Remind me to send a campaign contribution... to her opponnet.
Whatever Happened to Diane Carey?
- Thread starter RonG
- Start date
Forgot about Station Rage (mercifully). IMLAPO (in my loudmouthed and predictable opinion) it's one of the worst DS9 novels ever published. I'd rather reread The Laertian Gamble. Not for a minute while reading it did I believe Carey had ever watched DS9.
As for the politics... well, there's the whole "we hate the socialist United Federation of Planets so we're going to start a conservative/libertarian utopia" New Earth/Challenger books. And there's the contribution to the Day of Honor crossover series, which is supposed to be about a Klingon holiday, so everyone gets a holodeck lesson about how great the American side in the Revolutionary War was.
I never realized how political she could get (which is something of an embarrassment about myself, actually)
And this is offensive how?
When it starts to sound like a lecture and/or detracts from the work and/or seems to criticize the core ideals of the Star Trek universe.
Well. I'm going to have to say the American side of the Revolutionary War was the Right one. But the whole Conservative/Libertarian thing is just nutty. Is that what those books really are? I'm amazed they got published if so.
I've never read any of Ms. Carey's work.
I've never read any of Ms. Carey's work.
^They were fairly popular and made $$$
I had given up on Carey by the time "New Earth" was published, and was glad I did after hearing what the whole concept was about.
To be fair, a certain libertarian bent is found in a lot of science fiction, notably the work of Poul Anderson and Robert A. Heinlein. It's kind of a tradition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_science_fiction
And there's nothing wrong with expressing a point of view in a work of fiction, so long as it doesn't dominate to the point of becoming a polemic and compromising the entertainment value of the work. I don't agree with Poul Anderson's politics, but I love his prose style and his worldbuilding and he created a lot of entertaining characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_science_fiction
And there's nothing wrong with expressing a point of view in a work of fiction, so long as it doesn't dominate to the point of becoming a polemic and compromising the entertainment value of the work. I don't agree with Poul Anderson's politics, but I love his prose style and his worldbuilding and he created a lot of entertaining characters.
I never understood the logic of allowing Carey to write two stories for the otherwise excellent Enterprise Logs anthology that had absolutely nothing to do with Trek in any way, shape or form, except for the fact that they featured naval ships named Enterprise.
And I found "World of Strangers" so morally repugnant that I felt physically ill after reading it.
^I agree. I was actually expecting her to incorporate some sort of sci-fi into the stories and was looking forward to seeing how she placed these old Enterprise vessels in stories that could only have happened in the Trek universe.
Instead we get got the crap that we did that could've happened in any universe.
Instead we get got the crap that we did that could've happened in any universe.
That's because science fiction is the only place libertarianism would ever work.
For what it is worth at this point in the conversation, I appreciate the different style that Ms. Carey has brought to her works. While they may not be the most memorable stories out there, I largely read ST books as a diversion and entertainment and have, for the most part, found that the books of hers that I have read have worked nicely to that end.
She is not my favorite Trek author, as I tend to enjoy the more recent works and authors, but I read Red Sector a couple of days ago after reading several disparaging things here from a long ago thread, and found that I actually enjoyed it. The relationship developed at the beginning between the captives was nice and unexpected and I enjoyed the perspective that these characters brought to the story, young people with a reputation that they are expected to live up to, but that they did not earn. While I felt that the end, specifically the last page was a bit bombastic, by that time I had already enjoyed the book.
So, all that being said, I have not read all of her work, but what I have read, I have enjoyed. The naval references do seem forced at times, but they also add something different to her work that you are unlikely to see elsewhere in ST or SF work in general.
She is not my favorite Trek author, as I tend to enjoy the more recent works and authors, but I read Red Sector a couple of days ago after reading several disparaging things here from a long ago thread, and found that I actually enjoyed it. The relationship developed at the beginning between the captives was nice and unexpected and I enjoyed the perspective that these characters brought to the story, young people with a reputation that they are expected to live up to, but that they did not earn. While I felt that the end, specifically the last page was a bit bombastic, by that time I had already enjoyed the book.
So, all that being said, I have not read all of her work, but what I have read, I have enjoyed. The naval references do seem forced at times, but they also add something different to her work that you are unlikely to see elsewhere in ST or SF work in general.
Hard to come up with overt, specific examples, but there's always the same general feeling of discomfort with the ideological underpinnings of the work when reading Carey that one feels when reading Ayn Rand, for instance. Steve mentioned the odd perspective on the Federation from New Earth. To that add I'd that I felt a lot of her material had rather antiquated ideas about gender roles, and even where women made a strong presence, there's always this cloying kind of machismo about the characters. The Kirk/Picard holodeck scenes in Ship of the Line were ostensibly about Picard regaining his confidence as a captain following "Generations", but it seems more like a sissyfied Picard leaning to be a decisive and manly from Kirk's example; there's the sense that Carey thinks little of Picard's command style, that it is negatively feminized, and she prefers the testosterone-slinging ways of the 'cowboy' persona Kirk has accrued to himself. And what she does to Janeway in Fire Ship, presenting her as enjoying the role of submissive cleaning lady... ugh. Cultural insensitivity, sometimes bordering on the racist, is another thing I found bothersome. I remain to this day pissed off about the use of a term many of those to whom it is applied consider derogatory and an ethnic slur in reference to New Earth character Bonifay (and, oh yeah, support for the death penalty would be another conservative stance). Otherwise, there's a kind of jingoism that animates some of her depictions of conflict, a manichean good guy / bad guy split where the villanous aliens come across as purely motivated by malice and inherently sub-human as a whole. I expect Trek characters to regret having to fight even when they must, but there was something obscenely gleeful about that guy in Red Sector or Bateson's crew in Ship of the Line when they fight and kill the Romulans or Klingons. This ties into the aformentioned machismo; the way Bateson and his cronies talk about Klingons, Don Imus would feel right at home in that 'good ol' boys' club. Then there's that scene at the end of Ship of the Line when Madred's daughter turns on her father with a little speech is just so polemical you'd think it was written by Bush's speechwriters or arranged by the psychological warfare crew that set up the "Iraquis toppling Saddam's statue" photo-op. No sense of nuance or context whatsoever - the good guys are always justified, whatever they might do, and the bad guys are foreign and evil.
EDIT:
I'd agree; George III was a terrible king and quartering was an abhorrent practice that had to stop. But the way Carey depicts the American Revolutionary War is entirely one sided: rugged good guys, paragons of family and freedom, fighting against a faceless, foreign foe from far away. Mel Gibson' "The Patriot" comes to mind as analogous is terms of bias and jingoism. There's that same kind of black and white split I was talking about earlier, the praise of conflict as a manly pursuit, to the neglect of historical circumstance. From the perspective presented, you'd think there would be no good reason why so many Americans remained Loyalists, why another large chunk elected to remain neutral, why most African-Americans and Native Americans fought for the British, and no possibility that self-rule could have been attained without bloodshed (as it was, later, elsewhere).
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
To be fair, it's not as though the Trek novels are burdened with an overabundance of novelists writing from a relatively conservative political stance, and it was nice to be able to point to Ms. Carey's work when someone would invariably complain of an intentional liberal bias in the novel line.
I think there's something to be said for reading a thoughtfully constructed argument for a point of view you disagree with. We shouldn't be closed to at least listening to alternative viewpoints. Especially in fiction. Even if you think a character's viewpoint is entirely wrong, that character can still be intriguing to read about.
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