Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 1–3

Star Trek: Vanguard was a series of original novels (plus some novellas) from Pocket Books, released from 2005 to 2012. I read the first five novels (roughly) as they came out... but when the sixth book came out in 2011, my progress through my reading list had gotten quite bogged down, and as of 2026, I still haven't read it! I've been slowly digging my way out recently, though, and am at last ready to tackle it... only at this point the last time I read a Vanguard book was in 2010, over fifteen years ago. I am hardly ready to jump straight into book six in the tightly serialized saga.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2005
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: March 2026

So, before moving onto book six, I am rereading the first five Vanguard novels. The first three predate my bookblogging, so I have no written reviews for them. Thus, in this post I'm going to (briefly?) cover all three at once.

Vanguard is a sort of parallel to the original Star Trek television series. The first book starts shortly after the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; I think that the final book takes place around five years later, when the five-year mission is about to come to an end. At the time the series was announced, many fans wondered if it would a "Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century": just as DS9 took place simultaneously to Next Generation and Voyager, but was set in one place, aboard a space station, Vanguard was set in one place, aboard a space station. No traveling across space, with a new planet every week; instead, every installment is set in the same region of space. Vanguard Station (a.k.a. Starbase 47) is located in the Taurus Reach, a newly opened region of space at the fringes of Federation, Klingon, and Tholian space.

The creators of the series, editor Marco Palmieri and writer David Mack, pushed back against that conception. Rereading the series, it seems to me that everyone back then was comparing it to the wrong tv show: this isn't Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century, it's Breaking Bad in the 23rd century. Well, of course no one in 2005 could have said such a thing because Breaking Bad wouldn't debut for another three years. But Vanguard seems to me to be along those lines: one of those "prestige" television shows were we watch characters (usually white men) make difficult choices, many of them morally dubious, where the stories are willing to show the seedy underbelly of the universe and its inhabitants. I suppose more chronologically appropriate would be The Sopranos (1999–2007) or The Wire (2002–08). Really, a lot of those series came along after Vanguard, so I suppose Mack and Palmieri were ahead of the curve!

That said, shows like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men did this to explore American conceptions of masculinity—that's not what Vanguard is doing. (Though, perhaps, it would be nice if it did; there's an emphasis on sexual dynamics here, but the books are in general more interested in reproducing them than examining them. There seems to be a mandatory "man she looks good in a miniskirt!" scene once per book. Similarly, self-descriptions like "[t]he slender, leggy young woman" populate the supposedly close third-person narration of the female characters!) Instead, it's exploring the dynamics of post-9/11 security state. When have people gone too far in pursuit of their political objectives? So, perhaps, what the books really are in the end is "Battlestar Galactica in the 23rd century." 

If that was meant to be the case, though, I find the books frustrating. The narrative arc of the first three books seems to be taking Commodore Diego Reyes to a point where he feels like he's gone too far. In the first book, David Mack's Harbinger, he authorizes some heinous stuff done to Tim Pennington, a journalist seeking to uncover the truth about what Starfleet is doing in the Taurus Reach. Throughout all three of the first three books, he coordinates the Federation's ongoing colonization efforts in the Taurus Reach, knowing that this is just to provide cover for the Federation's attempts to obtain the Taurus meta-genome, which places those colonists in grave danger. At the end of book three, Mack's Reap the Whirlwind, this plotline culminates in Reyes's ex-wife and her entire planet dying, and Reyes thus permitting Pennington to publish a story that reveals what should have remained classified, resulting in Reyes's arrest. His court-martial is covered in book four, Open Secrets, so I'll cover that later, but I found this arc unsatisfying. The problem is, as I see it, is that we don't really go into Reyes's head as he makes these decisions; we don't really know how he justifies them to himself or how he ended up in this position. If this is a commentary on the post-9/11 security state, we don't get to see the logic that causes people to make these kind of decisions to begin with. In Reap the Whirlwind and Open Secrets, we're told Reyes has lived much of his life carrying secrets for Starfleet, but why does he believe this is the right thing to do? I'm not sure. Without that justification, the reversal at the end of book three falls flat.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2006
Previously read: May 2007
Reread: April 2026

Indeed, I would say that the main thing that stops me from getting invested in Vanguard is the characterization. I think in principle, the ideas are fine. I do very much appreciate that (as was later done on screen in Discovery) that "main cast" is not necessarily the senior staff, but the set of characters who are influencing and influenced by events. In addition to Reyes, that's: Rena Desai, the JAG officer assigned to the station; Ming Xiong, the scientific lead assigned to Project Vanguard; Jetanien, the ambassador posted on Starbase 47; T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence officer posted there; Cervantes Quinn, a smuggler operating out of the base; Tim Pennington, a journalist based on Vanguard; Ganz, an Orion smuggler whose ship is docked at the station; Ezekiel Fisher, the chief medical officer; and Anna Sandjeso, a Federation attaché who is secretly a Klingon spy. (There are lots of other characters, and not all of these characters play as big of roles as others, but these are the ones we get bios for at the end of book one, so they seem to be the ones Mack and Palmieri considered the leads.)

My issues with the characters, as of book three anyway (I'll have more thoughts on this in my writeup of book five, Precipice) is twofold. The first is that Harbinger seems to be trying to set up that these are more complicated, conflict-prone characters than you might be used to from Star Trek, especially the original series era. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this somewhat ham-handedly, in that the early parts of Harbinger are mostly about character walking around thinking about how much they don't like all the people they meet: Ming doesn't like his roommate on the USS Bombay, Reyes and Jetanien spend meeting scenes grumbling about what the other characters say, and so on. It makes everyone seem passive-aggressive and unpleasant.

My other issue is that there are just too many characters. There are the eight "main" characters, that would be fine... but there are tons of other point-of-view characters sprinkled in here, too. Random crewmembers on the Bombay in Harbinger (presumably to make us sad and surprised when they die), a whole bunch of USS Endeavour crew in book two, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's Summon the Thunder. Why do I care about, say, the Endeavour's chief medical officer? We also get the addition of the S.C.E. characters on the USS Lovell. Too many of these characters are generic Starfleet types, without any interesting hooks, the precise kind of thing it seems to me the series's main cast was designed to move away from. I would have liked to have spent more time with our supposed actual leads, instead of cutting away to all these random people all the time.

Also, maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but was there a discontinuity between Harbinger and Summon the Thunder when it came to the relationship between T'Prynn and Sandjeso? Near the end of Harbinger, we find out they're sleeping with each other other—the Intelligence agent and the Klingon spy—but there's no indication that T'Prynn knows Anna's true identity. Suddenly in Summon the Thunder, T'Prynn not only knows but has turned Anna into a double agent at some point in the past. Weird transition, and also weird undermining of the premise's potential drama. (Also the tone in Harbinger was very much convenient-sex-buddies, and then in the Reap the Whirlwind they're apparently actually in love?)

