Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire

Mass market paperback, 499 pages
Published 2010
Acquired September 2012
Read January 2018

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire

by Michael A. Martin

Early 2381 - August 2382
The previous Typhon Pact novels thus far haven't been moored to an ongoing series; each featured a Deep Space Nine character, but neither was really a Deep Space Nine novel. Seize the Fire is, however, a Titan novel, despite the lack of subtitle, as well as a Typhon Pact novel, so I'll be considering it from both angles.

The Typhon Pact was promoted as giving readers insight into underseen Star Trek aliens, and thus Seize the Fire promises us insight into the Gorn. Well, unfortunately, anything interesting or insightful is a long time coming. Michael A. Martin focuses on the Gorn caste system, and it basically comes out to a monotonous tech caste good, military caste bad. There are two different military caste leaders, and both are depicted as barbaric belligerents without subtlety, even though they're on a mission to save their people from extinction. The Gorn captain in "Arena" was way more canny and principled than these guys even though he was primarily committing war crimes. Like, there's a basis for sympathy here that goes completely unused. We gain no real insight into the Gorn.

Occasionally the novel raises sort of interesting ideas, but it tramples over them. The Gorn scientist who spends a lot of time on Titan is a very adept mimic, imitating Riker's voice enough to get into the shuttlebay; Martin here is picking up on how the Gorn in "Arena" sent multiple messages to the Enterprise to bait it to Cestus III, including mimicking the base commander's voice. You could do something with this, presenting the Gorn as canny and adaptive but in Seize the Fire it's really jarring with how they're otherwise characterized. S'syrixx can't even get Federation names right in his internal dialogue, calling them things like "Rry'kurr" and "Troi-mammal" and "Tie-tan," but you're telling me he can imitate Riker's voice enough to fool his crew? The idea of genetic castes also seems interesting (and potentially ethically dubious; at the novel's end the "good" Gorn are just going to re-engineer the warrior caste to be more pliable!), but trust me, by the end of this novel you'll hope no one ever says "caste" ever again.

What really dampens any potential insight into the Gorn is that the Gorn-only scenes are just painful to read, not only because of the sledgehammer characterization, but because the poor characterization means all you have to hang onto are these terrible space names. When discussing the two Gorn commanders, Riker says at one point, "Krassrr isn't Gog'ressh," and I was like, He isn't? because I literally could not tell those guys apart the whole book. Plus there's some dopey space religion stuff, which flattens the Gorn, not expands them.

As a Titan novel, it's not much cop either. Riker and Titan are curiously inactive, spending much of the book just watching the Gorn while the reptiles prepare to "ecosculpt" an inhabited planet. When done right, Titan is my favorite novel series, back-to-basic Star Trek with a modern update, but the characters have no life here. There are so many ineffectual staff meetings it's like you're reading a caricature of The Next Generation. Which is weird, because it was a scene in a novel co-written by Martin that made Titan come alive to me, and that scene was about a meeting! (The Blue Table just chatting away in Taking Wing or The Red King, I forget which.) None of the characters pop, and they don't really have any kind of character threads, except that Vale goes from prejudiced against Gorn to still prejudiced against Gorn.

There are also times the book is just clunkily written, such as times a character does a thing that obviously indicates an emotion, and then the narration tells us that this emotion is obviously indicated. There are also a few times where it seems like the interesting things happen "off-screen" while we follow less interesting things, and then someone gets filled in on the interesting things. Why? Martin tries to cram exposition into dialogue, too, which weird given that this is not a tv show, such as this mellifluous exchange:

PAZLAR: Eviku and Chamish were the first to notice the pattern [...]
VALE: If anybody aboard Titan was going to find that sort of pattern, it would be our resident xenobiology and ecology experts.
PAZLAR: Apparently. Unfortunately, my expertise in those fields doesn't overlap all that much with that of the biospheric scientists. My specialties are cosmology and big-bore physics.

Like, there had to be a less clunky way of getting everyone's science specialties into the book. Surely Vale knows this! Though I'm not sure why it matters at all.

