Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Fallen Gods

Mass market paperback, 358 pages
Published 2012
Acquired October 2012
Read December 2018

Star Trek: Titan: Fallen Gods

by Michael A. Martin

November 2382 ("roughly Stardate 59833.8"*)
This is a hard book to say much about, because it's just boring. Like, little happens, so what is there to discuss? There's two main strands, so I'll take them in turn.

The first is a by-now-typical Titan exploration story. Continuing its mission into the Gum Nebula, Titan has come across a huge pulsar, but despite the lethal radiation it spills out, it has a life-supporting planet in orbit. You might think this could be exciting, but it is far from so. First off, the beginning of the book alternates what's happening on Titan with what the aliens on the planet are doing, and the planetside chapters read like a parody of bad science fiction. Nonsense words just piled on top of each other interminably, lots of names with apostrophes, an alien race that is divided into two factions, one literally devoted to destroying things and the other to not destroying things. There's no nuance or worldbuilding here. The entire planet is a two-dimensional cipher.

Meanwhile on Titan... not much is happening, either. Like in Seize the Fire, there are an inordinate amount of meetings. It feels like these characters are never doing things, they're just being told things. There's a fifteen-page chapter where Melora Pazlar tells Captain Riker that there's life on the planet, something that we already know, and something that doesn't require this level of justification. When Titan sends a shuttle to the planet, it's hard to care about what it's trying to accomplish, because Michael Martin has done no work to make this planet or species interesting enough to be worth saving. In light of the Titan series's original mission of bringing a sense of wonder back to Star Trek, this book is a dismal failure.

The other plot line continues a thread begun in my previous read, the Typhon Pact novel Paths of Disharmony. Now than Andor has left the Federation, Starfleet has decided it doesn't trust the Andorians still serving, and wants them out of sensitive positions, moved into positions where they can't do any harm. Titan has seven Andorians serving aboard, and so a starship is coming to pick them up and take them back to Federation space. This paranoia is unbecoming the Federation, and hard to believe in. The Federation isn't even in a state of hostility with Andor! These particular Andorians haven't even given up their Federation citizenship! In Deep Space Nine, Worf was never treated in such a way and the Federation was at war with his people. The book tries to justify it with the statement that "during the months since Typhon Pact–allied Breen agents made off with Federation slipstream technology, Starfleet Command has been more concerned about internal security than at any time since the parasite infestation eighteen years ago." But in Martin's eagerness to cram in a gratuitous reference to "Conspiracy," he seems to have missed that surely Starfleet was much more concerned about internal security during the time it carried on a two-year war with shapeshifters! Compared to that, Andorexit is nothing.

This thread develops when an Andorian vessel appears to lay claim to Titan's Andorians itself. The commander of this ship is a cackling, evil caricature. Andor leaving the Federation didn't convince me in Paths of Disharmony, and if this is the kind of stories the writers are telling about it, it's still not convincing me. A lot of this story is dependent on you caring about what happens to Titan's most prominent Andorian crewmember, Pava Ek'noor sh'Aqabaa. I don't, because Martin does little to make me, and I even read the old Starfleet Academy comics from which she derives. (I did find the last chapter with her in it very existentially spooky, though; that was well done.)

The legalistic manner the forced transfer plotline resolved in felt very contrived. And then Riker and another captain smirk about how two of their officers are going to get some. Lol sexy Deltans, amirite?

Also what's weird is that the two halves of the story feel like they were written by different people, because they barely even interact. Warp drive, even warp-capable ships, are a big threat to the planet by the pulsar, but no one even mentions this when the Andorian ships comes warping in.

The big problem is that Michael Martin can't write characters as far as I can tell. No one here has a personality, each has a job and a species, and that's their entirety. They exist to deliver exposition and do whatever it is their species does. But how can I care about such poorly written characters? And thus, how can I care about anything in this book? Thankfully, this seems to be Michael Martin's last contribution to Destiny-era fiction.

