TNG RELAUNCH? WHY THE NEGATIVITY?

[Triskelion]

***SPOILERS*** (what's the policy about spoiler warnings anyone?)

RE the Relaunch:
On my vacation I read Before Dishonor, Death in Winter, Q & A, and Captain's Glory (Shatnerverse). Q & A was my favorite. But there was something to be enjoyed about all these titles.

Before Dishonor:
Seven is exactly the same character. Janeway is killed rather unceremoniously, which feels like a blip--either she'd better be back, or I'm going to be pissed if that's how we brush her off. Let's go rev up a planetkiller felt a bit...convenient. To be honest I've already forgotten much of this book, so I haven't much to offer by way of criticism. Worth the price? Worth it.


Death in Winter:
Better. I really liked the descriptions of the snow, although overall the story felt more like fantasy--but Trek benefited from that variety. The Krevata were cool aliens to get to know. The convicted Doctor Greyhorse felt like--the other shoe never dropped. I kept waiting for him to unravel and go ballistic but he never did. It's got some decent Romulan intrigue but that's an aspect of Trek that never appealed to me personally. Sela was true to character, her Romulan power was conveyed with weight and truth.
My complaints are fourfold:

1. The action in the climax fizzled like a wet bottlerocket. (Deadline)?

2. Geordie and Worf were planning a covert operation, then Janeway, IIRC, shut them down, and that was the end of that. I would like to have seen them proceed and remain a part of the story.

3. Also, the portable holoemitters used instead of reconstructive surgery is a great idea--but does this mean holograms can be mobile now? Kind of a big technology and it's implications are barely discussed.

4. The sudden awkwardness between Picard & Crusher in the denouement. It's like, Picard suddenly came off like a bumbling adolescent woman-repeller, and Beverly was suddenly, inexplicably aloof of the man she's had a crush on for years. I don't buy it that she didn't want what she could get; I never thought of her as that unrealistic or fickle. But it resolved nicely. Beverly showed her strength and determination here. Picard not so much.

All in all Death in Winter was a decent read with good descriptions and action. Worth the price? Worth it.


Q & A
Handily the most carefully-written of these. It has a symmetry and even pace. It has a viable logic and verisimilitude and love for Trek. It is creative and inventive. It totally worked for me. I will be buying KRAD's Klingon installments. I can't help but think that John DeLancy would be very pleased with the portrayal of Q in this novel, and I hope he reads it.
Complaints: none really. It wasn't "booky" enough. (I'm just trying to appear balanced). Worth the price? Worth it.

Also, I emailed Keith DeCandido and he wrote back expediently and that was pretty damned cool of him.

And Captain's Glory
Not part of the Relaunch, but it was part of my set. I liked the first act very much, but later the story referenced a lot of past works which I had not read. It also had Picard vs Kirk, which was kinda cool, but come on, really? I think those characters would have ironed out their conflict over a couple of beers, not with the lives of their crews, which had always taken precedence above all.

The three (two?) authors were blended rather seamlessly, so that was a pleasant surprise; there were no hiccups. Worth the price? Worth it--but I may skip the others in that series. (I just don't like playing catchup with series references, but this is a criticism I have of series publishing, not stories in particular).

I also bought Titan: The Red King, which is professionally written but far too ponderous for my taste. I like a little speed in my read.

But Star Trek is like sex. Even when it's bad it beats a day at work.

 

[BrotherBenny]

We should have seen the Borg's side of the story, and I'm sure Christopher will provide this.

He always delivers the goods.

 

[Christopher]

My point is that it doesn't matter that the Borg may be ridiculously huge and spread out. In their calculation of total defeat they would have taken into account the simple fact that no matter what the Borg threw at 8472 they would NOT be defeated, hell or even slowed down as we saw. So even if 8472 completely wiped out say 10000+ Borg worlds/ships why are we assuming that (since the Borg are so large and powerful) that that small number meant they were severely crippled?