My original reason for doing these three in one go was that they were simply the three I hadn't reviewed before, but I actually think they work pretty well as a complete unit, a trilogy with beginning, middle, and end, as it ends with the "secrecy" arc that began Harbinger being blown wide open. Similarly, books four and five seem to work as a duology as the series shifts its focus—more on that next time.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

Published: 2007
Acquired and previously read: August 2007
Reread: April 2026

Other Thoughts:

The cover to Harbinger is solid, giving us a nice view of the setting of the series, and I appreciate the inclusion of diagrams of the station in the book. I also like the cover to Summon the Thunder well enough. But the cover to Reap the Whirlwind is excellent, a work of art. Rarely has a "ships in space" cover to a Star Trek book been so dynamic and striking; never has a D7 battlecruiser looked more formidable. Unfortunately, I felt like after this point, the series's covers became pretty generic and mediocre, almost always just a picture of Vanguard with a Constitution-class starship somewhere. (Presumably so your casual bookstore punter would go, "oh, the Enterprise!")

I did not reread the prequel to the series, the crossover with S.C.E., a novella called Distant Early Warning (collected in Corps of Engineers: What's Past*). What is funny to me is the novella came out between books one and two, but takes place before book one... thus in book two everyone starts going on about the "Jinoteur carrier wave," a thing they for some reason never brought up in book one! 

My copies of Harbinger and Summon the Thunder are both signed by the authors; in Summon the Thunder, Kevin Dilmore wrote what is definitely my favorite thing an author has ever inscribed to me: "M-O-L-L-M-A-N-N... see I can spell it!"

Reap the Whirlwind contains a "minipedia" with entries for all the characters and places of the series thus far. I appreciate the assistance in trying to ground the reader in this sprawling saga... but unfortunately you can't use it as reference while reading the book because it contains spoilers for it! Weird call.

* This is in fact the reason I didn't reread it... I don't own it in a form where it's a complete "book" and thus I wouldn't count it as a book read on my reading list! Gotta keep those numbers up, can't waste time on reading that won't contribute.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Collateral Damage

January 2387
Being a consumer of tie-in fiction is weird, to be honest. If you are a "normal" reader, you read books that interest you... and well, you don't read ones that don't interest you. Why would you? Why would anyone spend time and effort reading and reviewing something you don't think you'll like? Yet you do! I consume Big Finish audio dramas, and I used to review them for Unreality SF. I often knew going into a release written by (for example) Matt Fitton or Nicholas Briggs knowing I wouldn't like it. I had learned I usually wouldn't like these writers' work, yet I would slog through it anyway.

The reason is, of course, that no offense to the writers, but you're not there for the writers. People largely don't consume tie-in fiction because they care about who writes it. They consume tie-in fiction because they like the characters from tv and want to know what happens to them next. I may feel fairly certain I might not enjoy the next Matt Fitton audio drama featuring the eighth Doctor... but if the eighth Doctor is my favorite Doctor, I'm hardly going to listen to all sixteen parts of Doom Coalition but not parts 1, 8, 10-11, and 14-15, am I? I want to know what happens to the Doctor and Liv and Helen, even if I have to listen to a bunch of scripts by a writer I don't like to do it.

Thus, what may be a bad thing from the perspective of the reader is actually a good thing from the perspective of the publisher and writer. Sure there are writers who's work I've learned I don't like... but I buy it anyway! I certainly don't do that for John Scalzi. But I need to know what happens next to Captain Picard, and I'm hardly going to skip over a book by a writer I don't like and thus miss a chunk of the story. If you were to go back through this series of posts, I think you would see that I have fairly consistently not enjoyed the work of David Mack. But, you know, I keep buying his books anyway (I own twenty-four of them according to LibraryThing, plus fourteen other books including contributions by him), so while I might be frustrated, he must be happy. (But no one worry, I am not going to read and review Picard: Firewall.)

That was sort of a long intro into what is the second-last Destiny-era David Mack novel I will ever read... but I think this is quite probably my favorite David Mack novel? Certainly it's the one I've enjoyed the most of all the ones I've read in this project. Let's break it down.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage
by David Mack

Published: 2019
Acquired: April 2025
Read: July 2025

Like Available Light, Collateral Damage features two parallel plots, one focused on the Enterprise, and one focused on the Section 31 revelations from Control and Hearts and Minds, specifically about Captain Picard's role in the Min Zife coup. The difference here is that Picard is in the S31 plotline on Earth, instead of the Enterprise plot; thus, Worf is acting captain, and we also get a lot of focus on Aneta Šmrhová.

Thadiun Okona from "The Outrageous Okona" is doing an op with a Husnock weapon from Titan: Fortune of War that goes wrong, and the weapon ends up in the hands of a band of Nausicaan marauders, disenfranchised following the destruction of their home planet in Destiny. The Enterprise must try to recover the weapon while working alongside the obnoxious Okona, battling not just the Nausicaans, but Starfleet's own Intelligence apparatus, and also trying to save a research outpost called Stonekettle Station whose solar shield is failing.

It's quick, action-focused stuff, the kind of stuff that David Mack can do in his sleep, and which rarely works for me. And though I didn't love everything about it, I think there are two things that really did work for me here. The first is the decision to tell chunks of the story from the first-person perspective of Okona and Kinogar (the Nausicaan leader). Back when I read Mack's Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory, I really enjoyed the section told in the first person from Noonien Soong's perspective there... these sections communicate character and tone in a way that I just don't see in Mack's use of the third person.

I discussed earlier how tie-in fiction kind of traps you as a reader, but I wonder if it hasn't trapped Mack as a writer too, forcing him to use a technique (the fairly affect-less third-person limited perspective of most Star Trek novels) that just doesn't play to his strengths. I found Okona and Kinogar sections lively and engaging, and I wish there had been more of them. (I did find the bit in the afterword where Mack explains his choices a bit insulting to the reader's intelligence, though. Let the work speak for itself! I do appreciate that the book doesn't label the sections, though.)

The other thing I liked about the Enterprise plotline is how it all wraps up. What one watches (and reads, and even plays) Star Trek for, I would argue, is clever problem solving, situations where characters do something unexpected that ties everything up. The Enteprise plot has this in its resolution, with Worf coming up with a way to stop the Nausicaans without resorting to violence... and yet in a way that is entirely in-character for Worf. I thought this was clever, and I really enjoyed the ending, and it made me sad that we've never really gotten any more "Captain Worf" stories.

The other plotline is necessary but ultimately kind of humdrum. Picard is kind of a passive observer to his own legal proceedings, which is probably fairly accurate but also not very dramatic; the solution to his problem comes from other characters. Overall this is fine... but I really did not like what we see of Philippa Louvois, Picard's prosecutor. In Available Light, she came across as principled and aghast at the violation of Federation values; here, she seems to be on a witchhunt, wanting to get Picard because she wants someone to pin the blame on. I feel like the book very much misses the mark here; I wish she had been portrayed as an antagonist, but not a villain, it seems to me that two people can be acting out of good principles but still come into conflict, and I think that would have been 1) more consistent with Available Light, and 2) much more interesting. Overall, I found the legal plotline a bit too twenty-first-century; one might have hoped the Federation's legal system might be more interested in actual truth.

My big complaint, though: anyone who thought the Šmrhová/Okona subplot was a good idea is bad and should feel bad. C'mon, really???

Scarlett Pomers, age 18
(but Naomi Wildman, age 12!?)

