"Star Trek: Destiny"

Star Trek: Destiny (David Mack)
Review by N. Web

As I said in my review of The Good that Men Do, one of my biggest
problems with the Star Trek literary universe is that its status as
canon is questionable at best.  Perhaps this is either good or bad,
because having a bad, ridiculous story as part of official canon can
lead to serious problems.  But, at the same time it can also lead to
authors not taking much of a risk for fear of disrupting established TV
and movie canon.  Which, as "These are the Voyages..." shows, sometimes
probably deserves to be disrupted.  Star Trek Destiny is a huge risk, as
far as I'm concerned.  But one that ultimately succeeds.

Star Trek Destiny also tackles one of the biggest problems in the
established canon, that being the Borg.  Much has been made over the
years of the "nerf"-ing of the Borg in Star Trek.  It seems as though
the Borg were always meant to have been seen as indestructible, and
indeed in "The Best of Both Worlds", they were only defeated through a
fluke.  Over the years in canon, the Borg seemed to lose their
unbeatable quality and in Star Trek Voyager pretty much became relegated
to Monster of the Week status.  Even the crew of the NX-01 Enterprise
had a turn at the tee.  So, how does an author manage to make the Borg
seem threatening again?  This radical of a solution doesn't seem like it
could possibly work, but in the end I was ultimately left more satisfied
than I have been with any Borg story since at least "Endgame" (the
against-all-odds inexplicably good series finale to Voyager), and maybe
even since "The Best of Both Worlds."   Massive spoilers to follow,
perhaps you don't want to read before finishing the book.

Verdict:  Highly recommended.




*** spoiler space ***


For David Mack, it seems the solution to the problem of the Borg was to
ultimately get rid of them.  But, it does make sense.  In order to
prevent the perpetual nerfing of the Borg or the perpetual power creep
that the Federation would have to go through in order to constantly
defeat them; perhaps the best solution really is to just eliminate them
entirely to prevent not only over-use of the Borg, but further
degradation of the "canon."  David Mack takes a gamble, and ultimately
wins, as far as I'm concerned.  The send-off they get is equal parts
relieving and moving.

Mack manages to tie together all four post TOS Star Trek series and a
large amount of established literary universe into three novels that not
only give the Borg an origin story, but an end story that manages to be
quite thought-provoking and moving.  Of course, the main stars are the
TNG cast, with almost everyone other than Ezri Dax relegated to small
parts and cameos, and the Enterprise crew is entirely off camera even
during the parts that take place during the 22nd century.  Captain
Hernandez ultimately becomes quite interesting, and ended up once again
making me wish that Enterprise had continued past Season 4.

I found myself less interested in the characters that were created in
the literary universe, but as the story went on I grew more familiar
with them.  The story is very evocative, and I found Mack manages to use
the prose to generate genuine dread, fear, creepiness and ultimately
relief throughout the tale.  It's to his credit that when I was done I
immediately began looking into more Star Trek literary universe ebooks
on Amazon.  David Mack's new series seems to be a three parter about
Geordi attempting to rebuild Data, and I'm already thinking of
purchasing it.


Stray observations:

This seems to be sticking with the "Bashir and Dax broke up post DS9"
book canon.  Also very weird that Bashir, O'Brien, and Nog are not
appearing in this film at all.  At least Garak shows up.

Speaking of, it would have been nice to see more of the Federation's
allies involved other than the brief cameos Garak and Martok and a lot
of generic ambassadors have.

Geordi doesn't have a lot to do, though a short romance is shoehorned in
for him, which I feel like he deserves at this point.

I like the idea of Worf as Picard's first officer, but isn't he supposed
to be the Ambassador to the Klingon Empire?  Worf also gets a short
romance shoehorned in.

I had one small gripe in that Picard seems to have dropped back into his
jerk mode he was in for most of Star Trek First Contact.  Which, I
thought the point of the movie is he gives up on the White Whale.  Maybe
I missed some kind of a relapse he had in the literary universe, but I
couldn't get over his inability to function for 2.9 books because of the
Borg.

"The Good that Men Do"

Star Trek Enterprise: The Good that Men Do (Andy Mangels & Michael A Martin)

(Guest post by N. Web)

As I'll probably explain in my upcoming review of Star Trek: Destiny, one of

my main problems with Star Trek literature is its inherent questionable canon

status, to the point where the series can tend to look like elevated

fanfiction. And where I felt that Star Trek: Destiny was a great (statuesque)

example of proving that the literary Star Trek universe is worth looking into,

I was sadly kind of disappointed with this story, even though I had good

expectations for it. Granted, those expectations were along the lines of

"Well, they couldn't have done a worse job than 'These Are the Voyages...'"

(the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise) did, but that's not a high bar to

clear if we're being real here.

