Finished Ex Machina, which was good.
But… why was Janice’s child’s father changed from being Kirk? Why dredge up an obscure reference from an 80’s novel like that just to change/discredit the jist of it?
Well, first off, The Captain's Daughter never actually said Kirk was the father, just that it was someone who was dead as of 2293, and that Rand hadn't told him about the baby because she felt he had a great destiny and didn't want to sidetrack his career. Absolutely nothing is revealed about the father beyond that, not even whether he was in Starfleet. So strictly speaking I didn't change anything, just elaborated on that information in a way that ruled out Kirk. Of course the implication was that it might have been Kirk, but I believe it would've been completely out of character for Kirk to do something as unethical as sleeping with a woman under his direct command. TOS made it pretty clear that Kirk wouldn't even let himself look at Janice in that way so long as she was a member of his crew. Despite the modern caricature of Kirk as a creature of impulse who slept with anything in a skirt, the truth was that TOS, especially in the first season, depicted him as a serious, duty-driven military man whose discipline always overrode his desires except when he was under artificial influence, and sometimes even then.
I also finished The Best and the Brightest. It’d picked up a third though and was mostly enjoyable, although most of the cadets came across like pampered rich kids.
By the standards of our culture, most Federation citizens would seem pampered and rich, just as the average middle-class person today would seem pampered and rich to a medieval peasant (heck, even a feudal lord wouldn't have lived as well in a lot of ways).