Vixen tries to do Before Dishonor or: Motherf**king Borg!!!

[DorkBoy [TM]]

His books were always a laugh riot, but the humor used to come from witty, clever dialog. His books used to be really funny, and had really good and interesting characters.

Lately his humor has been increasingly low-brow. Slapstick or crude. And his characters are more like caricatures.

I still think he's a very entertaining writer. But over the last few years of writing New Frontier, his writing has degenerated. It started around the time the original Excalibur blew up, I think.

I was hoping switching back to the TNG crew would snap him out of it. Unfortunately...

(His last New Frontier book was better, I think.)

 

[donners22]

I have, at long last, managed to get a copy of this from my library. I was originally planning to buy it straight up, but this thread made me wary.

Simply, half-way through, I like it. There are some very entertaining scenes in there, and several bits that made me laugh - the planet/dwarf planet bit and the New Frontier reference in particular. I like the links to Vendetta, the threats to the Q and the "evolution" of the Borg in general. While the acknowledgment was not quite as funny as one of the New Frontier ones, it made me smile. Considering one acknowledgment actually made me put a book back on the shelf, it's nice to see a writer who doesn't take himself too seriously.

Is it all a bit silly? No doubt. Certainly not as silly as Millennium, Shatner's Borg book or several others. It is, and I know PAD would hate this, almost like a Voyager-style episode - just shut your mind off and enjoy.

 

[donners22]

Having gone through my life with the last name DeCandido, I confess to not really getting the whole "hard to remember and pronounce" thing.

Thanks to Mick Foley, many younger men should be able to pronounce it (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mick_Foley).

I have the unfortunate job of empanelling juries, which involves calling out the names of 30-odd people. In a multicultural society like Australia, that can be a nightmare. In some cases, I make an attempt to pronounce the first few syllables and then mumble the rest. The names of the new crew members are nowhere near as tough as some I've come across.

 

[KRAD]

Thanks to Mick Foley, many younger men should be able to pronounce it (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mick_Foley).

No, Foley and his fellow wrestlers discussing Chris Candido will just exacerbate the problem, because Candido's name is pronounced "can-DEE-doh," and my last name is pronounced "de-CAN-di-do." (Sigh -- just what I need, something else to make it easier for people to mangle my last name....)

I have the unfortunate job of empanelling juries, which involves calling out the names of 30-odd people. In a multicultural society like Australia, that can be a nightmare. In some cases, I make an attempt to pronounce the first few syllables and then mumble the rest. The names of the new crew members are nowhere near as tough as some I've come across.

Heh. That job is just as hard in the courthouses of New York City, believe me............

 

[Defcon]

^ Just adopt Terri's last name after the wedding, Osborne is way easier to pronounce.

 

[BrotherBenny]

^ Just adopt Terri's last name after the wedding, Osborne is way easier to pronounce.

You have the bridge, Mr Troi

 

[Therin of Andor]

Lately his humor has been increasingly low-brow. Slapstick or crude. And his characters are more like caricatures.

Never noticed a change. Same ol' PAD to me. Love him just as it is!

 

[Sci]

^ Just adopt Terri's last name after the wedding, Osborne is way easier to pronounce.

Yeah, but then everyone will want to put a "u" into the damn thing.

 

[ClayinCA]

Having gone through my life with the last name DeCandido, I confess to not really getting the whole "hard to remember and pronounce" thing.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

- Clay Eichelberger

 

[TheAlmanac]

Thanks to Mick Foley, many younger men should be able to pronounce it (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mick_Foley).

No, Foley and his fellow wrestlers discussing Chris Candido will just exacerbate the problem, because Candido's name is pronounced "can-DEE-doh," and my last name is pronounced "de-CAN-di-do." (Sigh -- just what I need, something else to make it easier for people to mangle my last name....)

Just to make this issue even more convoluted, I always imagined your last name as it would be pronounced in Portuguese ("de-cun-DEE-doo") before I heard it spoken aloud.

 

[BlazerBoy]

http://peterdavid.malibulist.com/archives/005895.html#379715

Peter David lays the SMACKDOWN on some puling waif here about the character of Admiral Janeway. I'm a big fan of Janeway too but I have to hand it to Peter for ending that line of thought succinctly in his post in the link above.

YOU GO BOY!

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

http://peterdavid.malibulist.com/archives/005895.html#379715

Peter David lays the SMACKDOWN on some puling waif here about the character of Admiral Janeway. I'm a big fan of Janeway too but I have to hand it to Peter for ending that line of thought succinctly in his post in the link above.

YOU GO BOY!

Yeah, if he hadn't done it another author would have. But my issue with it wasn't that she was killed off, but rather the manner in which it was done. I'm not a big Voyager fan myself (and share some of David's criticisms of the show), but I still think the death was mishandled. Just as I feel the idea of killing Kirk in Generations wasn't a bad idea, but the execution--excuse the pun--was very flawed.

 

[JoeZhang]

Janeway went out like a putz - I think that's the wider problem for Voyager fans.

 

[Trent Roman]

^ Yeah. Quite aside from (A) By what reasoning did the editorial staff think it would be a good idea to kill Janeway?; and (B) By what reasoning did the editorial staff think it would be a good idea to kill Janeway in another series' novel?; I've got to wonder (C) When and why was this 'heroic death' PAD mentions as the original intent substituted for the callous and humiliating death the novel actually depicts? I fully agree that Voyager, as a series, failed to live up to its overall potential despite a number of sterling individual episodes, but I don't see how this is meant to translate into the thrashing the series has received in the fiction since the series ended... the abomination that is the VOY-R, the unnecessary and convoluted character fixes of the third String Theory book, and now Janeway getting Tasha Yar'ed at the beginning of a TNG novel. While I'm sure the repeated failures have been quite unintentional, I can't blame the Voyager fans who see all this and believe that there's some kind of grudge against the series.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[JoeZhang]

the abomination that is the VOY-R, the unnecessary and convoluted character fixes of the third String Theory book,

hum? tell me more - what happened?

