Worst Trek book?

[The Nth Doctor]

Wow, just wow.



Okay, I'm going to leave this thread open for now, as long as we can stay on topic. There are some warnings pending, but I'm going to reread this thread once, maybe twice more to figure out how many.

 

[ElaysianInvasion]

Shadow Lord didn't bother me that much when I read it. I'll have to pick up Prometheus Design and see what all the hoo-ha is about.

 

[Stevil2001]

Don't. I picked up the Phoenix books a couple years ago to see what all the hoo-hah was about and regretted it as soon as I read them. I wasn't sure what was going on half the time, but there was no way I was going to go back and find out...

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Christopher said:

AJA said:
I'm starting to hate forums...
So I'll just resort to this: Just drop it, forget it, I'd delete it if I could, but this forum has a setup that prevents that.

Yeah, it's so terrible to have to express your opinions in a place where other people can respond to them and challenge them and point out the flaws in them. That's just so unfair. We should all be free to spout whatever we feel like and not allow anyone to criticize it. Because it's just so unfair that we should have to listen or think or grow or change our minds or learn to live together.

Okay, your previous posts were pushing it, but this goes too far and is completely unnecessary. AJA was defending his opinions but then requested to drop the point, repeatedly. But you kept badgering him.

One warning for flaming. Please read this thread if you wish to protest the warning.



Everyone else, I understnd the need to defend Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin on this point, especially since this is a reoccurring debate. What we need to realize is that this will keep coming and coming. There's nothing we can do about it except to deal with it appropriately. It's frustating, I know, but we need to be cool headed and respond objectively. A few posters did this and it's greatly appreciated. We simply can't keep having knee-jerk reactions of sarcasm, sarcasm which is very difficult to get across on a message board, especially in a situation like this.

 

[ElaysianInvasion]

Meh. I have no standards. I'll read anything, good bad or indifferent.

 

[historypeats]

Sci said:
*whistles innocently*

So, yeah, I didn't really enjoy that book where the TNG crew travel to the dragon planet all that much.

*looks over thread*

My goodness, there's certainly a lot of... um... weather. Yeah. There's a surprisingly large amoung of weather outside, isn't there? Just flocks. Gaggles. Plethoras of weather outside, yessiree...

Gods, I hate that book! Sometimes I feel like the only one who does...

For "Most Awkward Moment in a Trek Book," I nominate the end of "Red Sector"...that "Freedom is never free" line just came out of nowhere, and it jarred me rather than giving a sense of conclusion. Was there really a reason that was included, or did Carey's brain just hiccup as she was trying to finish? Because I don't understand the character's reason for saying it, given the situation and the previous events of the story. (That book was chock full of other problems, including a bizarre characterization of Crusher, but I liked getting a look at the CST in action.)

Mike

 

[DaveGalanter]

Sci said:

Kevin Dilmore said:
I like taffy.

Taffy is delicious.

Kevin

You know, I've never actually had any taffy.

I get the impression I'm missing out.

Very sticky. It's okay if you don't have peanut butter cups.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Oops. Double post.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Red Sector?!?

Shoot me. Shoot me, please. Shoot me now!!!!!

I'd rather have rusty nails shoved up my nailbeds and suffer blood poisoning than have to expend one more moment thinking about Red Sector.

 

[AJA]

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but...
I apologize for opening a can of worms like that. I didn't realize that the subject in question was an ongoing debate, and that was my first post in this part of the forum. I admit that I was unclear, and I will be mre careful in the future. Anyways, back on subject, I disliked the Voyager book Bless the Beasts. It was quite strange, and adding a human character not from Voyagers crew made it all the worse.

 

[ElaysianInvasion]

Bless the beasts wasn't my favorite either, but I don't recall any huams other than Voyager's crew? Who'd I forget about?

 

[Sxottlan]

The SCE series has the best ratio of good to bad stories of any current Trek book series, but The Riddled Post and The Age of Unreason are its few turkeys. The latter being the most ridiculous and half-baked of the two.

There. Topic out of the way. Mwahahaha.

TerriO said:
For being a place where people are afraid to post negative opinions of anything for fear of being attacked.

Ah. It can be. I've noticed it.

Steve Roby said:I thought the reputation this forum had was for being a bunch of fanboys who suck up to the novelists.

Well, that's kind of the other side of the coin to what Terri said as I've seen that some times too. No one is saying the forum exhibits these traits all the time, but they are the two biggest problems this forum has.

That's obviously not true, given the fact that this very topic exists.

Eh, they'd have a pretty hard time justifying why such a thread would be closed for the topic alone. And really, I'd say things stayed pretty civil because most of the choices for worst books weren't written by anyone posting here or else were pretty old. As we saw above, things turned nasty instantly when the topic turned to the Titan series and the issue of Keru.