Continuity Notes:

• There's an unresolved thread that the Tholian-allied Andorians created transporter duplicates of Andorian Starfleet officers who refused to come over. I've no doubt this will be of huge significance to the Typhon Pact story going forward. Certainly, something like no one ever mentioning this ever again would never happen.

Other Notes:

• The novel analogizes the Federation attitude toward its Andorian citizens to the United States's attitude toward Japanese-Americans during World War II. Alyssa Ogawa tells Pava about it. Yet for some reason, we don't get this scene; instead we get this painful scene where Pava tells Tuvok about the Japanese internment, so each character is constantly explaining American history to the other, smothering what could be a potent analogy.
• A prime example of Martin's over-explaining: after two paragraphs about turbulence the shuttle is going through, we're told, "Bralik and Eviku sat in grave silence. The Ferengi geologist and Arkenite xenobiologist both seemed to have turned slightly green, no doubt because of the turbulence the shuttlecraft's approach pattern was generating." Like, why is everything after that comma even there? If it's so obvious you have to work "no doubt" into the narration, maybe you don't need to say it at all!
• It's official, I'm totally over the novels' style of Andorian name. Take a look at the load of nonsense letters on p. 212 when the full names of all seven Andorians on Titan are given. It's unreadable. The way Martin uses them doesn't even make sense; the retcon that established this naming practice in Avatar makes it clear that Andorians went by the abbreviated version of their forenames even in formal situations: Shras, Erib, and so on. No one on screen calls Shran "Commander th'Zoarhi." Yet in this book, it's a profusion of apostrophes as Andorians are always calling each other by their surnames... something they literally never do in the canon!
• There's also this really dumb bit where Pava can't remember that she saw Tholians on the Andorian ship because she has memory loss, until she sees Ogawa, who is wearing a scarf of Tholian silk, which triggers her memory. This makes no sense, because as the novel points out, it's a uniform code violation. It's also an improbably enormous coincidence: Ogawa just happens to wear her Tholian silk scarf for the first time on the day where Pava meets Tholians and loses her memory of them? It's also completely unnecessary, as there's no plot function for Pava's memory loss to begin with, given it lasts all of two pages.
• I feel like Martin has completely squandered WhiteBlue's potential as a member of the Titan crew. Poor guy. :(
• The trade dress on this installment is subpar. The spine and back cover don't match the previous books, even though they have the same designer, Alan Dingman! Couldn't he just open up his old Photoshop template and reuse it? The "A VOYAGE OF THE STARSHIP TITAN" on the back cover, which I always liked, is gone. The vertical "TITAN" on the front cover, which used to be done with a very subtle embossing, is now just part of the image. Plus the cover image itself is dead boring, beginning what will be a trend (at least Riker makes it onto this one, I guess, given all of the future installments are just ship images), after the first several books had excellent covers. Bring back Cliff Nielsen! And worst of all, we've gone from matte finish to glossy!

* If this is the rough stardate, how many digits does the precise one have?

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire

Mass market paperback, 499 pages
Published 2010
Acquired September 2012
Read January 2018

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Seize the Fire

by Michael A. Martin

Early 2381 - August 2382
The previous Typhon Pact novels thus far haven't been moored to an ongoing series; each featured a Deep Space Nine character, but neither was really a Deep Space Nine novel. Seize the Fire is, however, a Titan novel, despite the lack of subtitle, as well as a Typhon Pact novel, so I'll be considering it from both angles.

The Typhon Pact was promoted as giving readers insight into underseen Star Trek aliens, and thus Seize the Fire promises us insight into the Gorn. Well, unfortunately, anything interesting or insightful is a long time coming. Michael A. Martin focuses on the Gorn caste system, and it basically comes out to a monotonous tech caste good, military caste bad. There are two different military caste leaders, and both are depicted as barbaric belligerents without subtlety, even though they're on a mission to save their people from extinction. The Gorn captain in "Arena" was way more canny and principled than these guys even though he was primarily committing war crimes. Like, there's a basis for sympathy here that goes completely unused. We gain no real insight into the Gorn.

