Star Trek: Discovery

[Mommar]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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.

This actually sounds like a good story.

[JB0]

4 hours ago, Sildani said:

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. 

I love that book. True story: I think it is the only Trek book I actually OWN as opposed to having just borrowed from the library.

The other one that sticks out in my mind, and honestly skews more towards the bad fanfic side of the equation, was The Kobayash Maru. The main plot thread is Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, McCoy, and Scotty  everyone but Spock and Uhura are stranded in a damaged shuttle and killing time before Spock rescues them by swapping stories. The topic of the no-win scenario crops up, and next thing you know the three are telling each other how they handled the most famous test in Starfleet Academy.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, Mommar said:

This actually sounds like a good story.

It would've been, had it actually been the focus of a story... but it's treated as a mildly interesting background event during the USS Defiant's postwar survey of the gamma quadrant since, like the crew of Riker's USS Titan, the Prime Directive seems to have slipped the minds of Vaughn's whole crew on the USS Defiant.  With the crew destabilizing, then meddling in the development of, each and every alien culture they meet, Ezri's personal problems are completely overshadowed by their cause... the Prime Directive violations she's meddling in... and by the problems they cause for her relationship with Bashir.

They're then completely forgotten by the time she and Bashir are conveniently on Trill when all of the Trill government's eleventy billion dirty little secrets come out, nearly toppling the government via a popular uprising against the Joined, causing an attempted genocide of the symbionts that is mostly successful, and nearly getting Trill kicked out of the Federation after it's revealed that they were responsible (albeit semi-indirectly) for the parasite crisis from TNG's "Conspiracy" and all of their subsequent shenanigans , as they'd created the damn things in the first place, attempted to exterminate them on Kurl, and tried to keep it covered up by assassinating high-profile infected using stolen Federation personal stealth equipment.

[Sildani]

Huh?

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Sildani said:

Huh?

Hm?

[Mommar]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hm?

Wooza wuzzle?

[Thom]

1 hour ago, Mommar said:

Wooza wuzzle?

Don't have to read that one now...

[Sildani]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hm?

No, I was... incredulous. 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Mommar said:

Wooza wuzzle?

Wobuffet!

 

1 hour ago, Sildani said:

No, I was... incredulous. 

Heh.  The various Star Trek Relaunch series suffer from so many different nonsensical kudzu plots that the thing with Ezri doesn't even make the top twenty, and the thing with Trill's government and the thirty conspiracy pileup only barely charts thanks to the multi-train wreck of Star Trek: Destiny, Star Trek: the Fall, Star Trek: Typhon Pact, the post Destiny part of the Voyager relaunch.

It's a safe bet the Star Trek: Discovery novels will very swiftly climb that unenviable ranking given that their first author is set to be Kirsten Beyer, the author responsible for making the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch the worst of the relaunch series.  If they're tapping an author whose idea of brilliant writing is a Starfleet that's lost over 40% of its strength having USS Voyager restored to factory spec and lead a fleet into the delta quadrant for no goddamn reason, Janeway coming back from the dead to prevent the omega molecules from ending a few billion years early for some reason that isn't properly explained, the Klingon devil being a real thing and ripping off the Andorian reproductive crisis for the Klingons, and Species 8472 coming back for no reason.  I don't mean to imply the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch's Project Full Circle arc is only fit for use as emergency toilet paper... I mean to say it quite plainly as an honest fact.  

Edited September 9, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Mommar]

When did Janeway die???

[Seto Kaiba]

9 minutes ago, Mommar said:

When did Janeway die???

Vice Admiral Janeway gets assimilated by the Borg and made into a new Borg Queen in Before Dishonor, part of the runup to the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy finishing Captain Janeway's abuse of the Borg in Star Trek: Voyager itself by revealing their origins, dragging them through the mud, then finally making them extinct.  She's killed off by the computer virus which Geordi designed to wipe out the Borg way back in Star Trek: the Next Generation's "I, Borg" after her Borg cube developed a weird new ability to absorb stuff ala The Blob instead of assimilating it, which it used to wipe out a fleet of thirty-six Federation starships in 97 seconds and then eat a Doomsday Machine, Pluto, and its moon Charon before Geordi's Project Endgame virus was introduced to the cube and it blew up taking Janeway with it.

In short, the Borg briefly turn on Godmode after assimilating Janeway because otherwise there'd be no way to take them that seriously as antagonists anymore after Voyager and First Contact, and Janeway dies when the server turns cheats off.  

