Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Oblivion's Gate

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
by David Mack

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.

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.

Other Notes:

• 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 "René 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.

"Starman" by Gerry Conway, Mike Vosburg, and Mike Royer

A long time ago, I didn't read superhero comics. It's hard to believe, I know! But compared to many of my interests, I came to them relatively late, not until I was in college. One of my gateways was a blog called, I think, Comics 101 by Scott Tipton (later a writer for IDW's Star Trek and Doctor Who comics). Tipton would do deep dives on different comics characters—his history of Green Arrow was responsible, for example, for my deep and abiding interest in the character. I feel like you can find this stuff all over the Internet these days, but back then it was much rarer.

One of Scott's favorite ever comics was James Robinson's Starman, which he did a multi-part deep dive on, and he made it sound so good and so much to my taste, than when DC released the six-volume Starman Omnibus set a couple years later, I blind-bought the entire run as it came out. These days, the giant hardcover omnibus that reprints everything in order is a common format, but back then it was brand new; in fact, I am pretty sure that Starman was only DC's second foray into it, following the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. If you read Reddit's "OmnibusCollectors" sub, you will see lots of people who blind buy stuff they don't actually like based on hype, but I like to think I am actually very good at it, and I loved the run; I even got my wife to read it, and she enjoyed it too. My reviews of it from the time are all posted here on this blog.

One of the things that Robinson was very good at was pulling strands of the DC universe together. Though Robinson's Starman, Jack Knight, was the son of the original Starman, Ted Knight, DC had actually published several unrelated Starman characters between the two. Robinson didn't ignore these, but worked them into his story. I've long been curious about the original appearances of those Starmen: Mikaal Tomas, Prince Gavyn, and Will Payton. So my next comics project is to read the back issues about those other Starman characters, and then reread the James Robinson run, with both those original stories, not to mention twenty years of further comics reading, to inform my understanding. (For example, Starman is heavily connected to the Justice Society mythos, something I knew little about when I originally read it, but now know far too much about!)

Back when I added them to my list of things to check out, the stories of Mikaal and Gavyn were both uncollected, and though they have been collected since, I've still elected to pick up their original publications, since the collected editions in question have a lot of other material that makes them more expensive than just picking up the back issues. The fourth Starman, Will Payton, has never been collected at all. (I do wonder if this will all get collected in a "DC Finest" someday and how it will be handled if so. A DC Finest is typically 500-650 pages long... all of the 1970s Starman content totals less than 150 pages. Would they collect it alongside either the end of Golden Age run, or the beginning of the late 1980s run? It will be a weird collection either way.)

---

So the first post–Golden Age Starman revival was in the pages of DC's 1st Issue Special, a thirteen-issue series where every issue was the "first issue" of a potential run. In most cases, however, the hypothetical run never materialized, and Starman was no exception. Until James Robinson brought him back two decades later, this remained the only outing for this version of Starman.

This Starman is Mikaal Tomas, who is a blue-skinned alien from space. (The lettercol implies he could be from the same planet as Shadow Lass of the Legion of Super-Heroes.) It's the 1970s, and disco and David Bowie are popular, so he wears a shirt with a plunging neckline and a gold medallion. I feel like I often hear this version of the character referred to somewhat dismissively as the "disco Starman"...

...but that must be by people who have not actually read the comic, who have just seen pictures of the character, because this is excellent. Seriously, this isn't high art, but I thought it was masterfully put together. The creative team here is an all-star one: Gerry Conway (Steel, the Indestructible Man, Sun Devils), Mike Vosburg (Starfire), and Mike Royer (Fourth World, Kamandi) were all probably at their heights when they assembled to do this.

If only you didn't suck, Mikaal!

Basically, in eighteen pages, this story does exactly what a good first issue ought to do. Efficiently and effectively, Gerry and the Mikes give us a clear premise and a number of drivers of future conflict. Mikaal comes from a planet whose inhabitants intend to invade the Earth; both he and his girlfriend think this is wrong... but only his girlfriend is willing to do anything about it, and she dies in the attempt. This spurs him to travel to Earth to try to protect its people, only his spaceship crash lands, injuring him. He is rescued by a grocery store owner; meanwhile, a pair of cops investigate his crashed ship, and one of them dies... and then he's followed to Earth! 

So we already have a clear cast of characters with some interesting dynamics, especially the cop who thinks that Mikaal's the bad guy. The action is clear and sharp, the exposition is efficient and not heavy handed at all, it ends on an excellent cliffhanger. I get why this was never followed up on (1st Issue Special was cancelled one issue later, and the Wikipedia page on the series quotes an interview with Conway that does a good job of explaining of why it never really worked as a "tryout" book anyway), but it's a shame. I flew through this issue, and I loved reading it.

Presumably this guy and his beef with Mikaal are never heard from again.

I'll be curious to see how much of it James Robinson actually draws on when he brings back Mikaal; I don't remember much beyond the bare fact of his existence!

(Incidentally, there's no indication this is set in the DC universe: the humans in the story certainly don't act like people who are used to superheroes and aliens flying around. Robinson would place the story specifically in the 1970s, not on DC's sliding timescale, so this actually works out, as it's set in the relatively superhero-light period between the retirement of the JSA and the emergence of the JLA.)

"Starman" originally appeared in issue #12 of 1st Issue Special (Mar. 1976). The story was written/edited by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Mike Vosburg & Mike Royer. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Starman. The next covers Adventure Comics #467-78.

Noir Quarterly (anthology, 1994–95)

In order to read one of the Maze Agency prose stories, I picked up the first and only issue of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly from Alpha Productions. This actually was not very easy to do: one of those old comics that not so much expensive as unavailable!Published at the comics size, it was mostly made up of detective prose stories with just one comics story, plus a couple nonfiction features. Despite the subtitle and the grand ambitions of editor Christopher Mills (who also edited The Detectives one-shot from Alpha, in which a short Maze Agency comics story appeared), it only lasted one issue. 

Mills later revived the concept under the slightly different title of Noir Quarterly at CFD... though as he admits in a retrospective on his blog, the publication frequency was "way-too-optimistic." There are no Maze Agency stories in those issues, but look—I like collecting interesting and unusual comics, and if tacking two more issues of something onto my order can get me a complete set, then I'll do it. Plus those two issues had beautiful femme fatale–themed covers! (They're both by Brian Stelfreeze, who much much later would be the first artist on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run.)

All three issues have similar contents, though not always in the same proportions: predominantly, there are illustrated prose stories, with a couple comics. Most of the material is new, but sometimes there's archival material; one of the comics in Noir Quarterly #1 is from 1955, for example, and a few of the prose stories are reprints, though Mills says he prioritized reprinting stuff that was otherwise uncollected. There are also nonfiction features: book reviews, movie reviews, interviews, and retrospectives on some topic of interest to the audience, like old movies or comics.

from Noir Quarterly #1
(script by Ron Fortier, art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton)

Like any anthology, the prose stories are hit-or-miss, but there definitely was enough good stuff here to make it all worth reading. Though I was drawn to the series by The Maze Agency, I would say the majority of the prose stories are not detective fiction. Ones I particularly liked included "Surrogate" by Ed Gorman (illustrated by Richard Pace, from Noir vol. 1 #1), where a lawyer confronts the teenager who might be responsible for the death of his own son; "The Love Rack" by Max Allan Collins (illustrated by Blackhawk's Rick Burchett, from Noir vol. 1 #1), a gritty story about a private eye who gets caught in political conspiracy; "A Fine Officer" by C. J. Henderson (illustrated by Michael Harris, from Noir Quarterly #1), where a detective becomes caught in a gang civil war; and "They're Gonna Kill You after a While" by Ron Goulart (from Noir #2), about a detective investigating the disappearance of an actor who once played a Saint-like character in a series of films. This last story was illustrated by Brian Michael Bendis of all people; I had no idea he was also an illustrator! Of the ones I liked, only this last one was a mystery.

I don't read much "noir"; having gotten this sampling, I think what I don't like are ones that seem a bit... gratuitous. I don't mind cynicism, but sometimes it moves over into crassness. I didn't care for "Fool's Gold" by William Marden (illustrated by Darren Goodhart, from Noir vol. 1 #1), which goes on a long time for a mediocre ending, during which you have to read a lot about men ogling a teenage girl. Particularly bad, I thought, were two stories from Noir #2: "Granny Gumption Solves a Murder" by C. J. Henderson & Charles Hoffman (illustrated by Michael Harris) and "The Wallow" by Ardath Mayhar (illustrated by Delfin Barral). The former has a decent joke at its core, about Miss Marple–type characters, but then gets nasty; the latter is pretty obvious from its very beginning but takes a long time to get there.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1
(script by Nicola Cuti, art by Joe Staton)

The amount of comics content varies heavily. Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton's Michael Mauser character appears in both Noir vol. 1 #1 and vol. 2 #2 (he also appeared in the Detectives one-shot). I like the Joe Staton art, of course, but I think the first story suffered from the fact that I have read no other stories about the character than these three: when his brother popped up as part of a solution to a mystery, it was a bit jarring as there was no previous hint he had a brother! But I would read more about this guy. That's the only comics story in vol. 1 #1, but Noir Quarterly #2 has two: a mediocre Johnny Dynamite reprint from 1955, plus a new story by Ron Fortier with art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton. This same team also supply one of Noir #2's three comic stories, and Ron Fortier scripts another story for issue #2 with art by Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda. I don't think any of these are high art, but I do think everyone involved very much understood the assignment, and I enjoyed all of them. My favorite was probably the one in Noir Quarterly #1, "Blood Red Lips," about a dangerous femme fatale with a twist.

I did find the nonfiction features pretty interesting, though there were too many of them in Noir #2. This is a whole world I don't know very much, and since I will probably never have enough time in my life to delve into more deeply, I appreciate how other people can give me access. The book reviews were usually interesting enough, but things I particularly enjoyed included the interview with Mickey Spillane by Mills from Noir Quarterly #1 (I've never read any of his work, but he seems fascinating) and the overview of The Saint and Falcon films by Ed Gorman from Noir #2 (what a weird production history... though my guess more interesting to read about than to watch the actual films).

Overall, this was a decent package, though I did find Mills's editorial voice a bit grating at times. Not always great work here, but distinctive and interesting, a nice teaser into a wider world I am unlikely to delve more into, to be honest, but I am glad I tracked down and read it all!

Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly vol. 1 originally appeared in one issue (Winter 1994). The stories were written Ed Gorman, Wendi Lee, Mike W. Barr, Nicola Cuti, William Marden, and Max Allan Collins, and illustrated by Richard Pace, Terry Beatty, Rick Magyar, Joe Staton, Darren Goodhart, and Rick Burchett, with nonfiction features by Jeff Gelb, Eric Davidson, and Christopher Mills. The series was edited by Christopher Mills.

Noir [Quarterly] vol. 2* originally appeared in two issues (Apr.-Fall 1995). The stories were written by Joe Gill,† William F. Nolan, Robert J. Randisi, William Marden, Ron Fortier, C. J. Henderson (with Charles Hoffman), Nicola Cuti, Ardath Mayhar, and Ron Goulart, and illustrated by Bill Molno & Vince Alascia,† Rick Burchett, Flint Henry, Bob Cram, Jr., Gary Kato & Steve Crompton, Michael Harris, Joe Staton, Mike Harris, Delfin Barral, Brian Michael Bendis, and Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda, with nonfiction features by Ron Fortier, Christopher Mills, Eric Davidson, Jonathan Anger, Bill Spangler, James Chambers, and Ed Gorman. The series was edited by Christopher Mills. 

* The first issue was titled Noir Quarterly, the second just Noir.

† The Johnny Dynamite story "The Fixer's Mob" (a reprint from 1955) is not credited in the issue; credits courtesy the Grand Comics Database.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, David Messina, et al.

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation

Collection published: 2010
Acquired: June 2021
Read: October 2025

I spent some time late last year into early this year reading my way through the various "Kelvin timeline" comics and novels. Some of them I reviewed on the TrekBBS, though I fell behind. But what I never got around to doing was posting those reviews here. So, finally, time to do it!

Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #1-6 (Feb.-Aug. 2010)

screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, adaptation by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones, pencils by David Messina with Claudia Balboni, inks by Gaetano Carlucci, colors by Giaovanna Niro and Ilaria Traversi, letters by Robbie Robbins and Neil Uyetake

I was kind of worried about this book going in; in my experience, most comics adaptations of films are not up to much, often reading as a condensed version of a story optimized for a different medium.

To my surprise, then, scripters Mike Johnson & Tim Jones and artist David Messina deliver a pretty strong retelling of the 2009 film. I mean, it won't knock your world alight, but it does a good job of hitting the beats of the story via the medium of comics. Probably this is at least partially because it's been given a whole six issues, so (mostly) it's not too compressed. But also Johnson/Jones/Messina have good pacing instincts, sometimes piling a lot of panels into a single page, sometimes using double-page spreads in order to capture a key moment. Clearly also some thought was put into putting issue endpoints at key moments, so that each issue works as a unit.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #5
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The result is an adaptation that reads fairly genuinely as a comic. It's probably at its best when covering the earlier parts of the story; it's not until the end of issue #3 that Nero's attack begins, so the early parts of the book have a lot of space to unfold key moments like the destruction of the Kelvin or the reveal of the Enterprise in space. On the other hand, moments like Kirk's and Spock's fight on the bridge are given numerous panels on a single page, really giving them an impact.

Indeed, issue #4 is probably the one compression hurt the most; the drill battle is just not interesting in this format, with key moments like Sulu's unfolding sword going by too quick to leave an impression, and I found the death of Amanda way too rushed to give it the import it needed, and then the issue's final panel, weirdly, does not clearly communicate the destruction of Vulcan. The unnecessary Galaxy Questeseque second climax of the film, where the Enterprise is almost pulled into a black hole, comes across as even more unnecessary here.

from Star Trek: The Official Motion Picture Adaptation #4
(art by David Messina & Claudia Balboni and Gaetano Carlucci)

The book's solicits trumpeted the inclusion of cut material, but this mostly seems to just be a couple lines of dialogue here and there. David Messina is a longstanding Star Trek artist for IDW, and he mostly does a good job here, though I struggled a bit with his likeness for Bruce Greenwood's Pike. Overall I think this does exactly what it needed to, and did it well. Probably the best comics adaptation of a Star Trek film other than the two by Peter David.

This is the first in a series of posts about the Kelvin timeline Star Trek comics (and novels). The next installment covers More Beautiful than Death.

The Maze Agency: "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr et al.

Somewhat belatedly—I think while writing up the previous post in this sequence—I discovered that there were actually three Maze Agency short stories that had been published outside of the regular Maze Agency comic series. One was a comic story published in a one-shot from Alpha Productions called The Detectives; the other two were prose stories, which could be found in an installment of the quarterly series Noir (a mix of comics and prose) and an anthology called Sex, Lies and Private Eyes. So I tracked them down to cap off this series. (When the hypothetical Maze Agency omnibus is released, hopefully it will include them all.)

The comic story in Detectives #1 (which has a cover by original Maze Agency ongoing artist Adam Hughes), "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident," is just ten pages, and so can't be as complicated as most Maze Agency stories, but is pretty good regardless. Its main downside is that you only get any clues at all about a page before it's all revealed, so there's not really a chance to "play along" as the reader... but it's not like I was ever going to do that successfully in any case! Paul Pelletier is a solid artist here (I mostly know him from small bits and bobs on series like The Darkstars or Blue and Gold), and I would have gladly seen more Maze Agency from him.

The other two are, like I said, prose stories. It's weird when characters originated in comics make the jump to prose, in my opinion; I think a lot of time there's a kind of flatness. Comics tell you interiority through  mostly external cues, especially in a series like The Maze Agency, which has no narration. I spent some time reading a bunch of superhero-comics-turned-prose-stories, and I found it was hard to imagine a lot of superhero characters as actually having vivid interior lives—not just for me, but obviously for the writers! Mike Barr isn't inexperienced in prose (I actually read a couple of his prose Star Trek works two decades ago now), but he doesn't really go for interiority at all here: the narrator is distant from Jen and Gabe. This can work in a detective story, but it did make me feel like these weren't really playing to the strengths of the medium.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1

Weirdly, both "The Heat Is On" and "Murder Gone Wylde" are about pornography: the former about an adult video store, and the latter about a producer of porn DVDs. I found "The Heat Is On" had a good sense of atmosphere that worked well, but the actual mystery was slight; "Murder Gone Wylde" has an engaging set of characters and suspects, and was a lot of fun... unfortunately, I think it might have been even more fun as an actual comic! Still, as one last way to spend time with Jen and Gabe (and Lieutenant Bliss, etc.), you could do a lot worse. Did Barr ever write any original mystery novels? I feel like he could have done good things with that canvas.

"The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Detectives (Apr. 1993). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, pencilled by Paul Pelletier, inked by Bob Cram Jr., lettered by Susan Dorne, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"The Heat Is On" originally appeared in issue #1 of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly (Winter 1994). The story was written Mike W. Barr, illustrated by Rick Magyar, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"Murder Gone Wylde" originally appeared in Sex, Lies and Private Eyes (2009). The story was written by Mike W. Barr and edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr.

This is the last in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)
4. The Maze Agency vol. 3 #1-3 & vol. 4 #1 (2005-23)

Two related posts cover Noir Quarterly and Sex, Lies and Private Eyes.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow

July 2387
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. Some might roll their eyes at this declaration, but I just want to put my cards on the table as a reviewer. People are allowed to go into works of art with a suspicion of what they will think about them, contra the opinions of some creators. But, also, maybe I am wrong! Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.

Star Trek: Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow
by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired: October 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of book I, Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.

It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene where they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.

If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)

Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")

I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.

This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)

My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.

Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.

Continuity Notes:

• Because of the way the novels have jumped around in time, you end up with weirdness like Rugiero being Sisko's first officer for (arguably) longer than Kira was. You'll never make me believe it.
• Here we learn Tom Paris is on Akaar's staff. Tom was in Moments Asunder, but I thought just because he had experience with this kind of malarkey thanks to "Year of Hell"; if he was working for Akaar there too, I missed it.
• Here we learn what nickname Wesley has for his half-brother René. Was this preestablished? I can't remember any meaningful interactions between the two in earlier books, but perhaps it was in Cold Equations.
• There is a dog on Picard's vineyard (c.f., Picard season one). It's funny, because I think of the "novelverse" as so separate from the modern shows, it was quite jarring every time there was an explicit reference to them: for example, that Boreth is a source of time crystals (as seen in Discovery). The most effective one is probably when you realize part of Riker's motivation is this feeling that he ought to have two kids and live in a cabin in the wilderness (Picard: "Nepenthe"); I wish the book had leaned into that more, it could have made evil Riker work.
• Given how many books were referenced here, it struck me as quite pointed that the book makes sure to establish that Saavik and Spock are good friends and great colleagues and no more, contradicting Vulcan's Heart and Vulcan's Soul, even though those books have been previously referenced by other Destiny-era books.
• Alexander and Spock previously met (for some reason) in the Prometheus trilogy. I didn't detect any reference to that here, but I also didn't notice any explicit indication they hadn't met; their first meeting here seems to be between scenes.
• When did Odo resume being constable on DS9? Is this something that happened in another book that I forgot about?
• Look, the Andorian transporter duplicates were dumb. I appreciate this book wrapped that plotline offhandedly, but it should have done so in a way that made it clear what a dumb plotline that was to begin with.
• I didn't buy how little Picard seemed to know about Bashir (p. 287). Surely there was a lot of information on him in the Section 31 files released at the end of Control, and surely Picard would have read all about him!
• Counselor Hegol dies in book I of Coda but pops up here. Whoops.

Other Notes:

• Why is the adjutant of the Federation ambassador to the Klingons a Klingon? That didn't make any sense to me.
• At the beginning of the book, a former disciple of Admiral Dougherty (from Insurrection) gets a lot of setup, but I don't really know why, because he promptly vanishes from the story in favor of the "evil Riker" approach.
• There is a Nick Locarno joke here. James Swallow beat Lower Decks to the punch!
• Jake calls Rebecca his "stepsister" (p. 151), but that's wrong, she's a half-sister.
• Endalla being destroyed in gory detail without a single reference to the "what's up with Endalla" plotline that ran interminably through DRG3's DS9 novels just feels like trolling.
• Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack

* Funny moment: Riker points out Picard gets possessed a lot; Vale retaliates that so does Riker.