A brief summary of background: Star Trek: Enterprise was the last Star Trek series on television, and it's four-year run was the only since the original series to end in cancellation. The series is well-known rather derisively amongst fans of the series as kind of a bad one, and largely one that went unwatched by much of the fandom. I personally felt the same way for much of the series' original run on UPN (or was it the CW by that point? Does anyone care?) However, by seasons 3 and 4 of the series, the tone shifted from one of "silly situation of the week" drama along the lines of Voyager to one more of "long-form interconnected story" that Deep Space Nine rather perfected during its run. By the time Enterprise hit Season 4, it had a new showrunner, had ditched the "Temporal Cold War" storyline that never made any sense to begin with (the previous showrunners have stated that the sinister Future Guy was supposed to have been Captain Archer's future self, if that makes any damn sense); and it finally felt like the series was running on all cylinders, leading into what surely would have been an awesome multi-season conflict with the Romulans preceding the founding of the United Federation of Planets.

Except the show was confirmed to not be renewed just before the season ended, giving them enough time to hastily put together a finale which has proven to be the last hour of Star Trek on television in what is going on ten years now. They brought back Rick Berman and Brannon Braga for the finale, writing a ridiculous framing device wherein Commander Riker, during his The Next Generation days (I'll save a comment about how much he should not have aged since then), is visiting the holodeck to witness Enterprise's last mission before the founding of the United Federation of Planets (which itself is a time-jump to 5 years after the previous episode of Enterprise.) The disservice this does to the cast and story of Enterprise notwithstanding, this episode is also notable because in a ridiculous contrivance, Enterprise's chief engineer and one of the three primary characters on the show, Charles "Trip" Tucker is killed protecting series recurring character Andorian Commander Shran's daughter from pirate kidnappers. It makes no sense and seems to only serve to further dilute fans' final memories of the franchise with ridiculous forced drama, reportedly the character was killed off "to get people talking." Suffice to say, the episode is not well-remembered by fans.

Telling statements from Memory Alpha:

"This is the only series finale in the Star Trek franchise where the actual

ensemble crew of the series do not appear, but rather, their holographic

copies."

"The only exterior shot of the NX-01 Enterprise in this episode appears in the

closing montage."

"Rick Berman described this episode as a "valentine to the fans"."

"At a 2009 Star Trek convention, Jonathan Frakes simply said this episode

"stinks.""

"In 2013, eight years after the airing of this episode, Brannon Braga apologized to the entire cast of Enterprise for it and said he thought Rick Berman and himself made a "narcissistic move" in trying to make the episode a "valentine" to Star Trek. He also called it "a crappy episode.""

So, without Star Trek on TV, it's up to fans to fix it. The Good that Men Do serves largely as a fix-fic. Hilariously enough, the holodeck framing device which did a disservice to the cast of Enterprise is ultimately an easy way to ret-con Trip's death, because the program Riker was using was a lie, based on a false account of history! Weirdly, this revelation is presented to us by the framing device of old Jake Sisko and old Nog, discovering these recently unclassified files about Trip Tucker's "death." In reality, Trip faked his death so he could go undercover in the Romulan Star Empire and help the proto-Federation's efforts against Romulus.

What seems strange is that what is to me a delightful appropriation of a bad

episode to righteously upend a wrong done to the fan community ends up being

kind of unsatisfying. I read reviews of this book on Amazon before purchasing

it and all were largely positive, but one negative review stood out to me in

that it was criticizing the book because people were constantly crying. I

wasn't as upset for Archer wanting to hug T'Pol and Trip constantly as this

reviewer was, but man, I have to say, Trip, Archer, and T'Pol spend quite a

bit of time throughout this book misty-eyed. T'Pol, a damned Vulcan,

literally breaks down in tears on two separate occasions. The Denobulan

doctor Phlox, in on the conspiracy, almost cries thinking about not-dead Trip

Tucker. I know there's a lot of emotion and drama involved in faking one's

death, but c'mon.

What I liked:

During his fake death, Trip remarks at how ridiculous and unbelievable the

circumstances surrounding it are. Take that, canon!

Who's a good boy? It's Porthos! He's a good boy!

Things that bothered me, in order of annoyance:

At one point Trip is paired with another undercover human operative, who espouses the really deep observation that the universe is just so vast and amazing, that it makes you wonder if God did it. No, not just any God, the Christian one, apparently. Trip is written as conceding the very deep point that it really makes you think, don't it.

While undercover as a Romulan, Trip recognizes that another, potentially hostile Romulan is actually the same person as a Vulcan captain he met months before. Nothing comes of this. We never find out if he was a Vulcan operative undercover in the Romulan Empire or vice-versa. It just hangs out there.

Characterization. Yikes. T'Pol is all over the place, and Shran is stuck in default ANGRY until the final chapters of the book when he realizes what an idiot he's been. This mistake costs him nothing other than some internal guilt, and then he is subsequently rewarded. The most complex character is a Romulan nobody cares about.

Why doesn't Trip tell T'Pol about his fake death plans immediately? He eventually does anyway, I feel like this is just more unnecessary drama insertion, but what do I know?

Although this isn't much different than the television show, I would have hoped that Sato, Reed, and Mayweather would have gotten more time focused on them. Mayweather in particular was quite invisible. Again, just like the TV show.

