The Diane Carey novels

[Sci]

I have read MANY Trek books that could have been written by Michael Moore, but I don't complain; I just enjoy the story for what it is...

Rob

Examples please, and dedication pages don't count.

I have three examples that come to mind immediately, two of an anti-religious nature and one of a far-left political nature; however, I went years without reading Treklit after "Olympus Descending." Since then, I've only read the Treklit books sporadically, and in MOST cases only when I could find said books at used book stores.

Some of you may think these things are not offensive; however, there is no arguing that they are ideologically charged.

--The "A Time To..." series and the very thinly veiled Bush assassination fantasy with Min Zife. That one just about made me SICK. <SNIP> And the "A Time To..." thing even worse because it seemed like a WISH for something bad to happen to Bush, like a delight in it. Oh yeah, there was a little bit of "Oh, bad Section 31! BAD!" at the end, but it really felt like an attempt to put lipstick on a pig.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You're supposed to feel sick about President Zife's assassination. The narrative is not depicting his assassination as a good thing. Hell, you're not even supposed to walk away from the damn thing feeling good about the idea of him being forced from office -- Picard goes and calls it the darkest day in the Federation's history. You're certainly not supposed to think of his assassination as a good thing -- and to take blatant portions of the narrative that make it clear that the assassination is a bad thing ("the merciless hands of Section 31") and claim it's nothing more than a rhetorical slap on the wrist is a fundamentally dishonest way to depict the narrative.

 

[Sci]

Also, in regards to the Bush/Zife parallels, I think that we need to pause and consider something:

Insofar as A Time to Kill/A Time to Heal constitute a criticism of President Bush, they criticize the decision to invade Iraq. More specifically, they criticize the act of launching a war of aggression against a foreign state on the basis of false evidence for the purposes of political expediency.

Now, you could argue that that's a leftist or liberal message. But I don't think that's an even slightly reasonable claim to make. Used to be, back in the day, the idea that launching a war of aggression on the basis of false evidence was considered a bad thing, and that was a bipartisan consensus. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives -- they were all united around the idea that a war where the other guy wasn't the one who started it was a bad idea. Hell, we put the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg for being the aggressors in World War II, and we called the act of aggressive war a crime against humanity.

Now, given that, I don't think that the critique of President Bush that David Mack presents in Kill/Heal constitutes a left-of-center criticism. I think it represents a centrist criticism against an administration full of ideological radicals. Now, if the critique of President Bush that Kill/Heal had presented had been against the idea of tax cuts for citizens in the upper tax brackets, or a critique of Milton Friedman-esque privatization schemes, I'd agree that Kill/Heal could then be said to have constituted a left-of-center critique of the Bush Administration.

But it didn't. It was a critique of an unjust war launched against an enemy who did not pose a significant threat to the United States on false pretenses, and that's not left-of-center -- that's just sensible.

 

[stonester1]

Hear, hear.

Any other nation did what we did in that conflict, they would have been roundly condemned by most of the rest of the world, including us.

And rightly so.

Much of the rest of the world DID condemn us, and that war cost us much that the Obama Admin has since been trying to dig us out.

 

[captcalhoun]

yeah, but the Tezwa WMD were real...

 

[Sci]

yeah, but the Tezwa WMD were real...

True, and the Tezwan WMDs were given to it by the Federation as part of a criminal conspiracy which the invasion of Tezwa was undertaken to cover up. Therefore, Kill/Heal remains a critique of wars of aggression undertaken on false premesis. This is a centrist political position, not a leftist political position.

(Interestingly, the fact that the Tezwan WMDs were real undermines the presumption that Zife is meant as a strict allegory for Bush.)

 

[Rush Limborg]

^While I do see Nerys's point, I must admit I never saw Zife as Bush. I saw him as more of a Nixonian Good-man-with-a-strong-foreign-policy-who-fell-from-grace-because-he-was-led-to-believe-that-When-The-President-Does-It-That-Means-It's-Not-Illegal.

However, there was am SCE story in which there's supposed to be WMD's--and it turns out they're aren't there. (indeed, the Voyages of Imagination entry goes so far as to say, "Sound familiar?")

 

[Rush Limborg]

(BTW...the picture of Zife in Memory Beta, etc., makes him look like Ike! What gives? I like Ike!)

 

[David cgc]

(BTW...the picture of Zife in Memory Beta, etc., makes him look like Ike! What gives? I like Ike!)

See for yourself.

 

[JoeZhang]

Are they still doing that frankly retarded "nobody knows he's dead and they think he's off somewhere on a pleasure cruiser?" thing about Zife in the books?

 

[Rush Limborg]

(BTW...the picture of Zife in Memory Beta, etc., makes him look like Ike! What gives? I like Ike!)

See for yourself.

Fascinating....

 

[Captaindemotion]

If she didn't like TNG, why did she write in that universe? Was somebody holding a phaser to her head?

Probably more like somebody was offering her a large monetary advance for it. A person's got to make a living. If someone offers you a book contract, and the pay is good, it's hard not to say yes. Heck, I've taken on a two or three assignments that I didn't think were up my alley, but I managed to adapt and make them work.

I wonder how much I'd have to pay Carey to write a book called "Why Socialism is The Only True Way." ...

 

[JD]

Are they still doing that frankly retarded "nobody knows he's dead and they think he's off somewhere on a pleasure cruiser?" thing about Zife in the books?

