Spirit Walk duology....

[Mage]

So, I started my Voyager Relaunch with Full Circle and the follow-up novels. I never read Homecoming/Farther Shore, nor the Spirit Walk duology.

Thing is, thanks to a nice deal, I got secondhand copies of Homecoming and The Farther Shore.
I'm considering hunting down Spirit Walk, but have heard less then stellar reviews about them. Are the details of these novels explained enough in Full Circle and beyond, or is there a lot I'm missing and is it worth it to try and complete the series?

 

[JD]

I think there are some fairly detailed entries for the events of the Spirit Walk duology on Memory Beta. I just read up on what happened between Endgame and Full Circle on there before I read the current novels.

 

[Relayer1]

The plot threads from Spiritwalk are wrapped up in short order in Full Circle. I don't think it would be much of an issue if you didn't 'get' the references.

I've read both of the SW duology and my life is noticeably worse for it !

 

[Thrawn]

The thing is, they're incredibly quick reads. Like, damn near read-in-one-sitting quick. It's such a small investment of time that it almost doesn't matter one way or the other.

You can keep up with Full Circle fine without them, but you might as well read them, for the effort it takes to do so.

 

[Paris]

The thing is, they're incredibly quick reads. Like, damn near read-in-one-sitting quick. It's such a small investment of time that it almost doesn't matter one way or the other.

You can keep up with Full Circle fine without them, but you might as well read them, for the effort it takes to do so.

Agreed. Very quick reads. Not too bad, but nowhere near the quality of what has come afterwards

 

[Christopher]

Yeah, I never had a problem with Spirit Walk. I was always surprised by the vehemence of its critics.

 

[Avro Arrow]

You can keep up with Full Circle fine without them, but you might as well read them, for the effort it takes to do so.

And then you'll also appreciate the quality of what we got after so much more!

 

[Mage]

Hm, I suppose it would like nice on the shelf to have the entire set. I'll keep an eye out for some secondhand copies.

 

[tomswift2002]

I always found that the Spirit Walk was sort of like DS9's Abyss and Demons of Air And Darkness. The books took place after their relaunch "pilot" titles, but they were of a little bit lighter affair than what their "pilot"'s were, while at the same time still ramping up what was to come (although with Voyager, that ball kind of got dropped with Christie Golden's departure from the series, since it would've been interesting to see where the series could've gone had Golden stayed with the series).

 

[Cap'n Crunch]

Like Christopher, I didn't have any problems with Spirit Walk, and never understood why so many people disliked it.

 

[Christopher]

Some readers seemed to have a problem with the spirituality of the novel, but that puzzled me, since it didn't seem any different than Bajorans' beliefs in DS9. The entities in question could be interpreted as advanced aliens, just as the Prophets could.

 

[VDCNI]

It's been an age since I read them but I don't recall being bothered by the spirituality, more the sidelining of all of Voyager's interesting characters to be replaced by non entities.

 

[Scout101]

Biggest problem with the first VOY relaunch is that they kinda forgot to give it a reason to exist. Wasn't really anything going on, they broke up the crew a bit, and just had a generic series wandering the AQ, except this one had "voyager" stamped on the hull.

The re-relaunch really gave the series something to DO and stand apart again, and it shines.

 

[tomswift2002]

Biggest problem with the first VOY relaunch is that they kinda forgot to give it a reason to exist. Wasn't really anything going on, they broke up the crew a bit, and just had a generic series wandering the AQ, except this one had "voyager" stamped on the hull.

How was that a "Big" problem? TNG & DS9 showed the crew splitting up on screen, so why would that be a "Big" problem for Voyager? Really, would you expect Starfleet to not reassign people, even though they've been together for 7 years on screen.

 

[Scout101]

Don't expect that at all, and it's worked perfectly fine for the VOY re-relaunch. Not even what I was getting at.

The writer/editors had no plan for the series, VOY was just around, but it could have just as easily been any other crew. They split up the crew, but still tried to follow everyone, so you had a disjointed story and boring sub-plots.

So: just essentially watered-down TNG, but without a mission or half the crew. Series really didn't have any reason to exist at that point. They resolved the big mission, and didn't replace it with anything new. Full Circle gave them a reason to exist again, stand out from the other series, and has been much more popular...

 

[tomswift2002]

Full Circle gave them a reason to exist again, stand out from the other series, and has been much more popular...

As I recall, both Homecoming & The Farther Shore went through six printings within their first six to eight months. I don't recall hearing anything similar, or even seeing anything that close for Full Circle onward. So I would question which was more popular.

 

[Masiral]

Full Circle gave them a reason to exist again, stand out from the other series, and has been much more popular...

As I recall, both Homecoming & The Farther Shore went through six printings within their first six to eight months. I don't recall hearing anything similar, or even seeing anything that close for Full Circle onward. So I would question which was more popular.

But how many copies of each were printed? Maybe Full Circle and onward just had a larger first printing.

 

[Christopher]

^Six or more times larger? That seems unlikely.

Just because a book is unpopular with that tiny fraction of the audience that posts on Internet bulletin boards, that doesn't mean it's unpopular overall. BBS posters are not a statistically representative or unbiased sample of the audience. Heck, if you went by Internet comments alone, you'd think the Abrams Trek movies were total flops, but in fact they're the highest-rated Trek films on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb and two of the three highest-grossing Trek films in history corrected for inflation (STID is first, ST:TMP second, and ST 2009 third). So it's entirely plausible that the Spirit Walk books also sold better and were enjoyed more by the general audience than Internet reactions would suggest.

Also, there are more factors to consider. There was a gap of about four years between Spirit Walk and Full Circle. In that time, a lot of the VGR reading audience may have drifted away and not come back. Trek novel readership on the whole may have decreased as the books became harder to find on store shelves, or as a result of Trek no longer having a regular presence on television. Maybe the VGR books aren't the only ones selling in lower numbers now than they did a decade ago.

 

[langdonboom]

My only nitpick with the Spirit Walk books were the way they were written - as in the actual prose, which seemed pretty on-the-nose juvenile compared to the best of the more recent Trek lit.

I loved the Chakotay/aliens/spirits scenario (always have), and I also loved the possibility of a major species from DS9 having some kind of effect on the Voyager story, so plot wise I was on board. But reading them just felt very 6th grade level, and thus were a bit underwhelming that way.

But for story alone, I thought they were worth reading.

 

[Masiral]

^Six or more times larger? That seems unlikely.

Just because a book is unpopular with that tiny fraction of the audience that posts on Internet bulletin boards, that doesn't mean it's unpopular overall. BBS posters are not a statistically representative or unbiased sample of the audience. Heck, if you went by Internet comments alone, you'd think the Abrams Trek movies were total flops, but in fact they're the highest-rated Trek films on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb and two of the three highest-grossing Trek films in history corrected for inflation (STID is first, ST:TMP second, and ST 2009 third). So it's entirely plausible that the Spirit Walk books also sold better and were enjoyed more by the general audience than Internet reactions would suggest.

Also, there are more factors to consider. There was a gap of about four years between Spirit Walk and Full Circle. In that time, a lot of the VGR reading audience may have drifted away and not come back. Trek novel readership on the whole may have decreased as the books became harder to find on store shelves, or as a result of Trek no longer having a regular presence on television. Maybe the VGR books aren't the only ones selling in lower numbers now than they did a decade ago.

I'm just saying that without hard numbers, we can only speculate as to the size of the printings.