Star Trek: Discovery

[Sildani]

At the risk of losing respect points (if I actually have any) from Mr. Kaiba, I did like New Frontier and Titan. I suspect you're more of a... purist, perhaps, than I am, or maybe you objected to the way the stories were written. Certainly, NF and Titan were NOT mainstream, Prime Directive Trek, if that makes sense. Still, I was entertained, and I liked how they did something different in Trek. 

As for how you could manage to tell stories in the mangled Prime continuity, well, send a ship on a five year mission, don't involve them too much, or at all, in Alpha/Beta Quadrant affairs, and concentrate on one new planet at a time. Let's put actual trekking back into Trek. 

[peter]

Star Trek franchise = 

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Sildani said:

At the risk of losing respect points (if I actually have any) from Mr. Kaiba, I did like New Frontier and Titan. I suspect you're more of a... purist, perhaps, than I am, or maybe you objected to the way the stories were written. Certainly, NF and Titan were NOT mainstream, Prime Directive Trek, if that makes sense. Still, I was entertained, and I liked how they did something different in Trek. 

Nah, taste is highly subjective... but you've certainly taken a level or two in "eccentric", being the first person I've seen admit to actually liking those books.  Most Trek fans I know who've actually read them tend to be (what's a nice way to put it?) "unsatisfied" with them.

I'm not sure I could call myself a purist with a straight face, since I grew up on a steady diet of all things Star Trek.  Both of my parents are Trekkies, and they reckoned Trek was more wholesome than what other kids my age were watching and reading regularly.  (I grew up in the Dark Age of Comic Books, when Liefeldian ultraviolence and terrible "bad girl" comics, so in hindsight I almost want to admit there was some wisdom in their decision.)  I had a pretty steady diet of Star Trek's novels, comic books, etc. back then.  Pocket Books' Star Trek: the Next Generation series of light novels was more hit than miss, IMO, but there was also a fair amount of genuine garbage mixed into what I got (e.g. The Return, Q-Squared.)  I even had bootlegs of the old Star Trek cartoon.

The problem I've got with a lot of the modern Star Trek Expanded Universe is that most of what's been written reads, IMO, like the very worst kind of fan-fiction.  (That hasn't actually stopped me from buying and reading most of it, but still...)

So much of it is just incredibly lazy writing.  Most of the writers don't seem to want to develop new characters or let go of existing ones, so every EU series falls into the same rut as the Star Wars EU almost immediately.  No character is ever allowed to retire, or fade from the spotlight, or live out a life in peace after their series-specific story arc ended.  Even death doesn't spare them from being dragged back for abuse by the EU authors.  It's the perennial "Enterprise is the only ship in range" problem writ small.  No event of import is seemingly permitted to happen without an established character or five at the center of it, even if it makes no sense that they would be.  Even nameless background characters who never had any dialog are suddenly of vital galactic import.

Take, for instance, the DS9 Relaunch novels:

Spoiler

Even though the Dominion wiped out the Maquis almost to a man, Ro Laren is inexplicably still alive and manages to not only land a job with the Bajoran Militia but also gets Odo's old job as chief of station security.  Garak is the right-hand man to the new head of the Cardassian Union, who is the nephew of the Legate that Kira accidentally outed as a reformist from "Second Skin" and "Ties of Blood and Water", and said Legate's real daughter who was set to kill and replace Kira not only shows up but becomes a major antagonist.  Opaka comes back somehow despite being killed and then marooned on a moon where nanites keep reviving people.  The parasites from "Conspiracy" become a recurring antagonist, one of the roughly eleventy billion coverups perpetrated by the Trill government (and, of course, they were first discovered by a Dax and Captain Christopher Pike.  The symbiont compatibility coverup comes out exactly as Sisko had threatened.  Brunt makes ANOTHER bid to become Grand Nagus.  The obstructive arsehole Starfleet Admiral in charge of the Bajoran sector is the baby from TOS "Friday's Child", and a million other things.  There's barely a single original thought in the series, and it's gone on for over a dozen installments.  Half of the plots revolve around contrived coincidences so paper-thin that they're impossible to take seriously unless the Prophets are involved (in which case they're not coincidences at all, but closing a predestination paradox).

Dax is the worst offender by a long stretch though.  Every single one of her hosts had some enormous impact on Trill and Federation history that usually involved another established character.  Lela Dax was a major government figure tangentially related to the parasite crisis from TNG "Conspiracy", Tobin Dax worked on the NX-02 Columbia's warp drive during her construction and was part of the Warp Seven program team AND was pals with Sarek's parents, Emony Dax had a fling with Dr. McCoy, Audrid was the (re)discoverer of the parasites and a colleague of Christopher Pike's, Joran Dax was killed by an earlier host of the same symbiont who later assassinated First Minister Shakaar, Curzon has more references than I could count...

