The Khitomer Alliance?

[ProtoAvatar]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

That's not a criticism.
Indeed, the worst thing that could have been done after 'Destiny' was pretend it didn't happen. Consequences as ones depicted in the Typhon Pact books are inevitable after such a cataclism.
Of course, I don't really like the dark tone of these recent books. No matter how you look at it, 'Destiny' went overboard with the magnitude of the catastrophe depicted therein.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

That's not a criticism.
Indeed, the worst thing that could have been done after 'Destiny' was pretend it didn't happen. Consequences as ones depicted in the Typhon Pact books are inevitable after such a cataclism.
Of course, I don't really like the dark tone of these recent books. No matter how you look at it, 'Destiny' went overboard with the magnitude of the catastrophe depicted therein.

Wait are you saying an all out invasion of the Borg after they get really really pissed at the Federation wouldn't be that destructive especially since this is the conflict that gets rid of them once and for all

 

[kkozoriz1]

And remember your history. The Cold War was plenty dark and dismal without open warfare ever breaking out.

That doesn't really help the perception that Trek Lit is currently in a dark place.

Will the Federation be implementing a "Duck and Cover" policy?

 

[Hartzilla2007]

You know the cold war between the Federation and the Klingons turned out well seeing as it ended with them becoming allies.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

Yes, but that does not mean that they inevitably must lead to a shooting war. War is not the only possibility for a dark story. Like I said, remember recent history. How many hundreds of dark, cynical spy thrillers or political thrillers did the Cold War generate?

 

[ProtoAvatar]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

That's not a criticism.
Indeed, the worst thing that could have been done after 'Destiny' was pretend it didn't happen. Consequences as ones depicted in the Typhon Pact books are inevitable after such a cataclism.
Of course, I don't really like the dark tone of these recent books. No matter how you look at it, 'Destiny' went overboard with the magnitude of the catastrophe depicted therein.

Wait are you saying an all out invasion of the Borg after they get really really pissed at the Federation wouldn't be that destructive especially since this is the conflict that gets rid of them once and for all

I'm saying 'Destiny' went overboard with the scale of the destruction.

A star trek book should not be similar to BSG's pilot film, setting the stage for what can only be - in the short/medium term, at least - dark stories with half-traumatised characters.

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

Yes, but that does not mean that they inevitably must lead to a shooting war. War is not the only possibility for a dark story. Like I said, remember recent history. How many hundreds of dark, cynical spy thrillers or political thrillers did the Cold War generate?

True.
But The Typhon Pact books actually made the effort to make the Typhon Pact seem more aggressive than it already was. Not an auspicious beginning.
Of course, that doesn't mean that a hot war is unavoidable - especially if the writers wish to credibly avoid one.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

Yes, but that does not mean that they inevitably must lead to a shooting war. War is not the only possibility for a dark story. Like I said, remember recent history. How many hundreds of dark, cynical spy thrillers or political thrillers did the Cold War generate?

Oh good, we have hundreds of dark, cynical Trek cold war books to look forward to.

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Yes, but that does not mean that they inevitably must lead to a shooting war. War is not the only possibility for a dark story. Like I said, remember recent history. How many hundreds of dark, cynical spy thrillers or political thrillers did the Cold War generate?

True.
But The Typhon Pact books actually made the effort to make the Typhon Pact seem more aggressive than it already was. Not an auspicious beginning.
Of course, that doesn't mean that a hot war is unavoidable - especially if the writers wish to credibly avoid one.

Look at how the real Cold War began -- the Soviets subverted the governments throughout Eastern Europe, often assassinating the leaders of democratic and nationalist movements. Soviet troops sealed Berlin and tried to starve the Allied powers out of the city. China fell to Mao and then their Korean client state launched an all out attack on the south, coming perilously close to driving the Americans into the sea. Soviet scientists created their own atomic bomb using secrets stolen from the West. One of the reasons Truman took such a hardline stance was because events looked more than a little like Hitler's actions in the 1930s.

To me it looks like the Typhon Pact series is following almost allegorically close to real history.

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Oh good, we have hundreds of dark, cynical Trek cold war books to look forward to.