Continuity Notes:

• Does it make any sense that Naomi Wildman is already a lieutenant in Starfleet Intelligence? She's fifteen! Even accepting that Ktarians age faster, Voyager only got back to the Alpha Quadrant nine years before this book, and she didn't seem to be of Academy age in "Endgame," and she would have had to go through the whole program and become an experienced officer! I haven't read any of the Voyager relaunch following Full Circle; is this consistent with that?
• I was a bit surprised when there was a reference to Section 31: Rogue. Ranul Keru aside, I had totally forgotten about that book and that that was Picard's first interaction with S31.
• Given how in Picard we learned that Chateau Picard burned down but was rebuilt exactly the same way, it was interesting to see a very different approach taken here. There's also a whole thing here about the location of Chateau Picard which I think must be there to reconcile the location of the real vineyard of that name with the location of the fictional one.
• Dygan is usually (though not quite always) called "lieutenant" in this novel instead of his usual rank of "glinn."

Other Notes:

• I appreciate the idea of the cover, but don't actually like it in execution. Ugly colors.
• The characters in this book: Section 31's use of extralegal force is bad.
  Also the characters in this book: Starfleet Intelligence has a hidden black site where it imprisons Federation citizens without trial. I guess that's okay.
• It is a little disappointing that the Sarai subplot James Swallow introduced in the Titan novels gets wrapped up as a side thing in a completely different series... but I guess when this book was written, it was probably a reasonable expectation that there would never be a Titan novel again.
• It seems to me that David Mack has never known what to do with T'Ryssa Chen, to the extent of overlooking moments where a contact specialist would very obviously have something to contribute (e.g., Cold Equations: Silent Weapons). Here, she does a lot of generic science lab stuff, when it would have been nice to have her contribute to Worf's understanding of the Nausicaans.
• Intellectually, I understand that Naomi Wildman, the cute kid from Voyager, must someday become an adult and have all the drives and interests that adults have. But still I don't think I needed to read a Star Trek book where Naomi Wildman says, "A straight shot at the sweetest booty I've seen in years. Mm-yeah!"
• No one is ever going to make me believe that Geordi of all people can be in an open relationship with two attractive women. He is just not that smooth.

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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Section 31: Control

2140-64 / late 2386
Section 31 has, of course, been a controversial addition to the Star Trek universe since its debut in Deep Space Nine's "Inquisition." At the time, I was all in on it; as a teenager, it appealed to my cynical view of the world. Of course, it seemed to me (it's very easy to be cynical when you're young) the Federation had to be as bad as all the other interstellar polities. That's how the world works.

My opinion has been changed by twenty years of further thinking, and twenty years of further exposure to the Section 31 concept. I do really like "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," a Section 31 episode that does what Deep Space Nine did at its best, push our characters into interesting ethical situations that tested Federation morality. And though I find some aspects of DS9's "The Final Chapter" pretty badly done, I do like that in the end, the Federation triumphs because of how hard people like Bashir work to stop Section 31's attempt to genocide the Founders. Attempts to do the right thing in trying circumstances are ultimately what win the day. But I didn't care for the depiction of Section 31 on Discovery, and overall I haven't cared for its depiction in the novels outside of the original Section 31 tetralogy. The idea that Section 31 has some kind of widespread sanction within the Federation hierarchy, or that is somehow actually necessary to the survival of the Federation, is just a non-starter for me. Fundamentally, the appeal of Star Trek—to me anyway—is that working together to do the right thing eventually pays off even when it is difficult. (As I am forever telling my children, "If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing.")

Star Trek: Section 31: Control
by David Mack

Published: 2017
Acquired: September 2024
Read: December 2024

All of this is to set up the fact that there is pretty much no way I could ever like Control. I find the premise of the book fundamentally misguided and misjudged, un-Star Trekky in its utter essence. This is what we learn here: according to Control, back in the 2140s, an Earth computer programmer came up with an artificial intelligence called Uraei that could monitor all communications and data and use it to head off threats before they could begin. As time goes on, Uraei gives itself more and more power, eventually establishing "Section 31" within Starfleet to act on its behalf. As Earth becomes integrated into the Federation, Uraei begins acting on behalf of the whole Federation.

I have a couple big issues with the idea of Uraei. The first is that, as much as Section 31 stories in the past had the organization claiming the Federation owed its continued survival to Section 31, you didn't have to believe it, because your only source for that claim was Section 31, and as we saw throughout Section 31 stories, much of the time they actually ended up causing more problems than they solved. But Control makes it very clear that there would be no Federation without Uraei, there would be no Federation without continued extrajudicial executions and murders! Like, what the fuck? This is not what I want to read in a Star Trek book, it goes fundamentally against the entire ideal and appeal of the series premise.

Indeed, many of the "good" things our heroes have done over the years turn out to just be the manipulations of Uraei in action. Oh, you think Captain Kirk did a great thing by putting aside his prejudices and bringing about peace with the Klingons? Well, it was really all part of Uraei's masterplan. If you believe Control, the utopian aspirationalism that gives Star Trek its appeal is utterly impossible and can never happen. Sorry, suckers.

People complain about the "grimdark" nature of Picard and other shows of the Paramount+ era, but this goes further than any of them. Go write some other science fiction story about a utopia that owes its existence to facist violence, sure. I love me some Omelas. But as a Star Trek idea, it just sucks, I'm sorry, and should never have been approved by the licensor.

My other issue is that Uraei is so powerful that entire idea of Section 31 honestly doesn't even make any sense. Based on the things we see it manipulate people into doing, why does it need this group of people to work on its behalf in an actual organization complete with cheesy black leather uniforms? What does it gain from them, other than people who can go rogue? Why would Uraei let cockamimie plots like the Founder genocide or Cole's in Abyss go forward? The book itself flags this up in chapter 40, when we learn that Uraei itself has occasionally gotten rid of Section 31 when it became a liability, but Uraei is depicted as so powerful, I don't really get how Section 31 could become a liability to it in the first place. Indeed, it doesn't really make sense that Bashir could even defeat Uraei...

...and again, the book flags this up at the end, where we learn that all the events of the book are part of its masterplan, and now its more powerful than ever! Well, great, I do love reading Star Trek books because I like reading books about how the security state can never be stopped and all human action in pursuit of a more noble future is futile, thanks.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the book? Well, as for the actual characters and story, putting aside all of the above (and it's pretty much impossible to do, because without all of the above, you don't have a book), I didn't find much to enjoy here. I'm coming to think that most characters in David Mack's Star Trek books are pretty much the same, I find them to be selfish and kind of petty. It's how Bashir is written here; I don't see the conflicted, passionate, optimistic man I loved on Deep Space Nine. It's how Data was written in Cold Equations, it's how Sarai was written in Fortune of War. It's how all the "bad guys" in this book and his other books like Fortune of War are written too. One of the things that really defines Bashir on screen are his friendships: with O'Brien, with Dax, with Garak. Unfortunately, the Bashir plot in the Destiny-era novels has largely kept him away from all them, making him not feel very Bashirlike, and I have never bought into the Sarina relationship that provides the core of these books. It's probably not a coincidence that the one time Bashir did feel right to me here was when he goes to Cardassia Prime and briefly hangs out with Garak.