[Mommar]

15 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 ...after her Borg cube developed a weird new ability to absorb stuff ala The Blob instead of assimilating it, which it used to wipe out a fleet of thirty-six Federation starships in 97 seconds and then eat a Doomsday Machine, Pluto, and its moon Charon...

...

You didn't even make this up did you..?  Somebody actually wrote this garbage didn't they?

[Chronocidal]

Comparatively, using V'GER as the origin of the borg feels like a wonderful idea.

[JB0]

8 minutes ago, Chronocidal said:

Comparatively, using V'GER as the origin of the borg feels like a wonderful idea.

I thought it was the other way around, the Borg were the origin of V'Ger.

[Mommar]

I don't like either of those V'Ger ideas at all.

[Chronocidal]

The basic idea made some sense, and I actually imagined it might be the case long before that novel came out.  Blending organic and machine material into an organism obsessed with learning?  Easy explanation.

Also completely negated by the Borg existing long before that.  But it was an interesting idea at least.

Anyway, I thought it was more that the blending of V'Ger at the end of TMP resulted in a new organism that went back to the machine planet, and re-prioritized their existence.  The Borg don't seem like the kind of species that would send V'Ger back to its home planet in the first place.

 

Edited September 9, 2017 by Chronocidal

[JB0]

5 hours ago, Mommar said:

I don't like either of those V'Ger ideas at all.

I never said it was a GOOD idea. Though it apparently originated with Roddenberry himself before getting passed around to virtually everybody.

[Seto Kaiba]

13 hours ago, Mommar said:

...

You didn't even make this up did you..?  Somebody actually wrote this garbage didn't they?

Yes, this is a thing that someone actually wrote and published as a series of novels... Peter David actually wrote the book where Janeway snuffs it, so you can understand why I'm reluctant to believe that the man is capable of writing that isn't garbage.

 

 

13 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Comparatively, using V'GER as the origin of the borg feels like a wonderful idea.

Personally, I'm not so sure... in Star Trek: the Motion Picture V'Ger didn't see organic life as anything more than an infestation of vermin in its creator's universe, so it doesn't quite fit for V'Ger to have created a race of cyborgs based on organic life to be its advanced reconnaissance party.  It's less dumb than the idea that V'Ger went off and spawned a race of living ships that roved the galaxy collecting samples of intelligent life as a kind of roving space-zoo.

I've yet to read a Borg origin story that WASN'T stupid... but I have to admit the Borg being built on a nested predestination paradox in which the Borg are created by a race of nanotechnological hikkomori accidentally sending themselves and the NX-02 crew they were holding prisoner back in time to become the Borg and then in the future going back and causing the accident that caused them to accidentally create the Borg was a masterpiece of bad writing that managed to singlehandedly ruin almost every aspect of the Borg in one fell swoop.  

 

 

13 hours ago, JB0 said:

I thought it was the other way around, the Borg were the origin of V'Ger.

Nah, V'Ger is supposedly the creation of a race of sentient machines who found the probe after it fell through a wormhole and decided to rebuild it and send it home out of the goodness of their hearts.

(Of course, in The Next Generation, the writers weren't exactly consistent on whether the Borg wanted to assimilate everyone or evolve past the need for organics.)

 

 

7 hours ago, JB0 said:

I never said it was a GOOD idea. Though it apparently originated with Roddenberry himself before getting passed around to virtually everybody.

If memory serves, Shatner tried to riff on that for The Return, where Kirk manages to destroy the Borg collective and its homeworld by destroying the core of the Borg collective which looks suspiciously like V'Ger's system core.

Edited September 9, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[Mommar]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yes, this is a thing that someone actually wrote and published as a series of novels... Peter David actually wrote the book where Janeway snuffs it, so you can understand why I'm reluctant to believe that the man is capable of writing that isn't garbage.

It's as if he read about Chewie dying via a moon crushing him and took it as some sort of challenge.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Mommar said:

It's as if he read about Chewie dying via a moon crushing him and took it as some sort of challenge.

Y'know, for a while there I would have bet cash money that Michael Martin, Peter David, Kirsten Beyer, and David Mack were engaged in a perverse one-upmanship contest over who could write the worst, most cliched Star Trek story.  Michael Martin got knocked out of the running by Christopher Bennett taking over the Enterprise Relaunch, but the others hit new and exciting lows for Star Trek with Destiny, The Fall, Typhon Pact, and so on...

[JB0]

11 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If memory serves, Shatner tried to riff on that for The Return, where Kirk manages to destroy the Borg collective and its homeworld by destroying the core of the Borg collective which looks suspiciously like V'Ger's system core.