I think some of the characters did find out the truth in AotF, but I don't think his real fate has come out publicly. And I have a feeling it never will until the fall of S31 in the early 2400s.

 

[Mr. Crane]

What about her novels appeal or does not appeal to you?

When I was a kid, Final Frontier and Best Destiny were some of my favorite novels; I thought Diane Carey had a great understanding of Kirk, though her naval terminology threw me off... to much nautical stuff... but her characterization was pretty good for the original crew ... not so good for the TNG crew...

The book series that I couldn't quite get into was the Belle Terre series. I felt the story only sympathized with the colonists' perspective, and was not giving the Kauld side, the arguably indigenous people in the area. How did the Kauld feel about the Federation moving into their area and taking away planets, when their own planet and people were dying from an environmental disaster (if I recall the storyline correctly)? I would have liked to have heard more about their side of the tale, but that's just my personal perspective... I felt Kirk didn't really do much to understand the Kauld perspective of the Federation moving into the area, which I found surprising, considering the revelations he had discovered about the Gorn perspective to a Federation colony moving into their area in the TOS episode, "Arena".

I really enjoyed Carey's excellent entry in the Invasion! series, where Kirk encounters the Furies, an ancient race that ressembles monsters out of Earth mythology and claim they once controlled much of Beta Quadrant. I was impressed by how much Carey presented us with Kirk as a diplomat, trying to understand the perspective of this alien culture. I found his attitude here very different that the way he acted in the Belle Terre series towards the Kauld ... he seemed much more the explorer in this book, willing to communicate, even though the Furies represented a potential invasion force threatening the Federation. Then again, the Furies were written as much more willing to communicate with Kirk and the Federation than the Kauld were...

Overall, I have enjoyed most of her books, and wished she would return to the Trek book series...

 

[Mr. Crane]

Okay, this really isn't worth wasting time with, but one more try:

He said he'd read other books of Carey's, but felt that with this one, she'd "crossed a line" that made him stop reading them. So the chronological progression implied in that phrase is from other Carey books to Dreadnought. But in fact, Dreadnought was the first Trek book Carey wrote. So there's a cognitive dissonance there that I think is extremely obvious, and if you aren't getting it, you're just not looking in the right place. And that's my last word on the subject.

A good debate

 

[Sci]

(BTW...the picture of Zife in Memory Beta, etc., makes him look like Ike! What gives? I like Ike!)

I would presume that that is a function of President Eisenhower being the only President in recent history who was bald and the photoshop artist needing a bald model for the Bolian Zife.

Personally, I always pictured Peter MacNichol as President Zife. (And Bruce McGill as Chief of Staff Koll Azernal and Bruce Greenwood as President Kenneth Wescott. Never been able to come up with a truly adequate President Bacco, though.)

 

[Sci]

Are they still doing that frankly retarded "nobody knows he's dead and they think he's off somewhere on a pleasure cruiser?" thing about Zife in the books?

I think some of the characters did find out the truth in AotF, but I don't think his real fate has come out publicly. And I have a feeling it never will until the fall of S31 in the early 2400s.

Spoiler: Articles of the Federation

Ozla Graniv, a reporter from the Trill newsmagazine Seeker, discovered from the Orion Syndicate's boss on Deneva in Articles of the Federation that President Zife, his chief of staff, and his Secretary of Military Intelligece had been responsible for hiring the Syndicate to smuggle the nadion-pulse cannons to Tezwa. She also discovered from them that Starfleet, in the person of Admiral Ross, had forced Zife to resign. She continued to investigate and managed to discover that Zife had in fact been murdered after resigning, though she mistakenly believed that Admiral Ross had been the one to murder him.

She passed this information along to Palais de la Concorde Press Liaison Kant Jorel and Presidential Chief of Staff Esperanza Piñiero, who then passed the information on to President Bacco. Kant had been in the dark about it all, and Piñiero and Bacco had known that Ross had forced Zife to resign but had been under the impression that Zife was still alive. Upon confronting him about Zife's assassination, Ross chose to allow Bacco to continue believing that he had assassinated Zife and to refrain from revealing that it had been Section 31 that had assassinated the former President.

Presumably, with 64 billion Federates dead and untold numbers of Federation worlds near the Klingon-Romulan border exterminated, and with Bolarus lying very close to the Romulan border, it will now be much easier to cover up Zife's assassination, as he can probably be passed off as having died in the Borg Invasion.

 

[JD]

Ah, thanks. I haven't read AotF since it first came out, so I couldn't remember the deatails of the story.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I really enjoyed Carey's excellent entry in the Invasion! series, where Kirk encounters the Furies,

I think First Strike is one of Carey's best books.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

The book series that I couldn't quite get into was the Belle Terre series. I felt the story only sympathized with the colonists' perspective, and was not giving the Kauld side, the arguably indigenous people in the area. How did the Kauld feel about the Federation moving into their area and taking away planets, when their own planet and people were dying from an environmental disaster (if I recall the storyline correctly)?

Actually only the members of the Kauld military were dying from radiation poisoning (they were able to prevent it from reaching outside their primary military base) and were looking to move their military HQ to Belle Terre to prevent anything like that from threatening their people if they couldn't contain it the next possible time (though for some weird reason this was droped by the other authors of the mini until Carey came back in Challenger.)

 

[Thrawn]

I'm reading Gateways: Chainmail right now, and it's pretty great. Interesting sci-fi premise.