Star Trek: The Destiny Era Prelude: The Rings of Time

Mass market paperback, 374 pages
Published 2012
Acquired December 2012
Read August 2017

Star Trek: The Rings of Time

by Greg Cox

2020 / 2270
The novel follows two parallel chronological tracks: the first manned mission to Saturn in the far future year of 2020, and the Enterprise coming to the aid of a beleaguered Federation colony 250 years later. The 2270 plotline takes a little while to become interesting, but the 2020 one is pretty good right from the off. I think it pushes belief that a vlogger could smuggle herself onto a NASA mission, but once you accept that, it's a reasonable near-future realistic space story along the lines of The Martian or whatever. There are some obvious connections between the two time periods, with both concerning gas giants with strange hexagonal disturbances at their poles where the rings begins destabilizing.

The book kicks up a gear at the one-third mark, when Captain Kirk switches places in time with Shaun Geoffrey Christopher, commander of the Lewis & Clark. This is done Quantum Leap-style, so physically, the crews of both ships do not see a difference. I had fun imagining this on screen-- I bet Shatner would be hammy in just the right way as Kirk pretending to be an astronaut. (Though you'd probably also want to imagine Shatner as Christopher pretending to be Kirk, which isn't terribly consistent.) Captain Kirk having to blend in in the past always yields good comedy (e.g., "The City on the Edge of Forever," The Voyage Home), and Cox milks that well here. I laughed when Kirk tries to remember what the computer network of the 21st century was called and comes up with "the Interweb."

At first I thought it was a little much that there are two female guest characters in this book and they both have the hots for Colonel Christopher, but when the swap happened, I got it. Nothing is quite as good as Captain Kirk being in the dilemma of there being two sexually available women but he doesn't know which one to sleep with because he might destroy the timeline if he makes the wrong choice.

The plot here is kind of like whatever. It's not bad; it's just a structure to hang time travel hijinks and risky EVAs off of. It's all a bit The Martian like I said, but when Cox wrote this (presumably) in 2011, The Martian was just an above-average self-publishing phenomenon, and probably not on Cox's radar. Cox captures the original Star Trek crew well, and writes brisk action; I breezed through this thing in about two nights and had lots of fun in the process. That the Human Extinction League could have such an effect did seem a little hard to believe, but of course their comeuppance at the hand of the Enterprise crew was pleasing.

The only thing I didn't like is the revelation of what/who caused the time travel phenomenon, which felt like a cheat and a non-answer.

Continuity Notes:

• There are some callbacks to Cox's The Eugenics Wars novels: Christopher was supposed to pilot a DY-100 sleeper ship back in the 1990s, but someone (i.e., Khan and company) stole it from him.
• Cox also does a good job setting this in the early 21st century, blending references to our real world Great Recession with the sanctuary districts of Deep Space Nine's "Past Tense" (set in 2024).
• I do have one quibble here: the Earth-Saturn probe doesn't feel as significant as Spock made it sound in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday." It's hard to imagine the future of human spaceflight being thrown off course without Colonel Christopher's presence. This should feel as monumental as the Apollo missions! Of course, in the real early 21st century, it's hard to imagine any manned space missions happening at all, alas.

Other Notes:

• If I'm not mistaken, The Rings of Time was the second-last original series novel published without "The Original Series" branding on the cover and title page, the last being Dayton Ward's That Which Divides. Allegiance in Exile was actually the first to have it. I'm not a fan. (The 50th anniversary Legacies trilogy also didn't have it, actually; I assume because Star Trek: The Original Series: Legacies: [Actual Title] is a bit on the clunky side. Though this is the line of books that used to give us titles like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Gateways, Book Four of Seven: Demons of Air and Darkness, so what exactly could be too clunky?)

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #11: Project Crisis!, Part LIII: Final Crisis [novelization]

Trade paperback, 305 pages
Published 2010
Borrowed from the library
Read February 2016

Final Crisis by Greg Cox

I think I'm going to have to give up on these novelizations of comic stories, because for the most part, they're too limited by their medium. Marv Wolfman's Crisis on Infinite Earths novelization was great because he played to the strengths of his medium by transforming the multiverse-shattering epic into a personal story. But Cox's novelizations of Infinite Crisis, 52, Countdown, and now Final Crisis have not really done this; instead they mostly transcribe the dialogue and the action. But Cox captures none of the feeling of the stories he's novelizing: I may not have known what to make of Final Crisis, but there's not denying that it's epic and overwhelming and in turns despairing and triumphant. In Cox's telling, all of this is flat, just events without emotional resonance. There's no added depth here; his insights into the characters tend to repeat what they already communicate in dialogue. While Wolfman communicated something new with his novelization of his own story in the original Crisis, and Denny O'Neil's novelization of Knightfall was an adequate substitute for a set of comics I'll probably never get to, reading an outside author's take on comics I've already read hasn't really done much for me thus far.