It's all very one note; really the only thing that distinguishes the "good guys" from the "bad guys" are what side they're on. There's little sense that anyone here is trying to do the right thing in trying circumstances; even if that's technically what's happening, you don't feel it the way you do in, say, an Una McCormack novel. There's probably an interesting book to be written about Bashir grappling with the decision of undoing Uraei, but it's a weirdly small component of the book. (Also, the characters are like, "If we undo Uraei, the Federation will collapse!"... yet when they do it, and the Federation doesn't collapse, they don't seem to notice.)

The problem is, there's a core of a good idea here, but I think the book blunders into a pretty common mistake. There's often a fundamental misconception about AI. The danger of AI isn't that it will do things we don't want it to do. The danger of AI is that it will do exactly what we tell it to do. There's a group of people who like to worry about AI now who have this idea of the paperclip maximizer—you tell an AI to make paperclips as efficiently as possible, and soon its destroying humanity in its effort to produce paperclips. What many of the people who worry about AI in this way fail to notice is that paperclip maximizers aren't some futuristic danger, they're a current one. Humanity doesn't need AI to come up with systems that ruthlessly pursue a goal... these are what corporations are! The past couple weeks' discourse around UnitedHealthcare should make that patently obvious; insurance companies are paperclip maximizers, pursuing shareholder profit at the expense of everything else. Putting an AI in charge of insurance decisions would be a problem not because the AI would go rogue and start pursuing profit over people, but because the AI would do exactly what it was told to do and start pursuing profit over people.

I bring this up because I think Control doesn't really grapple with the human complicity in the development of Uraei. A group of humans designed and implemented Uraei, but weirdly, I don't think we ever get the sense of why they did this, why they thought it would be a good idea. The question of Control seems to be, "What would happen if an AI went too far in sacrificing due process and civil liberties for security?" but the question of Control ought to have been, "Why would human beings think sacrificing due process and civil liberties for security was a good idea?" But I don't think the book grapples with this question in an interesting way, in either its twenty-second- or twenty-fourth-century plotlines. Particularly with the inclusion of the more ruthless post-resurrection Data, it seems there was room for an interesting exploration of AI and the security state, but Data seems to be here largely because, 1) Mack had written about the character before in the Cold Equations trilogy, and he likes sewing together threads from across his Star Trek oeuvre, and 2) Bashir needs a very powerful ally outside the Federation to make this plotline work, and where we left Data after The Cold Equations and The Light Fantastic is convenient for that.

I also think the idea of Uraei sort of misses the point of what the security state is actually about, which is not really about protecting people, but about propagating its own power. Uraei seems to actually believe in its own mission, and actually do things that benefit the Federation. But I don't think the real organizations and real people that Section 31 and Uraei are a science fictionalized take on really have such goals, and thus any kind of a critique falls flat.

I should be clear that I don't think this book was intended to be an endorsement of the security state... but if it's meant to be a critique, it's a pretty poor one. This thing is utterly terrible... but you can't have utopia without it! Yes, everything Uraei did is depicted as reprehensible, but the novel doesn't offer much of a counterargument to its claims. It has been suggested to me that we're not supposed to take Uraei at face value, but if so, there's little textual evidence to support this. If the author meant the reader to take the book a different way than I have, they have done a poor job in conveying their message.

Using Section 31 in Star Trek to criticize the security state: good, great idea. Using Section 31 in Star Trek to say, well, the security state is a necessary evil and utopia is utterly impossible: what the actual fuck, to be honest, and those are words I don't use lightly. Thank god Picard obliterated this whole timeline.

Continuity Notes:

• Chapter thirteen gives us a little potted history of United Earth, which brings into aligment the various contradictory statements about the timing of this from sources like First Contact ("Poverty, disease, war. They'll all be gone within the next fifty years.") and "Attached" ("What if one of the old nation states, say Australia, had decided not to join the world government in 2150?")
• I think this is the first-ever "novelverse" reference to the book Memory Prime, an old favorite of mine, though I don't think the depiction of Memory Prime here has anything in common with how it was shown in the original book.
• There is a very small reference to Star Trek Beyond, as we learn Uraei had someone transferred to that film's NX-326 Franklin in 2164, the same year it disappeared.

though those of us in Spinal Consistency Club didn't like how the horizontal stripe was handled in the original run, either

Other Notes:

• Those of us in the Spinal Consistency Club are grumpy about the lack of effort in matching the original 2001 tetralogy. But those of us in Font Club do appreciate the maintenance of Parsi (I think) in the logo, even if it's got some fancy embossing here.
• L'Haan disses another character by comparing them to an Orion socialator. Aside from this feeling like a very un-twenty-fourth-century move (so much for sex positivity, remember what I said about all the characters being petty), "socialator" was the sci-fi term for prostitute on the original Battlestar Galactica.
• My copy is an eighth printing; in all those reprints, apparently no one has ever caught that it should be "burying the lede," not "lead."
• I did not buy at all the idea that you would for some reason take an award-winning investigative journalist and turn her into a "Features" editor, nor do I believe that in the Federation the practice of noncompete clauses would still be allowed.
• One thing that did ring true: Ikerson's graduate student who's in it all for the free food.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Fortune of War

late 2386
A cut scene from David Mack's Fortune of War, exclusive to Science's Less Accurate Grandmother:

"You know," said Riker, "my life has been very strange recently."
     "How so?" asked Deanna.
     "This is my fifth adventure in a row that follows up something that happened while we were on the Enterprise-D. First we went into interphase again, then we met the Cytherians again, then we met the Solanae again, then we met Arda's people again, and now we're looking at Husnock artifacts again."
     "That's odd," said Deanna.
     "The reason I wanted to captain the Titan was to explore strange new worlds, but it seems like we spend most of our time chasing down small lingering plotlines from two decades ago."
     "Well," said Deanna, "TNG was a very popular tv show. Even a follow-up to a mediocre episode is going to sell more copies."

Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War
by David Mack

Published: 2017
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I jest, of course, and I cheat by including some stories that aren't Titan ones even if they are Riker ones, but even so, this is the third Titan story in a row to sequelize a TNG episode (in this case, "The Survivors" from season 3). The original selling point of Titan was that it took a diverse group of characters into interesting new sfnal situations; Fortune of War, alas, does not really accomplish this. We have, on the one hand, a character focus mostly on Riker, Vale, and Titan's new XO, Sarai, and an action-adventure plot. Many people seem to think David Mack does these kinds of plots well, but Mack in action mode has never really appealed to me, and in any case, this isn't the kind of thing I come to Titan for.

Even within those confines, though, I didn't find much to enjoy here. I've repeatedly stated that while I think the promotion of Riker to admiral could be interesting, the novels that have followed The Fall haven't really capitalized on it. Fortune of War continues this trend; Titan is part of a fleet action here, which you think would be great for Admiral Riker... but weirdly, the character who does the most with this is Vale. I did appreciate the focus on Sarai, a character I enjoyed in Sight Unseen, but Mack's version reads a bit flatter than Swallow. The rest of the Titan crew don't get much focus that's very memorable or interesting. On top of that, a lot of time is spent on the various factions competing with Titan to get the Husnock artifacts, but I found these characters were almost universally one-dimensional and unpleasant.

Some of these TNG sequels have at least fleshed out the concepts in interesting ways (mostly Sight Unseen, I guess), but there's nothing interesting to be learned about the Husnock here. I find depictions of empire in sf fascinating, but the interminable glimpse we get of them makes them into snarling one-dimensional monsters.

