July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually
about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot
haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring
to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor.
The former book is supposedly about how to use political power appropriately and
trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the
book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told
the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it.
Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal
of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way
they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and
that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other goal, and disrupts the
urgency of it.
Star Trek: Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate |
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Published: 2021 Acquired: December 2021 Read: August 2025 |
I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel,
David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means
to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation
to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.")
But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action
sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels
like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack
himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after
all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with
it?
If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict
about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict
pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more
on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On
the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky,
aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very
little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants
to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other
than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be
characters who don't believe this, but come to.
This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which
began back at the beginning of book II and continues for a
distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative
standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the
other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are
always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I
just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's
antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of
them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But
beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about
what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition
coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the
trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a
necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married
to its themes.
The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how
the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First
Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's
so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific
way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek
time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) has quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters
decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the
reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on
from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the
trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians
was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to
buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter are seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they
can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not
necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.
Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a
huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of
direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called
"novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded
(especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan
novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from
big event to big event.
But I feel like even if you were a big fan of
everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda
wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're
reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But
what Coda does is cut this tapestry off. To the extent that there was
one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead
everything just blows up. The problem is, that without this trilogy, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know
that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If
we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I
feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.
Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in
particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one
last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up
over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much
time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three
books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character
largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.
On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv
characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching
Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book
about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the
mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?
Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion
out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it
despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate
doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the
metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be
satisfying.
This is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could somehow write a David Mack novel and an Una McCormack one... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity?
There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that.
Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda
that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often
managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly
nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.
On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.
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| Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata (photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think) |
Continuity Notes:
- The Defiant is in this book a lot... but did either book II or III of Coda even mention any of the various DS9/Defiant crew that David R. George III created for his post-Destiny novels? I get it, no one thinks those characters were more boring than I do, but it is kind of weird to totally exclude them from a novelverse wrapup.
- One notes that Mack makes sure to establish that the Borg can exist independent of the specific origin he ascribed to them in the Destiny trilogy.
- Totally random cameo from the mirror Kadohata. Why not, I guess.
- I found this book's seeming claim that K'Ehleyr was the real love of Worf's life honestly kind of weird. They had a nice fling, I guess... and then she systematically kept information from him for years! Why not the woman he actually built a life with? Surely that's what love really is. Spending so much time on this plot was another thing that felt misjudged about the emphases of this novel.
- I thought the scene where René goads all the mirror universe characters into dying for no reason very improbable. Look, I know people in the mirror universe are kind of dumb in general, but one kid calls you a coward, and that's it, you sacrifice your lives pointlessly to prove him wrong?
- I also really hated making Wesley inadvertantly responsible for the Devidians via a bootstrap paradox. First, those kind of things are often dramatically inert; it means people take action for no other reason than that the plot requires them to take action. And second, why put all this on Wesley's screwup?
- I don't really get what was up with the "RenĂ© gets old" subplot now that we've got to the end of the trilogy. Like, what did it add? It has been suggested to me that this is "because otherwise we have to read how a little kid dies," but of course the Rikers' daughter Natasha does die, and so does—more implicitly—the Siskos' daughter Rebecca. It thus occurs to me that if Coda were going to do weird time shit with a captain character's kid, surely it ought to have been the captain character's kid who already had weird time shit going on? Though that would have required the people writing this series to engage with David R. George's DS9 novels, though, which clearly was not a priority.
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The End of This Day's Business by Eleta Preloc
* On p. 215, Sarai finally reaches the conclusion that Riker "most definitely is not 'all right.'" I actually sighed out loud at this.
