, one of those classics I needed to catch up on.
Moving on to Oliver Twist, one of those classics I needed to catch up on.
It's a thick book so took some time but I thought it was a great book. Probably my favorite of Star Trek book of 2008.
I thought the first was the best of the bunch -- in a good way, I really liked it -- but then James Swallow had the freedom to create more of what happened; the other two books had to incorporate more of what we saw onscreen. (Not that the other two books weren't reading, too.) As for the style, I had no problem at all; I've liked his other Trek stuff and what I've read of his nonTrek stuff.
The writing style may be consistent, but the books are very different in other respects. One's a panoramic historical epic spanning years with a lot of new and/or relatively unfamiliar characters, while the other is a much more focused book with familiar faces in a more typically Trek kind of story. I liked them both a lot, though.
I'm now reading Junichi Fujisaku's White Maze, the third Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex book. So far so good.
I'm now reading Junichi Fujisaku's White Maze, the third Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex book. So far so good.
I loved Terok Nor. But although I liked Day of the Vipers a lot, I preferred the other two books. I really enjoyed the characterizations - and it's not because there are more canon characters, I liked the original ones just as much. Not that DoTV doesn't have great characterizations, I enjoyed the characters in all the books, but I guess I found the characterizations in books #2 and 3 deeper and/or more interesting. Besides, Dukat sounds more like Dukat in the other two... I know that he is supposed to be younger in book #1, and that people change, but he still felt a bit off at times, even taking that into consideration.
Plus, Darrah Karrys is one of the most annoying characters in any incarnation of Trek. She is all that people say that Keiko OBrien is, only, unlike Keiko, she really is like that, and worse. I've always hated that stereotype in cop movies and shows (hard-working cop's whiny nagging wife who exists to show us how hard it is for our hero the cop to reconcile job with family) and I've been fed up with it long before DoTV, and she is like a distilled, most irritating possible version of that type of character.
Anyway, the only real problem with Terok Nor is that the timeline and character ages make no sense at all. But I'm willing to overlook that, since they wouldn't have been able to include canon characters in The Day of the Vipers otherwise.
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I'm looking forward to a more detailed report. I couldn't get into tis book at all but I think I spent a lot of my time reading this thinking "And how is this a Star Trek book?". I'm wondering what you're finding in it.
I finished it and I did definitely love it, though the Challenger story in What Lay Beyond was pretty much balls.
Since you asked, I'll find some time to write some more detailed comments sometime soon.
The word 'conquer' was used during either Kobayashi Maru or The Good Than Men Do. I took this to mean occupy. The only way I could see the Romulan War making sense is, as you said, if it was a genocidal attack on Earth, akin to Coridan (although nuking major cities would fit in better with "Ballance of Terror"), or as a long-term deep-space conflict over planets that probably end up in the neutral zone and don't really matter anyway. I'm only a quarter though so far, so they may clarify later on, but all the talk of beacheads and supply lines seem to indicate they hope to put troops on the planet rather than wiping it out.
How so?
1) If I am supposed to think that Cardassians and Bajorans have longer lifespans and look like 40 or 50 when they're in fact 80, OK; but now it also applies to Humans? So
Alynna Nechayev
*Don't read the spoiler above if you haven't read the whole book.
2) But all right, let's accept this. But I'm still not buying that Dukat was born in the 23rd century. It requires me to believe that a) Dukat had done all those things that he's supposed to according to DoTV, and he had still never been promoted to legate 40 years later; OK, let's chalk this up to being the son of an executed "traitor"; but then b) he's also supposed to be much older than Tekeny Ghemor (who was just 19 when the Occupation was well underway); OK, let's presume that appearances can be deceiving; but then there's also...