This was a quick read, Mack always is, but other than that, I found this had little to recommend it. Competently done, but not what I want from a Titan book... which is a bit disappointing, as it's the final one. This series peaked back with Sword of Damocles, in my opinion; the post-Destiny run was too inconsistent and largely failed to tap into the series's original potential, installments by James Swallow aside.

Continuity Notes:

• Vale claims that "[t]here is no precedent in interstellar law for your claim of annex to a territory not contiguous with your own." But surely this must happen all the time in the three-dimensional, mostly empty environment of space, and indeed, there are a lot of discontiguous nodes of the Federation itself according to Star Charts.

Other Notes:

• I complain a lot about how all the captains in the Destiny-era fiction are parents; I think what makes it particularly grating is very few of the writers are. You can tell, because no one whose five-year-old had actually done ballet would ever write a sentence like "she had tears of joy in her eyes while she watched their daughter float like a sylph in time with a melody stolen from a dream." My (currently six-year-old) kid is very enthusiastic about ballet, but them and their classmates are lucky if they remember what they are supposed to be doing when they perform in a recital.
• Having Pakleds and Nausicaans, two different alien species who apparently never discovered the article, in the same book ends up being a bit grating.
• Admiral Batanides threatens Sarai with internment in a Starfleet Intelligence "black site." I just really hate this idea, which is part of a generally unpleasant way that Starfleet is depicted in Mack's fiction. Section 31 having "black sites" they deport unwanted people to, sure, I guess. But regular Starfleet? Ugh, no, I don't buy this at all, and I don't want to read Star Trek books where it can happen.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Section 31: Control by David Mack

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Section 31: Disavowed

Star Trek: Section 31: Disavowed
by David Mack

January 2386

Published: 2014
Acquired: September 2021
Read: June 2023

This novel returns us to Bashir, last seen back in The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses. Now living on Andor, Bashir has the opportunity to help bring down Section 31... from the inside. But doing so involves a trip into the mirror universe, stopping a potential plot by the Typhon Pact to steal wormhole jump technology from the mirror universe. This draws on a couple different earlier David Mack stories, most notably Mirror Universe: Rise Like Lions and Cold Equations: Silent Weapons.

The Bashir / Section 31 strand of the Destiny-era novels has never really clicked for me. I think there's a couple reasons. Partially, it's because Bashir feels very passive in the middle of all of it, it doesn't seem like Bashir makes a lot of interesting choices. He's brought into Section 31, he goes on the mission, and then he does all the things he's supposed to do. The one part I found interesting was when Bashir is recognized as the killer of the mirror Odo in "Crossover" and the mirror Dominion seeks to sentence him to death—and eventually Bashir agrees to hand himself over for the greater good. But outside of this, Bashir does very little except carry out action sequences. Once he hands himself over, Bashir isn't who gets himself out of the situation; it's not Bashir either who does anything to foil the true Section 31 plot in the mirror universe. He just stand there as all these other people make the interesting decisions.

I also—and this just might be my fault—always expect more moral compromise on Bashir's part in these books. But it seems to me that he signs up with Section 31, and pretty much just acts as he normally would. I want a sense of Bashir going deeper, things getting beyond his control, him getting soiled, but this never happens. I don't know that the book promises this, but it's what I feel a Section 31 story ought to deliver, and this story doesn't.

On top of this, the Sarina relationship never works for me. I like the idea of it, that Bashir has finally a woman who can keep up with him... but in the actual book they mostly just exchange some weak banter. When do they click like no one else can? As a character, she has never interested me in her novel appearances, I find it hard to get a hold on her in a meaningful way.

Outside of Bashir, I found most of what was happening not very interesting. The other characters, Typhon Pact and Commonwealth alike, are pretty one-dimensional, and I found it tedious every time the narrative switched to them sniping at one another. As I said back in my review of Rise Like Lions, I never cared much for DS9's approach to the mirror universe, and it's particularly boring in prose form, where a character may be called "Saavik" but can basically be anyone for all she has to do with the Prime Saavik when she's not played by Kirstie Alley or Robin Curtis.

The whole plot ends up resolved with Memory Omega being essentially omnipotent, which takes a lot of agency away from everyone else, and I thought raised more problems than it solved. How did they even get into the situation of being threatened by the Prime universe Breen if they had quantum windows? Why did they let Cole and his friends attempt what they attempted if they knew all along what they were going to do?

It's competently written, of course, but it all felt pretty hollow and uninteresting—made worse by my consistent feeling that somewhere out there in the multiverse there's a different Section 31 novel that really spotlights Bashir's character in the way that the best Section 31 episodes of the show did.

Continuity Notes:

• Cole says new laws ban Starfleet Intelligence from operating in the mirror universe, thanks to a "reaction to blowback from certain recent operations involving your former colleagues on Deep Space Nine." But I wasn't sure what this was actually referring to
• Bashir says the last he knew of Odo, "[a]s of last year, he was leading the Dominion." But Odo was trapped in the Alpha Quadrant in September 2383, and had not returned to the Gamma Quadrant yet when Bashir left the station in September 2384.
  
• A guard that Bashir knocks out in "Crossover" is here identified as the mirror Cenn Desca. I don't think there are any great shots of him in the episode, and Memory Alpha doesn't know who played him, but you can see Deep Space 9's least interesting character (except for all the others) over on the right.

Other Notes:

• Though as I said above, I was disappointed in how Bashir played little role in his own fate, it was nice to see that the mirror Dominion was somewhat different and had a different way of operating. The follow-up conversation between Bashir and the Founder is pretty good, too.
• I appreciate the revival, twelve years later, of the Section 31 branding... though of course I would have preferred the same logo and even more importantly... spinal consistency!
  
• The idea that Section 31 has a uniform only becomes more hilarious the more times you read it. (And, of course, Discovery would take this to new heights later on. BLACK BADGES!)

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion by Jeffrey Lang

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses

Published: 2013
Acquired: October 2020
Read: November 2020

Star Trek: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses

by David Mack

31 August–19 September 2385
Clearly it works for other people, but I find David Mack as a writer least interesting in thriller mode. I will admit that I had a number of issues with the Cold Equations trilogy, but I did think that the "Noonien" section of book I, as well as book III, were trying to do something more interesting than his more thriller-y books, like Zero Sum Game and book II of Cold Equations and this one.

As I read, I struggled to isolate why this might be. If someone described A Ceremony of Losses to me, I think it would sound quite good. One of the things I like most about Bashir is that moral crusader spirit he has, where his ideals outrun his practical limits; "The Quickening" is one of my favorite Deep Space Nine episodes, and Warchild one of my favorite novels. This book, then, put that to the ultimate test: Bashir wants to cure the Andorian reproductive crisis, but in doing so must draw on classified information that puts his career and even life at risk. What will he do, especially when he has to go up against his friends and colleagues?

But in the execution it's just not that, well, thrilling, and I'm not sure why. I think partly because Bashir honestly doesn't come across as very tested or conflicted by it all; he sets out on his course of action, and that is that. I didn't feel like he was very often making difficult choices. When Bashir makes his big decision to initiate the whole thing, it's because of a weird vision he has of being judged by Anubis, which feels like a writing crutch, as opposed to his decision being motivated by his Bashir-ness.

