The ending felt rushed, and I guess ultimately the weakness was in that the book basically focused on snippets from character lives that were in the end ephemeral to the overall ARC. I feel almost like the Crusher/Daret/Ishan bits should've been an ebook filling in pieces,
Completely disagree here. Crusher was clearly the main character, and her relationship with Daret was the most important one of the book. And the Ishan/Baras flashbacks were just as important to the story as anything else -- they were the scenes that really revealed to us what kind of man Baras/"Ishan" really is. Not his literally identity -- I mean his moral character, his fundamental drives, his haunted past, his sublimated guilt.
while more could've been done with the conspiracy within Starfleet Command (which to me seemed the more interesting thing than Ishan being a manchurian candidate).
Well, it takes all sorts, but I think that it's pretty clear that there was no "conspiracy" within Starfleet per se. Rather, what we come to realize is that "Ishan" was taking advantage of the "new warhawks" within Starfleet to use them as pawns -- subverting the chain of command and issuing illegal orders he knew they'd be ideologically predisposed to accept. But there was no active, organized conspiracy within Starfleet the way there was in
Star Trek VI or "Homefront/Paradise Lost." There were just officers being used and letting themselves be used, without themselves necessarily knowing the big picture.
The characters we expected to be more central to unraveling the plot, whether it be Picard, Riker, Akaar, et. al.
I think
Peaceable Kingdoms established fairly early on that
Crusher would be the character central to unraveling the plot. That was clear the instant she left the ship.
became side pieces to the action down on the planet. This would be fine if we had an additional volume to tease out the big picture stuff, and have more to do with the presidential race, but that tension never seemed to be conveyed properly in the book.
All I can say here is that with the Federation presidency held hostage by a murderer and a conspirator with no respect for the rule of law and a militaristic outlook on life, I certainly felt plenty of tension whether or not there was emphasis on the special election. (I will, however, admit that I would have liked to have heard more about the other candidates and their platforms... but that's the political science geek in me.
)
The epilogue was okay, but we don't care about anyone in that scene because, unlike say the final A Time To... books we never saw much of the staff outside of one throw away chapter.
I mean, you're not necessarily supposed to care about every minor member of zh'Tarash's staff. But zh'Tarash was an important supporting character in
A Ceremony of Losses -- we have a clear sense of who she is and what she wants, and we're supposed to view her in the epilogue, I suspect, as being a sort of "audience surrogate," who's missing Bacco and talking about what the Federation is supposed to stand for (aka, what
Star Trek is about at its most optimistic). I rather like zh'Tarash, and I liked that epilogue quite a bit.
Part of what redeems Revelation and Dust for me is that there is much that is beautiful in it. I very strongly disagree with Edit_XYZ's (and others') characterization of it as a prologue and episode recap. There is something very profound and intimate that is going on as Kira sees, for the first time, what happened when Sisko first entered the wormhole. I also think it reveals something fundamental about the Prophets– but that's a discussion for a different thread.
Completely agree here.
There also seemed to be a number of “Chekhov’s Gun” problems– things Ward would introduce but never really follow up on. The whole flashback with Kadohata, Crusher and Data, for example, felt unnecessary; we didn’t get any particular new insight into those characters or the history of Federation-Cardassian relations, and it took a nontrivial amount of time to read.
I think the key element of those sequences was threefold. One, it established Crusher's and Daret's relationship. Two, it established for us why we the audience should trust and feel invested in Daret as a character. And three, it established a thematic concern -- the idea of enemies overcoming their animosity, of people learning to cooperate and becoming friends who would risk their lives for one-another. This stands in contrast to the ideology espoused by "Ishan"/Baras, who represents the inability to move past enmity and conflict. This novel is literally about the power of peace and unity (as represented by Crusher and Daret's having forged a friendship despite their former hostility) overcoming the power of belligerence and fear; those flashbacks helped establish the emotional and thematic stakes.
The second thing which underwhelmed me was the story itself. I came away asking myself what message the authors were trying to convey with this series– what was the theme?
I thought the theme was pretty firmly established in the title: the necessity of a peaceable kingdom. The importance of embracing peace and cooperation above belligerence; of supporting doves over hawks.
The revelation that Ishan was behind Bacco’s death just felt so predictable, and frankly stretched credibility past the breaking point.
Predictable? I mean, maybe. I suspected "Ishan" would have something to do with Bacco's assassination when he was first mentioned in
Revelation and Dust back in August. But I'm okay with that -- the trope of the illegitimate successor who murders the king is at least as old as
Macbeth, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I still found it entertaining.
The only part I found that strained credibility was wondering how "Ishan" kept his real identity a secret for so long -- and then it occurred to me that someone seeking to assume a new identity would have a unique opportunity to do so on a world just emerging from almost a century of occupation, because records would almost necessarily be fragmentary and such a government's civil service would be uniquely vulnerable to subversion.