But hey, we're told repeatedly that fans' opinions on the net means nothing, so why should anyone get offended? :thumbsup:

 

[KRAD]

The SCE series has the best ratio of good to bad stories of any current Trek book series,

Thank you for saying that! That does my little editor heart proud. (And hey, you only dislike 1/32 of what we've done, that's good..... )

 

[Sci]

Sxottlan said:
And really, I'd say things stayed pretty civil because most of the choices for worst books weren't written by anyone posting here or else were pretty old. As we saw above, things turned nasty instantly when the topic turned to the Titan series and the issue of Keru.

It would probably be more accurate to say that things turned ugly when accusations of a homosexual agenda were tossed around and when the possibility that Michael A. Martin might be equally responsible for the decision to include gay characters was ignored.

But hey, we're told repeatedly that fans' opinions on the net means nothing, so why should anyone get offended? :thumbsup:

You're misconstruing what has been said. The argument was not that fans' opinions on the net mean nothing, but that they do not necessarily represent a widespread trend.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Speaking of Red Sector...was anyone else hoping that Stiles would die a slow and painful death? He had to be the worst character to ever appear in a Trek novel. Or at least one of the worst. He was such a whiny little turd...I just wanted to kick is ass. I just hate that book.

 

[Brennyren]

Bizarrely enough, I actually remember enjoying The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix when I read them, though they seem to be on many peoples' "least favorite" lists. Of course, I was very young.... (No, really -- I was! I have pictures!)

So maybe it's not so surprising that one book I absolutely loathe seems to be the favorite book of many VOY fans: Jeri Taylor's Mosaic. I thought her Janeway was unlikable: petty and bad-tempered as a girl, a poor judge of character as an adult, and chronically insecure throughout. The section where she couldn't decide who to save, and then suffered a weeks-long bout of crippling depression as a result, made her look like a damned poor candidate for command. And KJ was so chronically obsessed with her hair that it drove me mad -- and made her look relentlessly trivial as well.

Honestly, this book was horrible. I'm convinced the only reason it got the positive reception it did from VOY and Janeway fans was that Jeri Taylor had a rep for being good to fans. A friend gave me a copy of the follow-up, Pathways, but after more than five years I haven't been able to bring myself to read it. I should probably just give it to our library for the used-book sale.

Brennyren

 

[Baerbel Haddrell]

Allyn Gibson said:
Red Sector?!?

Shoot me. Shoot me, please. Shoot me now!!!!!

I'd rather have rusty nails shoved up my nailbeds and suffer blood poisoning than have to expend one more moment thinking about Red Sector.

To me, it is the most annoying book. It has some parts I enjoyed a lot but others were absolutely terrible.

I still had a bookmark marking the worst part of it: (page 161): "You sure don`t talk like a man who did the heroic deed and got awarded the Medal of Valor," Travis observed. "What a dismal example for all those punks out there who`re shooting for the braids and brass, know that? They want glory".

I was THIS tempted to throw the book across the room.

 

[GMac]

Christopher said:
Personally, I thought The Prometheus Design was the best of the four Marshak-Culbreath novels, though that's faint praise.

Frankly I'm surprised The Fearful Summons hasn't been mentioned more in this thread.

Me too - the one thing I am glad about that particular book was that I didn't spend any of my own money on it (I borrowed it from my Mum, who promptly gave it away when I returned it - she didn't think much of it either, and she's every bit as fond of Trek Lit as I am, if not more so).

GM

 

[Kira's Mom]

The worst in my opinion- DS9's Saratoga. It was almost exactly like Reunion, but instead of Stargazer survivors on the Enterprise, it was Saratoga survivors on the Defiant. It was the same exact story, right down to someone sabotaging the ship, a former crewmate turning out to be a crook, and another carrying a dark secret about the death of someone else's spouse. Ugh. Reunion was good, it didn't need to be re-written! (and I think I've posted this before...)

 

[Wentworth-Roth]

Kira’s Mom said:
The worst in my opinion- DS9's Saratoga. It was almost exactly like Reunion, but instead of Stargazer survivors on the Enterprise, it was Saratoga survivors on the Defiant. It was the same exact story, right down to someone sabotaging the ship, a former crewmate turning out to be a crook, and another carrying a dark secret about the death of someone else's spouse. Ugh. Reunion was good, it didn't need to be re-written! (and I think I've posted this before...)

Reunion was actually much much better, and the crook crewmate had a far better motive for his actions than the one in Saratoga. He, maybe the author wanted to create a new "reunion" series, featuring the same plot/character constellation in each Trek series.