Star Trek: Titan is just as bad in many senses...

Spoiler

The crew's holdovers include Riker, Troi, Nurse Ogawa, the girl from "Melora", Tuvok and his wife, and they even pillaged characters from other novels and the old Starfleet Academy comic series.  Troi names her firstborn for Tasha Yar and the first star she's given the honor of naming for her dead sister.  Most of the Romulans from Nemesis put in an appearance or two. Even the Star Trek cartoon gets mined for ideas and alien races to fill out the ship's crew, and bit part space monsters like the crystalline entity and the thing that was Farpoint station come back.  (Let's not even get into the nods to Star Wars and Lilo and Stitch.)

There's the tie-ins to Destiny and its ridiculous Borg War plots, the upheaval in the Romulan Empire from Nemesis, and of course having a happy marriage is insufficiently dramatic so anyone with a family has to get good and traumatized repeatedly.

Honestly, for my money, the worst bit isn't that it's borderline plotless continuity porn half the time... it's Riker.  The man used to be the XO on Starfleet's flagship.  He was the best of the best, and Titan drags him through the mud to an extent that even the series hanging a lampshade on it stops being funny.  The fourth pip on his collar must've come straight from Pandora's Box, because he's a bigger menace than Janeway.  At least Janeway left a couple of civilizations standing on her thoughtless, prime directive-flouting, arson murder and jaywalking rampage back to Federation space... Riker and company upset the socio-political order on EVERY PLANET THEY VISIT.  He's started more conflicts in five years as the USS Titan's captain than most Klingons start in a LIFETIME, and every time he does he's conveniently distracted from fixing it by trouble with the missus.  Forget naming the ship the Titan... it should've been the Mars, for Riker is the BRINGER OF WAR.  (Don't think I've forgotten that Janeway's the one who unleashed Riker on an unsuspecting galaxy...)

For a franchise that's all about peaceful exploration, Star Trek: Titan spends way, WAY too much time holding the conflict ball to work.  If I didn't suspect it'd cause a lawsuit, I'd write the publisher and suggest they change the name to The Star Trek Wars. 

 

 

Quote

As for how you could manage to tell stories in the mangled Prime continuity, well, send a ship on a five year mission, don't involve them too much, or at all, in Alpha/Beta Quadrant affairs, and concentrate on one new planet at a time. Let's put actual trekking back into Trek. 

That'd be a nice touch, I think... as long as they didn't change gears the way Enterprise did with an inexplicable war arc because they felt it wasn't action-packed enough.

Edited August 2, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Focslain]

@Seto Kaiba, your Titan rant was beautiful, thank you.

[Sandman]

@Seto Kaiba Wow on those DS9 and Titan summaries. Those do seem fanfictiony in the worst ways.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Focslain said:

@Seto Kaiba, your Titan rant was beautiful, thank you.

1 hour ago, Sandman said:

@Seto Kaiba Wow on those DS9 and Titan summaries. Those do seem fanfictiony in the worst ways.

It's completely insane, really... some nutter looked at the ensign whose only noteworthy deed in a Star Trek teleplay was to spill hot chocolate on Captain Picard and said "this is main character fodder".

(No I am not joking, she's the XO of the USS Da Vinci in the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers series.)

[peter]

The way things are going, I'd rather binge watch M7 than Destiny.

[Sandman]

1 hour ago, peter said:

The way things are going, I'd rather binge watch M7 than Destiny.

Yeah, I'd watch M& over Destiny (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2753526/) Any day as well.

[Chronocidal]

To be perfectly fair, the "horrible fanfic" model they seem to be following had a great start with Nemesis.

Between the long-lost brainwashed evil triplet hidden in the middle of nowhere and suddenly detected via plot device, the wacky old guy in an armored dune buggy car chase/shootout, the super-ultra-definitely-evil pleather-clad surprise-protagonist-clone villain gallivanting around in an invisible planet destroying WMD, the previously-unheard-of race of space vampire labor slaves finally deciding they want vengeance, the wacky old guy in a dune-buggy shuttlecraft corridor-chase/shootout, the super obvious Chekov's boomerang main character sacrifice (and subsequent complete negation of said sacrifice via insane robot clone logic), and... oh yeah, the "I'm not obviously evil enough yet, so let me just mind-rape someone" scene..

