 |
| Trade paperback, 391 pages Published 2018 Acquired February 2018 Read March 2018 |
by Dayton Ward
The second Discovery tie-in novel is also a prequel, set ten years before the series proper, and featuring slightly younger versions of Philippa Georgiou and Gabriel Lorca-- importantly, this is a Lorca we haven't actually seen before, so to speak. The novel is set during the Tarsus IV massacre, which forms the backstory to the original series episode "The Conscience of the King." Lorca is stationed on Tarsus IV, while Georgiou is on one of the relief vessels. The tying in of the new to the old seems to be a staple of these Discovery novels, and here it works well.
Dayton Ward weaves the various (sometime hard to understand) hints about the massacre into a coherent whole. The book especially shines in its depiction of Kodos himself; I expected the book to cheat on him, to depict him as a hypocrite as stories like this often do. That is, after all, the easy way out. Make a monster into a hypocrite, and you can reject him with ease. But Ward makes Kodos into a patriot and a true believer, a man who really does think he's doing the right thing in a time of crisis. I found the glimpses into his mind and into his followers, fascinating.
Lorca is the novel's real focus, and the man who emerges is the man who might guess Lorca was based on the first season of Discovery. He's tough when the situation calls for it, but Ward uses one of those fortune cookies he occasionally dispensed on the show to anchor the moral core of the character, one that we didn't see on screen. Georgiou comes across as more generic, unfortunately; the show makes her into a woman who sticks to her principles even when that might be risky, and one who fervently believes in the values of the Federation. Putting a personality like that into a situation like Tarsus might resonate, but she's just kind of a typical leader character most of the time.
Sometimes Ward can be a slow writer, and there are signs of that here (I think the backstory of migration to Tarsus IV is explained to us three times in the first fifty pages), but most of the book moves at a fair clip, and it was an enjoyable read.
(dat epilog tho!)
So you watch Star Trek, you read Star Trek, and you collect Star trek stuff(I am assuming), have you watched the Orville yet though? It's not Star Trek but its a good series. Or maybe you have seen it and you just hate it?
ReplyDelete