In fact, something that bugged me is that it seems like Bashir makes very few choices on the whole. We have the promise of a genetically engineered genius really stretching his limits... but Sarina sets up most of his plan, and he just sits there; when events converge over Andor at the novel's climax, he doesn't do anything particularly smart or impressive. Captain Dax on the Aventine is tasked with hunting him down because she (paraphrasing) "knows how he thinks," but he scarcely does any thinking at all, he's just along for the ride. (And Dax's galaxy-brain move in catching Bashir is to realize the guy who works on Deep Space 9 is probably on a ship that came from Deep Space 9.) I wanted a thrilling book of Bashir pushing his abilities to the limits, but this is mostly limited to him being rude at colleagues.

I said in my review of Brinkmanship that in most novels, I struggle to see Ezri Dax in the character called Captain Ezri Dax, and that was true in this book, where Ezri is rulebound in a way that doesn't ring true. Where's the playful Dax who does what's right? In fact, it ends up being lampshaded when Ezri actually asks Bowers why is she so rulebound all of a sudden! Plus the Ezri/Julian thing is back to immature arguments... I would really be glad to never read about an Ezri/Julian argument in a Star Trek book ever again, thank you.

I think Mack's characters in general don't have strong voices. Lense is here, but she didn't remind me of the Lense I remembered from S.C.E. She's not not Lense, she's just kind of a person who's there. The same goes for Shar; I remember him being one of my favorite DS9 relaunch characters, but I don't see why that would be based on this. And Andor doesn't feel like a real place in the way it did in previous novels like Heather Jarman's Paradigm.

The other thing that bother me is that Mack's Star Trek universe doesn't really feel like the Star Trek universe I know from screen. Almost everyone is mean and selfish-- some people have ideals, but those who are opposed to Bashir are entirely venal and self-interested. Andorian politics are a total shitshow of self-interest; one would hope that the Andorian secessionists at least believed they were doing the right thing, but here they are deliberately encouraging self-extinction to hold onto political power. But this seems to be everywhere: this is our first real look at Ishan, the president pro tem of the Federation, and he's a nasty piece of work, willing to let the Andorians die to beef up his election chances. Really!? Even the characters call out that he's so nasty as to be unrealistic. How did this guy even get elected? As villains go, both he and the Andorian secessionists veer too much into the one note. I would say that they read as implausible, but 2016-20 gave me a real-life leader who is arguably worse... but reality doesn't have to be plausible, you know! Ishan doesn't seem like a very good politician-- he just antagonizes everyone even though he's in a very precarious position! It's been pointed out to me that so did President Trump, but unlike Trump, Ishan supposedly had a long and successful political career before ending up president. I am not sure you could become president pro tem with an attitude like his, and if you can cover it up enough to become president pro tem, surely you could cover it up for an extra sixty days to win an election!

I think in some ways this book and this series is meant to show how proto-fascism can take root even in the Federation, and that could make sense if you think about the extent of the crises the Federation has endured, between the Dominion War and Destiny, but the book itself doesn't really lay that groundwork. The other Starfleet captains are pretty rotten (one sits around thinking about how great it is that he doesn't have any friends). All of this reduces the ostensible dilemma of the novel: there's no meaningful counterargument put forth, no real sense that Bashir could ever be doing anything wrong. Seeing even just one principled character endorsing Ishan's way of doing things would make a big difference.

I don't think the Federation has to be a utopia, but I do think it ought to be aspirational. To be honest, Cardassia seemed like a more idealistic place in The Crimson Shadow than the Federation does here. At the end, Bashir is locked up without trial on a dark penal asteroid! Like, c'mon, I don't read Star Trek books to read about how nasty people can be. I guess I will see what we learn about him in the last two Fall books.

As I was wrapping up this review, I looked at some others. Over at Tor.com, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro says, "Its construction around a poignant ethical dilemma with far-reaching consequences—do you follow lawful orders, even when those orders will lead to the extinction of a recently allied sentient species that you could possibly save?—makes it quintessential Trek..." I mean, I agree that this should be interesting (though orders versus genocide isn't much of a dilemma, to be honest), but I struggle to recognize the novel Zinos-Amaro describes in the one I read.

Continuity Notes:

• Aha, this is the book where we finally find out what happened to those Andorian transporter duplicates... no? okay...

Other Notes:

• This book introduces zh'Tarash, who states her intention to run for Federation president once Andor is readmitted to the Federation. I know from the Prometheus audiobooks that she does indeed win, but this doesn't seem very plausible to me, and I'm not even sure why she wants to run. I guess I will see how this is handled in the next two Fall books.
• The first two Fall books were named after in-universe works of literature, a Bajoran religious text and a Cardassian speculative fiction story, respectively. This is not quite true for A Ceremony of Losses, where in-universe "a ceremony of losses" is a phrase from the Andorian religion: "Though she [zh'Tarash] was not a religious person, she found herself reflecting upon an oft-quoted line from The Liturgy of the Temple of Uzaveh: 'The Path of Light can be found only by those who brave the Road of Storms and weather its ceremony of losses'" (69). Out of universe, though, "a ceremony of losses" is a quotation from a 2012 essay about old age by U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall: "I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two" ("Out the Window"). I'm not sure I see the relevance.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Fall: The Poisoned Chalice by James Swallow

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Cold Equations: The Body Electric

In theory, every couple months, I read five of the Star Trek books set in the "Destiny-era" continuity. In practicality, it's been a while; I finished the previous book fourteen months before I got around to this one. But, finally, here I am.

Published: 2013
Acquired: March 2014
Read: September 2020

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Cold Equations, Book III: The Body Electric

by David Mack

September 2384
I have to say, I don't really get what the point of the Cold Equations trilogy was. I mean, the Event is "the return of Data." But what is this story about? There's inklings of a theme breaking through. This is a story of parents: Soong and Data, Data and Lal, Beverly and Wesley, Flint and Rhea, even T'Ryssa and her dad. But I never felt like these aspects came together in any coherent way, and in books II and III, the parenting theme doesn't resonate with the plot at all. Why tell a technological thriller? (When I finished book II I felt like it was a "political sidestep away from the core idea of the trilogy" and hoped book III would save it, but nope.) Why tell a story about a massive machine entity destroying the galaxy? As I type this out, I can actually see the resonances-- the Body Electric wants to leave its mark on the universe, and that's kind of what raising a child is-- but if that's what was meant, you don't feel the resonances as you read.

That's possibly because you don't feel much of anything reading this book. The threat of black hole collision is too abstract, even if the characters occasionally look at the viewscreen aghast at the destruction of civilizations. There's a bit where the Enterprise crew all listen to transmissions of screams from a planet as it's added to the Abbadon black hole by the Machine, and I couldn't help but compare it unfavorably with the excerpts from transmissions of the Venette syndics in Brinkmanship, which made you sad over a bunch of people who weren't even characters in the book! I think a real sense of wonder could be conjured up... but this book doesn't do it.