 

[AuntKate]

^ Yeah. Quite aside from (A) By what reasoning did the editorial staff think it would be a good idea to kill Janeway?; and (B) By what reasoning did the editorial staff think it would be a good idea to kill Janeway in another series' novel?; I've got to wonder (C) When and why was this 'heroic death' PAD mentions as the original intent substituted for the callous and humiliating death the novel actually depicts? I fully agree that Voyager, as a series, failed to live up to its overall potential despite a number of sterling individual episodes, but I don't see how this is meant to translate into the thrashing the series has received in the fiction since the series ended... the abomination that is the VOY-R, the unnecessary and convoluted character fixes of the third String Theory book, and now Janeway getting Tasha Yar'ed at the beginning of a TNG novel. While I'm sure the repeated failures have been quite unintentional, I can't blame the Voyager fans who see all this and believe that there's some kind of grudge against the series.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

I have to commend you, sir, for not bowing and scraping to the bull hockey we usually get when we mention the way Voyager has been overlooked and poorly treated by Pocket books since it left the air. I'm tired of being put off by vague "you just don't know the truth" double talk and people who look down on the average readers and fans of the Voyager series. Voyager has been treated dismally--and I guess, based on Mr. David's posting, we have the editorial staff to blame for it. It seems incredible to me that the one series that seems to produce endless interest on the internet is the same one that is slighted by the very people who could profit from its popularity.

I know I speak for literally hundreds of Voyager fans who have bought their last book, thanks to this kind of abuse (is that the best term for it?). Luckily, we don't need Pocket books. There's plenty of decent fanfiction out there, for free, that seems capable of continuing the series without killing off the captain or assimilating Seven of Nine and putting her on the cover of a TNG novel.

And here's the real rub--despite vociferous and widespread complaint, we get absolutely no promise of improvement and no apology for perhaps having made a very stupid decision--or a series of very stupid decisions. It staggers the imagination.

 

[Steve Roby]

And here's the real rub--despite vociferous and widespread complaint, we get absolutely no promise of improvement and no apology for perhaps having made a very stupid decision--or a series of very stupid decisions. It staggers the imagination.

Vociferous, yes, widespread, maybe. I certainly haven't seen anything like hundreds of people complaining about what happens in Before Dishonor.

Maybe Pocket has market research that disagrees with your assessment of the Voyager readership. Or maybe the people making the decisions aren't reading the boards and don't yet know that they should immediately respond to you. Or maybe they know something you don't but aren't ready to discuss it publicly yet.

 

[AuntKate]

Maybe. Maybe not.

The fact that Voyager is the "red-headed stepchild" at Pocket books is not up for debate.

 

[Steve Roby]

The fact that Voyager is the "red-headed stepchild" at Pocket books is not up for debate.

Sure it is. Since 2001, when Enterprise premiered, there have been eight original Enterprise novels. It took under two years from Voyager's premiere for eight original Voyager novels to be published. Since 2001, there have been ten original Voyager novels and a short story anthology.

And if we want to open this up to books-only series, only one novel appeared under the Star Trek: Challenger banner, and only six novels appeared under the Stargazer banner, the last one in 2004.

You don't know what Pocket has planned. Neither do I. They've told us that the Destiny trilogy will set out the direction for future Star Trek books. They showed us Janeway hanging out with a Q and having a nice conversation after she allegedly died. Saying that Voyager is therefore completely over and Janeway will never again appear in the books seems premature to me.

 

[Trent Roman]

the abomination that is the VOY-R, the unnecessary and convoluted character fixes of the third String Theory book,

hum? tell me more - what happened?

Well, I couldn't possibly get into what's wrong with the VOY-R, since I don't have several hours to spend doing so. But one of the aspects of the rather slapdash third book of String Theory was 'explaining' away what editors or writers felt were some of the less explicable character moves in VOY. For instance, and without getting into too many spoilers, Janeway undergoes a mental meltdown at the end of the second book as a result of alien interferece. At the end of the third book, another alien restores her but can't patch her up full, and warns that now she's going to have mood swings (as a means of justifying the so-called character inconsistencies in Janeway after Jeri Taylor left the show). Oh, but she can't be told why, or about anything else that happened in the trilogy, or else her brain will implode! So, another massive conspiracy to cover up events and crewperson deaths aboard the Voyager.

Then there was also this thing with Kes, trying to undo "Fury". I'm not actually sure how to summarize it because it's so incredibly convoluted, but here goes: the Kes from that episode wasn't actually Kes, but rather the soul of an Ocampa warlord from the planet's distant past grafted to Kes' body while the real Kes waits back on Ocampa due to the need to seal a photonic space/time rift created by the Caretakers' ascension to a higher plane of existence. Or... something like that. Bizarre and completely unnecesary. The problem with these scenarios, and similar situations like in The Good that Men Do, apart from the rather evident and as such unseemly contempt for the source material, is that it takes incidents that were simple if implausible, and makes them complicated and implausible, and far more subject to collapsing under the weight of its own machinations. The cure (Byzantine plots in the books) is basically worse than the disease (bad writing on the shows); the latter can be casually disregarded, but the former requires massive conceptual space that's just not worth the effort.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman