Spoilers TOS: Agents of Influence by Dayton Ward Review Thread
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Yep. T’Kuvma cites it during one of his many speeches. It took place about twenty years prior to TOS, so it’s still a decade in the past when the Battle of the Binary Stars takes place.
There was a bit of a retcon there, though. The first episode had dialogue suggesting that there'd been virtually no Federation contact with the Klingons for nearly a century, but the second episode walked that back a bit by mentioning Donatu V and other brief skirmishes.
Is there any actual mention of the plans to upgrade the Constitution-class ships in the near future? Or is it just that we know by the time-frame that this will happen?
There are several direct references to the DSC-conflict in the story, but none to Donatu V that I can recall. As DGCatAniSiri mentioned above, Donatu was already quite some time in the past even back at the start of DSC (and was covered pretty thoroughly by Kevin Ryan's Errand of... trilogies).
No mention of this in the book. Although
one can maybe infer that the Endeavour's near-destruction during the events of the novel due to a Klingon weapon serves as a flashing warning to Nogura and the rest of the admiralty that Starfleet needs to upgrade their topline heavy-cruisers, stat, which would fit the timeframe. The K'tinga-class battlecruisers are discussed at some length, however, in terms of them being about to finally enter production at Imperial shipyards.
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I mostly just seized on it because I have a bit of a personal investment in Endeavour surviving to the movie era (well, not to mention the fact that we only know its registry number because of a chart in TUC).
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Dayton had the Endeavour (or at least some form of it) evidently surviving into the TOS movie-era in his novel Elusive Salvation, where it participates in the 2283 Iramahl rescue-mission with the Enterprise. Based on how this new book ends,
maybe the saucer got attached to a new, 5YM-era Connie stardrive-section and then both underwent a refit in later years, but who knows.
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Virtually none doesn’t mean 100% none. Also they could have meant contact as in actually speaking, the attacks could have had no communication.
Yes, of course any inconsistency can be rationalized. The very point of the word "retcon," which a lot of people don't get, is that it's retroactive continuity, not discontinuity. It's supposed to be reconcilable. But it still represents a change in the storytellers' intentions. My point is that I got the feeling that the writers of the pilot episode had forgotten about Donatu V and someone (probably Kirsten Beyer) set them straight by the time they did the second episode.
I finished this book and voted outstanding. I really liked this story alot. Vanguard should really enjoy the storyline with Captain Khatami and her crew working with Captain Kirk and Uhura and Sulu to protect them from Orion Pirates and ruthless Klingons in the Irvantri asteroid field. Also Spock in command of Enterprise with Admiral Nogura investigating the klingon technology that causes attacks on their ships .
I really loved this book and voted outstanding. I agree with previous posts that it started a little slow but once I got about halfway through I could. not. put. it. down.
I have to admit I found myself somewhat disappointed by this one. It wasn't egregiously bad, to be sure, but neither did it stand out and distinguish itself in any particular way. It has the bones of a really cool story in there somewhere, but the way it was fleshed out doesn't live up to that underlying potential.
Certainly the concept of long-term deep-cover Federation agents on the Klingon homeworld sounds like something with all kinds of fascinating story potential, but none of it is really developed. We barely get to know the agents, barely see them operating among Klingons, barely learn anything about their work or lives on Qo'Nos, never actually learn how they were discovered—they don't even bring any particular intriguing plot MacGuffin with them. In a sense, they are the MacGuffin.
Likewise, bringing the oft-mentioned but seldom-seen Admiral Nogura aboard the Enterprise seemed to have lot of character-revealing potential. It all goes unrealized. Nogura himself comes across as a generic hardass-with-a-heart-of-gold, such a cipher in personal terms that the book literally lampshades how little personality he has. Nor do we see any interesting interactions with the regular crew. The highlight of the entire story, Nogura-wise, is probably the moment when he calls McCoy "insolent."