They had been fighting the war for five months and were predicting that it would be lost within a few weeks at most. They didn't just say they judged defeat to be inevitable in the grand scheme of things, they said the war was nearly over already, that it would be lost by the time they could escort Voyager to the far end of their territory. How does that not mean that they've already lost the majority of their forces, regardless of the actual number? (Although I admit I'm assuming that the escort would be at transwarp speeds. "Scorpion" is contradictory on this point, on the one hand having Voyager proceed under its own power, on the other hand giving the impression that the research into the nanoprobe weapon is a matter of mere days' work.)

All I'm saying is that while it MIGHT have been the case that the Borg were actually crippled, the logic that "because they stated that they were 'mere' weeks away from total defeat" meant that they were actually severely crippled.

Only if you fail to take the preceding duration of the war into account. That's the key point you seem to be overlooking. If they were within a few weeks of being totally wiped out, then what must the previous five months have done to them?

Whether they were crippled or not is not my argument, just that the logic doesn't hold that, that statement meant that they MUST be.

No, it's not certain, but it is more probable than the alternative.

Consider an even more ridiculously powerful force, Q, the Borg would be mere nano-seconds away from total defeat if they faced them and could easily state as much, but that closeness doesn't mean that if suddenly that Q was stopped then the Borg would necessarily be super weakened, such that they couldn't defeat an enemy that they normally would be able to defeat.

Again, that analogy only works if you completely and utterly ignore the fact that the war had already been going on for five months. You keep talking about it as though it's an instantaneous event. The Q analogy doesn't work because the Q could wipe them out in a microsecond. Species 8472 had been working at it for, I'm getting tired of repeating it, FIVE MONTHS. Twenty-two weeks. Over a hundred and fifty days. That means they weren't the kind of ridiculously overpowerful force you're proposing. They were unstoppable, but they needed time to get the job done. And they were somewhere around 80 percent of the way through the job already at the time "Scorpion" occurred.

The convicted Doctor Greyhorse felt like--the other shoe never dropped. I kept waiting for him to unravel and go ballistic but he never did.

But that was the "other shoe." The resolution of his storyline was that he proved himself to be truly reformed despite others' suspicions of him.

3. Also, the portable holoemitters used instead of reconstructive surgery is a great idea--but does this mean holograms can be mobile now? Kind of a big technology and it's implications are barely discussed.

By this point, Starfleet has had the Doctor's mobile emitter available for study for nearly two years -- longer, if you count the time they were in touch with Voyager in the Delta Quadrant -- and we saw some briefcase-sized prototype mobile emitters in Homecoming/The Farther Shore, set over a year and a half before this book.

Also, I imagine the disguise holograms are simpler, since they don't need to be independently mobile but just modify a living body. So the emitter technology for them would be simpler and easier to miniaturize.

 

[Triskelion]

The convicted Doctor Greyhorse felt like--the other shoe never dropped. I kept waiting for him to unravel and go ballistic but he never did.

But that was the "other shoe." The resolution of his storyline was that he proved himself to be truly reformed despite others' suspicions of him.

3. Also, the portable holoemitters used instead of reconstructive surgery is a great idea--but does this mean holograms can be mobile now? Kind of a big technology and it's implications are barely discussed.

By this point, Starfleet has had the Doctor's mobile emitter available for study for nearly two years -- longer, if you count the time they were in touch with Voyager in the Delta Quadrant -- and we saw some briefcase-sized prototype mobile emitters in Homecoming/The Farther Shore, set over a year and a half before this book.

Also, I imagine the disguise holograms are simpler, since they don't need to be independently mobile but just modify a living body. So the emitter technology for them would be simpler and easier to miniaturize.

Did he appear in a previous volume? Maybe it helps to know his character more. But his interactions in Death in Winter were as animated as Remote Spock in Spock's Brain. Judging by this book alone, tweren't hardly worth his kerning.

And thanks, Christopher for so many considered and thoughful responses. What you posit about the holoemitters makes sense; the disguises would hold less information than a fully-autonomous holo crewman. Maybe the next generation of uniforms should be holographic! A little chilly in the folding chairs, perhaps.