Yeah, there's nothing that's ever going to convince me that the outline for Nemesis wasn't unearthed from the bowels of some poor teenager's long-dead Livejournal account.  You can't fill that many squares on a "Bad Fanfic Bingo" board by accident.

Anyway... As far as Discovery goes, I have no expectations for anything of any sort of quality or entertainment.  If the rumors about Sarek's role in this are anything to go on, I almost want to suspect that they're trying to start a third timeline, so they can be contractually free from any of the licensing nonsense that seems to be overrunning the franchise. 

Maybe they'll just say that Original Spock went back and eliminated himself from the timeline so Nero never destroyed Vulcan, and now we have a third copy of the universe where somehow there's no Spock at all, and they use that to explain that the main character is Sarek's replacement goldfish.  

 

[peter]

31 minutes ago, Sandman said:

Yeah, I'd watch M& over Destiny (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2753526/) Any day as well.

Destiny, Discover....may as well be the same thing at this point, hahaha!

[electric indigo]

50 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

To be perfectly fair, the "horrible fanfic" model they seem to be following had a great start with Nemesis.

Between the long-lost brainwashed evil triplet hidden in the middle of nowhere and suddenly detected via plot device, the wacky old guy in an armored dune buggy car chase/shootout, the super-ultra-definitely-evil pleather-clad surprise-protagonist-clone villain gallivanting around in an invisible planet destroying WMD, the previously-unheard-of race of space vampire labor slaves finally deciding they want vengeance, the wacky old guy in a dune-buggy shuttlecraft corridor-chase/shootout, the super obvious Chekov's boomerang main character sacrifice (and subsequent complete negation of said sacrifice via insane robot clone logic), and... oh yeah, the "I'm not obviously evil enough yet, so let me just mind-rape someone" scene..

  

 

Let's have some pictures to your brilliant synopsis: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Nemesis/Pictorial-1.html

The only good thing about Nemesis is that it didn't succeed in destroying Tom Hardy's career before it started.

[peter]

21 minutes ago, electric indigo said:

Let's have some pictures to your brilliant synopsis: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Nemesis/Pictorial-1.html

The only good thing about Nemesis is that it didn't succeed in destroying Tom Hardy's career before it started.

That link was awesome, thanks, lol!

[Thom]

7 hours ago, peter said:

Star Trek franchise = 

Wow, that is an awesome trailer. When is that scene shown!?

[Chronocidal]

Dangit, I entirely forgot the entire interior corridor fight and "drop the enemy into the bottomless pit" scene.  Who built this ship, the Star Wars designers?

[mechaninac]

^ Or the same ones who designed the N.S.E.A. Protector?

 

Parody a parody that parodies a franchise primed for parodying, exactly because of things like ST:V and Nemesis... an oroboros or a chicken and the egg paradox...

[Mazinger]

Regarding Bird of Prey designs, I recently put together a LEGO mini-MOC of one the be along the same scale as a refit Enterprise.  I started to get concerned about whether they were in scale together and went looking for specs on how they compared and was surprised to see that basically they all have the same outline but can be of just about any size since the Great Houses do indeed build 'em to fit their particular moods (really whatever the writer needs for the episode or movie.)

They go from small crews of 2 people to TNG Enterprise D size behemoths, albeit without the wing maneuverability of the smaller vessels. 

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/bop-size.htm

Edited August 3, 2017 by Mazinger

[Mazinger]

2 hours ago, peter said:

That link was awesome, thanks, lol!

Indeed! The internet delivers yet again!

[Sildani]

That was cathartic. Nice. 

I never saw Lilo & Stitch in its entirety, so I missed the reference. As for the war-mongering, the PD has been ignored/raped/modified so many times it doesn't phase me anymore. Looks like Discovery won't care too much about it either. 

I think a Trek with constancy, good physics, and hard exploration would work today if done well. The Martian did well, didn't it? That's what I'm going for. 

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

To be perfectly fair, the "horrible fanfic" model they seem to be following had a great start with Nemesis.

Between the long-lost brainwashed evil triplet hidden in the middle of nowhere and suddenly detected via plot device, the wacky old guy in an armored dune buggy car chase/shootout, the super-ultra-definitely-evil pleather-clad surprise-protagonist-clone villain gallivanting around in an invisible planet destroying WMD, the previously-unheard-of race of space vampire labor slaves finally deciding they want vengeance, the wacky old guy in a dune-buggy shuttlecraft corridor-chase/shootout, the super obvious Chekov's boomerang main character sacrifice (and subsequent complete negation of said sacrifice via insane robot clone logic), and... oh yeah, the "I'm not obviously evil enough yet, so let me just mind-rape someone" scene..

