Spoilers VOY: A Pocket Full Of Lies By Kirsten Beyer Review Thread

I do like Janeway, but I agree with the thrust of your gist. L&O: SVU has somewhat of the same problem with Olivia Benson, come to think of it...

 

Overall I do like the book. I like the Year of Hell revisited and the call back to Shattered. I was really happy to see Tuvok again. I'm glad the Paris family is back together again and I hope they won't go through any long term separations again even though the last one was only a couple of months.

I like the character of Conlin but honestly I could have done without her story in this and part of that was it called back to Extreme Risk which was an episode I didn't particularly care for and I tend to skip. That's also one of the reasons I can't bring myself to read Places of Exile even though I like all of CB's other books. I was accidentally spoiled for it and I remember thinking

Spoiler

B'Elanna goes to a dark place..again. No thanks. I was tired of it on the show and had no interest in reading about it.

I am curious why writers don't explore after effects Tom's experience at Caldik Prime. We saw what happened in Pathways (and even that was changed from the TV version). You would think he would have a bad dream about it or a flashback once in a while. All we got on the TV shows were his issues with his father.

 

Miscarriage is a bit of a cop-out - we

I had to take a series of 12 hour flights over the last few weeks and ploughed through quite a few of the recent TNG era books and it seems to be that the books all are treading too much of the same ground (the last DS9 book and the last voyager book have pretty similar stories about faith) and seem very very conservative (with a small c) in a way I cannot quite put my finger on.

I guess to an extent that is what the audience for these books might want to see but it would be nice to see more distinctive themes develop between books.

 

I feel the same way about abortion. A cop out. Expected. It wouldn't surprise me in the least.

I wish the whole scenario hadn't happened but whatever. The writer must follow his or her instincts. Some things we like, some things we don't. It's the way it is.

 

I'm am trying to think - have we ever had an abortion in a Trek book? And not one with 'circumstances' but just where they don't want it and terminate it?

 

Interesting that you bring that up - but Benson is the reason I never got into that programme... I sense a pattern here...

 

To me, the telling scene about the pregnancy was when Nancy and Harry discuss it - he says it's her decision and he won't try to tell her what to do. That's where we last check in on this story in the book, the final note that storyline hits for the time being. So regardless of the build up, the place we left this on is saying 'it is the decision of the woman that matters.' That said that there's going to be a respect of her choices and decisions, because that's the note chosen to end on.

As for the doctors reactions, they seemed rather even-handed to me, telling her 'this will save your life' and, recognizing that learning that she's dying and pregnant at the same time, this is something that she should consider some before making a decision, give her the facts and tell her to wait a while and think it over. It didn't feel like strong-arming to me, just laying out the facts and not accepting a snap decision that doesn't need to be made this very second.

As for the 'having children' thing, I think it's the fact that either the characters or the overall narrative has made a big deal about family. In TNG, we have Picard's family line being very important for him, which is why taking that step with Beverly was an important character advancement for him, that he could bring himself to have a child after years of emphasizing that he was uncomfortable with them. Sisko was always a family man - he was introduced with a son, the show ended with Kasidy pregnant. Voyager was always saying that the crew considered themselves a family, and Tom and B'Elanna got married and conceived Miral on the show, and it's a big part of their story that B'Elanna have this family, and has children who never experience what she did, seeing her father driven away by the 'Klingon stuff.' And while Riker and Troi might not have made it a big deal, Lwaxana clearly did, seeing her daughter married (presumably with the assumption of having children) was a major note for her characterization. Janeway having children was something that I seem to recall Kate Mulgrew wanting to approach and deal with, it was a factor in her portrayal, and we have Q saying that Denzit Janeway was the only one who had a child (whether or not you believe that Q has actually witnessed the infinite number of Janeways and seen this is up to interpretation). And that's still a handful of characters out of all of the 24th century crews, across the line.

I mean, I'm not even much of a children person, I don't want any of my own, and am about as uncomfortable as season 1 Picard around them. But I don't think there's an overemphasis on them. These novels have been about taking these characters to the next stages of their lives, and for a number of them, that includes children. If you take them all at once, yeah, it might seem overwhelming, but it's really only about one 'family unit' per series.

 

Let's not forget that they essentially lock Conlon up... just for her own safety? I doubt that. As said before, there are other ways (even nowadays) to get to stemcells, but they only talked about her having to have that baby. Is there another "genetic manipulation" discussion on the horizon, a baby to be born just to save its parent (or sibling etc)? And what happens after its stemcells are harvested?