I was thinking that a, say, laptop-sized mobile emitter could be embedded and supported within the hologram's magnetic field (like a battery pack). He could carry it around inside him instead of wearing the thing.

 

[Turbo]

^ Who, Doctor Greyhorse? He was the CMO on the USS Stargazer, and appears in the all of the Stargazer books, cameoed in The Buried Age, and was in the TNG book Reunion.

 

[KRAD]

Q & A
Handily the most carefully-written of these. It has a symmetry and even pace. It has a viable logic and verisimilitude and love for Trek. It is creative and inventive. It totally worked for me. I will be buying KRAD's Klingon installments. I can't help but think that John DeLancy would be very pleased with the portrayal of Q in this novel, and I hope he reads it.
Complaints: none really. It wasn't "booky" enough. (I'm just trying to appear balanced). Worth the price? Worth it.

Thanks muchly!

Also, I emailed Keith DeCandido and he wrote back expediently and that was pretty damned cool of him.

Aw, not a problem. Happy to do it.

 

[LightningStorm]

five months, five months, five months, FIVE MONTHS. Twenty-two weeks. Over a hundred and fifty days.

Still, none of that matters to my original point. You are still making assumptions based on some information we have and a lot that we do not. Again, I'm not saying the Borg absolutely were not crippled, but you said that based on these things that "they must've been in pretty bad shape." when that simply isn't absolutely certain.

The amount of time of the war is wholly irrelevant when we don't know how fast/slow 8472 was actually destroying them, how many resources 8472 applied to the start of the war vs "now". The rate of increase if any in resources committed to the war. Assuming that they were 80% defeated simply because in time 80% of time had passed to the end is quite a leap unless you know for certain that 8472 was causing exactly the same amount of and rate of damage constantly throughout the entire war.

It is just as possible that 8472 got five months into the war and decided "OK, let's end this BS" and stepped up their offense to such a level that they could wipe out the entirety of the Borg in a fully operational state in merely two weeks. But then Voyager interferes and the war ends and for all we know the Borg end up not that badly damaged from it (damaged for sure, but we do not know how bad if even bad at all), thanks to Voyager.

The fact of the matter is we simply do not know and you can not make declarations of truth and absolutes without all the information.

 

[Trent Roman]

I'm afraid you do seem persnickety, because my list was intended to show a cumulative pattern, not to suggest that each individual instance was of equal impact to the Borg. Yes, the Borg weren't bothered by the first few instances where Starfleet stymied them, but eventually a clear pattern began to emerge, culminating with the crippling strike on the transwarp network and the Unicomplex. The Borg haven't just taken one severe blow from the Federation -- they've been beaten by them again and again, with the damage escalating over time.

Well, then, it's obvious that we just have rather different conceptions of how--and at what scale--the Borg operate. Which is a shame, because I always liked it when the Borg were the leviathan of the galaxy, incredibly dangerous without being malicious, and we the mere plankton trying to avoid being consumed by the uncaring beast. I really dislike these new, small-minded Borg, just like everybody else but with different tech, but since I'm not the one here who'll actually be setting the direction of the Borg in the future, I guess I have no choice but to suck it up (or stop reading, but I don't feel strongly enough about the issue for that).

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Christopher]

Still, none of that matters to my original point. You are still making assumptions based on some information we have and a lot that we do not. Again, I'm not saying the Borg absolutely were not crippled, but you said that based on these things that "they must've been in pretty bad shape." when that simply isn't absolutely certain.

Nothing in life is ever absolutely certain. If you demand absolute certainty, you'll never be convinced of everything. Besides, we're reading between the lines of a totally imaginary series of events. There is no "certainty" when it's all just made up, so that's a ridiculous standard to insist on. I never once claimed we were talking about absolute truth or certainty. It's just a question of finding the most plausible speculative explanation for their change in behavior as seen onscreen. A matter of probability and reasonableness, not "certainty." It is all imaginary, so I don't know how you can possibly bring terms like "certainty" or "absolute truth" into the discussion in the first place.

