Now with the opening of the beta of Star Trek Online, be sure to read up on the back story… Or even if you’re not planning on playing the game, the developers have been filling up the timeline between the movie Nemesis and the start of the online game universe. (The new “Star Trek” movie is not considered)

It’s interesting to keep up on what’s new on the universe… specifically, Picard “retired” and Data took up as captain of the Enterprise.

It will be interesting to see if new books will keep up with this story, or if they will ignore it all-together.

You can read it here, and as with all blogs, to read in order you got to start with the last post and read cronologically backwards. The “interviews” are quite nice in themselves.

 I had trouble reading this one, I actually had to start over two times as it was a bit weary at first. The storyline is disjointed and it’s very slow to advance. Much was set to get a good feel of the world and it’s placement, but the action lost me a few times.

The ‘Chapel’ storyline was actually interesting, but it felt it did not actually play much into the rest of the plot, it might have as well have being a short story. (It seems that’s her on the cover!) Even so, it did was set into the general ‘theme’ of the story, so that might pass as a good thing.

The main ‘confrontation’ or ‘war’, was unhinged, with a not very believable end. Later on this type of ‘war-between-species’ on the same planet will be forever replayed, although this specific relationship was suprising, it works out into a science fiction mechanic. Star Trek does tend to focus on having actual science fiction into it (not unlike Star Wars, which is really fantasy in a SF setting).

There was a bit of a surprise at the end, I did not expect it at all, so that was pretty good also (although a bit disturbing).

This book was not that mediocre as others have been, it WAS entertaining at points, but there were lot of slow moving parts. It seems it was just minimally outlined and then hastily filled out. Lot of ‘angst’ and ‘contemplative-what-am-I-doing-here’ passages that I just sped-read through. I hope I’m getting better at this,  as this type of fluff actually helps.

It might have been better, but as I’ve detailed, most of this early books were just quick-n-dirty writes, just to get a story out published. The characterizations were mostly on point, although I feel Spock and McCoy were much more aggresive towards each other, with direct abusive remarks instead of the low, playful banter.

The big problem on “reading” these stories, is that you MUST play the game to get to it…

 Well… so to have the proper chronology, I consulted Memory Alpha’s Games post.

 The first is the Vectrex game, called “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, but it does not have any story at all, you just fly around fighting Romulans and Klingons… which totally breaks the name of the game, because on the movie there are actually no Romulans at all…

Also, the next novels deserve a good write-up, notably “The New Voyages 2″ (which is horrible) and “Mudd’s Angels”, which is actually somewhat nice, if you skip the novelizations.

Traffic has been slow here, I guess people do not search or read much on these old novels, but eh, I still think it’s nice to see how ST fiction evolved…

What should have been a nice novel by a recognized, Hugo and Nebula winner author, turns up to be bland space opera. It’s really a mediocre try by a good author, so most of the writing is nice and enjoyable, with some faint trace of science thrown in, but mostly it’s just an adventure in space. The interaction in the crew is not ignored however, and there’s a bit of banter and character-building, but it’s mostly just novel-filler.

Now here’s a very good example of a failed sci-fi story. Even though the author has comprehensive science knowledge (and displays it nicely), he does not really make good use of it, and falls into the more-powerful-being trap that plagues a lot of Star Trek episodes. This is definitively lazy writing. One’s attention is quickly caught at the beginning at the story, then you’re just waiting for a good sci-fi explanation of what’s going on, but it’s finally betrayed by a deus-ex-machina. It’s really been done before, and it has gotten real tiresome.

Also, some of the direction of the novel is misguided, it seems to continuously go into one direction, and then go off into another. Also, the whole plot renders the whole story into just a bunch of “adventure” happenings, which for a children’s book might appeal to a 5-minute-attention-span reader, but it’s just not enough for an adult audience.

“Planet of Judgement” delves a bit into the characters, has enough ‘tech’ content to justify it as sci-fi, but in general it’s just another forgettable story. If you like to read and just pass time with your favorite characters, this is actually nice. But if you’re looking for a good science-fiction story, or looking for something that expands the Trek universe, you just might as well skip it.

“Sleeping beauty,” Omne said. “You may perform the awakening–in the traditional manner, if you like.”

I absolutely hate the dialogues. They tend to be repetitive, speaking out the obvious, and in large parts “confrontational”, like bad fighting speeches. The writers like putting words in the mouths of the characters, and they drone on and on, most of the time getting nowhere, just talking of what they would do or not do, or challenging stupidly their adversary. This slows a lot the action on the book, and the pages go on and on while little is actually happening.

“Where I come from,” he said, “and in the civilized world, the custom is to ask permission to enter.”

“One does not ask permission of property,” Omne said.

“We have had that argument before.”

Omne smiled. “You lost.”

“Force is not an answer to argument”

“It is the last answer.”

Kirk shook his head, not deigning to answer.

The first time I could not even read it straight, I could not even comprehend how this was even published, or worse still, how Roddenberry himself read it and did not veto it.

 A very excellent plot synopsis and character analysis is available at Wikipedia, so I won’t recreate it.

There are also other comments how Omne is one of the greatest adversaries the Enterprise has encountered, but if you analyze it closely, there’s really no big merit on this character’s creation. He has no personality per se, he’s just a sounding board where the characters get to voice off. He’s over-simplified, and the planet he created is absolutely ridiculous. The planet is “westernized”, with guns provided, but this is not touched nor used later, it’s just the backdrop. The Romulan commander is also present, but besides being a plot device, it’s totally out-of-character and illogical why it’s there and why she acts that way.

There are lot of big holes in the premise, in the action, in the characters actions, in the theme, in the plot, the descriptions, etc. I won’t go further in trying to describe more of the awful problems this book has, it simply was written by worse than amateurs, in a horrible way. I hated it all the way, I can’t stand this type of careless writing or the style it’s written in. The closest I could compare it to would be to a romance pulp novel, but I have not read too many of those either. Maybe a romance-pulp-reader would like it more, or there’s something in there that I’m not getting, but I highly doubt it.

I would recommend that you skip this book. The plots are not even that interesting, and are nothing like what normal Trek is about. Better yet, skip the whole series, or anything written by these authors; there are lots of much better (or at least mediocre, but interesting) books out there.

Drawn by Gordon Purcell, it will contain a sequel to Fontana’s episode “The Enterprise Incident”, in which Kirk posed as a Romulan to capture a new cloaking device. THe story will detail what happens next.

I have seen but a few of the latest comics released, and some of the stories are really nice, even if they are a bit short by the comic format. If you like reading comics this will surely hold your attention for a while.

More info.

Many early novels put a lot of attention into the Vulcan character, as it was the most popular character then. The internal emotion/logic conflict also generated a lot of interest. On Spock, Messiah!, even though it was centered around Spock, it actually did not include him directly during most of the plot.

Here’s also a recurring plot device: the mind-altering bug/disease/poison/gadget that made a character to act in extreme ways. At the beginning of this book, it’s actually interesting to see how the mind-monitoring device went haywire with the science office, mashing his mind with an alien psychopath, making him a religious fanatic, but with all the abilities and capacities of the Vulcan mind.

The plot quickly spirals down into a western adventure in a alien planet. I quickly lost interest in the middle of it, and did not pay much attention to the details, just to the end where they ‘rescue’ Spock and everything returns to normal.

I would like to expand more about it, but there really is not much here.

At this point, there was a lot of demand for full Trek novels. This was not a very good try, it seems like just a quick write-up of a story to quickly fill a writing quota. I would not recommend it; skip it to other better written novels.