For such a complicated story, it was a painfully simplistic conclusion.
I would have liked to have seen the process of Picard contacting the Attorney General and convincing her of his assertions, and of the Attorney General gathering the evidence, contacting Garak, and putting together the charges... but, realistically, it
would be that simple once the evidence is in their hands. Presidents are powerful, but they are also inherently the inhabitants of gilded cages; it's not as though a president would ever have a chance in hell of getting away if the cops come to arrest them. Realistically speaking, once the evidence is in an attorney general's hands, it really
would be that simple.
The story boils down to:
A Bajoran collaborator using a false identity, now sitting on the Federation Council, in collusion with a Tellarite businessman turned politico, allies with a Cardassian anti-Federation extremist group to assassinate the president of the United Federation of Planets in a bid to grab power so as to adopt a hawkish stance, such that the Federation arrives at what he believes will be an era of “peace through power.”
*sigh* You know, after writing it all out like that, I realize just how plausible and realistic it actually sounds. How depressing is that?
Fairly. But -- in spite of how terrible "Ishan"/Baras's crimes are... consider this. In spite of all that,
he didn't get away with it. The Federation government
placed its own president pro tempore under arrest in full view of the entire galaxy and held him accountable for his crimes.
Compare that to real life. The last two United States Presidents have committed some pretty horrific crimes -- Barack Obama is responsible for ordering the murder of
United States citizens who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes, and for the deaths of God knows how many innocent civilians through his drone attacks, and George W. Bush launched
a war of aggression that resulted in
untold hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet the idea that either one will ever be held accountable for their crimes, let alone that they could be arrested while addressing Congress for all the world to see, is utterly outlandish; in America, we treat our presidents as though they are above the law and let them get away with all sorts of crimes, all in the name of "national security."
The Federation has some serious problems -- but they're doing a hell of a lot better than we are.
(I think I am getting hung up on the assassination part. It still seems somewhat implausible from an in-universe perspective, but God only knows how believable it is from a real-world perspective.)
Honestly, I found the revelation that "Ishan"/Baras and Velk were behind the assassination to help make the assassination more plausible, from an in-universe perspective. Why wasn't there a forcefield around the stage to protect Bacco, for instance? Well, probably because Velk's contact in the Federation Security Agency turned it off.
Some other thoughts:
I was not keen on reading the second book in a row that features a large part of the action on a distant barren world that no one cares about,
I didn't think of Jevalan as a world no one cares about. I thought of it as being a sort of modern-day
Camp 14; that helped me perceive a greater sense of emotional impact to the setting.
Was surprised at the ultimate winner of the Federation presidential election.
I wasn't. I felt that the writers had foreshadowed that development back in
A Ceremony of Losses -- she was, after all, the only other presidential candidate we met.
I think it stretches credibility a bit, given the recent secession, but oh well.
I don't, actually. I see the Federation as being the kind of society that would be disinclined to hold the secession against Andor, because they would recognize that the Andorians had a legitimate reason to be angry with the UFP (even if it did not justify secession), and that facing extinction is something that can drive a society to behaviors it wouldn't normally contemplate. I view the UFP as being a more forgiving, less tribalistic political culture than we have today -- hell, they'd almost need to be, since they're adding new worlds every couple of years, and it's not like you can discriminate against those worlds when they join. You've got to
trust for the Federation to work, and to forgive when things go wrong.
Also, it probably helps that zh'Tarash and the Progressives were always against secession in the first place.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: When I first read
A Ceremony of Losses, I found the idea that the new Andorian administration would willingly petition to rejoin the Federation a bit implausible, because of everything "Ishan" had ordered done against them.
But then I thought about it and realized that those Members of Parliament who would otherwise have objected to rejoining were probably persuaded by zh'Tarash's promise to run if they supported the petition.
In the A Ceremony of Losses thread, I speculated that this book would mark the end of the current Grand Epic of the 24th century, in which most of the stories tie together to form an overarching narrative (and have an especially political focus). I may still be wrong, but this book certainly felt like a finale (and the entire series overall, now that I think about it). Getting in one last scene with each of the regulars. Having flashbacks to incorporate Kadohata and even Data briefly. Bringing back Sonya Gomez and Philippa Louvois. Tying off a number of loose ends, including Ezri Dax (indirectly) and Geordi’s romance with Tamala Harstad. It reminded me of a combination between “All Good Things” and “What You Leave Behind.”
And, of course, the last chapter ended with a callback to “Encounter At Farpoint” (Picard: “Let’s see what’s out there.”) and “All Good Things” (Q: “See you… out there!”), with Riker saying, “Go see what’s out there.” Sure as hell felt like a finale to me.
*shrugs* It didn't feel like a finale to me -- or, at least, not like a series finale; a season finale, maybe.