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

I received this book for Christmas from LibraryThing's Secret Santa program and, as is my usual practice with such books, tried to go into it with as little foreknowledge as possible; in this case, all I knew about The Book of Strange New Things was that it was science fiction.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Originally published: 2014
Acquired: December 2025
Read: April 2026

This is definitely one of those sf books written by a "literary" author, as opposed to a "genre" author, yet it also seemed to me that it was in dialogue with the genre of science fiction, specifically that subgenre of science fiction about missionaries going to alien planets: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989), and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). Unlike those, though, the protagonist of this book, Peter Leigh, is not Catholic—he's a convert to Protestantism and a married one at that. I thought this was interesting, because all of those predecessor books I can think of are not only about Catholics, but specifically Jesuits, one of the most intellectual of the Catholic traditions. Peter comes at his faith from a very different direction, with the emotional fervency of the late-life convert (very much not, in my experience, a Catholic trope). His love for Jesus is bound up in his love for his wife. It's a different perspective on faith than I'm used to (as an atheist that grew up Catholic), and I found it interesting—sometimes Peter and his wife are so damn earnest I found them annoying, but never not real.

Like a lot of fiction, it's also about what Elaine Scarry calls "the difficulty of imagining other people": Peter struggles to empathize with his wife, and his wife struggles to empathize with him, over such a long distance, and in such different contexts. And this difficulty is also what's driving a social collapse on Earth, which felt all too real. 

I found the book kind of nerve-wracking, in that everything in it is vaguely off-putting—the environment Peter finds himself in, the actions of the people on the settlement, the enthusiasm of the aliens for Christ, Peter's own decision-making. You know bad things are coming, but are completely sucked along in it. The final reveal about what the aliens are interested in is very well done.

Vincent Shandor, Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century (1997)

Carpatho-Ukraine is a region bordering Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, populated by members of all those ethnicities, not to mention the Ruthenians. Over the years, it has been annexed and abandoned by various powers. I forget how I first heard about it, but back in 2013, I got interested in it and read Republic for a Day, a book by a British journalist who was present during its short-lived status as its own nation: after Czechoslovakia broke up in 1939, it declared itself an independent republic, but only days later, it was annexed by Nazi-backed Hungary. Several years later, I read The Lost Embassy, a novel that fictionalizes these events.

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: A Political and Legal History by Vincent Shandor

Published: 1997
Read: March 2026

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century is a more serious work than both of those, the work of a leading scholar of Carpatho-Ukraine who was a key figure in local politics during the 1930s. The book is published by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, and thus very much aimed at scholars—if you're looking at a book providing a general, accessible history of the region, this is not it, nor does it intend to be it. Shandor assumes you know a lot! Unfortunately, an accessible history of Carpatho-Ukraine has never been written in English as far as I can tell, so this is what you've got to work with.

I found that Shandor is one of those scholars who gives you a lot of details, but it's sometimes hard to extract the narrative. Occasionally, he's obviously trying to settle scores against other people from the time of the events he chronicles—still, this clearly comes from a place of deep passion for the region and its people, and that resonates through its pages.

This gives the kind of context and scope you just don't get from Republic for a Day. I finished the book with a much clearer understanding of how Carpatho-Ukraine related to the other countries around it, and how it got tangled up in their political games and false promises.

Note that the book's title claims to cover "the twentieth century," but it really pretty much stops at 1945, I think because that's when Carpatho-Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, and Shandor (I am pretty sure) was never able to go back after that. The book was published in 1997, but he lived until 2003; I hope he was able to reconnect with his homeland. 

Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Published: 2023
Acquired: June 2025
Read: June 2026

Last summer, I participated in our local library's summer reading program; I got a pick of several books as a prize for participating, and I semi-arbitrarily picked this one knowing nothing about it.

North Woods chronicles the happenings in a forest in New England, from the time of the Puritans up to the present day. It's more of a story cycle than a novel, alternating stories told by a narrator and ones that are found documents like diaries or magazine articles. Over time, you realize there are links between the stories.

It's the kind of book I find more intellectually admirable than emotionally enjoyable. Well written, but in an austere, this-guy-went-to-an-MFA-program kind of way (I have no idea if he did or not, by the way). Some strong individual stories, some forgettable ones. Unfortunately, I think one wants a story cycle to be greater than the sum of its parts and this one is probably less. I don't have any real complaints about it, but I struggle to imagine myself recommending it to someone either.

Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell (2012)

I presented at a conference back in March about my idea of the "epistemic crisis" in science fiction. Specifically, I focused on stories where your understanding of how the world works is doubly upended, such as (though it's not actually sf) Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Afterwards, a member of the audience came up to me (I do not remember his name, alas) and suggested that I read a novella, Steven Peck's A Short Stay in Hell. He said it was an example of what I call an epistemic crisis happening not just once or twice, but repeatedly throughout the book. When I got home, I requested it from my local library.

I was quite surprised to realize that even though the book is over a decade old, it was in heavy demand. The library had just two physical copies, but I was fifteenth in line for them; the library had eight e-copies... but I was forty-fifth in line for them! This is the kind of demand typically reserved for brand-new books by popular authors. Why would this be happening to a book that came back in 2012?

The answer turns out to be that, I guess, it became "BookTok" and "BookTube" famous, receiving lots of positive interest there. Probably this is how my conference interlocutor came across it himself. Take a look at the book's popularity curve on LibraryThing:

Most books, of course, have an initial burst of interest when they are released and then go down over time. A Short Stay in Hell, on the other hand, began to take off in 2023 and has only continued to get more popular since! That I even got the book as quickly as I did (it took two months for my hold to come in) was because the library ordered three more copies.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

Published: 2012
Read: June 2026

Anyway, what is the book actually about? It's a riff on Borges's "The Library of Babel," a story I have not actually read, about a library that contains every possible book, in the sense that the library is filled with books that contain every possible combination of random characters. So the vast majority of the books in the library are random nonsense, but through the vagaries of randomness, every book that exists in the real world is going to appear exactly once... along with books that are quite close to them but slightly different, and book that are mostly nonsense but contain a couple lucid sentences.

The narrator of A Short Stay is a devout Mormon who dies of cancer... and discovers that actually Zoroastianism is the one true religion. Whoops. Thus, he is (like most people) condemned to Hell. But Hell isn't an eternal punishment, you can redeem yourself and go to Heaven. For him and many others (it's indicated Hell can be different for different people), Hell is the library of Borges's story. The key to getting out is finding the book of your life story and inserting it into a slot.

I disagree with my conference interlocutor: I don't think this is an example of repeated epistemic crises. Once you have this basic premise explained to you, everything flows quite logically from it, and it is never upended. But that makes it, in fact, an example of a different but related phenomenon that interests me in sf: the fantasy story that starts from a logical impossibility but then thinks through all of its implications as logically as possible. If you could have a library like this, how big would it be? And, thus, what would the people trapped in it do? This is what Peck works out, through the vehicle of this story.

There's a pleasure to this, which China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation." It's the joy of a certain kind of fantasy. I reckon that Ann Leckie is a very good example of how to do this, in her stories from the world of Raven Tower, but also you see it in places like Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, and even L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's just enjoyable to follow along with the author as they extrapolate from their basic premise... even if, as it is in A Short Stay, quite horrific!

This is a short book, and it's mostly given over to thinking through different aspects of what such a "Hell" might look like. What would the people in such an environment do, what kind of societies would spring up, what kind of implications would the sheer size of such a structure have? We get lots of cool stuff like the protagonist throwing himself off the structure and falling for an interminably long time—but then how would he stop himself?

The end of the book indicates he exists for billions of years in the library... but if you go back to the beginning, it's mentioned that the book you are reading is one he finds within the library, so if he inserts it into the slot, he'll finally get out and go to Heaven.

Except... we're told the book of your life story has to be free of typos, and I found at least two: on pp. 6 and 10, questions in dialogue are followed by capital letters when they should be lowercase ("One of the women whispered hoarsely" and "He said looking..."). So is he doomed to keep looking for the error-free version of his story for billions more years?

One last thing: the narrator is Mormon, like author Steven Peck. But so too are the two people who provide back cover blurbs: science fiction author Dan Wells and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. Is there a Mormon book-blurb-providing exchange?

The Maze Agency: "A Beautiful Crime" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr, Ariel Padilla, Ernest Jocson, et al.