Again, not to overly criticize Star Trek literature as "elevated fanfiction", but I was quite often reminded of fanfiction that loves to pepper in foreign words that the author knows just to prove their cred. Right, senpai? I can sort of understand doing this for Klingon words everybody knows (I don't expect "Q'apla" to be translated), but every tenth word out of a Romulan character was italicized, and even the Andorians were occasionally complaining about how others didn't have any ZHAVEY, which I assumed was "honor." This is even more ridiculous when Romulans were constantly counting down things, which it was obvious they were numbers, and yet during at least the third countdown in the Romulan language (nerd voice: That's RIHANNSU!) Trip is translating in his head to English for the viewers at home.

Along these same lines, the questionable fanon of the Andorians having four genders and declining population growth is brought up. Further, this book takes the bold step of declaring the Aenar extinct in the 2400s. I'm less annoyed with the fanon gender theory (even though this was not represented in the considerable time spent on the Andorians in the Enterprise TV series) than I am about suddenly declaring the Aenar extinct. (especially when they exist in Star Trek Online.)

Starfish

Starfish
Peter Watts

There's an inherent danger in over-recommendation. I think it's half the reason Final Fantasy 7 is so reviled at this point in history, it was over-recommended. The eventual backlash against the game was so overwhelming that it has significantly tainted the reputation of every RPG to come out of Japan, and it's possible that the coming (and don't lie, you know it will come) backlash against the backlash against Final Fantasy 7 may be so immense as to destroy our reality.

Such was I think the byproduct of my knowledge of Starfish before reading it. All I knew was it was AWESOME. And that it was about people surgically and technologically modified to be able to survive at the bottom of the ocean.

Starfish wasn't bad. To be honest, I thought it was pretty good. It just wasn't the most amazing, fantastic book I've ever read. Does that mean I'm now participating in the requisite backlash against all the hype I'd experienced because I'm a smartass on the internet? I hope not, the book was still good.

Sort-of-not-really spoiler below:

Good stuff: Interesting view of the future, still dystopian, but less so than your average Atwood sci-fi book. The sort-of but maybe not really lack of an "antagonist" was probably the most interesting aspect of the book to me, as the not-protagonists/but-not-antagonists-either were more compelling than the "main" characters. Some of the terminology was funny, I particularly liked suffering from Nitrogen Narcosis being referred to as getting "narked."

Stuff I didn't really need: All the psychodrama. I know Evangelion is influential, but I don't think every Sci-Fi genre piece published after that pivotal day in the history of Fiction in which Shinji yelled at his dad needs broken characters doing badass stuff brokenly (see: Xenogears.) To me, characterization needs to be more than "was abused and has brown eyes." It was a bit too distracting in the middle of the book, but I got over it after the story moved on.

Grade: B

Hyperion, or, judging artists by their later politics

Does Mike Nelson's current Yoostabee-ism prevent me from still liking Mystery Science Theater 3000? Can I not still laugh at the mocking of the brilliantly inept Space Mutiny simply because the head writer of MST3K went crazy after 9/11? Is it merely a political disagreement, or do I now disagree with the artist on a more fundamental level? Questions that must be wrestled with in the hypercharged politics of the 21st century.

And also a question I asked myself after reading Hyperion and wanting to look into more by author Dan Simmons. As it turns out, and after wanting to read more by the author, I uncovered that he likes to have political discussions on his website/blog and message board, which usually involve stories of him politely pointing out the flaws in his liberal friends' logic, and arguing with readers on his messageboards who found some sections of his Illium series borderline anti-Islamic.

I didn't know this before I read Hyperion. All I knew about Hyperion was that it won a Hugo, it was recommended to Kyon by Nagato Yuki, and I bought it for half off the cover price at Bookman's about 2 years prior without getting around to reading it.

Hyperion is hard to describe as it is several small plots woven into one large, sweeping Sci-Fi story. It compares itself to Chaucer, due to the way the narrative is divided into each major character telling their tale of how they came to Hyperion for the momentous occasion of the opening of the Time Tombs, the mysterious and eventually sort of explained galactic MacGuffin which drives the overall plot. Some of the stories are very good. The opening tale, that of the priest, is particularly interesting, and the desire to read more led to me reading about 1/3 of the book in one sitting on a 12 hour flight.

The individual nature of the stories makes Hyperion a very character-driven novel, and some of the characters are quite strong, while others seem to be a bit more archetypal (the hard-boiled detective [IN SPACE!] in particular was too cliche and didn't really interest me much personally), but their motives and drives are still well thought-out. It's easy to see after reading Hyperion that it quietly influenced a lot of genre (including anime, somehow) in the years since its release, and it didn't win the Hugo for no good reason. It's an very solid book, and worth a read. I can't really recommend looking further into Dan Simmons's politics and personal beliefs, however. Contemporary religious politics, specifically lauding one while damning another have no place in discussions of Science Fiction, as far as I'm concerned. But try keeping that knowledge out of your head while reading the depictions of the Catholic Church and Islam in this novel now.

Yes, there are sequels, and no, they didn't win Hugos.

Overall Grade: A