Next Week: Time to start playing catch-up, first with Gotham cops in Gordon of Gotham!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #10: Project Crisis!, Part LII: Countdown [novelization]

I keep trying to catch up on audio drama reviews and not entirely succeeding, but here's a review of The Avengers: The Lost Episodes, Volume 5 at Unreality SF. Meanwhile, I'm switching gears away from Final Crisis, but on the way I'm stopping to read another prose tie-in:

Trade paperback, 321 pages
Published 2009
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2015

Countdown by Greg Cox

Cox's novelization of 52 was not as good as the comic series on which it was based, but his novelization of Countdown is better. Mostly, this is down to the quality of their respective source materials: 52 was a good comic, and one of the things that made it good was its huge span, in terms of both time and characters, which was hard to pare down for a 300-page novel in a way that kept the story effective. One of the many things that made Countdown to Final Crisis bad was its aimlessness, its repetitiveness, its plot-lines that went nowhere, or issues that served only to repeat the content of previous issues. Judicious cutting could only make it better, not worse.

So, tons of the original comic is gone here, to good effect. First off, two whole plot-lines are just removed: there's no Karate Kid and Una search for a cure to the OMAC virus, and there's no Pied Piper and Trickster on the run for the murder of the Bart Allen Flash. These were probably the worst of the various threads of Countdown, so no loss there. This leaves four primary plot-lines: Holly Robinson and Harley Quinn among the Amazons, Mary Marvel trying to tame the power of Black Adam, Donna Troy and Jason Todd searching for Ray Palmer, and Jimmy Olsen investigating the death of the New Gods. These plot-lines still aren't great, but they are better, because Cox deletes a lot of terribleness. There's no tie-ins to wider DC universe events, like Amazons Attack! or the death of Bart Allen. Donna and Jason only visit a couple parallel Earths, and never encounter Monarch. There are no cutaways to the incoherent meetings of the Monitors. Jimmy Olsen doesn't learn ten times over that his powers only activate in situations of danger. OMAC doesn't eat Apokolips. Earth-51 isn't destroyed even once, much less twice.

Cox manages to give everything some focus: instead of being hunted by Donna and Jason because of something something morticoccus virus, Ray is seemingly recruited because he's needed to save Jimmy in the final battle against Darkseid. The whole book becomes about driving to that moment, to stop Darkseid from acquiring all the powers of the Gods and controlling the imminent Fifth World. (I'll be curious to see if Cox's novelization of Final Crisis makes any explicit links to the events of Countdown.)

If this all seems like damning with faint praise, well, it is. There's still no substance here. Mary Marvel still behaves stupidly for no apparent reason. Jimmy Olsen's romance with Forager is still pointless. Jason and Donna still stand around for most of the book. I did kind of like the Holly/Harley plot, but it's not much to write home about, either. How have they changed as people? Have we even learned anything about them? These aren't characters, they're ciphers being pushed around by a pointless plot.

It does read quickly, though.

Proposed Countdown novelization drinking game: drink every time a main character meets someone and thinks to themselves, 'I thought [x] was dead, but I guess I heard wrong/I saw wrong/they got better.'

Next Week: I return to the early days of Batman in Project Gotham!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #9: Project Crisis!, Part XXXIV: 52 [novelization]

Trade paperback, 359 pages
Published 2007
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2015

52 by Greg Cox

Prose and comics are two mediums that have very different strengths, and nowhere is that more evident than here. One of the things that made 52 so successful was its very investment in the comics model of long-form serialized storytelling: it told a single story in 52 parts, adding up to over a 1,000 pages of comics. Though obviously you could in theory reproduce this in other mediums (prose, television, &c.), I don't think it would play to their strengths, at least not as those mediums are produced in contemporary America.

So while a novel version of 52 could in theory work, I suppose, this novel version never could. The whole point of the story was its hugeness, its sprawl, its peeking into every corner of the DC universe/multiverse. That just cannot happen in a 359-page novel. Cox is hampered by trying to simulate the very format of the original comics; while in his later novelization of Countdown to Final Crisis, he can just lop out whole subplots, here he emulates the original comics in having 52 chapters, one for each week. This means at least some part of each issue has to make it into the book, which makes it much more difficult to cut the story down. Countdown focuses on just a couple of the subplots in great detail; the novel of 52 hits most of the subplots at a very superficial level.

The result is a book that would probably be mildly interested if you hadn't read 52 as a comic, but is thoroughly uninteresting if you have. I'm sure Greg Cox did his best with the hand he was dealt, but in this format, I just don't see a way this project could have ever succeeded.

(Also I'm pretty sure there's just one flat-out error: the Nightwing who meets Batwoman in Gotham is Dick Grayson here, but I'm pretty sure that in the comics he's meant to be the undead fellow former Robin Jason Todd impersonating Dick.)

Next Week: Time to begin a countdown... a Countdown to Final Crisis!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #8: Project Crisis!, Part XXXIII: Infinite Crisis [novelization]

Trade paperback, 371 pages
Published 2006
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2014

Infinite Crisis
by Greg Cox

I enjoyed Marv Wolfman's Crisis on Infinite Earth novelization, but Greg Cox novelizing Geoff Johns's story didn't have anywhere near the impact of Marv Wolfman novelizing his own. Part of what has motivated my reading of superhero prose fiction is to see how the writers handle superhero interiority-- a potentially tricky area, I think. Well, Cox doesn't: these people are flying code names and backstories. This might be interesting if you haven't read the comic, but it adds little depth to it if you have. Breezily written, but still felt like it took me forever to read.