Yeah, there's nothing that's ever going to convince me that the outline for Nemesis wasn't unearthed from the bowels of some poor teenager's long-dead Livejournal account.  You can't fill that many squares on a "Bad Fanfic Bingo" board by accident.

Well, when you put it like that... yeah, I can totally see it.

The Star Trek: the Next Generation movies never were my cup of tea, but I did feel like there was a pretty steady downward spiral in quality once they bucked the trend of even numbered movies being good.  Generations was kind of forced and ended on what is arguably the worst pun in Star Trek history, but IMO First Contact is where the rot really set in.  Star Trek makes a goddamn zombie movie.  That was pretty evidently the point where ANY idea, no matter how stupid, would get a pass.  I do appreciate that Jean-Luc Picard's inability to win a fistfight in any context continued to the bitter end, with him getting the snot kicked out of him by a clone of himself in a rainbow pleather onesie.

 

 

4 hours ago, electric indigo said:

Let's have some pictures to your brilliant synopsis: http://www.stardestroyer.net/Nemesis/Pictorial-1.html

De-lightful!

 

 

2 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Dangit, I entirely forgot the entire interior corridor fight and "drop the enemy into the bottomless pit" scene.  Who built this ship, the Star Wars designers?

I want to know where that damned pit IS.  As big as the Sovereign-class is, there's no rational place to have a goddamn pit surrounded by bare metal rails.  I know Starfleet doesn't have much time for OSHA, but still...

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Mazinger said:

Regarding Bird of Prey designs, I recently put together a LEGO mini-MOC of one the be along the same scale as a refit Enterprise.  I started to get concerned about whether they were in scale together and went looking for specs on how they compared and was surprised to see that basically they all have the same outline but can be of just about any size since the Great Houses do indeed build 'em to fit their particular moods (really whatever the writer needs for the episode or movie.)

They go from small crews of 2 people to TNG Enterprise D size behemoths, albeit without the wing maneuverability of the smaller vessels. 

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/bop-size.htm

Yeah, they've rationalized that as them being a variety of different sizes... the design apparently scales pretty well, and has held up for ages.

The one area of inconsistency I wish they'd clear up is where the warp field coils are.  The early Bird of Prey from Enterprise had a pair of dorsal nacelles, but I've seen stuff for the classic Bird of Prey claiming it has either a single warp nacelle internally along the centerline, or that the EPS feed to the wingtip disruptors also feeds warp coils in the surface of the wings.

 

 

5 minutes ago, Sildani said:

That was cathartic. Nice. 

I never saw Lilo & Stitch in its entirety, so I missed the reference. As for the war-mongering, the PD has been ignored/raped/modified so many times it doesn't phase me anymore. Looks like Discovery won't care too much about it either. 

I think a Trek with constancy, good physics, and hard exploration would work today if done well. The Martian did well, didn't it? That's what I'm going for. 

Remember those high gravity world aliens that spread the rumor that they were massively heavy to stop people picking them up?  Physiologically, they're Stitch.  It's right there in their description.  (Hearing a Klingon quote Yoda was quite an experience in its own right.)

Discovery looks like it's taking the Enterprise route... from what we've been told, the first episode or two are going to be a "nice job breaking it, hero" for the main character, which will lead to some kind of prolonged conflict with this new band of Klingon religious nuts.  It's not completely terrible, but it doesn't really feel like Star Trek anymore.

[sh9000]

I don't think I'll watch Discovery.  

Happy 30th Anniversary STTNG.

 

[Sandman]

On 8/2/2017 at 0:47 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's completely insane, really... some nutter looked at the ensign whose only noteworthy deed in a Star Trek teleplay was to spill hot chocolate on Captain Picard and said "this is main character fodder".

(No I am not joking, she's the XO of the USS Da Vinci in the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers series.)

Came across this video that relates to what you were saying. My reaction was ....wow. There is so much quitting Starfleet and rejoining starfleet that they must have a revolving door installed at the main recruitment office.

[tekering]

On 8/3/2017 at 1:54 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The problem I've got with a lot of the modern Star Trek Expanded Universe is that most of what's been written reads, IMO, like the very worst kind of fan-fiction.

I was under the impression that all of it reads like the very worst kind of fan-fiction...  Certainly, that's the reputation Star Trek novels have within the literary sci-fi community.

Seriously, what Star Trek books would you actually recommend?

[JB0]

On 8/2/2017 at 2:47 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's completely insane, really... some nutter looked at the ensign whose only noteworthy deed in a Star Trek teleplay was to spill hot chocolate on Captain Picard and said "this is main character fodder".