Occasionally the novel raises sort of interesting ideas, but it tramples over them. The Gorn scientist who spends a lot of time on Titan is a very adept mimic, imitating Riker's voice enough to get into the shuttlebay; Martin here is picking up on how the Gorn in "Arena" sent multiple messages to the Enterprise to bait it to Cestus III, including mimicking the base commander's voice. You could do something with this, presenting the Gorn as canny and adaptive but in Seize the Fire it's really jarring with how they're otherwise characterized. S'syrixx can't even get Federation names right in his internal dialogue, calling them things like "Rry'kurr" and "Troi-mammal" and "Tie-tan," but you're telling me he can imitate Riker's voice enough to fool his crew? The idea of genetic castes also seems interesting (and potentially ethically dubious; at the novel's end the "good" Gorn are just going to re-engineer the warrior caste to be more pliable!), but trust me, by the end of this novel you'll hope no one ever says "caste" ever again.

What really dampens any potential insight into the Gorn is that the Gorn-only scenes are just painful to read, not only because of the sledgehammer characterization, but because the poor characterization means all you have to hang onto are these terrible space names. When discussing the two Gorn commanders, Riker says at one point, "Krassrr isn't Gog'ressh," and I was like, He isn't? because I literally could not tell those guys apart the whole book. Plus there's some dopey space religion stuff, which flattens the Gorn, not expands them.

As a Titan novel, it's not much cop either. Riker and Titan are curiously inactive, spending much of the book just watching the Gorn while the reptiles prepare to "ecosculpt" an inhabited planet. When done right, Titan is my favorite novel series, back-to-basic Star Trek with a modern update, but the characters have no life here. There are so many ineffectual staff meetings it's like you're reading a caricature of The Next Generation. Which is weird, because it was a scene in a novel co-written by Martin that made Titan come alive to me, and that scene was about a meeting! (The Blue Table just chatting away in Taking Wing or The Red King, I forget which.) None of the characters pop, and they don't really have any kind of character threads, except that Vale goes from prejudiced against Gorn to still prejudiced against Gorn.

There are also times the book is just clunkily written, such as times a character does a thing that obviously indicates an emotion, and then the narration tells us that this emotion is obviously indicated. There are also a few times where it seems like the interesting things happen "off-screen" while we follow less interesting things, and then someone gets filled in on the interesting things. Why? Martin tries to cram exposition into dialogue, too, which weird given that this is not a tv show, such as this mellifluous exchange:

PAZLAR: Eviku and Chamish were the first to notice the pattern [...]
VALE: If anybody aboard Titan was going to find that sort of pattern, it would be our resident xenobiology and ecology experts.
PAZLAR: Apparently. Unfortunately, my expertise in those fields doesn't overlap all that much with that of the biospheric scientists. My specialties are cosmology and big-bore physics.

Like, there had to be a less clunky way of getting everyone's science specialties into the book. Surely Vale knows this! Though I'm not sure why it matters at all.

Between these factors, Seize the Fire makes for a dull read, and the weakest Typhon Pact novel yet. A poor exploration of the Gorn, and a dull novel otherwise.

Continuity Notes:

