I just picked up a copy of Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski's 1996 novel A Fury Scorned, #43 in the old TNG novel series, from one of Toronto's many fine used-book retailers.
I'd hopes for the novel when I opened it up this evening. I'd bought most of the TNG novels consistently until the mid-1990s, #40 or so. I posted here last February about Diane Duane's Intellivore, #45 in the series, probably the last book I bought as I lost interest in the series. I probably passed up #43 in the bookstores. It wasn't until later, when I learned more about the authors as I read more SF, that I became curious. Sargent and Zebrowski, it turned out, were notable authors in their own rights, Sargent writing among other things a noteworthy trilogy about Venus terraforming and a YA generation ship novel (Earthseed) that I quite like, Zebrowski writing "Big Idea" SF of which perhaps his most notable might be his 1979 Macrolife. Their credentials made me curious about what they'd do with the book, especially when I read the promising premise.
Epictetus III is a Federation colony world with a largely human population, a hospitable ocean world (92% of the surface) with beautiful landmasses, an enchanting ecology, and the fascinating mystery of a vanished and accomplished indigenous civilization that has left vestiges of a very advanced all over the planet's surface. By the time that the Enterprise arrives on stardate 46003.6 (early January 2369), the planet has been settled for 150 years and is home to 20 million people who've built a thriving civilization. Most unfortunately, it turns out that Epictetus III's sun is set to go nova, as the ancient indigenous civilization's mechanisms for stabilizing an apparently unstable star finally break down. (Or something.)
A Fury Scorned is a Trek novel that's explicitly concerned with ethics, appropriately enough for a novel concerned with the fate of a planet apparently named after the Greek philosopher who was concerned with finding ways to lead an ethical life and avoid suffering. How does anyone behave ethically in the context of the impending death of a world? How do you show sympathy? Who and what do you evacuate? What is the best way to meet your world's end? These questions keep coming up as the Enterprise-D crew--including a native of the planet in question, Ensign Ganesh Mehta, an interesting character who's a friend of Worf--try to deal with an impossible situation. The character of Captain Picard is of particular note as an individual concerned with the ethics of how to behave, but other characters--Worf, Troi, Mehta, various Epictetans like the planet's chief minister's Mariamna Fabre and archeologist/politician Samas Rychi--also share this concern. This concern engages with different situations featuring in the novel. What are people to think of the few thousand Epictetans who took the planet's few sublight craft and tried to flee? How important is it to save vestiges of the planet's past? Just how do you pick three thousand people to evacuate out of a planetary population of twenty million? How do you deal with the sort of despair that makes suicide--even mass suicide--more palatable than waiting helpless for the apocalypse?
Fortunately for Epictetus III, there always was a solution. (Did you really think that there wouldn't be?) Data saves the day, coming up with the idea of using the ancient Epictetans' sun-stabilizing technology to tap vast volumes of energy from the planet's sun to let the Enterprise generate a wormhole that could deposit the planet in a suitable orbit around another stabler star. (We'll come to the Trekverse mechanics of this later.) Interesting, in A Fury Scorned ethical problems feature as highly as the technical. While the Enterprise crew do end up deciding that it's better to risk everything with the hope of saving the entire planet--the wormhole generation might fail, and the ship could be left without warp drive in front of the nova--than to play it safe, save three thousand people, and let the world die, they're under orders from the Federation Council to remain silent about the plan until they're sure they can implement it. (Better not to tell the desperate people of a doomed world that there's a high-risk solution that could save their world, the Council judged, in case the plan can't be implemented and the Federation and Starfleet look like liars. Even if the mass suicides are ongoing.)
The awesome plan is implemented, despite the challenges, and they do an awesome job of showing what happened. I have to give props to the authors for coming up with the idea of shunting an endangered planet via wormhole from one system to another. The authors did a good job of vividly describing the planet's features before, but they do a great job of showing what happens: the slicing-off of ocean and ocean floor carved off the planet by the wormhole when it started prematurely to contract, the strange distortions of time inside, the massive earthquakes and tsunamis besetting the planet, even the final fluttering and death of beautiful colourful ephemeral insects under a oddly rippling black wormhole sky. The planet and its people don't come off lightly, with massive damage worldwide and hundreds of thousands of dead, while Picard especially is left wondering what he could have done differently. At least the Epictetans are left with the luxury of deciding what their world should be called now that it's the second planet out from its new sun.
A Fury Scorned is a very good novel: I'd give it an 8 out of 10, easily. The scenario--the planet and its people and the threatened catastrophe and its risky solution and the final resolution all --is interesting, both the established crew and original characters are characterized well. I really like the way that Sargent and Zebrowski's describe Data in their novel, depicting him as a meticulous and unflappable being who's able to come up with an audacious plan, get it approved, and implement it, showing him able to deal with Picard's concerns as an equal. The Epictetan characters are all memorable, concerned in their own ways with trying to figure things out (Mehta how to behave on this mission to her threatened homeworld, Fabre with govering her planet, Rychi with figuring out what happened to the natives before it was too late. Worf and Troi also stand out, Worf for his rigourous and not unhelpful approach to the catastrophe and Troi for taking the initiative to negotiate with hostage-takers and taking charge generally. A Fury Scorned is easily one of the best TNG novels published before the current line, and I'd hope it like so many others could also be grandfathered into the current continuity. (I just hope that Epictetus III survived 2381. What a terrible irony it would be if it didn't!)
The biggest problem with the novel is that it features the Enterprise-D creating a wormhole big enough to fit a planet through. I don't think it's insuperable. In the Trekverse, artificial wormholes were created at least as early as the V'Ger encounter, when the unbalanced engines of the NCC-1701 accidentally created a wormhole. Just a few years later, the DS9 episode "Rejoined" starting on stardate 49195.5 featured a Trill science team under Lenara Kahn trying to manufacture a stable wormhole, one that would be as suitable for regular passage to and fro as the Bajoran. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the Enterprise-D might have had the equipment necessary to create a wormhole that would be stable for just long enough to permit safe passage to Epictetus III and the ship itself, especially with the MacGuffin of an alien technology that was able to tap and transmit vast quantities of energy from the core of the dying star.
What say you all?
I'd hopes for the novel when I opened it up this evening. I'd bought most of the TNG novels consistently until the mid-1990s, #40 or so. I posted here last February about Diane Duane's Intellivore, #45 in the series, probably the last book I bought as I lost interest in the series. I probably passed up #43 in the bookstores. It wasn't until later, when I learned more about the authors as I read more SF, that I became curious. Sargent and Zebrowski, it turned out, were notable authors in their own rights, Sargent writing among other things a noteworthy trilogy about Venus terraforming and a YA generation ship novel (Earthseed) that I quite like, Zebrowski writing "Big Idea" SF of which perhaps his most notable might be his 1979 Macrolife. Their credentials made me curious about what they'd do with the book, especially when I read the promising premise.
Happily, I wasn't disappointed.
Epictetus III is a Federation colony world with a largely human population, a hospitable ocean world (92% of the surface) with beautiful landmasses, an enchanting ecology, and the fascinating mystery of a vanished and accomplished indigenous civilization that has left vestiges of a very advanced all over the planet's surface. By the time that the Enterprise arrives on stardate 46003.6 (early January 2369), the planet has been settled for 150 years and is home to 20 million people who've built a thriving civilization. Most unfortunately, it turns out that Epictetus III's sun is set to go nova, as the ancient indigenous civilization's mechanisms for stabilizing an apparently unstable star finally break down. (Or something.)
A Fury Scorned is a Trek novel that's explicitly concerned with ethics, appropriately enough for a novel concerned with the fate of a planet apparently named after the Greek philosopher who was concerned with finding ways to lead an ethical life and avoid suffering. How does anyone behave ethically in the context of the impending death of a world? How do you show sympathy? Who and what do you evacuate? What is the best way to meet your world's end? These questions keep coming up as the Enterprise-D crew--including a native of the planet in question, Ensign Ganesh Mehta, an interesting character who's a friend of Worf--try to deal with an impossible situation. The character of Captain Picard is of particular note as an individual concerned with the ethics of how to behave, but other characters--Worf, Troi, Mehta, various Epictetans like the planet's chief minister's Mariamna Fabre and archeologist/politician Samas Rychi--also share this concern. This concern engages with different situations featuring in the novel. What are people to think of the few thousand Epictetans who took the planet's few sublight craft and tried to flee? How important is it to save vestiges of the planet's past? Just how do you pick three thousand people to evacuate out of a planetary population of twenty million? How do you deal with the sort of despair that makes suicide--even mass suicide--more palatable than waiting helpless for the apocalypse?
Fortunately for Epictetus III, there always was a solution. (Did you really think that there wouldn't be?) Data saves the day, coming up with the idea of using the ancient Epictetans' sun-stabilizing technology to tap vast volumes of energy from the planet's sun to let the Enterprise generate a wormhole that could deposit the planet in a suitable orbit around another stabler star. (We'll come to the Trekverse mechanics of this later.) Interesting, in A Fury Scorned ethical problems feature as highly as the technical. While the Enterprise crew do end up deciding that it's better to risk everything with the hope of saving the entire planet--the wormhole generation might fail, and the ship could be left without warp drive in front of the nova--than to play it safe, save three thousand people, and let the world die, they're under orders from the Federation Council to remain silent about the plan until they're sure they can implement it. (Better not to tell the desperate people of a doomed world that there's a high-risk solution that could save their world, the Council judged, in case the plan can't be implemented and the Federation and Starfleet look like liars. Even if the mass suicides are ongoing.)
The awesome plan is implemented, despite the challenges, and they do an awesome job of showing what happened. I have to give props to the authors for coming up with the idea of shunting an endangered planet via wormhole from one system to another. The authors did a good job of vividly describing the planet's features before, but they do a great job of showing what happens: the slicing-off of ocean and ocean floor carved off the planet by the wormhole when it started prematurely to contract, the strange distortions of time inside, the massive earthquakes and tsunamis besetting the planet, even the final fluttering and death of beautiful colourful ephemeral insects under a oddly rippling black wormhole sky. The planet and its people don't come off lightly, with massive damage worldwide and hundreds of thousands of dead, while Picard especially is left wondering what he could have done differently. At least the Epictetans are left with the luxury of deciding what their world should be called now that it's the second planet out from its new sun.
A Fury Scorned is a very good novel: I'd give it an 8 out of 10, easily. The scenario--the planet and its people and the threatened catastrophe and its risky solution and the final resolution all --is interesting, both the established crew and original characters are characterized well. I really like the way that Sargent and Zebrowski's describe Data in their novel, depicting him as a meticulous and unflappable being who's able to come up with an audacious plan, get it approved, and implement it, showing him able to deal with Picard's concerns as an equal. The Epictetan characters are all memorable, concerned in their own ways with trying to figure things out (Mehta how to behave on this mission to her threatened homeworld, Fabre with govering her planet, Rychi with figuring out what happened to the natives before it was too late. Worf and Troi also stand out, Worf for his rigourous and not unhelpful approach to the catastrophe and Troi for taking the initiative to negotiate with hostage-takers and taking charge generally. A Fury Scorned is easily one of the best TNG novels published before the current line, and I'd hope it like so many others could also be grandfathered into the current continuity. (I just hope that Epictetus III survived 2381. What a terrible irony it would be if it didn't!)
The biggest problem with the novel is that it features the Enterprise-D creating a wormhole big enough to fit a planet through. I don't think it's insuperable. In the Trekverse, artificial wormholes were created at least as early as the V'Ger encounter, when the unbalanced engines of the NCC-1701 accidentally created a wormhole. Just a few years later, the DS9 episode "Rejoined" starting on stardate 49195.5 featured a Trill science team under Lenara Kahn trying to manufacture a stable wormhole, one that would be as suitable for regular passage to and fro as the Bajoran. It's not unreasonable to imagine that the Enterprise-D might have had the equipment necessary to create a wormhole that would be stable for just long enough to permit safe passage to Epictetus III and the ship itself, especially with the MacGuffin of an alien technology that was able to tap and transmit vast quantities of energy from the core of the dying star.
What say you all?
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