(No I am not joking, she's the XO of the USS Da Vinci in the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers series.)

That's funny, because I was skimming the last couple pages, saw the part about "the books are all about the main characters doing everything and everyone being connected to someone from before" and thinking "Not Corps of Engineers! Aside from Scotty, the cast was all-new!". I guess if you grab a small enough bit part, people won't realize you grabbed anything at all.

 

I still liked Corps of Engineers, though. It was very different from the usual Trek book, and the lack of main characters combined with unusual premise let them mess around in interesting ways.* Darn shame the series didn't sell very well(being sold as eBooks in a pre-Kindle world didn't help).

 

I think I dropped out of Trek books around the time they did a 4-book interseries crossover about... demons banished to the far corners of the galaxy, I think? That sounds completely insane, but I am pretty sure it is a thing they did and not a fever-dream. I mostly just remember it was REALLY bad, even by the standards of the market. Voyager and then Enterprise were giving me all the bad Trek stories I could handle, I didn't need print to fill that void in my life. (The real problem: Janeway Binks darn near killed Trek for me.)

I ALMOST came back to the books after Enterprise, when I saw the first post-Enterprise book to come out was dedicated solely to undoing the entire final episode. Because that was a beautiful thing, and I loved how FAST it happened. But no. I read very few Voyager novels(possibly only the one), and no Enterprise novels.  Had to move on to unlicensed science-fiction.

 

 

*Similarly, on the other side of the Trek/Wars fence, I always loved the X-Wing books. No one more important to the franchise than Wedge Antilles on the main cast, and screw jedi power creep. Instead of the Han, Luke, and Leia Power Hour, it was a bunch of franchise-nobodies doing all these things that the regular cast can't get away with. There was also a tension that's absent from most of the stories because they can and do write some of them out.  I'd also argue they were more Star Wars-y than the mainline books, but opinions may vary.

[Seto Kaiba]

15 hours ago, tekering said:

I was under the impression that all of it reads like the very worst kind of fan-fiction...  Certainly, that's the reputation Star Trek novels have within the literary sci-fi community.

Nah, there are some Star Trek Expanded Universe works that read like merely bad fan fiction rather than the very worst kind of fan fiction. 

I've noticed the Relaunch novels tend to be among the very worst of a bad lot much of the time, but the Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch seems to be working quite hard to reach "least bad" territory and has had a few installments that were significantly less awful than the franchise average.  The quality of any given Enterprise Relaunch novel seems to be dependent on a linear relationship between the number of reused TV series characters and the number of bad fan-fiction tropes resulting from their presence.  Readability increases in direct proportion to the percentage of the cast that didn't appear in the TV series, marking a pretty noticeable jump in quality beginning with the change of author at the start of the Rise of the Federation miniseries and the ensuing benching of almost the entire TV main cast.  I'm still wading through that particular literary sewer... I'm currently three books into the Rise of the Federation series, and I have a nasty suspicion Christopher Bennett's about to stumble HARD with Uncertain Logic.

That's not to say the all-original ones are automatically better... the Star Trek: New Frontier novels are some of the worst tripe to be committed to paper, but that's mainly because they're written by an author (Peter David) who is responsible for some of the cringiest moments in the Relaunch and clearly doesn't know a pen from a hole in the ground.

 

 

Quote

Seriously, what Star Trek books would you actually recommend?

... I'll let you know as soon as I find one I'd consider "good".  

Among the ones I would consider "least bad" would be several of the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation novels including Masks and Gulliver's Fugitives, and the Department of Temporal Investigations books (which may be "least bad" because they're less Star Trek than they are a very thinly veiled parody of Doctor Who and The X-Files).  There's also something to be said for the completely ridiculous, almost to the extent of self parody, How Much for Just the Planet?.

 

 

8 hours ago, JB0 said:

I ALMOST came back to the books after Enterprise, when I saw the first post-Enterprise book to come out was dedicated solely to undoing the entire final episode. Because that was a beautiful thing, and I loved how FAST it happened. But no. I read very few Voyager novels(possibly only the one), and no Enterprise novels.  Had to move on to unlicensed science-fiction.

It was funny, initially, how much effort The Good That Men Do put into bashing the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise... but oh my god what followed it was a million, billion times worse than almost anything Enterprise had.  Trip Tucker, space spy?  Their Romulan War arc was so bad I'd rank it as some of the worst SF I've ever read, next to the Luceno/Daley Robotech novelization.