Between these factors, Seize the Fire makes for a dull read, and the weakest Typhon Pact novel yet. A poor exploration of the Gorn, and a dull novel otherwise.

Continuity Notes:

• Seize the Fire reconciles the different appearance of the Gorn in "Arena" and "In a Mirror Darkly" by indicating that the "Arena" Gorn was warrior caste, while the "In a Mirror Darkly" one was technological caste. Though this is compared to the various Xindi species, which doesn't really seem analogous at all.
• Riker thinks about a story that he heard that O'Herlihy and Lang, the two tactical officers who weren't Kelowitz that went to Cestus III with Kirk, weren't killed by the Gorn, but were tortured for years or decades for information. This is not mentioned again. I can only assume it's a reference to something, because it's totally irrelevant, and Michael Martin novels reference irrelevant things like it's his job, but if so, I don't know to what.
• A number of characters are skeptical that the ancient ecosculptor can be sentient. This makes little sense given the whole previous Titan novel was about artificial intelligence... and one of those artificial intelligences is standing right with the characters while they argue about this!
• Titan, since the events of Destiny, Over a Torrent Sea, and Synthesis, has returned to the Vela OB2 Association, the star cluster in the Gum Nebula that was the setting for the earlier Titan novel Orion's Hounds, though none of that novel's worldbuilding seemed to be in play here.
• Vale mentions that she learned to be an XO by watching Riker on two different Enterprises. This is wrong, as Vale came aboard the E-E after the Dominion War, replacing Daniels as chief of security. She did not serve on the E-D.
• The Prime Directive is said to explicitly invoke warp drive as a criterion for first contact-- thus causing a difficulty for Titan when the crew discovers a planet where the inhabitants have warp technology but not warp propulsion. This jarred me, as I never had the impression that warp qua warp was mentioned in the Prime Directive. We've seen Starfleet interact openly with pre-warp societies, and also the Prime Directive applies to species with warp technology (even the Klingons!). My personal impression of the Prime Directive is that it's probably a relative short rule with two centuries of accumulated judicial rulings because the idea of "natural development" is impossibly complicated. Warp drive is definitely an important criterion, but I never had the impression from the show that it was written into the actual Directive as the criterion.
• Also there's a joke about how even in-universe, "These Are the Voyages" is considered to be terrible. (Did Riker tell Troi that was how he felt about it?)

Other Notes:

• This one is a little long, and a little personal, but I feel it's worth mentioning in case it's influencing my judgement here. In Fall 2008, following a conversation at Shore Leave, Michael Schuster and I sent a couple pitches to editor Marco Palmieri at S&S. One of them was eventually accepted, and became the Myriad Universes story The Tears of Eridanus. The other was for a Titan novel where (in a subplot) the ship ran into a Gorn exploratory vessel charting the same planet as it. Marco responded that this fortuitously aligned with his plans for the Typhon Pact series. He said that fitting Titan in was a challenge, but our proposal showed a way with its depiction of Gorn exploration, which could be tweaked to incorporate the Typhon Pact. (He also said it wasn't very good!) On December 1 he e-mailed us to say some Destiny reading materials were coming to us to give us the background we needed; on December 4 we heard that he was fired, and his editorial replacement on the Typhon Pact project never answered any of our e-mails about it... and then the next year a Gorn/Titan novel by a completely different person was announced! So it goes. At the time I was upset, I think, but finally reading the book almost a whole ten years later it's like it's from another life.
• Deanna has really powerful empathy in this novel, reading the emotional intentions of distant fleets of Gorn in precise detail!
• I guess it's a thing that Typhon Pact novels will include extended irrelevant flashbacks; this one has a gratuitous chapter about mission from Tuvok's Excelsior days to do with the Genesis Project.
• A couple threads are set up (Tuvok's ecosculpting knowledge, something bad with White-Blue) which I guess will be picked up in future Titan novels; I see the next one is by Michael Martin again.