It certainly seems to mark a creative turning point in the Pocketverse, but that doesn't mean that it's the end of anything. (And I've already outlined why I never perceived the books as constituting the kind of unified narrative you perceived.
)
A focus on exploration tales would definitely lend itself to a focus on standalone stories– which is what I think we are going to get for the foreseeable future in the 24th century. And frankly, that’s fine by me.
Well, we know that at least one upcoming 24th Century novel will be entitled
Section 31: Disavowed, and will follow Bashir's situation post-
The Fall. So there's still going to be SOME level of serialization and political stories -- which is fine by me. I'm happy to see the mix.
Personally, I'm most interested in
Star Trek political adventures, but to me, what I do agree will be good will be a reiteration of
Star Trek's traditional optimism.
The Fall does still have a fundamentally optimistic ending, as I argued above, but it will be nice to see stories that don't go to quite as dark a place as
The Fall did, too.
I don't know. The whole thing is believable, but at the same time not. Rereading A Time To Heal today, I was struck by the realization that, of the last four Federation presidents presented in TrekLit, two have been "bad." I don't know, something about that feels like cheap writing to me. Is the Federation's democracy so dysfunctional that it has a 50% success rate at selecting a competent person to do the job?
I do think that having two fundamentally corrupt Federation Presidents in (in real-world time) ten years risks treading on ground that's already been covered, and undermines the perception by the audience of the Federation as a stable liberal democracy. I think that the creative rewards of
The Fall justified it -- "Ishan"'s story was ultimately very different from Zife's -- but I agree that we should only see either good or not-objectionable Federation Presidents for a while now.
Besides -- the people of the Federation
did not select "Ishan"/Baras to be President. He was appointed President Pro Tempore, not President, and he was only supposed to "keep the seat warm;" that he exercised so many fundamental presidential powers while in office was a break with the Federation's constitutional customs. And when the truth about "Ishan"/Baras's identity and actions was revealed, he was almost instantly removed from power -- which, as I argued above, is a damn sight better than what our democracies are capable of today.
Do the authors mean this as a general statement on the efficacy of democracy? If so, then I find that to be such a cynical perspective that it exists in total conflict with the fundamental optimism which underlies the entire Star Trek franchise.
I don't think they meant it that way. I've made this argument before about other plot developments in TrekLit, but I think what we're seeing -- from Zife and Tezwa, to Bacco, to the Typhon Pact, to the leaks of the Meta-Genome, to Active Four, to "Ishan," and even to the Emperor Spock/Mirror Universe arc -- is a function of the political culture of modern America.
Star Trek is many things and goes many places, and commentary on the political culture has always been a part of it -- and the past decade or so of American history has been particularly historic, and particularly dark. What we're seeing is a collection of writers using
Star Trek to explore and react to recent history -- both in terms of exploring what is bad about it, and in terms of talking about how things could be better (Bacco, in general, represented this ideal).
Maybe that's what bothers me. The Federation is supposed to represent the ideal democracy, democracy at its best possible. To tell a story where someone as simplistically bad as Ishan Anjar (in that he arranged the assassination of his predecessor in order to grab power) can come within an inch of being elected president (as he would have been, if our heroes had not intervened) suggests that democracy, even its ideal form, is fundamentally vulnerable and naïve. And I disagree with that notion in the strongest of terms.
Well, democracy
is vulnerable. It requires the citizenry to have a full understanding of the world around them in order to make educated choices -- and that means that it can be vulnerable to manipulation if political actors are able to prevent information from being freely shared.
Democracy is, arguably,
less vulnerable to such manipulation than other systems, because it is harder to control the flow of information in a liberal democracy than it is in, say, a hereditary dictatorship or a single-party totalitarian state. But that vulnerability persists, because it is intrinsic to any form of governance that public support can be artificially cultivated through the manipulation of public information; there's a reason North Korea doesn't have a free press, and there's a reason Corporate America holds the major mainstream newsmedia on such a tight ideological leash.
But, again, I would emphasize that
The Fall presents us with a Federation democracy that works a damn sight better than ours. I mean, hell, do you really think a U.S. Navy ship commander who engages in all the violations of orders that Picard and Riker do in order to uncover the truth about a criminal U.S. President would be rewarded the way they are? In
The Fall, people just begin disobeying illegitimate orders left and right when they sense that the liberal democratic system is somehow being subverted, even if they don't yet know in what way it is being subverted. In real life, you have the occasional Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden, but the entire state apparatus is arrayed against them for their insubordination to morally illegitimate authority.
I continue to maintain that
Star Trek: The Fall, while not utopian and darker than
Star Trek has traditionally been, is still an ultimately optimistic depiction of a peaceable liberal democratic ideology under siege yet prevailing. It begins in darkness, yet ends in light; it starts from despair yet ends in hope. Baras Rodirya's coup d'etat is defeated.