They've announced a series of tie-in novels to Star Trek: Discovery written by Kirsten Beyer, the clueless hack behind the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch from the end of Star Trek: Destiny on... a choice that bodes ill for their quality considering how much of that reads like it was written by a person coming off the anesthesia after having their wisdom teeth out.  I'm not sure if planning a novel series this early in the game is going to make for early installment weirdness, or if there'll simply be so much weirdness that it won't matter. 

The third trailer for the TV series certainly is not encouraging me... Sarek seems to be kind of a racist prick in this one, which is odd for a guy whose day job is in Vulcan's diplomatic corps, and they're playing up the VFX so much it's almost like we're about to get an expensive, vapid, CGI action series rather than science fiction.

 

 

Quote

*Similarly, on the other side of the Trek/Wars fence, I always loved the X-Wing books. No one more important to the franchise than Wedge Antilles on the main cast, and screw jedi power creep. Instead of the Han, Luke, and Leia Power Hour, it was a bunch of franchise-nobodies doing all these things that the regular cast can't get away with. There was also a tension that's absent from most of the stories because they can and do write some of them out.  I'd also argue they were more Star Wars-y than the mainline books, but opinions may vary.

I've read very few Star Wars EU novels, but most of the ones I've read didn't impress me any... I'll say the Thrawn trilogy was definitely the best of the lot, and miles better than anything Trek has fielded in EU books by my estimation.  It was nice to have an antagonist who was good at what he did rather than simply being appointed-by-fate due to Space Magic.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Dynaman]

A good Star Trek Novel is "The Final Reflection".  I don't think I've ever read any others.

[Mommar]

Thrawn and the first three or four X-Wing books are good.  Everything else, eh.  Never read any of the Star Trek novels except for the Generations Novelization, and that was only because I'd heard a bunch of stuff was cut from the film that the book had (seeing that Kirk in Orbital Skydiving action figure at Target made me curious where it came from.)  It's not really necessary to read Trek novels, we have hundreds of hours of Television plus a lot of movies.  Star Wars was largely contained to the three films (I'm going to ignore Droids, Ewoks, Battle For Endor and The Christmas Special because nobody should remember those things...) 

Edited September 7, 2017 by Mommar

[Sandman]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nah, there are some Star Trek Expanded Universe works that read like merely bad fan fiction rather than the very worst kind of fan fiction. 

I've noticed the Relaunch novels tend to be among the very worst of a bad lot much of the time, but the Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch seems to be working quite hard to reach "least bad" territory and has had a few installments that were significantly less awful than the franchise average.  The quality of any given Enterprise Relaunch novel seems to be dependent on a linear relationship between the number of reused TV series characters and the number of bad fan-fiction tropes resulting from their presence.  Readability increases in direct proportion to the percentage of the cast that didn't appear in the TV series, marking a pretty noticeable jump in quality beginning with the change of author at the start of the Rise of the Federation miniseries and the ensuing benching of almost the entire TV main cast.  I'm still wading through that particular literary sewer... I'm currently three books into the Rise of the Federation series, and I have a nasty suspicion Christopher Bennett's about to stumble HARD with Uncertain Logic.

That's not to say the all-original ones are automatically better... the Star Trek: New Frontier novels are some of the worst tripe to be committed to paper, but that's mainly because they're written by an author (Peter David) who is responsible for some of the cringiest moments in the Relaunch and clearly doesn't know a pen from a hole in the ground.

 

 

... I'll let you know as soon as I find one I'd consider "good".  

Among the ones I would consider "least bad" would be several of the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation novels including Masks and Gulliver's Fugitives, and the Department of Temporal Investigations books (which may be "least bad" because they're less Star Trek than they are a very thinly veiled parody of Doctor Who and The X-Files).  There's also something to be said for the completely ridiculous, almost to the extent of self parody, How Much for Just the Planet?.

 

 

It was funny, initially, how much effort The Good That Men Do put into bashing the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise... but oh my god what followed it was a million, billion times worse than almost anything Enterprise had.  Trip Tucker, space spy?  Their Romulan War arc was so bad I'd rank it as some of the worst SF I've ever read, next to the Luceno/Daley Robotech novelization.

They've announced a series of tie-in novels to Star Trek: Discovery written by Kirsten Beyer, the clueless hack behind the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch from the end of Star Trek: Destiny on... a choice that bodes ill for their quality considering how much of that reads like it was written by a person coming off the anesthesia after having their wisdom teeth out.  I'm not sure if planning a novel series this early in the game is going to make for early installment weirdness, or if there'll simply be so much weirdness that it won't matter. 

