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Captain's Star Log: March 1st, 2012: After reviewing last month's column, I decided that non-themed months just don't work as well as a more structured column. I will try to avoid such rocky roads in the future. Since I have enough Star Trek books to fill an entire 52 book challenge of their own, I decided now would be the perfect time to take a few short voyages into the final frontier. As part of my mission I will attempt to read at least one novel for each of the live action Star Trek series. However Commander Tucker informs me that might not be possible but Ambassador Porthos disagrees.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation- Invasion Book Two: The Soldiers of Fear by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
The Furies- the horrible demon like aliens from Diane Carey's Star Trek: First Strike are back, they are mad as hell and they've had eighty years to stuff a few new tricks up their sleeves. There are a couple of strong points to this book. First of which is that all the characters seem very much what we've come to expect from their television counterparts. Another is a strong use of continuity. It references episodes not only of Next Generation but the Original Series and Deep Space Nine. Now come the downsides: there are several places with weird punctuation. These are clearly not the writer's fault. They are, or at least were, common when converting from one file format, particularly between Wordperfect or Word to something that could be run on a Macintosh. The other problem is that unlike the previous episode which made an attempt to be a character piece on top of an epic, this one was a fairly paint by numbers Star Trek all the way down to Riker's Academy roommate the new assistant navigator Lt. Redbay. That's right- he has red in his name and he's a navigator. Le'baktag daq gagh- that's just a little too close to naming him Lt. Redshirt. (Also- if there are any Klingon speakers reading this- please don't tell Sheryl what I just said.) This is a problem with almost any Star Trek book made while the series is still going. Too much is set in stone. The big names can't be in any real danger. There was no other way the story could end and still meet the licensing requirements. It is not terrible but it wasn't as good as the first book.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Invasion Book Three: Time's Enemy by L.A. Graf:
Leave it to Deep Space Nine to really kick the epic into high gear. Here you have two parallel stories. One involving Sisko, Dax and Bashir being sent to Starbase One to investigate a starship- a possible future U.S.S. Defiant that had crashed into a comet. The other involved Kira, Odo and O'Brien tracking down a Bajoran terrorist cell. At first- the plots are so unconnected you wonder what if anything these two plots have to do with a each other. About halfway through- enter Plot C. Weird carnivorous aliens that mimic certain genetic traits of anything they eat show up. They are slowly discovered to be the enemies that drove the Furies from the Alpha Quadrant thousands of years before. Actions which humanity has taken the blame for and which almost caused a war between the Furies and the Federation on two occasions. The Kira story isn't as strong at first but once the plots begin connecting things really pick up on that front. There are plenty of moments I didn't figure out until about a chapter before they happened. Which considering how much Star Trek I watch and read really tells you something. There are some creative and bizarre uses for time travel in this book which leans to an ending that kinda/sorta breaks the licensing agreement. One of the main characters dies but in a way that actually fixes a major time anomaly.
- Trek: Voyager Invasion Book Four: The Final Fury by Daffyd Ab Hugh:
Remember Lt. Redshirt from Soldiers of Fear? It seems his tiny shuttlecraft survived travel through an artificial wormhole and was surrounded by a Fury armada. His distress call is picked up by Voyager who finds him captive on the Fury homeworld. What begins as light comedy of errors in the first quarter, morphs into MacGuyver style escape plans in the second half before morphing into a tale of the moral use of genocide at three quarter mark. In that respect it is kind of fun. There are two points that bother me about this book. First, there is a major continuity error- Tuvok claims to have overheard the original communication traffic of the first encounter with The Furies during his days on the Excelsior. The problem is that First Strike is clearly set on the NCC 1701 during the latter half of Kirk's fifth year as captain. Sulu was still Kirk's navigator and the Excelsior was still a sketch on the screens of Utopia Planitia shipyards. Secondly- Ab Hugh occasional flip flops on the spelling of Janeway's first name. Most of the time he spells it Kathryn (which is correct) but one or two instances it gets spelled Katherine (which is wrong). These two errors really kind of bug me. Details like that are just as easy to get right as they are to get wrong. There is also the use of Lt. Redshirt who through the course of this book gets tortured, dug out of a prison colony, sedated, fed intravenously, woken up with drugs while in unstable condition, gets his shuttlecraft shot down and finally goes scuba diving in space without his space gear. Not only that- he figures things out faster than everyone else and is immune to the Fury fear gun. Both make sense in the story- since he's the only one who has faced them before- but that is the only thing keeping him from being a soulless Mary Sue. That and when he finally, finally dies he stays dead. Star Trek fans read Star Trek books to get the types of stories the TV series can't tell- not to see Ensign Nobody spin plates on his nose while unicycling upside down and naked. Now if Kes were the one on the unicycle (a member of a species The Furies have never encountered and a known psi active) were the only one immune it would have 1) made just as much sense and 2) given an existing cast member something to do. Over all- the book was not great. It really picked up the action level in the last quarter. I didn't like the fact that Janeway was willing to commit genocide or Neelix's willingness to help. Neelix of all people, having been on the other side of things, should know it was the wrong decision.
- Star Trek: Mudd in Your Eye by Jerry Oltion:
This book falls into the typical three act structure. The first and third act both contain the amount of zaniness that one expects from a Harry Mudd episode. The story involves the Enterprise crew visiting a pair of planets that has had a continuous war for 20,000 years, all over fruit. Anyway, they've declared peace and it's all thanks to Mudd. Of course once Mudd's real scam comes into play, things all go haywire. Both in the sense that a plot should but in a story telling way. Everyone dies. This being a licensed book they don't stay dead. Still what should be a chuckle worthy mockery of religion seems a little dark for a Harry Mudd story. This drama/comedy confusion fixes itself right around the time the Stella Mudd android dies. Then everything is wacky and light again. Overall- the story is not bad. It is leaps and bounds beyond The Final Fury. It is hard to find anything bad to say about it and hard to find anything extremely positive either.
- Star Trek: Enterprise - By The Book by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Book of the Month):
This book has plenty of continuity errors. The double inversion of the order of Hoshi Sato's name is just for starters. (Most Japanese names are last name first, individual name second but Hoshi already inverted when she joined a most American and European crew.) Cutler is mysteriously promoted to Ensign. This is story is said to be Archer's first contact with a race the Vulcans didn't already know about- even though that story was told in an episode that aired before the release date of this book. However- the long time gamer in me loved the on going subplot with Cutler and Mayweather (along with two other crewman) playing a roleplaying game with tons of parallels to the main story. It reminded me of some of the less character driven games I played in during my high school years. The main story is another in a long line of prime directive themed stories or in the case of Enterprise the need for the prime directive. The two species they make contact with couldn't be more different- a humanoid species that is timid and ordered. The other is a crablike telepathic intelligence that inadvertently harms anyone not of its species it tries to communicate with. However, they are at their heart explorers. Of course Archer finds a way to make communication work and is faced with the question of if he should give it to them.
That's all for now . . . I'm sick so I won't make any predictions for next month's theme yet. Though there will be one . . . so you be here.
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