Beyond that, the book really feels like it would've benefited from more attentive editing. For example (at least in the Kindle edition I read), when we first meet D'zinn and her Orion crew, they're tracking a civilian freighter with three people aboard—at a moment in the story when we've just learned that Kirk and company are planning to go undercover in just that way. Except it's not them, because they haven't actually started yet, and whatever random civilian freighter it actually is is never seen, heard of, or mentioned again. For an even more egregious example, the firefight on the asteroid later in the book, which is something that by all rights should be taut and suspenseful, instead drags out interminably, with scenes that repeat themselves almost literally word-for-word. And these are just a couple examples; lots of other scenes, from beginning to end, have a similar sense of overly wordy drag to them.
The pacing is an issue in terms of plot developments, too. From the moment we first learn that a problem has cropped up with the signal buoys the Endeavor is using, I thought, "Hmm, it would be thematically appropriate if there were an undercover agent on board trying to sabotage things... I bet it's Character X!" But it isn't until some godawful number of chapters (and multiple additional sabotage attempts) later that the story finally reveals that gosh, yes, the saboteur is indeed Character X. And even after all the waiting, for some inscrutable reason, the scenes are staged in such a way that we don't get to see our protagonists figuring that out.
On the whole, it just feels like it's going through the paces of a generic run-of-the-mill Trek story. I was hoping for better.
Certainly the concept of long-term deep-cover Federation agents on the Klingon homeworld sounds like something with all kinds of fascinating story potential, but none of it is really developed. We barely get to know the agents, barely see them operating among Klingons, barely learn anything about their work or lives on Qo'Nos, never actually learn how they were discovered—they don't even bring any particular intriguing plot MacGuffin with them. In a sense, they are the MacGuffin.
Likewise, bringing the oft-mentioned but seldom-seen Admiral Nogura aboard the Enterprise seemed to have lot of character-revealing potential. It all goes unrealized. Nogura himself comes across as a generic hardass-with-a-heart-of-gold, such a cipher in personal terms that the book literally lampshades how little personality he has. Nor do we see any interesting interactions with the regular crew. The highlight of the entire story, Nogura-wise, is probably the moment when he calls McCoy "insolent."
Beyond that, the book really feels like it would've benefited from more attentive editing. For example (at least in the Kindle edition I read), when we first meet D'zinn and her Orion crew, they're tracking a civilian freighter with three people aboard—at a moment in the story when we've just learned that Kirk and company are planning to go undercover in just that way. Except it's not them, because they haven't actually started yet, and whatever random civilian freighter it actually is is never seen, heard of, or mentioned again. For an even more egregious example, the firefight on the asteroid later in the book, which is something that by all rights should be taut and suspenseful, instead drags out interminably, with scenes that repeat themselves almost literally word-for-word. And these are just a couple examples; lots of other scenes, from beginning to end, have a similar sense of overly wordy drag to them.
The pacing is an issue in terms of plot developments, too. From the moment we first learn that a problem has cropped up with the signal buoys the Endeavor is using, I thought, "Hmm, it would be thematically appropriate if there were an undercover agent on board trying to sabotage things... I bet it's Character X!" But it isn't until some godawful number of chapters (and multiple additional sabotage attempts) later that the story finally reveals that gosh, yes, the saboteur is indeed Character X. And even after all the waiting, for some inscrutable reason, the scenes are staged in such a way that we don't get to see our protagonists figuring that out.
On the whole, it just feels like it's going through the paces of a generic run-of-the-mill Trek story. I was hoping for better.
Over 100 pages in. All right so far. Tired of Orion pirates.
Really enjoyed this one!
We had Dayton Ward as a guest on the most recent episode of Literary Treks, talking about Agents of Influence: Literary Treks 306: There's Shag Carpet on This Ship Somewhere.
We had Dayton Ward as a guest on the most recent episode of Literary Treks, talking about Agents of Influence: Literary Treks 306: There's Shag Carpet on This Ship Somewhere.
Will have to wait until I finish the book.
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