The Badlands novels

[Oz Trekkie]

Does any one know in which years the four stories in the two Badlands novels are set in the timeline?

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

The TOS story I believe is sometime around “Balance of Terror,” as the Romulans play a part in it. I can’t recall when the TNG story is set. The Voyager one is (understandably) set mostly prior to Voyager being brought to the Delta Quadrant (I think a good chunk of it basically takes place between scenes of Caretaker). And the DS9 story is set shortly before the Cardassians ally with the Domjnion.

I seem to recall the books themselves include a historian’s note before each section.

 

[Christopher]

Memory Beta sayeth:

Part I/TOS: 2268 (5650.1)
Part II/TNG: 2368
Part III/VGR: 2371
Part IV/DS9: 2373 (50502.4)

 

[tomswift2002]

The Voyager novel takes place before Caretaker. As I recall it is essentially a prologue to the Voyager series, as it tells the story of Tuvok's mission in the Maquis, and Janeway getting Voyager ready for its departure from DS9.

 

[The Wormhole]

I don't remember if there is much about Tuvok's mission. There is a lot of stuff that is concurrent with what we see in Caretaker, and it ends with Voyager getting swept into the Delta Quadrant.

 

[JD]

The TNG story is right after Ensign Ro. I actually just read the first one of these back last year.

 

[Oz Trekkie]

Memory Beta sayeth:

Part I/TOS: 2268 (5650.1)
Part II/TNG: 2368
Part III/VGR: 2371
Part IV/DS9: 2373 (50502.4)

I had a quick look on MB and didn’t spot it.
Thanks for that.

 

[tomswift2002]

I don't remember if there is much about Tuvok's mission. There is a lot of stuff that is concurrent with what we see in Caretaker, and it ends with Voyager getting swept into the Delta Quadrant.

Spoiler

2371, stardate 48305.8 (immediately prior to "Caretaker")—

From their hidden base within the Terikof Belt, the Maquis plan a strike against the Montee Pass shipyards in the Oliv system. However, their fleet of eight ships is hit by a shockwave while leaving the Badlands, and only Chakotay's Selka remains fully operational. As the fleet returns home, Chakotay decides to detour and attack the Opek Nor station alone. Thanks to recently obtained intel, his crew is able to destabilize the station's integrity and it falls into the atmosphere of its orbited planet.

Seska periodically reports to Gul Evek, providing him with details of the planned raid. Evek allows the attack to proceed, setting a trap for the Maquis and ordering Seska to frame Starfleet spy Tuvok for the mission's failure. The trap redeploys the Cardassian fleet to Oliv, leaving Opek Nor vulnerable and ultimately spells disaster for both Seska's and Evek's careers. Seska tries to surreptitiously disable the Selka's engines during the attack, but fails, and the Maquis escape. The Selka is attacked by the Vetar, but flees and then is pulled into the Delta Quadrant.

With his career, status, crew loyalty, and marriage all torn away, Evek launches a single-minded campaign to bring the Maquis to justice. The Vetar is damaged in the plasma storms, then hit by tetryon radiation, but USS Voyager responds to her distress call, treating the irradiated crew and helping to repair the ship's systems. His disgrace complete, Evek commits suicide.

The crew, including ex-convict Tom Paris and young Harry Kim, begin to adapt to their new lives and crewmates aboard ship. Captain Janeway studies various reports of the anomalies and deduces a pattern that suggests the Romulan bird-of-prey's destruction in 2268 released its artificial quantum singularity (AQS) power core and that it has been orbiting the Badlands, causing the hazards and radiation. She sends her theory to Starfleet Command and delivers her passengers to a Cardassian ship before Voyager is lost and presumed destroyed.

 

[Stevil2001]

Was The Badlands the most contrived and pointless crossover of the Ordover era? Discuss.

 

[Jinn]

I haven't read thiese two novels (which is always the best way to start a post) but from what I gather they're just four Trek stories from different series that are all connected to the badlands published in two volumes. Does that even count as a crossover? I mean, Enterprise Logs isn't a Pike/Kirk/April/Picard crossover just because it features all of those in seperate short stories.

 

[Christopher]

I haven't read thiese two novels (which is always the best way to start a post) but from what I gather they're just four Trek stories from different series that are all connected to the badlands published in two volumes. Does that even count as a crossover?