Well, just one family unit? We have Data and Lal, Worf (both to a certain extent), Picard and Beverly on Enterprise alone. But I think it's that all those "new" children happened within a few books of each other - I remember Beverly and Deanna both being pregnant in Destiny etc. It has been hard to escape those pregnancy/baby-issues because whatever series you were reading the same issues kind of popped up. Which got boring very quickly. I remember thinking: What happened there? Some kind of "we need a baby"-virus?

 

The babies don't bother me one way or another. With the exception of Miral, who is canon and no longer a baby we rarely see the others or at least I haven't (keeping in mind that I am just now catching up in the books). Riker and Troi's daughter took up quite a bit of space before she was born in the Destiny novels but apart from that they are pretty much scene setting and window dressing.

 

It was like you were reading my mind on your response! I am childless by choice, but don't mind seeing these topics broached at all in the books. Even if some of the couples do not have children, it's certainly a subject they can discuss (or in Harry and Nancy's case, make) - I was pleased that the choice was firmly placed back in Nancy's hands by Harry, and saw that to be completely in character to what he would do. Overall I am reading these books for more character growth and updates rather than the larger sci-fi story and I feel like Beyer offers a lovely balance to that.

 

Another solid Voyager novel. Towards the end of the tv series I was losing interest in Voyager, but these books remind me why I used to like it earlier on.


I have to say, the denzit's substitute-coffee mustn't be very effective if it "enervates".
I normally wouldn't have blinked at the use of the word here if I hadn't just seen enervate used in it's proper context and had to look it up because it seemed out of place.

 

I finished reading A Pocket Full of Lies a few days ago and I really liked it. Coincidently, I watched Shattered the day before I started reading it, so that helped with understanding some of the plot.
I missed the Icheb/ Bryce thing. Maybe I'll see it when I read the book again.
I liked the Harry and Nancy relationship. I think it's because Harry has such bad luck with women, I want him to be happy with someone.
Happy that Tuvok is back! It's like the band is back together again
An alternate version of any character is always interesting because you often get to see them act very differently to how they normally would.
I have to admit though, my main draw card to Kirsten Beyer's Voyager books, has been the relationship between Janeway and Chakotay. When I watched Voyager, I really hoped they would get together and Beyer's books have made my JC shipper heart very happy

 

You can sometimes find the pBook available for sale before the release date and the eBook is never out early. It's always released on the release date.

 

That's my one biggest complaint about being an e-book person, that we have to have to wait for the exact release date, while the paper books come out early.

 

Sometimes I find that annoying too but then I remember I used to have to wait a month to get the new releases in physical book form whereas now I get them at the same time as in the USA, thanks to my kindle.

 

So are the e-books released on the US release date overseas then?

 

Yep.
I suppose officially all books are released on the same date but the shops in Ireland (and probably rest of Europe) get their deliveries by sea which means they arrive a month after release in the US.
Or at least the Trek books do. More popular books are flown in to be released all together around the world and some other books probably do have staggered release dates.

 

I'm only about half way through this so I haven't ready any of the comments but just wanted to say this book has been amazing so far. A real mystery where I'm wondering what's going on, all the fleet is doing something that seems to be contributing to the solution, all the ongoing story lines are feeding the plot in an interesting fashion. It's all working for me.

 

Maybe poor Harry is going to end up carrying the baby to term. Its the kind of thing that happens to him and solves various problems. Nancy may still die and he ends up single dad (which is also a likely outcome and makes an interesting contrast with him and Tom)

In terms of Icheb (who spell corrects as inches if we need a nickname) and Bryce...well maybe, but it's also just as likely that a teenage boy will blush because of received attention of any kind rather than it being an attraction thing. You can see Wesley do it at various points. Trust me, teenage boys can easily embarrass and embarrassment leads to blushing. In fact it suits a science oriented boy geek character extremely well, and the naivete of both ex borg characters (seven as well) can make things both difficult and interesting. (I find Cambridge really really annoying. And while I think J/C is best, the novels all suffer from retconning finale relationships out of existence. Tired of Bashir/Serena, was fine with Dax, and how many Bashir books are going to end with corridor shoot outs after some not very good espionage attempts? Seriously. The 7/C breakup feels as out of leftfield as their initial get together I guess. But Cambridge is really annoying.)

 

Didn't Kirsten say earlier in the thread that it was supposed to be an attraction thing? I might be remembering wrong, though.