TNG - Headlong Flight pre-release thread

[Enterprise1701]

Due out on 31 January 2017 is Dayton Ward's upcoming TNG novel Headlong Flight.

An exhilarating thriller from bestselling author Dayton Ward set in the universe of Star Trek: The Next Generation, following Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew as they explore the previously uncharted and dangerous Odyssean Pass.

Surveying a nebula as part of their continuing exploration of the previously uncharted “Odyssean Pass,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise encounter a rogue planet. Life signs are detected on the barren world’s surface, and then a garbled message is received: a partial warning to stay away at all costs. Determined to render assistance, Picard dispatches Commander Worf and an away team to investigate, but their shuttlecraft is forced to make an emergency landing on the surface—moments before all contact is lost and the planet completely disappears.

Worf and his team learn that this mysterious world is locked into an unending succession of random jumps between dimensions, the result of an ambitious experiment gone awry. The Enterprise crewmembers and the alien scientists who created the technology behind this astonishing feat find themselves trapped, powerless to break the cycle. Meanwhile, as the planet continues to fade in and out of various planes of existence, other parties have now taken notice….

 

[tomswift2002]

Sounds like the season 3 DS9 episode where Dax fell in love with that guy, but then ended up almost tearing the planet apart when it tried to shift universes because she was "grounded" to our universe. But with the E-, D- and TOS-era Romulan Warbird, I wonder if time travel is also involved.

 

[David cgc]

Maybe it's just because the starship team-up on the cover of the first "Prey" novel ended up being figurative, but my instinct is that it's more a case of the storyline taking place over multiple time-periods than literal time travel between the 2260s, 2360s, and 2380s.

 

[tomswift2002]

Maybe it's just because the starship team-up on the cover of the first "Prey" novel ended up being figurative, but my instinct is that it's more a case of the storyline taking place over multiple time-periods than literal time travel between the 2260s, 2360s, and 2380s.

Did you read the last part of the write-up? The planet appears in different planes and dimensions! That doesn't exactly rule out time travel!

 

[Enterprise1701]

Sounds like the season 3 DS9 episode where Dax fell in love with that guy, but then ended up almost tearing the planet apart when it tried to shift universes because she was "grounded" to our universe. But with the E-, D- and TOS-era Romulan Warbird, I wonder if time travel is also involved.

Ha, the comparison to DS9 - "Meridian" has popped up everywhere I have seen!

 

[Reanok]

I 've been looking forward to getting this book for a few months. I really like the cover art.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

But with the E-, D- and TOS-era Romulan Warbird, I wonder if time travel is also involved.

It could be travelling to other universes where the Ent-D and the Warbird were never destroyed.

 

[Idran]

Where which warbird was never destroyed? That's not a specific ship, is it? All of them from the TOS era looked like that, I thought.

 

[Enterprise1701]

It could be travelling to other universes where the Ent-D and the Warbird were never destroyed.

Are you talking about TNG - "Timescape"? Neither ship was destroyed in that episode. And the cover of Headlong Flight features a 23rd century bird of prey, not a 24th century warbird.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ No, I was just referring to this book.

 

[BritishSeaPower]

The E-E looks very small compared to the E-D there. It's a great cover, but the scale seems off.

 

[The Wormhole]

The E-E looks very small compared to the E-D there. It's a great cover, but the scale seems off.

The Sovereign class is actually smaller than the Galaxy class in terms of height, width and internal volume. The Sovereign has greater length, though.

 

[BritishSeaPower]

Yeah, but the forced perspective of the cover makes it look like the saucer and engineering hull fit within the saucer of the E-D, which doesn't seem right. It's been bugging me since I first saw the cover on Amazon.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The arrangement of the ships seems very slapdash.

 

[Markonian]

Seems fine to me. The ships are at different distances from our viewpoint. The E-E is above and behind the E-D. Looking from above, the E wouldn't throw a shadow on the D.

 

[Idran]

Seems fine to me. The ships are at different distances from our viewpoint. The E-E is above and behind the E-D. Looking from above, the E wouldn't throw a shadow on the D.

I don't think the objection is that it isn't physically possible, but that it was poorly laid out so as to give the illusion of size mismatches. That they could have done better and arranged things so as to not even generate that sort of optical illusion. They're evaluating it on aesthetic principles, not accuracy ones.

It's like explicitly choosing to make a map with a Mercator projection nowadays: yeah, it's technically valid, but that doesn't mean it's worth introducing the size confusion it causes when there are so many better options.

 

[Tuskin38]

It's like explicitly choosing to make a map with a Mercator projection nowadays: yeah, it's technically valid, but that doesn't mean it's worth introducing the size confusion it causes when there are so many better options.

Are you trying to tell me that Greenland isn't bigger then Africa?

 

[Defcon]

Since the book should start to appear in the wild soon I've posted a review thread:

http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/tng-headlong-flight-by-dayton-ward-review-thread.285842/