...but then when it came time to do that, I found that I just had too many thoughts! So I will repost those old reviews, but also I am going to expand those thoughts. Just as I felt the first three books worked as a single unit, so do books four and five: between them, they tie off a number of the character and plot threads set up in the first two books, especially as regards Reyes, T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn.
Of book four, Open Secrets, I originally wrote this:
The Vanguard series continues from the cliffhanger at the end of Reap the Whirlwind, and that plotline was probably my favorite of the many strands running throughout this book. Though Commodore Reyes seemed less than active in his own defense, I feel that despite (or because of) that we learned more about him in this one book than in the previous three. The other plotlines continue to chug along, perturbed by the events of the Federation-Klingon War (as seen in "Errand of Mercy") but otherwise not incredibly remarkable, with the exception of the Pennington/T'Prynn story, which added another interesting layer to my favorite journalist. I'm never quite sure what to think of Vanguard, but I'll certainly be continuing along to Precipice.
Rereading it over fifteen years later, I feel differently about the Reyes plotline; I think this is because the events of books one through three are fresh in my memory, since I read them months instead of years prior. When I reread the first three books, particularly book one, Harbinger, it was very clear to me that these books were commenting on the post-9/11 security state through a science fiction lens much in the same way that, say, the Battlestar Galactica reboot did. Here, Reyes goes on trial for what he's done... but in a nice twist, not for the unethical things he did, but for the one ethical thing he did, allow Pennington to reveal the truth. I like this idea, but in the end, I feel like—just as was true of the earlier books—we don't get much insight into why Reyes ultimately did what he did, what made these decisions feel compelling to him to begin with. Why was he willing to sacrifice innocent lives and civil rights on the altar of Federation security and state secrets? I honestly still don't really know after reading four books about this guy. (I do finally know why T'Prynn was willing to do this, but we'll discuss that when I get to book five.)
Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets |
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Published: 2009 Acquired: May 2009 Previously read: June 2009 Reread: April 2026 |
Outside of the trial, I unfortunately found the book pretty dramatically inert. The book begins with a flash-forward to what was happening on Vanguard during the events of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy"—the Klingons are approaching Vanguard, but as seen in that episode, suddenly both sides' controls get too hot to use and the Organians unliterally end the war. This scene is set in 2267, and then we jump back a year and fill in what got us up to this point. This does the exact opposite of open the book with an exciting tease, unfortunately, as whenever the Klingons are up to something in the rest of the book, the reader knows it's ultimately going to go nowhere because of something that happened in an episode from 1967. I mean, the reader might know this anyway, but we don't need to remind them!
Similar choices dog other aspects of the station narrative. Reyes is replaced as commander of Vanguard Station by Admiral Nogura. Nogura was only mentioned on screen twice, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where he's Kirk's superior, but to fans of a certain age, he's a well-known figure, thanks to his presence in the 1980s novels. Especially in J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years, where he's called "the Old Man," a revered figure known for how hard he was; he comes out of retirement to take over Starfleet and clean it up following a series of scandals in the novels Dreadnought! and Battlestations! When it was announced that Nogura was going to be in this book I was quite excited... but he doesn't do anything for the entire book. He makes no interesting choices. I know he's not one of the series's ostensible leads... but it also seems weird to me that when Reyes is in command of Vanguard, there are lots of hard choices that constantly need to be made, but as soon as he's not in command, basically this all dries up and Nogura spends him time sitting around in staff meetings. Why bother to use this potentially interesting character if you're not going to do anything interesting with him?
The other major station subplots are about the scientific research happening, and they are similarly devoid of interesting moments. A Tholian defects and joins the scientific operation at Vanguard, giving them valuable information on the Shedai... but the novel only considers this from the angle of the scientific plot. How does Ming Xiong feel about working alongside a representative of the people responsible for the death of a bunch of his friends back in book one? Apparently just fine. Are the station crew curious about the mysterious Tholians? I guess not. The Tholian is there to deliver exposition about the Shedai, and beyond that, no thought has been put into their role in the narrative. Also, Ming gets assigned a boss who relieves him as leader of the science investigations on the station (The Wrath of Khan's Carol Marcus), but he's just fine with it and they get along great. In the long run we'll realize that this happens for "lore" reasons (what Carol learns about the Taurus meta-genome here influences her later work on the Genesis Project), but again, it isn't really thought through in any other way. (Also I have a hard time believing that from the way her son David talks about Kirk in the movie that he actually grew up on a Starfleet base!)
