Re: TTN: Absent Enemies by John Jackson Miller Review Thread (Spoilers
After "The Struggle Within" turned out to be a rather unimportant entry in the Typhon Pact series, these e-book only stories tend to look more like filler books than actually adding to the overall story.
Well, the original
Typhon Pact miniseries was designed to be a group of standalone novels built around a common theme, so that one could read them all or just whichever selected ones caught one's fancy. Later books have since picked up on threads from at least three of them and made them feel more integrated, but at the time, they were meant to be about equally self-contained, and
The Struggle Within was written in that same spirit.
The original idea of the TP miniseries, when it was initially conceived as a 6-book series, was to have one book for each of the six members -- not to tell a single overarching narrative, but simply to give each member species its own focus novel. When the miniseries was cut down to four books, the Tzenkethi and Romulans were folded into the same novel, but the Kinshaya were orphaned, leaving the series incomplete. TSW was done to complete the set -- to give an overdue focus not only to the overlooked member of the Pact, but the overlooked member of the potential Khitomer Accords allies, the Talarians. In that respect, it was as important as any of the others. I certainly was not instructed to tell an expendable or irrelevant story. On the contrary, I tried to make it a capstone on the whole series to date, a tale that would tie together some of the threads from earlier books and bring some resolution, defusing tensions at least a bit and letting the series (up to that point) resolve on a hopeful note. If that was not picked up on in later books, that was a decision made after the fact.
I wasn't told to make my upcoming DTI e-book unimportant either. Indeed, I wasn't given any parameters about what kind of story it should be, other than that it be between 25,000 and 35,000 words, not in the Abramsverse, and not post-TMP because there were already two other pending e-books in that era (which I assume are Michael A. Martin's TWOK-era
Seasons of Light and Darkness and Scott Harrison's early-post-TMP
Shadow of the Machine). If anything, I'd say
The Collectors is fairly important to the DTI series.
. I guess I skim-read that too fast, reading only the first sentences of those two paragraphs ...
It's like US$6.70...