The third trailer for the TV series certainly is not encouraging me... Sarek seems to be kind of a racist prick in this one, which is odd for a guy whose day job is in Vulcan's diplomatic corps, and they're playing up the VFX so much it's almost like we're about to get an expensive, vapid, CGI action series rather than science fiction.

 

 

I've read very few Star Wars EU novels, but most of the ones I've read didn't impress me any... I'll say the Thrawn trilogy was definitely the best of the lot, and miles better than anything Trek has fielded in EU books by my estimation.  It was nice to have an antagonist who was good at what he did rather than simply being appointed-by-fate due to Space Magic.

I one of the few that think the Thrawn trilogy is awful. I don't understand how people think it so good. It's completely overrated to me. I can see people liking it at the time it was released mainly because it was one of the limited numbers of merchandise that were available at the time. But now ...

It's interesting you don't think much of Peter David. He's considered a great writer in the comics field and has a huge following. The only ST novel i read of his was Vendetta which I remember being good at the time (when it came out what 20 years ago?). But it definitely had fanfiction elements of connecting eve3rything in ST. I'm not sure I would like it as much if I reread now.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Sandman

[Seto Kaiba]

42 minutes ago, Sandman said:

I one of the few that think the Thrawn trilogy is awful. I don't understand how people think it so good. It's completely overrated to me. I can see people liking it at the time it was released mainly because it was one of the limited numbers of merchandise that were available at the time. But now ...

I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but several of my friends are... and I'm fairly certain the Thrawn Trilogy's big draw is Thrawn himself.  The actual plot is a fairly mediocre Star Wars form letter plot, but Thrawn himself carries the series by being a wicked cultured magnificent bastard who puts the New Republic and all of the principal characters on the ropes and keeps them there for the whole series with little more than a keen grasp of psychology and psychological warfare.  He's not The Chosen One or an evil space wizard... he's just crazy smart.  It's like space villain Batman.

 

Quote

It's interesting you don't think much of Peter David. He's considered a great writer in the comics field and has a huge following. The only ST novel i read of his was Vendetta which I remember being good at the time (when it came out what 20 years ago?). But it definitely had fanfiction elements of connecting eve3rything in ST. I'm not sure I would like it as much if I reread now.

Seriously?  Having read a fair sampling of his Star Trek work for the Pocket Books TNG series and Star Trek: New Frontier, I have a really hard time believing anyone could regard him as a writer at all... let alone a great one.  The only Trek authors whose work I'd rank below his are Bill Shatner (for The Return), David Mack (for Star Trek: Destiny), and Kirsten Beyer (for her role in the Voyager relaunch).

I can kind of see how a lot of the stuff he tried with New Frontier would be more at home in superhero comic books though... especially the fricking space kaiju.  Maybe being locked into a comic book mindset would explain why so many of his Trek novels are so bad they stand out in an expanded universe justly famous for terrible writing.  (One reason I'm dreading the Star Trek: Discovery novels... they're being written by someone even worse than him.)

Edited September 7, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Mommar]

8 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I'm not a big Star Wars fan, but several of my friends are... and I'm fairly certain the Thrawn Trilogy's big draw is Thrawn himself.  The actual plot is a fairly mediocre Star Wars form letter plot, but Thrawn himself carries the series by being a wicked cultured magnificent bastard who puts the New Republic and all of the principal characters on the ropes and keeps them there for the whole series with little more than a keen grasp of psychology and psychological warfare.  He's not The Chosen One or an evil space wizard... he's just crazy smart.  It's like space villain Batman.

It's also the fact he's not a classic cackling villain who murders whoever disappoints him.  I always remember the part where Luke has his X-Wing tucked in the back of a freighter and uses a charge to blow the ship so as he's speeding away from Thrawns Star Destroyer the debris shields him from the Tractor beam.  The gunner facing Luke attempts to change something about what he's doing (this was over twenty years I read it so details are light) but whatever it is Thrawn notices and questions him about it.  The gunner explains he knew the debris would throw off the tracktor beam and he attempted to compensate for that.  Even though it failed Thrawn is impressed with his quick thinking and orders the guy be promoted on the spot.  That's not something you see from villains anywhere, ever.  In every other story the villain is shown they're evil by tossing the gunner out an airlock, which is comically stupid.  Thrawn was menacing because he knew what he was doing.

Edited September 7, 2017 by Mommar

[F-ZeroOne]

The details are very hazy for me now, but at one point Thrawn does execute a crewmember for something to do with the tractor beam problem - something about the tractor beam operators supervisor not instructing the operator that Lukes trick was a possibility.