Assuming that they were 80% defeated simply because in time 80% of time had passed to the end is quite a leap unless you know for certain that 8472 was causing exactly the same amount of and rate of damage constantly throughout the entire war.

Okay, now I know you're just not listening, because I addressed that point two or three posts ago. Let's just drop it.

Well, then, it's obvious that we just have rather different conceptions of how--and at what scale--the Borg operate. Which is a shame, because I always liked it when the Borg were the leviathan of the galaxy, incredibly dangerous without being malicious, and we the mere plankton trying to avoid being consumed by the uncaring beast. I really dislike these new, small-minded Borg, just like everybody else but with different tech, but since I'm not the one here who'll actually be setting the direction of the Borg in the future, I guess I have no choice but to suck it up (or stop reading, but I don't feel strongly enough about the issue for that).

I don't see "malicious" and "small-minded." Resistance made it explicit that the Borg were more aggressive because they were growing a new Queen and her vulnerability demanded a more defensive behavior. That seems entirely pragmatic to me. And as mentioned before, that was just one isolated cube, cut off from the rest of the Borg. It doesn't follow that its drones' behavior is representative of the entire Collective.

 

[Enterpriserules]

I think, above everything else, the Borg are really played out. It just does not seem fresh and inventive anymore. What is good about DSR-R is that they have so much to still play with; Cardassia, Bajor, Sisko coming back, the fallout of the Dominion and the great characters. Titan has the unknown and some really interesting new characters that the writers are really making jump off the page. Also, Riker and Troi are really getting their time to shine, growing and finding depth that we did not know was there. ENT-R has the Romulan wars and the formation of the Federation to play with. TNG-R seems to be given the same old stuff. The new characters are not great and the old characters just feel tired. There just needs to be something new in the series. Or, as DS9 does, play with the universe a bit more.

 

[donners22]

I suppose they're the Lord Soth of the Star Trek universe - they should only be used in small doses, lest they overwhelm the main characters or, worse, lose their impact. One could say that Voyager has already gone past the point of no return on that issue, though at least the Borg episodes on that series were generally quite strong.

 

[wahwahkits]

If you're saying that the Borg have been overdone (they haven't imho) then when aren't the cynics saying the same thing about Q?

Q stories always fall into one of either two stories
A-- Q is watching us to see if we will solve a problem

or

B-- Q is going to teach us a lesson.

On a personal level I don't think Q has been overdone but the the anti-borg out there should consider the above points.

 

[Wowbagger]

If you're saying that the Borg have been overdone (they haven't imho) then when aren't the cynics saying the same thing about Q?

Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe the last TNG Q novel was, depending on whether you count the latter as a TNG novel (I do), either Greg Cox's Q-Strike of 1998 or Jon DeLancie's own 1999 novel I, Q. Either way, it has been nearly a decade since the last time we've seen Q and Picard together in any media, and, since "All Good Things..." there have been only four Q episodes at all ("Q-Less", "The Q and the Grey", "Death Wish", and "Q2"... as I recall) and a smattering of stories and novels where he played a role (SNW in particular).

But the Borg? They've had a movie and an Enterpise story. No fewer than twenty-two Voyager episodes. I could start counting novels in the last decade that've involved them, but, frankly, my memory isn't that long and Memory Beta isn't that complete.

In short, whatever your opinions on the Borg arc, you most certainly cannot compare Q to it.

In fact, a Q arc could've been pretty excellent, given how much room there is to work with him and the Continuum.

 

[JAG]

There was also Q&A 2-3 months ago.

 

[KRAD]

Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe the last TNG Q novel was, depending on whether you count the latter as a TNG novel (I do), either Greg Cox's Q-Strike of 1998 or Jon DeLancie's own 1999 novel I, Q.

I'm correcting you because you're wrong about this. The last TNG Q novel was, in fact, my own Q & A released in October of 2007....

