VOY: String Theory, Book Two: Fusion by Kirsten Beyer
Blurb:
As the Cosmos Unravels
The disruption in the space-time continuum caused by the creation of the "Blue Eye" singularity continues: Thread by thread, the fabric slowly frays and peels away, breaking down barriers between dimensions. As the lines between realities blur, the consequences cascade.
A Sleeping City Awakes
Voyager pursues Tuvok to a long-dormant space station, a place of astonishing grandeur and wonder. Ancient almost beyond imagining, the city seduces the crew with the promise that their greatest aspirations might be realized. Such promise requires sacrifice, however, and the price of fulfilling them will be high for Voyager.
A Mysterious Power Stirs
Unseen sentries, alarmed by Voyager's meddling in the Monoharan system, send emissaries to ascertain Janeway's intentions. Unbeknownst to the captain, she is being tested and must persuade her evaluators that their contention -- that Voyager poses a threat to the delicate web of cosmic ecology -- is baseless. And failure to vindicate her choices will bring certain retribution to her crew.
____________________
My review from 2005:
Especially compared with the great first part of the trilogy a huge disappointment.
Like in her short story “Isabo’s Shirt” Kirsten Beyer’s writing style is a pain to read here, too. That has mainly two reasons in my opinion : she gets to complicated at times and she’s implying to much emotions. Instead of just writing her story and let the reader decide what the characters are feeling, she tries to press through her points of view on how the figures are feeling. That’s not only annoying if you thing she’s totally wrong most of the time, like I do, but a unreasonable decision, because you most likely irritate readers and make them not buy future stories of you. A result of me disagreeing with her assumptions about the feelings of characters, is that most of the characterizations don’t work for me, too.
The quality of the story is tolerable, but is going down in the last third of the novel. Beyer makes one of the biggest mistake you can make in a Voyager story set during the shows run, she implies the possibility of Voyager coming back, but we all know they won’t make it back at that time in the series. Granted, that’s just a little subplot, obviously designed to set up book 3 of this “trilogy”, but it’s still annoying. A similar thing is Tuvok’s evolution, we all know he won’t become a new lifeform, so where is the point ? The Nacene described here read just like a slightly more uncontrolled version of the Q and their story isn’t really able to carry the book in my opinion.
Overall a big letdown for the String Theory trilogy after Cohesion, although I think the three books doesn’t deserve the name trilogy, because so far they appear to be just loosely connected stories, but not one big whole.
---------
It's ridiculous to see how much Kirsten Beyer has improved since those early days ...
Blurb:
As the Cosmos Unravels
The disruption in the space-time continuum caused by the creation of the "Blue Eye" singularity continues: Thread by thread, the fabric slowly frays and peels away, breaking down barriers between dimensions. As the lines between realities blur, the consequences cascade.
A Sleeping City Awakes
Voyager pursues Tuvok to a long-dormant space station, a place of astonishing grandeur and wonder. Ancient almost beyond imagining, the city seduces the crew with the promise that their greatest aspirations might be realized. Such promise requires sacrifice, however, and the price of fulfilling them will be high for Voyager.
A Mysterious Power Stirs
Unseen sentries, alarmed by Voyager's meddling in the Monoharan system, send emissaries to ascertain Janeway's intentions. Unbeknownst to the captain, she is being tested and must persuade her evaluators that their contention -- that Voyager poses a threat to the delicate web of cosmic ecology -- is baseless. And failure to vindicate her choices will bring certain retribution to her crew.
____________________
My review from 2005:
Especially compared with the great first part of the trilogy a huge disappointment.
Like in her short story “Isabo’s Shirt” Kirsten Beyer’s writing style is a pain to read here, too. That has mainly two reasons in my opinion : she gets to complicated at times and she’s implying to much emotions. Instead of just writing her story and let the reader decide what the characters are feeling, she tries to press through her points of view on how the figures are feeling. That’s not only annoying if you thing she’s totally wrong most of the time, like I do, but a unreasonable decision, because you most likely irritate readers and make them not buy future stories of you. A result of me disagreeing with her assumptions about the feelings of characters, is that most of the characterizations don’t work for me, too.
The quality of the story is tolerable, but is going down in the last third of the novel. Beyer makes one of the biggest mistake you can make in a Voyager story set during the shows run, she implies the possibility of Voyager coming back, but we all know they won’t make it back at that time in the series. Granted, that’s just a little subplot, obviously designed to set up book 3 of this “trilogy”, but it’s still annoying. A similar thing is Tuvok’s evolution, we all know he won’t become a new lifeform, so where is the point ? The Nacene described here read just like a slightly more uncontrolled version of the Q and their story isn’t really able to carry the book in my opinion.
Overall a big letdown for the String Theory trilogy after Cohesion, although I think the three books doesn’t deserve the name trilogy, because so far they appear to be just loosely connected stories, but not one big whole.
---------
It's ridiculous to see how much Kirsten Beyer has improved since those early days ...
It was a tiny thing...the rest of the book was fine.