[Mog]

21 hours ago, tekering said:

Seriously, what Star Trek books would you actually recommend?

If you liked Garak from DS9, I'd recommend A Stitch in Time.  It was written by the actor that portrayed the character, fills in a lot of Garak's backstory, and goes a little into how Cardassia was post-Dominion War.

I also read the first two books of the DS9 Relaunch.  They weren't too shabby.  Considering she was the first Bajoran character we ever met, I understood why they wanted to put Ro Laren on the station.  I also didn't mind the new characters they introduced:  a 100-year old Starfleet commander (tons of experience, elderly equivalent), an Andorian (a race we hadn't really seen since TOS), and a Jem'Hadar that Odo sends back to experience more than just fighting and war (and that brings up unresolved issues for Nog).  I also liked the idea of Ezri considering the command track.

Now, I can't really speak to anything that happens after these books or the direction they took these characters afterwards.  But there was enough "meat" there to pique my interest.

[Sandman]

I didn't get the Ezri becoming a captain in the expanded media. I just don't see her becoming a captain. There's a tenancy for these novel writers to make everyone become a captain or admiral. Not everyone becomes a captain. I was so glad in DS9 when they didn't have Jake join Starfleet - unless some novel writer has changed this.

[Mog]

If I remember correctly, Ezri had to take command of the Defiant, and her memories of captaining as Jadzia (during the Dominion War) came back to the forefront.

In this particular case, at least there was some basis from the TV series for the career path switch.

Edited September 8, 2017 by Mog

[Seto Kaiba]

26 minutes ago, Mog said:

If you liked Garak from DS9, I'd recommend A Stitch in Time.  It was written by the actor that portrayed the character, fills in a lot of Garak's backstory, and goes a little into how Cardassia was post-Dominion War.

In my experience, Star Trek's actors usually do a pretty poor job writing... especially ones who are writing books about their own characters.  Bill Shatner can't seem to resist trying to use his books as soapboxes to settle the Kirk vs. Picard thing in his favor like in The Return.  J.G. Hertzler turned Chancellor/General Martok into a Klingon King Arthur when he wrote a duology for the Deep Space Nine Relaunch.  

 

26 minutes ago, Mog said:

Now, I can't really speak to anything that happens after these books or the direction they took these characters afterwards.  But there was enough "meat" there to pique my interest.

Remember how annoying all those early episodes of Deep Space Nine that harped on the Bajoran religion with all that not-allegory-for-middle-eastern-religious-fundamentalism-honest writing?  That's basically Kira's entire story arc until the end of Unity when Sisko comes back and Bajor finally joins the Federation.  There was some kind of aggressively-enforced "one character trait per character" limit in the DS9 relaunch prior to Unity, so everybody's lives revolved around one particular trauma or psychological problem.

(The first rule is that, if there was any kind of important event in the last 300 years, a Dax was bloody well there for it and critically involved.  Even the Enterprise Relaunch isn't safe from the tyranny of Dax.)

 

2 minutes ago, Sandman said:

I didn't get the Ezri becoming a captain in the expanded media. I just don't see her becoming a captain. There's a tenancy for these novel writers to make everyone become a captain or admiral. Not everyone becomes a captain. I was so glad in DS9 when they didn't have Jake join Starfleet - unless some novel writer has changed this.

Ezri Dax's arc is one of the few that actually make a modicum of sense.  She never had any kind of training to be Joined, so she doesn't know how to balance all of her past lives with her current existence.  Once circumstances force her to start drawing heavily on her past lives for experience and skills, it all starts to run together for her to the point that she starts calling herself by the wrong name and her personality starts to change as her wilting violet self gets overwhelmed by more assertive former hosts like Curzon and Jadzia.  Since there isn't a way to separate her from the symbiont without killing her (until the Worlds of DS9 books) she just has to make peace with the changes to her personality.

[Sildani]

I very much liked a TOS-era novel, Doctor's Orders by Diane Duane. Kirk and Co. investigate a planet that's home to three discrete sentient species, and when Kirk beams down to do some diplomacy he vanishes. Before that, to teach Bones a lesson, he leaves him in command. After that, McCoy initiates a desperate search for Kirk, aided by Spock and the other Enterprise crew, and eventually the Klingons appear (there's a reason given) and Bones has to deal with them, and then the Orions show up and all hell breaks loose. 

What I really like about it is it spotlights the member of the Triad that never got too much attention, and the fact that Duane didn't write McCoy as being totally out of his depth. He's new, he's scared to death, but he's competent and possesses a tremendous amount of common sense and canniness.