Leaving it out probably wouldn't bother me but for the fact that it's one of the books that this very topic is about.....................

 

[Richard White]

I'm inclined to believe that Wowbagger was referring to the fact that before Q&A, it had been almost a decade since the last "Q" book.

But, I'll defer to the original poster to make his position clear.

 

[Wowbagger]

I'm inclined to believe that Wowbagger was referring to the fact that before Q&A, it had been almost a decade since the last "Q" book.

But, I'll defer to the original poster to make his position clear.

Precisely what I meant. The last TNG Q novel prior to Q&A was I, Q (what is it with Q and two-letter novel titles?). wahwahkits was calling Q tapped out, and, aside from the simple fact that it's been ten years since a Q TNG book, Q&A (my favorite of the relaunch arc) is the best evidence available that that is the opposite of true. One might even call it categorically not true, to coin a phrase entirely at random.

My final words were a suggestion that the story with "Them", while entirely satisfying to me in the single-novel form it was in, could easily have been stretched to form a larger TNG-R arc. And, while I don't like arcs in TNG on principle, I suspect it would have been a objectively better story than the Borg shindig that's currently ongoing. And that's partly because the Borg are, as earlier asserted, comparatively tapped out.

I'd hate for you to get the impression, KRAD, that I am either a complete newb or someone who didn't love Q&A. While debateably a tasteless idiot, I'm a longtime fan with a good memory who also happens to be debateably a tasteless idiot, and I, personally, would rip off my shirt and excitedly jump up and down screaming girlishly like you were Paul McCartney if you were onstage at a convention I was attending. (Depending on your opinion of my taste or lack thereof, this may or may not be a good thing.) My comments were purely in defense of the use of Q versus the use of the Borg in response to wahwahkits.

EDIT: Incidentally, Cox's Q-Continuum was a big part of my childhood. I was grateful to see references to it and every other Q novel in Q&A. It seems I've read all of them.

Hm. Maybe I am a bit of a Q-partisan.

 

[Trent Roman]

The question was: the major elements of the Relaunch so far have been the Borg and Q, both elements from the series, who why are people complaining that the Borg are repetitive and not Q? To which one good answer was, Q hasn't been touched in quite a while (or so Lady Q tells me...), whereas the Borg have had a lot of coverage. Other goods answers would be: Q was the 'antagonist' (so to speak) for one book, the Borg two with more on the way; since Q is, essentially, chaos distilled, his appearances are always different even if they all have a 'lesson' behind them, whereas the Borg books read like do-overs of "First Contact" and a lot of previous New Frontier material; and even where the Q book covered old ground, it did so in a fashion that both shed new insight on the Q without radically altering that basic Q sense of roguishness and knavery, whereas the devolution of the Borg has all but euneuch'ed them as credible, interesting villains.

EDIT: Posted before I saw Wowbagger had responded.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Wowbagger]

EDIT: Posted before I saw Wowbagger had responded.

True, but I like yours better. Shorter and to-the-pointer.

Everyone, read Trent's instead!

 

[Enterpriserules]

I think that what I wish for is originality. Titan is making Star Trek great again. The fun and unknown are really pushing that series to greatness. DS9-R has the originality of the series just continuing and also branching out into new characters. ENT-R has the unknown past. TNG-R has gotten lost in losing characters we liked, reusing the same villain that we have seen too many times (A villain that is a one trick pony. They are so utilitarian, that even the addition to the queen could not help make them more personable. The Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians all have more that one side to them. They have good and bad people in them. It helps make, even the enemy likable. The Borg, just all evil). So, forge new ground TNG-R writers. Give us something new. Mix up the characters from other series, and do it well. It would be awesome to see Paris and Torres on the Enterprise. Let the Enterprise go explore strange new worlds. Let the crew grow. Let them mix it up with the Romulans, Andorians, Tellarites, Cardassians, and other great races. Maybe give the Enterprise a chance to save the universe the way Kirk did so many times. Just give us something original, authentic and fresh!