Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prometheus: The Root of All Rage

Star Trek: Prometheus: The Root of All Rage
by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg
translated by Helga Parmiter

November 18-25, 2385

Translation published: 2018
Originally published: 2016
Acquired: December 2020
Read: March 2023

Okay, so here we have another Prometheus novel that felt like it could have been a third of a novel. Let's tackle this one a bit differently. I want to move through it in order, not quite chapter-by-chapter, but significant chapter by significant chapter.

• Chapter 2: A recap of where we're at so far, which is mostly characters talking about how they haven't actually learned anything yet.
• Chapter 4: A chapter set on the Klingon ship. On the one hand, these kind of feel like distractions; on the other hand, they almost read like they're by a different writer(s) to the rest of the book, because these characters actually have personalities and are trying to do things that bring them into conflict with one another.
• Chapter 5: For some reason, Lwaxana Troi is in this book.
• Chapter 6: The Klingon High Council meets to complain about how little is happening in this book.
• Chapter 7: One of the trilogy's ongoing subplots is about how women shouldn't be just having casual but enthusiastic sex all the time.
• Chapter 12: One of the very annoying things in the first book were a large number of chapters where boring people did boring things and then at the end they all blew up. Here's another one, alas, but thankfully it's the only one in this book.
  
• Chapter 13: The Klingon High Council meets to have the same conversation over again as in chapter 6. I don't think you need either of these two chapters, but you certainly didn't need both of them.
• Chapter 14: Over 150 pages into the second book in this trilogy, Captain Adams finally makes an interesting decision. The Klingon captain, Kromm, decides he is going to bombard innocent civilians in order to get some answers. Adams places Prometheus between the Bortas and the planet to stop him. How is Adams going to deescalate this situation and save the innocent civilians?
• Chapter 15: Don't worry, Captain Adams is in no danger of joining the pantheon of clever Star Trek captains. The showdown fizzles out when Lwaxana on Earth calls in a favor from Picard who calls in a favor from Worf who calls in a favor from Martok who orders Kromm to stand down. And that's it.
• Chapter 18: Another meeting where people complain about how little has happened, but in this case it's the Federation Council. So many interminable meeting scenes in these books.
• Chapter 19: Finally the characters figure out something that's been obvious the entire book, which is that some kind of external influence is making everyone more aggressive and xenophobic.
  
• Chapter 22: Lwaxana figures out that what's happening now is linked to the disappearance of the Valiant a century ago. I am not sure why she is making every significant plot breakthrough and not our supposed main characters.
  
• Chapters 24-5: The main characters do a lot of technobabble to figure out where the crashed Valiant is. It's a very undramatic way to climax your novel.
• Chapter 27: Spock is the one who makes a key breakthrough in the subplot on the Klingon ship.
• Chapter 30: Spock figures out that the cause of everything here is the entity from "Day of the Dove." This is doubly frustrating: one, the attentive reader could have figured this out six hundred pages ago from the prologue to the first book, and two, it's yet another breakthrough by literally anyone other than the crew of the Prometheus.

And that's it, that's the book. A bunch of meetings, the main characters doing almost nothing, the Klingons, Spock, and Lwaxana Troi being responsible for most of what does happen. It could have been one-third as long.

Continuity Notes:

• Not as reference-heavy as the first book, but the book does recap what we learned about the "Day of the Dove" entity from The Q Continuum, even carrying over the name that book gave it, (*).

Stray Observations:

• Not sure what I think of a book whose moral is clearly "don't be a xenophobe" also having one of its few significant breakthroughs coming from gratuitous torture.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: The Missing by Una McCormack