Almost a decade after its first revival (see item #3 on the list below), Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency was revived again, for a second three-issue miniseries, this time from IDW. (The revival was accompanied by a new collection of volume 1's first five issues, see item #1 below; I have also seen some evidence that ISBNs were assigned for more collections, but none of those were ever published.)

I found these three issues more of a mixed bag than the previous revival from Caliber. I think there were two reasons: one avoidable, and one perhaps unavoidable.

First, the avoidable one. I didn't find any of the stories among these three as well put together as the ones in the previous two runs of The Maze Agency. Maze Agency stories were always complicated, sure—I imagine there's very rarely a fair-play whodunit that isn't—but these usually verged into overcomplicated. The reader might very often lose track of things... but probably the one thing that should never happen in a whodunit is that the reader loses track of the suspects. But in all of these stories, especially the first and the third, I found that was exactly was what happened. Two many characters, and when the murderer was revealed, I wasn't quite sure I remembered who they were.

Probably part of the problem there is not the writing, but the art: the IDW stories are all penciled by Ariel Padilla, and I didn't think he had the command of making unique faces necessary to pulling off the complex character work of a murder mystery. Sure, not everyone can be Adam Hughes, but almost all of his many replacements in the original run still managed to do it. The glossy mid-2000s coloring techniques probably don't help either. In particular, issues #2 and 3 have lots of characters—beauty pageant participants and two distinct Japanese families, respectively—and if you can't tell them all apart, you'll very quickly be lost. I wish a stronger artist had been found to bring back The Maze Agency.

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #2

The other reason, though, was probably unavoidable. The pleasure of the original Maze Agency wasn't just the whodunits, it was being with Jen and Gabe as their relationship evolved and developed. The series moved forward in real time; its two years of comics covered two years of their lives.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency was published fifteen years after the last issue of volume 1...  yet the characters have clearly not aged fifteen years. Nor, however, are we picking up shortly after where we left off; these are not early 1990s period pieces, either. In true "comic book time" fashion, the fashions and the technology indicate this is the mid-2000s, but Jen and Gabe are where we left them. Or, even worse, regressed a little: one of the stories indicates Gabe has his own apartment, but he actually moved in with Jen during the original run. There probably was not a good solution to this dilemma, but I find it disappointing nonetheless. (I think, though, I would have done what Sue Grafton did in the Kinsey Millhone books partway though, and transformed them into period pieces. For one thing, the fashions of the late 1980s and early 1990s are much better than the generic mid-2000s stuff Jen is wearing here. She even lost her forelock!)

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #3

What I think of as the "modern" revival of The Maze Agency actually isn't all that modern—depressingly, it's closer to the series's original run than it is to the present! However, there was one last Maze Agency revival just a couple years ago, from Scout Comics... which lasted just one issue! I was able to find a press release about the Scout revival but no interviews or anything; certainly, the fanfare with which it was announced seems to indicate it wasn't planned as a one-shot, but no further issues were solicited or anything.

Anyway, it's fine. The twists of the mystery are interesting enough, and there are some good bits of humor in it. Unfortunately, it's let down by the art: all of Silvano Beltramo's women basically have the same face, and he's also the colorist, and occasionally gives Jen reddish-blond hair (matching one of the suspects) instead of blond, so I often had to reread dialogue to figure out which woman was Jen! I do appreciate they got Alan Davis back to do one of the covers; I think it was originally a 1:5 incentive cover, but it wasn't any more expensive than the regular cover online.

from The Maze Agency vol. 4 #1

The Scout Comics one-shot seems to be it for The Maze Agency; I believe it was Mike Barr's last-ever published comics work, and he's now having health problems, alas. If you liked the core series, these later revivals don't quite recapture its glory days, but are still worth tracking down.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from Nov. 2005 to Jan. 2006. The stories were written by Mike W. Barr, penciled by Ariel Padilla, inked by Ernest Jocson (#1-2) and Michael Jason Paz (#3), lettered by Tom B. Long, colored by Rainier Beredo (#1, 3) and Romulo Fajardo Jr. (#2), and edited by Dan Taylor.

"Shriek: The Sequel!" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Maze Agency vol. 4 (Dec. 2023). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, illustrated and colored by Silvano Beltramo, lettered by Tyler Smith, and edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari.

This is the penultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers the short stories. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)