Faceman Reads Star Trek Books

So I actually did complete this task (as of when the books were published) even though I stopped updating the thread. I ended at Hearts and Minds - which was terrible. It deserves a review honestly.
I just started Available Light which so far is good. I heard about coda and figured I can actually end this project for good now. So a few more books until I reach coda.
what I can’t remember is where I left off with VOY. I know there have been some published since Hearts and Minds but chronologically it takes place in 2382 not 2386 so I may be a few behind. Is VOY integrated into Coda? If so I may have to hit a few of those too.

So far it's mostly a TNG/DS9 story, but some of the bigger and later events of the VOY relaunch series do get referenced. I'd finish off before jumping into Coda.

Also the The Brave And The Bold duology from 2002 is relevant to the plot, because who's going to stop the writers from doing what they want at this point?

Vaguely related: I was curious so I asked over confirmation over at TBBS, and I was right:

They never outright say the name of it, but in the TNG relaunch novels one of Picards favourite books is Strangers From The Sky.

OK, so it looks like my last review was the Fall Book 1. I honestly can't remember the plot of that series to review the remainder of them, nor can I recall much of what came after. Looking at the chart:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Rexjvtxw...it-verse+Reading+Order+Flow+Chart+Mark+VI.png

I am reminded of many books that came later. Takedown was good. I don't remember the last three Titan books, but did read them. I assume that series is done. I remember liking the Prey trilogy. But the TNG books in the Odeysean Pass have been mostly meh.


There appear to be a ton of DS9 that came after - I remember reading the first (and last!) Gamma book, Original Sin, where Sisko takes a ship into the Gamma Quadrant. And of course Control (but don't remember Disavowed) in the Section 31 line.

I reread Hearts and Minds last week to reorient myself to the TNG line since that's where I left off. Let me tell you...it is the most terrible piece of crap ever. No wonder I didn't bother to read on.

It is two stories - one in the 21st century and one in the 24th. The 21st century involves some characters the author ginned up for a series of books he wrote twenty years earlier. The story is terrible. It's about some alien agents on earth who know worked with Gary Seven (from TOS - no I didn't see TOS either). Gary Seven's not in it, but people who know people who know him are! They are completely irrelevant to the overall plot of the 21st century story too, wherein the US government reverse engineers a crashed warp ship, arms it with nukes, and sends it back to the planet it came from to destroy. You meet the pilots of the ship in the last chapter and, without knowing anything about them or their motivation, they chicken out as soon as they arrive, are captured and killed. The weapons are taken by one of the planet's nation states and used to nuke other nation states...but history forgets that and blames Earth the whole time.

These chapters are interspersed without narrative purpose throughout the book as we deal with Picard stumbling across the planet. He is of course captured and put on trial (but escapes before trial) for the crimes of Earth in the 21st century. Naturally he discovers the flight data recorder which proves Earth innocent. This part of the story probably takes up 100 pages. The other part more, but lacks story.

But here's where it gets truly awful. At the beginning of the novel a Vulcan engineer informs Picard he knows what is going on on the planet, but does not provide any details. The Vulcan was briefed in earlier by an Admiral. Picard is mad at the Admiral and the Vulcan and cuts the Vulcan out of the away team. The Vulcan spends the novel in his quarters and does not contribute to the plot after that. The author sets up this conflict with the Vulcan and the Admiral, but there's no pay off. There's not even any inkling of pay off. The Vulcan does not ever play a role in the mystery - he just says the Admiral has briefed him about the planet they arrived at. Neither he nor the Admiral provide Picard with any information about the planet. At the end, Picard calls the Admiral (to have it out?) but instead is informed that it has been disclosed that, years earlier, Picard played a role in overthrowing the Federation president and he best keep in line.

WTF.

Like I said, I'm partly through the next book, written by the same author. His track record is exceedingly poor yet the next one (Available Light) so far is lacking in these narrative flaws. I'm honestly not sure how Hearts and Minds was published. They'll buy anything I guess.

The Federation president gets assassinated, the interim Federation president turns out to be a Cardassian spy surgically modified to look like a Bajoran, Will Riker gets promoted to Admiral, Tom Riker shows up as a a Starfleet intelligence agent, Bashir solves the Andorian reproductive crisis with the help of Section 31 and some stolen top secret information from the Vanguard series, the Cardassian gets outed, Andor rejoins the Federation, some Andorian lady becomes the new Federation president, she sends Picard out to keep exploring.

Other than Rikers promotion and Bashir getting thrown out of Starfleet, I don't think any of it really matters going forward.

Oh yeah, one thing I hate about Coda so far is that it falls back on the "everyone in Starfleet except our heroes is a stupid useless asshole" trope. I get that it's the grande finale and they want to spotlight the characters we've been reading about for a couple decades now, but the Destiny and Cold Equations trilogies didn't have to resort to that. I appreciated those little asides in the Destiny trilogy mentioning other ships and crews coming up with novel ways to destroy individual Borg cubes all by themselves. It was good to see Starfleet listening to Picard right away and diverting a bunch of ships to support the Enterprise even if it turned out they'd arrive too late to make a difference.

There's a joke in there somewhere about the names of the authors ("dayton", "swallow", "mack"?!?!?) but I'm too tired to come up with anything clever this evening.

Did the temperamental 2nd child ever get to sleep? It seems not.