Do you consider A Private Little War, Balance of Terror, The Enemy, or The Defector to be dark and cynical?

 

[Christopher]

China fell to Mao and then their Korean client state launched an all out attack on the south, coming perilously close to driving the Americans into the sea.

Now, that's misunderstanding the situation. The last thing Mao's government wanted in 1950 was to get dragged into a war. They'd been fighting Japanese invaders and their own corrupt Nationalist leaders for decades, and had only just succeeded in winning the struggle. The whole nation was battered and exhausted, and the new PRC's priority was to consolidate their government and rebuild things at home. But North Korea invaded the South on its own initiative, and both the PRC and the US were dragged into the war because of their respective political allegiances with the combatants. But it was a war that neither the PRC nor the US wanted to be involved in, because it was a distraction from both sides' postwar reconstruction -- and China's war had ended far more recently and inflicted far more ruin on their country. America's assumption that North Korea was a puppet state acting on China's orders to invade the South was a profound failure of intelligence, in both senses of the word.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Oh good, we have hundreds of dark, cynical Trek cold war books to look forward to.

Do you consider A Private Little War, Balance of Terror, The Enemy, or The Defector to be dark and cynical?

They weren't set in a Federation that's had large chunks blasted to rubble, billions dead in the Federation alone and a group formed of (mostly) hostile powers knocking on their door.

 

[Jakks]

Oh good, we have hundreds of dark, cynical Trek cold war books to look forward to.

As long as the story's are engaging and intelligent I have no problems with dark and gritty tales.

nuBSG was about as grim as TV scifi gets...and I consider much of it some of the best stuff that's ever been on the tube.

Of course, YMMV.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Yeah, that's what I want out of Star Trek, taking story cues from NuBSG.

Will Kirk be ordering firing squads on the hanger deck? Should Bacco order captured spies shot out of the airlock? Tell you what, let's bring back the Borg, destroy the remaining planets of the UFP and set the survivors out looking for a new place to live. Yee-haw! That's the sort of better days story Trek's been missing out on.

 

[Christopher]

Christopher, there may be no editorial mandate requiring you to write 'dark' stories, but the tone of the Typhon Pact books has been dark.

Yes, but that does not mean that they inevitably must lead to a shooting war. War is not the only possibility for a dark story. Like I said, remember recent history. How many hundreds of dark, cynical spy thrillers or political thrillers did the Cold War generate?

Oh good, we have hundreds of dark, cynical Trek cold war books to look forward to.

That's not what I meant at all. I was merely speaking hypothetically in order to point out the flaw in the assumption that war stories are the only kind of dark stories that could possibly exist. I was saying that, even if the books pertaining to the Typhon Pact were to remain dark, that wouldn't automatically mean they'd involve a war. But that's just a hypothetical for the sake of argument. I'm not saying the books will remain dark, because I have no reason to believe or suspect that to be true. There's no continuation of the Typhon Pact arc on the 2011 schedule, and I'm not aware of any such projects in the works for 2012.

And even if -- again, stress if -- the plan were for future Pact-related books to tend toward the darker side, there are still plenty of other subjects for Trek novels to explore, even within the 24th-century setting. Just because a rival power exists, that doesn't mean it's a constant focus. (Remember, the Klingons were only in 7 TOS episodes out of 79, the Romulans in only 3.) And it would certainly be absurd to expect the Pact to be involved routinely in Voyager or Titan or, obviously, TOS or Lost Era or anything set pre-2381.

 

[Jakks]

Yeah, that's what I want out of Star Trek, taking story cues from NuBSG.

Will Kirk be ordering firing squads on the hanger deck? Should Bacco order captured spies shot out of the airlock? Tell you what, let's bring back the Borg, destroy the remaining planets of the UFP and set the survivors out looking for a new place to live. Yee-haw! That's the sort of better days story Trek's been missing out on.

I take it being obtuse is something you enjoy...or is it just whining in general?

 

[kkozoriz1]

It's a hobby.

 

[Sci]

I'm saying 'Destiny' went overboard with the scale of the destruction.