Well, that was a recurring pattern among the books in the '90s, crossover miniseries consisting of one book in each series with a loose unifying theme. The first one, Invasion!, had a closer connection among books, since they were all dealing with different stages of the same alien threat over the course of a century. But then we got things like Day of Honor and Section 31 where the stories were totally independent aside from dealing with parallel subject matter, and The Captain's Table where the only unifying thread was the title bar and the first-person conceit. Also Gateways, which went back to the Invasion! pattern of multiple crews dealing with different parts of the same larger threat, except that the 24th-century installments were simultaneous. The idea was to do crossovers that could work either way -- each book could work independently as part of its own series or as a standalone without needing reference to the others, but if you read them all, you'd get a larger story. (Although Gateways changed that by adding a closing volume that combined the conclusions of all the stories in a single hardcover. That got a lot of complaints.)

I guess doing 4 loosely connected short novels in just 2 volumes isn't quite the same, since the individual parts don't stand so well on their own. But I can see how it's an evolution from the existing pattern. Maybe just doing four different stories about the Badlands wasn't the best idea for such a thing. The second one, The Brave and the Bold by Keith DeCandido, had a unifying plot thread -- the search for four connected alien artifacts -- and a shared gimmick that every story involved teaming up the TV crew with the crew of a guest starship from the show and was told from the guest crew's perspective (hence the title, a nod to DC Comics' team-up series).

 

[JD]

I didn't really see it as contrived or pointless when I read the first one. There was the bit that run through the stories with radiation or whatever it is making people sick, but the connections really didn't feel that forced to me, and they actually could work pretty well on their own. It's really not that different from The Naked Time and The Naked Now.

 

[ATimson]

Was The Badlands the most contrived and pointless crossover of the Ordover era? Discuss.

No, that's Dark Passions.

 

[DS9forever]

I liked the Badlands novels for their tie-ins to several episodes I really liked. The DS9 story had references to "The Begotten", "For the Uniform", "In Purgatory's Shadow" and "By Inferno's Light".

 

[Stevil2001]

It's just like... taking place in a region of space is not a good hook. Ooh, it's a storm. And Susan Wright was kind of a middling writer. (The Badlands, Book One contains the infamous scene where Captain Kirk uses his comm badge.)

 

[Christopher]

And Susan Wright was kind of a middling writer.

I dunno, I thought some of her stuff was fairly good, at least by the standards of the '90s books before the authors were free to cut loose. I liked The Best and the Brightest, her Starfleet Academy backdoor-pilot novel. And Dark Passions is a bit trashy on purpose, but fun. I admit, I didn't find The Badlands all that engaging, though.

 

[Csalem]

I enjoyed The Badlands when it first came out but that was around the time I started reading Trek novels. It was a useful way to catch up on all the crews in a short time.

 

[Stevil2001]

I dunno, I thought some of her stuff was fairly good, at least by the standards of the '90s books before the authors were free to cut loose. I liked The Best and the Brightest, her Starfleet Academy backdoor-pilot novel. And Dark Passions is a bit trashy on purpose, but fun. I admit, I didn't find The Badlands all that engaging, though.

Best and the Brightest was excellent.

 

[tomswift2002]

I think the one issue with some of the crossovers were the TOS stories. TNG, DS9 and VOY were all set in the same timeframe, whereas TOS was 100 years before, so the stories kind of had the TOS story as a prologue or epilogue, and then the rest all took place fairly close in time.

And with “The Badlands”, it was such a major part of DS9 in the mid seasons, and it even played a pivotal role in Voyager’s pilot that those two really needed stories dealing with it and the Maquis. And TNG could even get in on it because of “Journey’s End” and “Preemptive Strike”. But TOS had no Maquis connection.

 

[Christopher]

And with “The Badlands”, it was such a major part of DS9 in the mid seasons, and it even played a pivotal role in Voyager’s pilot that those two really needed stories dealing with it and the Maquis. And TNG could even get in on it because of “Journey’s End” and “Preemptive Strike”. But TOS had no Maquis connection.

Didn't the duology have Kirk's crew discover the Badlands or something? Although any large cosmic phenomenon like that should've been discovered centuries earlier by telescopes, since there are no horizons in space to hide distant things from discovery. (Heck, if it were as large as shown in Star Charts, it'd fill a huge portion of Earth's night sky, no telescope needed.)