I don't think Data has been handled well in this trilogy. Suddenly he's hell-bent on bringing Lal back to life, and he wants to settle down on Earth and raise her alongside Rhea. Where did this all come from? I know this new Data is different, but there's a core of Data-ness that's lacking-- where's Data's curiosity and wonder? Why would he want to settle down? I don't doubt that an author could get Data to this point, and I think that would be an interesting story, but Data starts the novel having made all his significant emotional decisions (except one, which I'll get to), and when we're in his point of view, it's all pretty blah. He's never deciding things, just doing things, mostly focusing on his captivity.

This book's depiction of AI feels very retrograde. Compare it to the lively, interesting, unusual AI character of Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice that would come out just a few months later-- a distributed intelligence that operates simultaneously. Here, I mostly kept conjuring up a mental image of cheesy robots from a mediocre Doctor Who story. The secret Fellowship of artificial beings don't really impress.

No one really impresses, to be honest. One key plot advancement completely depends on an astounding bit of naïveté from Picard. Wesley has gone to get Data to help speak to the Machine (don't forget, the Machine is imminently going to cause the destruction of the entire galaxy). Data has been kidnapped by an evil member of the Fellowship; when Wesley brings the Fellowship and Data to the Enterprise, Wesley is unconscious (shot by the evil android), and the evil android won't let Data leave. So, they ask the evil android to go intervene with the Machine for them. Literally the only thing they know about this guy is that he shot Wesley and kidnapped Data. Does this seem like a guy to trust with saving the galaxy from an evil AI? After he leaves, when Data points out (they can communicate with him) that this is a bad plan, Picard's rebuttal is that "even if we had objected to Gatt making contact with the Machine, we would have no right to prevent him from doing so."

Picard, as we know, is famously principled, but I don't think even Picard is so stupid in his principles as to say (this is a paraphrase), "well, we can't stop this guy from potentially instigating a galactic apocalypse if it infringes on his free speech rights." (Guess what: the evil android decides that galactic genocide is a great plan, and does his best to help bring it about. Whoops!)

In my review of book II, I commented, "So far this trilogy is two for two on bumping off significant women characters," and then joked, "Who will buy it in book III?" Um, well, it wasn't a joke, I guess. Rhea McAdams was introduced way back in 2002's Immortal Coil as the new security chief of the Enterprise-E (one of many it had in First Contact/Insurrection-era novels); she and Data fell in love, but she was eventually revealed as a robot built by the immortal Flint (of "Requiem for Methuselah" fame), and she left. I think. There were around eleven years between Immortal Coil and The Body Electric, and now it's been eighteen. As I said above, part of Data's aspiration here is to settle down with Rhea once he revives Lal... I'll be honest, it's hard to care about this. I remember liking Rhea in Immortal Coil, but that was a long time ago; Rhea in this book is a complete nonentity, spending most of the novel off-screen, and getting just one real scene of her own, mostly focused on action.

At the climax of the novel, Data is put in a situation where he has to choose between letting Flint (who knows the secret to resurrecting Lal) and Rhea die. I think this is meant to be heartbreaking. But I didn't feel anything at all. One, as I said, I don't really get where Data's sudden Lal obsession came from, and two, who cares about Rhea? Nothing in The Body Electric convinces you that Data loves Rhea, or even really likes her. It's in the book, but like so much else, you don't feel it. I think it would have to be a very different book for this to work, a book actually built around Data's relationships with Rhea and Lal-- instead it's a book mostly about action sequences and stopping a super-black hole in which those relationships happen to put in cursory appearances.

The death of Rhea did do one thing for me, though. I have been wondering throughout this whole trilogy... why is it called "Cold Equations"? "The Cold Equations" is a famous hard sf story, written by Tom Godwin, but its essential design was created by editor John Campbell: a young woman has to die in order to demonstrate the cruelty of the universe. That is the role women play in the stories of men, and that is the role women play in this trilogy, time and again.

Continuity Notes:

• The Machine was sent by the same AIs that upgraded V'Ger. The book doesn't really capture the grandeur of The Motion Picture in any way, shape, or form, though.
  
• Tamala Harstad continues to exist. (She finally got her Memory Beta page a couple of months ago. It only took nine years for someone to care enough.)

Other Notes:

• There's a bit where when they're all out of ideas, La Forge begins to suggest, mostly as a joke, traveling back in time. Picard shoots him down. But then I was like: how can the imminent apocalypse of galactic civilization not be a justification for a little time travel? Could you really make things worse? There are probably lots of situations in Star Trek where a little light time travel (something done quite casually in some episodes) would fix all the problems, but the reasons for not doing this seem pretty obvious from a narrative standpoint. But this is a situation where it does seem warranted, so then I kept wondering why it was so self-evidently a bad idea, because I wasn't convinced. Only I wouldn't have thought of it if the novel hadn't brought it up!
• Um, Wesley's in this book. I don't really have anything to say about this; like most aspects of the novel it seems like something interesting could have been done with it, but it wasn't.
• I just can't get interested in the new Enterprise crew. Take Dina Elfiki, for example. She's one of a number of characters (always women) we are told are very attractive. I don't quite get it for two reasons. One, I can't see these characters, and the book saying (paraphrasing) "Dina Elfiki was very attractive"... well, just saying it doesn't actually make her attractive. Two, it seems a meaningless statement in a media tie-in novel, given on screen, everybody is very attractive. How is it a distinguishing characteristic? It seems to be her only attribute, though, because she basically has one scene in the book, where she gives dating advice to T'Ryssa Chen. In this scene, we learn that women don't like her because of how hot she is, and men suffer erectile dysfunction because of how smart she is. Wow, um, so 24th-century gender roles are like a bad sitcom?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock by Christopher L. Bennett

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Cold Equations: Silent Weapons

Mass market paperback, 340 pages
Published 2012
Acquired June 2017
Read July 2019

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Cold Equations, Book II: Silent Weapons

by David Mack

March 2384
There's something to be said for defying expectations. Fiction can't always go the way you predict, otherwise you might as well not bother to read the actual stories. After The Persistence of Memory, I predicted the next book would dive into Data's new quest indicated at the end of book I, to resurrect Lal, and that some of the backstory from Immortal Coil would come into play.

Instead, we get a political thriller that feels only very tenuously linked to the first book. Sure, the villains are using Soong-type android, but it verges on maguffin; this book doesn't really explore any ideas of artificial life. Sure, Data is back... but he spends half the book locked up in jail, and we get, I think, just two scenes written from his perspective. Why bring him back and then do almost nothing with him?

If you're going to defy expectations, the defiance has to be worth it. It has to in some way be better than what your reader expected. Unfortunately, Silent Weapons is pretty boring. Yes, technically, the political future of the Typhon Pact and the Khitomer Accords is at stake... but that was true two books ago, and three books ago, and four books ago. The Enterprise crew spends a lot of time investigating, but the questions are so murky, it's hard to care about the answers. It just feels like they go around in circles getting nowhere for a long time before things even vaguely begin to clear. Add to that that Mack's Breen characters feel like they run straight into Russell Davies's planet Zog problem, where you have a bunch of people with weird names and no personalities. (The contrast to how Brinkmanship gave personalities to a bunch of Tzenkethi with equally weird names is sharp.)

The big event, such as it is, is the death of Esperanza Piñiero, President Bacco's chief of staff introduced back in A Time for War, A Time for Peace. I always liked her, especially when written by Keith DeCandido, and was bummed to see her turned into cannon fodder to prove the situation was serious. So far this trilogy is two for two on bumping off significant women characters. Who will buy it in book III?