Lastly, I also found the T'Prynn/Pennington subplot a damp squib, contra my comments of fifteen years ago. Basically, Pennington and M'Benga take T'Prynn back to Vulcan. Exactly why Pennington is willing to do this is pretty vague, but mostly all the characters just do nothing while a Vulcan mystic works. T'Prynn herself is fairly absent from her own plotline.
Small niggle: while in all previous books (and future books, as far as I know), Ambassador Jetanien was a Rigellian "Chelon," in this one he suddenly becomes a "Chel" for some reason.
Precipice is the fifth Vanguard novel, and the last that I kept up with as the series was released. From this point on, all the books will be new to me. At the time I originally read it, this is what I wrote:
This novel covers almost a full year in the saga of Star Trek: Vanguard, but it feels like it artificially stretches events out in order to do that; it would have been better off with a time-frame of a couple months. I'm not a big fan of the fragmented plotlines either; hopefully the next volume sees a more central focus. It's nice to see Cervantes Quinn get some solid time, even if he did inexplicably turn from Harry Mudd into Butch Coolidge.
You can see me trying to be diplomatic there, I think. This was during my brief period as a writer of Star Trek fiction, and it didn't seem the done thing to be going around slating my fellow authors' work. (I think it was shortly after this that I stopped reviewing new Star Trek books online, actually; I only resumed doing so once it was clear to me I was not going to be writing any Star Trek books ever again.)
Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice |
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Published: 2009 Acquired: January 2010 Previously read: March 2010 Reread: May 2026 |
Just as Open Secrets tied up the Reyes arc begun in book one, Precipice seemingly ties up the arcs for T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn. I found the T'Prynn arc wrapup particularly bad. First, the book's answer to the question of "why do people do terrible things in service to the security state?" is "mental illness"! The reason T'Prynn made all these awful choices in book one was because ongoing trauma from her failed mating bond and the presence of her deceased lover's katra (p. 240). It's about the least interesting answer I could have imagined. On top of that, there's this whole weird thing about how when T'Prynn is cured following the events of book four, she finds out Reyes is dead and decides to hunt down his killer. (Reyes isn't actually dead, but she doesn't know that yet.) Whose killer does she not decide to hunt down, or even think about? Her lover's! No, she's gotta deal with the death of her Man. Such a weird choice, like the author forgot the very thing that put her into a coma to begin with.
The wrapups for Pennington and Quinn are also quite bad. Pennington was introduced in book one as a good, if kind of cynical and obnoxious, journalist, but a bad person, having an extramarital affair. He's then sent to his lowest point thanks to T'Prynn's machinations; unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be only friend, Quinn, helped her. In this book he delivers a speech explaining his personality defects that lead him to having this affair and now he's all better (pp. 238-9). It's very pat and it comes out of nowhere; how and when did he learn all this about himself? Certainly not in the intervening three books. I think you can do some interesting stuff with infidelity in fiction, but this series has not. Also, Pennington learning that his friend betrayed and lied to him also goes nowhere. Quinn's plotline here is even weirder; suddenly he has a previously unmentioned backstory as a principled mercenary and he's a badass commando operative. Like, where did this come from?
Continuity grumble: This book goes to great pains to work in the events of the 1980s novels The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic into its continuity. I don't know why, because I wouldn't have any expectation that those books were "in continuity" with these ones. But it does so in a way that makes absolutely no sense, setting them both before the television episode "Journey to Babel." But Vulcan Academy Murders is a sequel to "Journey to Babel," which entirely depends on the Enterprise characters' familiarity with Spock's parents, who they only met in "Babel." Weird choice.