3) a comparison between the timelines in Terok Nor and A Stitch In Time - and even though the books are not canon, you'd at least expect Terok Nor and ASIT to be consistent with each other, particularly as TN was partly inspired by ASIT and used elements introduced in that book (like the Oralians). And that book makes Garak still a child while the Occupation of Bajor is well underway. I'm sorry, I might accept that Dukat is over 80 in DS9 and that this is the middle age for Cardassians, I might perhaps accept that he's much older than Tekeny Ghemor, but I really, really am not buying that he's at least 20-25 years older than Garak. Not just because the actors are the same age, but mostly because Dukat and Garak never acted as if one of them was significantly older than each other. When you see their interactions, do you ever get the impression that one if a whole generation older than the other? Especially since Cardassians tend to respect age; if Dukat was significantly older than Garak, I bet he'd make sure to emphasize the fact in the way he addressed Garak.
And in fact, A Stitch In Time makes Garak and Dukat seem to be roughly the same age, since Dukat is friends with a character who is just a couple of years older than Garak (which we know since they went to school together), while the fathers of Dukat and that other character are supposed to be
in a secret organization together
Sure, nobody ever mentions their exact ages anywhere, but I can't be the only one who finds the ages of Cardassian characters as depicted in those 2 books and the series a complete mess?
4) Enough of the Humans and Cardassians, let's take a look at the Bajorans. Why is Jaro Essa supposed to be a whole generation older than Li Nalas, and a peer of Nalas's father?
Yeah, I know. I am discussing timelines in Star Trek books. Can you get any geekier?
(Well, maybe if I discussed the size of the Enterprise... 
)But, as I said, it doesn't really bother me. Canon series and movies already screw up the continuity, it would be crazy to expect better from books. And it's far from the most important thing I look for, I care more about characterizations and depiction of Bajoran and Cardassian culture and politics, and in those departments Terok Nor books are excellent.
"Wrongs Darker than Death or Night" pretty much made that canonical by showing the Dukat of 28 years in the past looking no different from the Dukat of the present.
Quite true. Picard was 65 at the end of TNG.
That character's appearance in DotV was 42 years before the end of TNG, so if she'd been, say, 23 at the time, she could've been the same age as Picard. True, the actress is ten years younger than Patrick Stewart, but different people age at different rates. (People seem to think I look maybe 15-20 years younger than my actual age, and I had a college friend who was being mistaken for a teenager well into her 30s.)
They were from a century earlier. There could've been significant longevity increases in the interim.
Like I said, it wouldn't be uniform. Humans are already quite diverse in their rates of aging. And across a population of tens or hundreds of billions spread out over hundreds of planets, any medical advances in longevity would not be distributed at a uniform rate. Different human populations on different worlds might have different access to the technology, different value systems influencing whether or how much they embraced it, different genetic or environmental factors affecting their apparent age (for instance, you'd wrinkle less if you grew up around a star with less UV in its spectrum).
Like I said, "Wrongs Darker..." canonically established that Dukat was the Prefect of Bajor in 2346 and that he apparently hadn't aged a day in the ensuing 28 years. Naturally he must've had a long career before 2346 in order to rise to such high status. The book just extrapolated on what the show already codified.
Personally I think it was ridiculous for that episode to rewrite history by making Dukat the prefect that long ago (and having Terok Nor even built that long ago, which directly contradicted "Babel"), but the books are constrained to follow the precedent of onscreen canon.
ASiT was a first-person memoir by a notorious liar. Its assertions are thus of questionable reliability, making inconsistencies with other works not that hard to reconcile.
There was recently a discussion about Dukat's age in that episode in the DS9 forum, and Nerys Ghemor pointed out and demonstrated through screenstills that Marc Alaimo's makeup for Prefect Dukat in the Occupation scenes was different from the usual Dukat makeup, including the present day scene at the beginning: less prominent eye and neck ridges, smoother forehead. That would indicate that there was some effort to make Dukat look younger. http://trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=3582198&postcount=160
She was described in the book as being already an experienced operative and noticeably older than her young colleague. So, I'm guessing at least in her early 30s.
That is a good point, it happens to me too, people always think I'm about 10 years younger than my actual age, and it also happens/happened to most of my relatives from my mother's side.
Also a good point. Nothing in ASIT can be taken at face value, since it is after all 100% told from Garak's POV.
Maybe he was lying about his age because he had been corrupted by Human values into valuing youth over age.
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