I guess it's just weird, because in the Acknowledgments, Mack thanks Jeffrey Lang for writing Immortal Coil because "[m]any of this trilogy's coolest ideas either originated in that book, or else would not have been possible without it to build upon," but there aren't really any cool ideas here, Mack's or Lang's. Maybe this book is setting up some interesting stuff to come in The Body Electric, but as it is, it feels like a pointless political sidestep away from the core idea of the trilogy.

Continuity Notes:

• I assume that the thing the whole big plot turns out to be about at the end is a reference back to Rise Like Lions? I barely remember Rise Like Lions at this point.
• There are references back to the Typhon Pact's dastardly plots from Plagues of Night and Raise the Dawn... but not Brinkmanship. Brinkmanship came out a month before Persistence of Memory, but given David Mack had to write a whole trilogy and Una McCormack a single novel, I assume books I and II, at least, were finished significantly before Brinkmanship was. This would also account for why Glinn Dygan feels out of character, not as serious as the earnest young man we saw in Brinkmanship.
• The short account of La Forge's recent career, including new position as second officer, makes it clear that no such book as Indistinguishable from Magic ever took place, as does La Forge's continued relationship with totally non-entity Tamala Harstad. (No one's ever even bothered to write her a Memory Beta entry in over eight years.)
• Starfleet officers have photo IDs they can flash. Who knew? Memory Alpha tells me they were seen on screen just twice, in "Mudd's Passion" and The Voyage Home.

Other Notes:

• It's neat that Chen gets to command the Enterprise and face down the Gorn... but odd that this scene doesn't draw at all on Chen's expertise with alien cultures. These books always say she's a contact specialist, but does she ever do it?
  
• Whenever this book moves to discussing Rene, it feels as though as it is written by someone whose entire understanding of children comes only from reading a developmental psychology textbook.
• There's a weird three-scene subplot about Crusher thinking of leaving the Enterprise that is so underdeveloped I'm not sure why it's even there.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory

Mass market paperback, 385 pages
Published 2012
Acquired April 2017
Read July 2019

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Cold Equations, Book I: The Persistence of Memory

by David Mack

January 2384
First off, let me say it's nice to read an adventure for the Enterprise that has nothing to do with space politics. Though not every Destiny-era story I've read so far has been political, all of the Enterprise ones have: Paths of Disharmony, The Struggle Within, Plagues of Night, Brinkmanship (and, earlier on, Losing the Peace). But even though space politics influence the story (the Breen are involved), the focus of the story is elsewhere, at long last.

Persistence of Memory is the first book of a trilogy, and it's also a novella-length frame around a novel-length flashback. I'll discuss the flashback first. Part Two, "Noonien," is in the first person and the present tense (both are unusual in Star Trek fiction, let alone together) following Data's creator, Noonien Soong, from the moment of his apparent death in "Brothers" up until the present. In a sense, it's there for a very long exposition dump; we find out how Soong might have seemed to die but did not, what he's been up to in the interim, how B-4 from Nemesis fits in with what Next Generation itself told us about Soong's android prototypes, what he thinks of the events of the novel Immortal Coil, and so on.

But in another sense, it's a great portrait of an unusual mind, a man obsessed with himself and his legacy. Mack wisely doesn't give him a tragic or overwrought backstory to explain why he is this way; he just get on with telling us who Soong is. We see how he plans quite elaborately, again and again, his tendency to devise long complicated routes to his goals often preventing him from actually reaching those goals. He's never emotionally fulfilled in one sense, and in another, he clearly finds fulfillment in the plan, not entirely the achievements. But he hates those moments where he realizes someone out there might know more than him. I really enjoyed all of this, and read it very quickly. It also lays a good groundwork for the "return" of Data, though I don't have much to say about that event itself, since we haven't seen much of it. I will weigh in on this once future novels have done something (or failed to) with Data.

The framing novella, though, feels like David Mack on autopilot, something it flags up itself a couple times by mentioning other stories where he's done the same things as here. There's a super-secret away mission without backup gone horribly wrong (i.e., A Time to Kill and Failsafe), and the Enterprise takes refuge in a gas giant (i.e., "Starship Down" and Wildfire). The characters feel very flat; compare Brinkmanship where the narrative makes the Enterprise's mission personal to Crusher even without a clear personal hook-- here there is one for many of the crew, especially La Forge, but it never feels personal. I'm not really into fast-paced intense action sequences in prose when there's no emotional stakes, and Persistence of Memory was no exception. I've read its like before, and I imagine I'll read it again.

The frame would be competent, but not bad, if it wasn't for one thing: the death of the Enterprise's security chief, Jasminder Choudhury. There are two problems with it. The first is that it is a borderline ridiculous repetitive thing to have happen to Worf, who has been married twice, and had his wife die both times. Now he's in a third committed long-term relationship (though not a marriage), and she dies too. Like, really? Come on, come up with a new idea. Books II and III will have to work very hard to convince me that this is not as clear-cut an example of fridging as you can have. I had to stop reading the book and explain to my wife how bad it was, so much did I roll my eyes.

The second problem is that I just don't care about Jasminder Choudhury. While ongoing Treklit concepts like New Frontier and the Deep Space Nine relaunch were filled with likable characters I cared about, post-Nemesis TNG fiction has struggled to build up any interesting original characters, either using them inconsistently (e.g., Leybenzon, Kadohata) or rarely using them interestingly (e.g., T'Lana, Chen). Choudury was in the latter group; the only book I can even remember her making an impression in was The Struggle Within. Her characterization within this book and most others was very generic, and I don't really have any sense of how she related to most of the other characters; the book says Picard feels "profound sadness" at her death, but you don't believe it. I just didn't care, while surely against the whole point of killing her is to make me feel something. (Brinkmanship made me care much more about anonymous Vennette farmers who didn't even die!)

Continuity Notes:

• Jeffrey Lang's Immortal Coil is very heavily referenced. I don't think I've read it since it came out in February 2002. (If I ever reread it, it was before August 2003, when my reading records begin.) Mack provides a lot of recaps and summary, but it's kind of a complicated book with a lot going on.
  
• I was surprised that (unless I missed it) in among all the sewing up of Soong continuity, there were no references to Arik Soong, Noonien's ancestor from Enterprise who supposedly inspired a family turn to cybernetics.
• There's a mention of the Grigari, who I really liked in Federation and the Millennium trilogy.

Other Notes:

• "[A]s Picard had begun the paternal duty of reading his boy to sleep, he had been impressed with his scion's growing vocabulary and seemingly insatiable appetite for narratives. By the time he cracked open the sixth tome of the evening's recitation, he began to question whether it would be unethical to let Crusher use a mild hypospray to hasten the boy's descent into slumber." Judging by the overwrought wording of this passage (e.g., "scion, "narratives," "tome"), little René isn't the only one showing off his vocabulary.
• There's a scene from the perspective of Aneta Šmrhová, Enterprise tactical officer, that establishes in three years, she's never really done anything interesting. I'm always kind of disappointed when the novels imply that absent a television program, our heroes don't go on twenty-six-plus wacky adventures per year.