• Seize the Fire reconciles the different appearance of the Gorn in "Arena" and "In a Mirror Darkly" by indicating that the "Arena" Gorn was warrior caste, while the "In a Mirror Darkly" one was technological caste. Though this is compared to the various Xindi species, which doesn't really seem analogous at all.
• Riker thinks about a story that he heard that O'Herlihy and Lang, the two tactical officers who weren't Kelowitz that went to Cestus III with Kirk, weren't killed by the Gorn, but were tortured for years or decades for information. This is not mentioned again. I can only assume it's a reference to something, because it's totally irrelevant, and Michael Martin novels reference irrelevant things like it's his job, but if so, I don't know to what.
• A number of characters are skeptical that the ancient ecosculptor can be sentient. This makes little sense given the whole previous Titan novel was about artificial intelligence... and one of those artificial intelligences is standing right with the characters while they argue about this!
• Titan, since the events of Destiny, Over a Torrent Sea, and Synthesis, has returned to the Vela OB2 Association, the star cluster in the Gum Nebula that was the setting for the earlier Titan novel Orion's Hounds, though none of that novel's worldbuilding seemed to be in play here.
• Vale mentions that she learned to be an XO by watching Riker on two different Enterprises. This is wrong, as Vale came aboard the E-E after the Dominion War, replacing Daniels as chief of security. She did not serve on the E-D.
• The Prime Directive is said to explicitly invoke warp drive as a criterion for first contact-- thus causing a difficulty for Titan when the crew discovers a planet where the inhabitants have warp technology but not warp propulsion. This jarred me, as I never had the impression that warp qua warp was mentioned in the Prime Directive. We've seen Starfleet interact openly with pre-warp societies, and also the Prime Directive applies to species with warp technology (even the Klingons!). My personal impression of the Prime Directive is that it's probably a relative short rule with two centuries of accumulated judicial rulings because the idea of "natural development" is impossibly complicated. Warp drive is definitely an important criterion, but I never had the impression from the show that it was written into the actual Directive as the criterion.
• Also there's a joke about how even in-universe, "These Are the Voyages" is considered to be terrible. (Did Riker tell Troi that was how he felt about it?)

Other Notes:

• This one is a little long, and a little personal, but I feel it's worth mentioning in case it's influencing my judgement here. In Fall 2008, following a conversation at Shore Leave, Michael Schuster and I sent a couple pitches to editor Marco Palmieri at S&S. One of them was eventually accepted, and became the Myriad Universes story The Tears of Eridanus. The other was for a Titan novel where (in a subplot) the ship ran into a Gorn exploratory vessel charting the same planet as it. Marco responded that this fortuitously aligned with his plans for the Typhon Pact series. He said that fitting Titan in was a challenge, but our proposal showed a way with its depiction of Gorn exploration, which could be tweaked to incorporate the Typhon Pact. (He also said it wasn't very good!) On December 1 he e-mailed us to say some Destiny reading materials were coming to us to give us the background we needed; on December 4 we heard that he was fired, and his editorial replacement on the Typhon Pact project never answered any of our e-mails about it... and then the next year a Gorn/Titan novel by a completely different person was announced! So it goes. At the time I was upset, I think, but finally reading the book almost a whole ten years later it's like it's from another life.
• Deanna has really powerful empathy in this novel, reading the emotional intentions of distant fleets of Gorn in precise detail!
• I guess it's a thing that Typhon Pact novels will include extended irrelevant flashbacks; this one has a gratuitous chapter about mission from Tuvok's Excelsior days to do with the Genesis Project.
• A couple threads are set up (Tuvok's ecosculpting knowledge, something bad with White-Blue) which I guess will be picked up in future Titan novels; I see the next one is by Michael Martin again.

Archival Review: Star Trek: Corps of Engineers: Aftermath by Christopher L. Bennett, Loren L. Coleman & Randall N. Bills, Robert Greenberger, Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels, and Aaron Rosenberg

Trade paperback, 640 pages
Published 2006 (content: 2003-04)
Acquired November 2006
Read November 2007

Star Trek: Corps of Engineers: Aftermath

by Christopher L. Bennett, Loren L. Coleman & Randall N. Bills, Robert Greenberger, Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels, and Aaron Rosenberg

This is the first of the rebranded, trade paperback collections of the S.C.E. series, collecting the first eight eBooks following the da Vinci's return to space after the Galvan VI disaster.  As always (am I possibly biased?), the series provided cracking adventures, intriguing dilemmas, and solid character work.  My favorite from this volume is The Demon by Loren L. Coleman and Randall N. Bills, the intense story of a journey deep into a black hole, almost to its event horizon.  What struck me most, reading these all at once for the first time, is the (welcome) increased focus on Soloman in this volume-- Ishtar Rising is all about him, of course, but Buying Time and Collective Hindsight also contain some very good moments for my favorite Bynar, who seems to fall by the wayside a little more often than one might like.