Spoilers Star Trek - Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack Review Thread

Fans in Germany don't have to wait much longer for the new Picard book by Una McCormack. We are finally able to read a book simultanously with American fans.....

I couldn't find a blurb, though....

 

^ Yeah, no blurb as of yet. Also, I just noticed that this book is apparently going to be released as a hardcover(!). Both Barnes & Noble and Amazon are confirming this, and for the exact same price as a mass-market paperback, too.

 

It's out in select Canadian bookstores as well. No word on translations to French or any of our Indigenous languages yet.

 

I have this on pre-order, should be here a-week-Tuesday according to Amazon.

 

No blurb - I guess it's because they want to avoid major spoilers.... I'm excited anyway. I like Una's books.

 

Waiting for the download...

 

The title is an odd phrase, and seems grammatically...off. I can only think of it anywhere before in the opening narration on Babylon 5.

Is it commonly used in America ?

 

Babylon 5 got it from a message Abraham Lincoln sent to the U.S. Congress, which is directly quoted in one episode of B5.

It may have been used in other places as well, of course.

 

More specifically, from the closing lines of his annual letter to Congress in December 1862 (the equivalent of the modern State of the Union address -- the Constitution just says the President has to report to Congress on the state of the Union, it doesn't say how). It was a month before he signed the Emancipation Proclamation banning slavery. Lincoln in turn was paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, who called the United States "the world's best hope" in his first inaugural address.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/last-best-hope/

 

A version of the phrase appears in the sixth TOS movie, TUC. McCoy talking about being desperate to save Gorkon because he was "The last, best hope for peace in the Galaxy," during the trial scene.

 

Cross Cult translated the titel as:
"Die letzte und einzige Hoffnung" (The last and only hope).....

 

I have read The Last Best Hope; Canadian bookstores did get it early.

I am still responding to it. It is a very good book; it is also a very sad book.

In a lot of ways, this book does remind me of The Crimson Shadow. That book saw Picard witness a civilization that was pulling itself together after catastrophe even as the Federation teetered on the brink of something.

And The Last Best Hope? Things do not go so well.

This is an excellent first novel for the Picard series, one wholly deserving its sale as a hardcover and one that deserves to be read by as wide a readership as possible. It goes into wonderful detail about what happened before 2389, introducing us to old changed characters and to new ones. (Raffi is memorable: Meet her here, first, before you see her on TV.)

I just have to caution people that this is not a happy novel.

 

Technically comic readers will have already met her, she made her first appearance in the Picard: Countdown comic miniseries.
Is Raffi the only new Picard character who appears in the book?

 

We learn a lot more about her. Suffice it to say that civilizations are not the only things which get broken.

Agnes Jurati does appear at length. Geordi LaForge is, after Picard himself, the major TNG character who makes the most appearances. We see a lot of Kirsten Clancy, the insight we are given into her making her anger with Picard that much more comprehensible.

And, one other old character who appears at length?

Spoiler

Bruce Maddox.

 

Yup -- U.S. Amazon is currently selling it for $11.95, and B&N has it for $17.50 at the moment (which will likely go down somewhat the closer we get to release-day).

 

The one where I spotted it on the racks used to be a Coles and is now an !ndigoSpirit location.

And despite the official publication date of record being later this month (February 2020), every store in Ottawa in the !ndigo/Chapters/Coles/Prospero chain has stock on the premises and logged into their catalogue terminals as I write this.

Independent retailers will, I expect, be able to get copies fairly quickly upon request.

 

Just ordered mine. It’ll be interesting to read a story set in this new dark timeline. I hope it goes into detail as to why he became a admiral. He must have been blackmailed.

 

"Last Best Hope." Sounds like a ST/B5 crossover.

 

The show already explained that. It was in order to spearhead the Romulan evacuation effort.