A guide I came across while trying to keep my progression from the Destiny Trilogy forward without missing anything crucial.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Rexjvtxw...it-verse+Reading+Order+Flow+Chart+Mark+VI.png

And I'm done. Wow. Coda was...unnecessary. Unnecessary is me being charitable at this point. I'll get back to this later but...what a disaster.

Yeah, I couldn't even be bothered to post about it after reading the last book.

Apparently it was rushed, and it shows.

I have to admit, the Trek Litverse is one of those things that I'd like to get back into, but it's ballooned so massively that it's just daunting.

I grew up reading the novels that basically took place during the run of shows, especially TOS (Uhura's Song, The Better Man, First Frontier, How Much for Just the Planet?) and TNG (Grounded, Blaze of Glory, Q-in-Law, Reunion, Q-Squared, Vendetta). Also loved the ones that filled out the movie era or the time between the series and the movies (Probe, A Flag Full of Stars) or the pre-TOS period (my favorite is probably Diane Carey's Final Frontier). I read a whole bunch of the New Frontier books in college, which was probably the deepest I ever got into anything that fell outside the live-action series' continuity ...

And now it's like "holy shit, where would I even start?"

Destiny Trilogy.

So here's Coda:

They felt that with the launch of Picard the litverse no longer made sense since Picard (2399) deviates from it in many ways. The deviations, so far are minimal, but it's enough to scuttle it entirely, say the authors. Picard left the E-E earlier than in the novels (now set in 2387), Riker had two children in Picard (one dead), not one, and the names were different than the Novels. I'm not sure Seven's backstory has been inconsistent yet, but that the Borg still exist in 2399 is a contradiction with Destiny. I'm sure there are other deviations too. I've not seen Prodigy, but I understand Janeway is in it. But that's balanced against the fact that it's a kids show on Nickelodeon.

Anyway, they decided that because of the conflict between the LitVerse and the new TV shows, they needed to end the LitVerse in some way. First, this is flawed. While it's less likely that the publisher would green light litverse novels in the near future (though not impossible) there wasn't actually a reason to end the universe. Second, the manner in which they went about it was bonkers and pretty uninteresting.

Why is it uninteresting? The first novel is primarily about Wesley Crusher and time travel. The second novel is mostly about streams of time and time waves and time collapse and...ugh. The third novel, by David Mack, features the mirror universe and everyone dying. Everyone. Everyone dies.

Spoiler alert. Everyone dies. These are not high plot points.

The overarching plot is the Devidians - the bad guys from TNG's Time's Arrow - are using time travel to collapse various divergent universes and then consuming the life force of all the beings from those collapsed timelines when they die. It is a technobabble heavy series. There is no villain. There is nothing Star Treky about any of it. Early on they admit that they are going to die and have no chance at survival. For some reason, they determine that they are not in fact in the "prime" timeline and therefore decide it's ok to sacrifice their timeline to preserve the prime timeline.

The nonsensical third act involves coordinating between the alternate universe (mirror), an alternate 2372 where the borg took over earth, and the litverse 2387. All the while characters start "remembering" elements from the TV timeline (Riker has two kids and goes insane with the contradiction of having only one, Worf...well who knows, but also goes insane). And once everything is coordinated (thanks to Wesley!) they collapse their timeline at the time of divergence (identified as 2372 during Star Trek First Contact) thereby killing the Devidians and saving the Prime Timeline.

As I said, everyone dies. Not all at once - they kill people in each book and then the whole universe in the end. All the novel characters including the children. They make a big deal out of making Picard's six year old son an adult so as not to kill a child, but the adult has the mind of a six year old still...so is that better or worse?

The sad thing about all this is that in their ill thought attempt to close the LitVerse, they actually stumbled upon an elegant solution but opted instead to kill everyone anyway. By finding out that they exist in an alternate timeline (called the First Splinter) that began in 2372 the authors could have just stuck with the LitVerse continuity (at least without killing everyone). They could have linked the LitVerse and the TV timeline in novels in other ways - cross overs, etc. - acknowledging the differences between the two (so far pretty fucking minor, certainly not apocalyptic) and the similarities.

Still, it's their book series. If that's how they want to go out, OK. I guess they felt it was more important to point everyone towards the TV shows that are better than this trilogy of novels, but still nothing to write home about.

So I guess that's it. I read them all.

Yeah, I read a lot of Trek books during the 90s and very early 00s, and got a lot of enjoyment out of them. But I'm reading other things now. I might go back for a few things, like the miniseries Garamet wrote for or the first few books of the DS9 relaunch, or even the older stuff, but I got my enjoyment out of them and I'm moving on to other reading material for the future.

Do they die horribly? I hope so.

Faceman: reading all the Star Trek books so you won't have to.

It's been years since I read a Star Trek novel. The last was garamet's Burning Dreams, which I enjoyed. I got Unspoken Truths but I never started it.

Anyone who dies before the timeline is erased and reset dies horribly, but quickly (save one for dramatic purposes). Everyone else (and I mean everyone) is simply forever erased from time.

So, Coda.

But hey, at least they filled the first two books with pointless repetitive fight scenes against nameless enemies, then spent most of the finale focusing on MU characters and bringing back the Borg because it's not like they didn't already have a fine resolution.

They also "fridged" Ezri, which was idiotic.

I will admit that Nog and Jake did get solid moments, with Nog going out as a hero and Jake finally rising to the occasion and channeling his inner Avery Brooks.


I did ask over at TBBS if the "temporal psychosis" thing was meant to justify Picard Picard spending a decade in a useless depressed funk, the authors there denied it. I'm still convinced, tho.