A star trek book should not be similar to BSG's pilot film, setting the stage for what can only be - in the short/medium term, at least - dark stories with half-traumatised characters.

Why not?

Personally, for all that Destiny dealt with the inevitability of death and the possibility of apocalypse, I found it to be one of the most life-affirming stories Star Trek has ever created. Much of Star Trek, especially in TNG and VOY, has tended to want to avoid the fact that life can be painful and despairing, painting it as dishonestly sunny thing. Existence is a hard and painful thing and it's dishonest to pretend that it is not.

What the darker incarnations of Star Trek -- DS9, TOS, and, to a lesser extent, the later two seasons of ENT, and, yes, Destiny -- is, they acknowledge and confront darkness and despair. They portray life's hardships.... and then they move forward into the light. They talk about the darkness and evil and pain, and then they say, "But we can beat it, life will go on, life will get better, and there is still good in the world, there are still things worth living for. The light still outweighs the dark."

That you can't move past Destiny's darkness into its light has more to do with your own issues than with the actual content of the books. That you can't see the life-affirming nature of the post-Destiny books -- seriously, how wonderful and inspirational was the finale of William Leisner's Losing the Peace? It was bloody brilliant, it was! -- is ultimately your problem, not the novels' problem.

Yes, the novels are depicting things that are dark. They are also depicting things that are light. It's not the authors' fault you're only fixating on the dark.

 

[ProtoAvatar]

I'm saying 'Destiny' went overboard with the scale of the destruction.

A star trek book should not be similar to BSG's pilot film, setting the stage for what can only be - in the short/medium term, at least - dark stories with half-traumatised characters.

Why not?

Because I - and, from what can be seen in this thread alone - many other readers, do not read trek for depressing, dark stories; there are more than enough other books along these lines out there for anyone who wants to read them.
And, Sci, you can come up with all the rhetoric you want; it won't change the fact that the recent trek books have been dark.

'Destiny' did serious damage to the atmosphere/spirit of the trek books of the short/medium term with its diaster porn.

 

[Sci]

I'm saying 'Destiny' went overboard with the scale of the destruction.

A star trek book should not be similar to BSG's pilot film, setting the stage for what can only be - in the short/medium term, at least - dark stories with half-traumatised characters.

Why not?

Because I - and, from what can be seen in this thread alone - many other readers,

I take it that by "many," you mean, "a couple of guys on the Internet?"

Because I - and, from what can be seen in this thread alone - many other readers, do not read trek for depressing, dark stories;

And all Star Trek books should conform to your tastes?

And, Sci, you can come up with all the rhetoric you want; it won't change the fact that the recent trek books have been dark.

They've also been light.

I mean, seriously, why are you ignoring books like Inception or The Children of Kings or Unspoken Truth or the ST09 novelization or Errand of Fury: The Sacrifices of War or Troublesome Minds or The Never-Ending Sacrifice? I mean, seriously, most of the books published since Destiny have either literally had nothing to do with it or have completely different tones. And that's not counting the TPBs of the SEC series. You're acting like every book since Destiny has been Zero Sum Game.

'Destiny' did serious damage to the atmosphere/spirit of the trek books of the short/medium term with its diaster porn.

No, it hasn't. And the authors are not responsible for your inability to fixate on anything other than darkness if their stories dare to be anything other than Disney fairy tales.

 

[kkozoriz1]

I mean, seriously, why are you ignoring books like Inception or The Children of Kings or Unspoken Truth or the ST09 novelization or Errand of Fury: The Sacrifices of War or Troublesome Minds or The Never-Ending Sacrifice? I mean, seriously, most of the books published since Destiny have either literally had nothing to do with it or have completely different tones. And that's not counting the TPBs of the SEC series. You're acting like every book since Destiny has been Zero Sum Game.

Children of Kings is not a dark book? You really need to come into the light from time to time.

And ST09, with the destruction of Romulus and the death of most of the Romulans (- He called himself Nero,- Last of the Romulan Empire.) and the destruction of Vulcan including 6 billion Vulcans), was such a rollicking good time who minds a little genocide.