• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Wow - Just read "Before Dishonor" - what a thrill ride! (Spoilers)

C

Cadet49

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
I had heard some negative reviews by some people of "Before Dishonor" and I was shocked, because Peter David was always my favorite Trek writer.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why people had a problem with this storyline. It was full of great character moments, great epic suspense, and Peter David gave us the overused Borg a fresh new sense of menace they hadn't had in years - and the death of a famous regular character, while startling, gave the book a sense of real emotional impact, and gave the character a heroic exit.

It has all the humour, tension, and suspense that I wished could have been a part of Star Trek: First Contact, and think this would have been a much better plotline for that film (or David's earlier Borg book, Vendetta). David makes the Borg a truly terrifying antagonist in a way ST: FC and VOY never did.
 
Capt. Chewbacca-- have you read Resistance and Q & A? Many (but far from all) of the complaints dealt with the fact that the characterizations of T'Lana, Leybenzon and Kadohata were not even close to what was previously established by Dillard and KRAD.

For my money, it was far from PAD's best work, but hardly his worst.
 
Haha - yes, I guess I should be ready for that ... is that the main problem people have with this novel - that Janeway was "lost"? I just finished the book, but it seems to me that the book seems to indicate that Lady Q might have rescued Janeway at the very last minute, taking her to the Q continuum - I see her making a comeback eventually (a la Superman, etc.)
William Leisner said:
Ready to cue the Militant Janeway Fans in five... four... three...
Click to expand...
 
Turtletrekker said:
Capt. Chewbacca-- have you read Resistance and Q & A? Many (but far from all) of the complaints dealt with the fact that the characterizations of T'Lana, Leybenzon and Kadohata were not even close to what was previously established by Dillard and KRAD.
Click to expand...

This was/is one of the main complaints I have, among others.

And she's Not. Dead. :klingon::vulcan:
 
Hearing that was one of the things that turned me off, and some of the other stuff I heard about didn't help.
 
I did read these two books, and both are by great Trek authors. However, I didn't really feel engaged in either book - Resistance just felt to me like a "same old, same old" Borg threat book (Picard as Locutus again - why the heck had he been lugging around those implants all these years, even after the Enterprise-D was destroyed?), and Q & A seemed like it was another "Picard and Q try to stop the galaxy from nonexistance", which I felt had been covered in "All Good Things" and Peter David's and John DeLancie's "I, Q" novel.

I had no problem with David spicing up T'Lana and Leybenzon a bit, as they seemed like pretty "cookie cutter" characters in the other two novels - T'Lana was like most of the other Vulcans we had encountered in Trek, and Leybenzon was a typical security man. I found by David adding the fact that T'Lana, a counselor wh was supposed to help people with their emotional health, stereotyping other alien cultures unfairly, and Leybenzon's conflicts with Picard and Worf, added a more interesting dynamic to the characters, and made them much more interesting to me. I would have liked to see the characters develop more in future novels post-mutiny, and I was disappointed to see the authors that followed kill off these characters - these could have been potentially very interesting characters, the way Peter David set them up, with unique character flaws. A lost opportunity, in my opinion.




Turtletrekker said:
Capt. Chewbacca-- have you read Resistance and Q & A? Many (but far from all) of the complaints dealt with the fact that the characterizations of T'Lana, Leybenzon and Kadohata were not even close to what was previously established by Dillard and KRAD.

For my money, it was far from PAD's best work, but hardly his worst.
Click to expand...
 
Capt. Chewbacca said:
Resistance just felt to me like a "same old, same old" Borg threat book (Picard as Locutus again - why the heck had he been lugging around those implants all these years, even after the Enterprise-D was destroyed?)
Click to expand...

I thought the implants were newly replicated from the computer records of the originals.


I would have liked to see the characters develop more in future novels post-mutiny, and I was disappointed to see the authors that followed kill off these characters - these could have been potentially very interesting characters, the way Peter David set them up, with unique character flaws. A lost opportunity, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

If anything, it was the other way around. The reason the decision was made to write out those characters is because, after the extreme directions they were taken in Before Dishonor, they were effectively rendered untenable as regular members of the ensemble. Where could you take them after mutiny and betrayal, after they'd been established as so unremittingly hostile toward the rest of the crew? How can a crew function if its members can't trust each other? Maybe there could've been a way to tell further stories with such a deep schism and resentment between members of the crew, but they wouldn't have felt like TNG.

At least, that was the editorial position. As for myself, I felt T'Lana was capable of redemption and would've liked the opportunity to explore that. But ultimately it wasn't my call.
 
From what I remember the book had a lot of stuff that felt like a fan made it up.
Like cubes that absorb other ships and the cube keeps getting bigger and eats Pluto.

I loved Peter David in the late 80s early 90s but that was some pretty dumb shit.
 
Nardpuncher said:
From what I remember the book had a lot of stuff that felt like a fan made it up.
Like cubes that absorb other ships and the cube keeps getting bigger and eats Pluto.

I loved Peter David in the late 80s early 90s but that was some pretty dumb shit.
Click to expand...

I can take his New Frontier books, but only just. Those get a little outrageous and didn't seem very harmonious with other Treks.
 
Capt. Chewbacca said:
I just finished the book, but it seems to me that the book seems to indicate that Lady Q might have rescued
Janeway
at the very last minute, taking
Janeway
to the Q continuum
Click to expand...

Why does this remind me so much of the SG1 episode where Daniel dies and one of the Ancients rescues him by helping him ascend?
 
Nardpuncher said:
Yeah, I only read the first 6.

I simply adore Vendetta, Imzadi and quite like A Rock and a Hard Place
Click to expand...

I liked Q-in-Law, The Captain's Daughter, Double or Nothing and got through Imzadi, Imzadi II, The Siege, and whatever New Frontier books of his I've read.
 
I liked Before Dishonor, but I didn't think it was a masterpiece. It was like reading a novelization of a big dumb Trek action movie that never was.

I loved that Vendetta finally got a sequel. I would have loved to see Delcara again - her versus Queen Janeway would have been epic.
 
All I could think of while reading "Before Dishonor" is having this astonished thought that Peter David actually wrote this. Interesting though I never though to think of it as a sequel version of "Vendetta" :) It was just way off base for me in terms of what was going on. Everything seemed HYPER to the max and granted their was a pretty serious event going on to warrant that type of tension but not at the expense of characters acting strangely.
 
Admiral_Young said:
All I could think of while reading "Before Dishonor" is having this astonished thought that Peter David actually wrote this. Interesting though I never though to think of it as a sequel version of "Vendetta" :) It was just way off base for me in terms of what was going on. Everything seemed HYPER to the max and granted their was a pretty serious event going on to warrant that type of tension but not at the expense of characters acting strangely.
Click to expand...

"Pluto was just absorbed by the Borg!"

"Lolwhut?"
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top