Spoilers VOY: Architects of Infinity by Kirsten Beyer Review Thread

Trek.fm Literary Treks podcast will be interviewing Kirsten Beyer writing this book and hopefully To save the earth question about if it will be written too.

 

Please let us know when it will be happening.

 

I will let you know. I've enjoyed listening to her other interviews on Literary treks podcasts discussing her other Voyager books..

 

I enjoyed the book but i found myself skipping the interaction between Tom and B'elanna and Icheb and Bryce.

 

Don't want to start a new topic. Any chance that the older Beyer VOY books also get audiobooks soon?

 

As far as I know, there hasn't ever been an instance of an old book getting an audiobook version, Voyager or otherwise. It's a pretty recent thing that the new books are getting audiobooks at all. Sorry.

 

My copy arrived today. It'll take a few days for me to finally start reading it, though.

 

I will definitely do that. And I booked a vacation today in June. I'm going to take Trek novels along the journey....

 

I will not give up hope. Thanks.

 

It's 4am and I've just finished reading this one. It's taken me a few days to get into it because of life but I started reading about midnight and obviously haven't put it down since.

I'll probably post a more comprehensive review/thought-piece at a more reasonable hour but for now:

Spoiler: that ending tho

Kristen sure does love to give us a rollercoaster huh? First Conlon, then Gwyn, then Patel and Sal and Tom and B'Elanna - and here I thought we were going to get a chill shore leave book! But that ending..... I really don't know what to think apart from they can't just be gone. She can't have resolved(ish) Harry and Nancy like that and then just blown them up.

 

I'd take anything involving apparent deaths of canon (= TV) main characters with a grain of salt.

 

I saw a copy of this book in my book store so I bought it. Won’t be a while until I read it though. Still haven’t finished the main saga yet. I’ll find out how Janeway came back to life soon enough.

 

Finally got started. Should not have been surprised that Lucsly was mentioned as DTI monitor.

 

Now I'm curious

 

So krenim kind of have to time undo that ending.
Because that’s two canon tv characters and a developed books character biting the dust.
Or the sensors are lying.

It’s actually the first time I feel a bit let down by a VOY book. There’s a lot of questionable stuff in there ‘you don’t feel something, therefore something is wrong with you, therefore we can try to fix you’ ‘unable to understand social cues? Don’t worry just do what we tell you..’
Harry looks in danger of ending up with two ‘wife figures’ assuming that ending isn’t what it looks like...
It’s very fiddly, which is shame, because so much of it is firing on full thrusters as usual, and it’s a nice BDO Clarke style story, which always suits Voyager.
Cambridge’s characterisation is very constant...I still think he’s a tit.

 

As someone who played through that arc, you are mistaken. In its execution it’s less contrived than a lot of the novel stuff even, and very Trek.

 

Isn’t future guys identity in flux? At one point it’s the timeline corrupted Daniels no?

 

This would actually be a very convenient way to lead into the next book with the Krenim. But does that mean we could potentially end up with no Doc/Harry/etc for a good chunk of the next one? And where would they wind back to I wonder? Go too far and the important developments for Harry are erased, but if what happened was to do with Species 001 the damage was done almost as soon as they landed.

I don't think this will be an issue, the jist I got was the female Kriosians bonded with each other to cure the finiis'ral in what seemed to just be a super-close friendship, like Gwyn's mother and 'aunt'. And as someone with, shall we say, pretty casual ties to most of the crew I don't think she's suddenly going to be a motherly figure. Maybe she just volunteers for babysitting more than others in the future.

 

They bond with the baby...sometimes others babies, before they are born. (The abortificant tea may be related to the practice...it’s sort of an allegory to the sixties sexual revolution and the post ww2 baby boom at the same time.) Given how on-the-rocks things were with Nancy, Kim’s chat with Gwyn looked like a classic Trek ‘new relationship’ opener for him. But that changes. She is however, bonded to the baby in some kind of Kriosian Godmother situation...though, there’s some ambiguity there, because Gywns mother also seems to have an empathetic bond with Gwyn, and there’s Gwyn general inability to lie convincingly too...since the whole book is themed around empathy, and telepathic empathy is bobbing around in the mix, it’s hard to separate the occurrences that are ‘real’ from the ones that are just thematic. (We also see two separate scenes where characters are empathetic with artificial life, and a couple of scenes where a lack of empathy where it should be expected is important. It’s a very thematic book, with just a dash of Blade Runner bubbling in there.)
There’s all sorts of stuff, but only the Icheb stuff isn’t sitting right with me...maybe it’s because of the Spacey stuff and Ichebs actors reaction to that, maybe because Icheb (like all the TV characters) has a strong link with his screen portrayal, and therefore comes over younger than he theoretically is by this point. It just has a squick factor that maybe wouldn’t have been there a year ago, or wouldn’t be with different -novels only - characters. Once you factor in people talking about genetically modifying him so he can actually have a physiological response (which is possibly an allegory for circumcision of some kind, when you sit it alongside the kriosian stuff, or even for an entirely different kind of genderqueer character....Icheb is now functionally asexual after all) and it seems a bit...unpleasant. Maybe it’s the way it’s presented, particularly keying into the bizarre fandom notion that when any two male characters are close, they must also be homosexual partners...a sort of odd melding of slashfic tradition with Yaoi manga fandom that we see aroun all sorts of things these days (Sherlock for example.) and the odd power imbalance we see with Bryce in the book. There’s a hint of coercion and ‘grooming’ in this book that wasn’t in the last. I dunno. Maybe liberated Borg relationships are difficult to handle narratively. (Which has had the unfortunate side effect of making me think of Cambridge as something out of a Nabokov novel. Ick. That’s just cos I hate the guy most likely though.)

I wonder if it’s going to end up relating to other ‘strange liquid’ duplicates in Voyagers past. That would tie with the sub themes of marriage in this book funnily enough.