Yeah, I think Shatner's novel is the most prominent actual USE of the Borg/V'ger connection. And, well, it is pretty bad. All Shatner's Trek novels read like bad self-insert fanfics with Kirk as some overpowered author wish-fulfillment avatar... which I guess they are. 

 

Really, I've long felt that the secret to a good Trek novel is to try NOT to make it a big deal. Don't write some galaxy-changing event, a multi-book saga, a universe-spanning epic, or a shocking revelation that will change the way you view X forever. Just pretend you're doing a TV episode with no budget restrictions or union contracts or star egos to assuage. All the best Trek books I ever read felt like they were "just another episode". Not every story needs to be Best of Both Worlds or Wrath of Khan.

 

 

Also, thank goodness no one is willing to tie into Star Trek V. Imagine if someone decided to write a book about the god trapped in the center of the galaxy.

Edited September 10, 2017 by JB0

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, JB0 said:

Yeah, I think Shatner's novel is the most prominent actual USE of the Borg/V'ger connection. And, well, it is pretty bad. All Shatner's Trek novels read like bad self-insert fanfics with Kirk as some overpowered author wish-fulfillment avatar... which I guess they are. 

Yeah, he loooooves to try to settle the whole Kirk/Picard thing in his favor every time he has the chance.  If there's a threat Picard faced, you can bet Shatner will write Kirk facing it first and doing a better job.

 

12 hours ago, JB0 said:

Really, I've long felt that the secret to a good Trek novel is to try NOT to make it a big deal. Don't write some galaxy-changing event, a multi-book saga, a universe-spanning epic, or a shocking revelation that will change the way you view X forever. Just pretend you're doing a TV episode with no budget restrictions or union contracts or star egos to assuage. All the best Trek books I ever read felt like they were "just another episode". Not every story needs to be Best of Both Worlds or Wrath of Khan.

Unfortunately, Star Trek's Expanded Universe authors don't seem to understand that happy little principle... so every plot is of galaxy-shaking import, most become a multi-book saga and the bigger ones become a multi-series crossover, almost all of them are determined to change the way the audience looks at a particular character or a past event from the Star Trek series or films, and the base level for new threats is "a threat to the whole Federation" and it only goes up from there.  After a while it starts to feel like the same plot problems from superhero comics... there are so many potentially-apocalyptic catastrophes happening so often that it's flat amazing the Federation/galaxy/quadrant/universe/multiverse lasted long enough for the double handful of protagonists to come along.

It's not even in "the Federation never exists if Jonathan Archer dies" territory like in Star Trek: Enterprise... this is so fiddly it's on the order of "the whole galaxy is doomed to be enslaved or destroyed if Jean-Luc Picard's tea goes cold before he can drink it".  There are so many dystopian alternate realities where one little thing changed the course of the entire galaxy's history that are encountered by dimension-traveling protagonists that it's amazing the Federation doesn't have planet-sized psych wards for people suffering from apocalyptic tangent reality traumatic stress disorders.

 

12 hours ago, JB0 said:

Also, thank goodness no one is willing to tie into Star Trek V. Imagine if someone decided to write a book about the god trapped in the center of the galaxy.

... I have some bad news for you.  They didn't write a book about it... it's a trilogy.

Q is responsible for bringing a number of different malevolent entities into the universe using the Guardian of Forever, including the Beta XII-A entity from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove", Gorgan from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead", and The One from Star Trek V: the Final Frontier.  It at least answered why "god" needed a starship... he'd been deprived of his physical body and imprisoned behind the great barrier by the Q Continuum for his crimes, and needed a physical body to pass through the barrier.

[JB0]

Bahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!! A Trek V sequel... a TRILOGY!?!?

 

Yeah, Trek books these days are a lot diffrent than when I was reading. More like Star Wars books. Seriously, guys. Leave the endless cavalcade of galaxy-spanning crises and heroic lineages to the other franchise. Get back to what makes Trek work. 

...

And more Sela cameos, plzkthx.

Oh. Never mind, the books did that too. And screwed it up.

[Seto Kaiba]

59 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Bahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!! A Trek V sequel... a TRILOGY!?!?

Yeah, the Star Trek EU has a terrible habit of trying to tie up every loose plot thread and make every minor one-shot character part of some greater scheme.  A lot of the seemingly or actually omnipotent entities and energy beings with delusions of godhood get filed under "Q Continuum Shenanigans".  Some got their powers from the Q (e.g. Gary Mitchell), some of them were brought into the universe from other planes of existence by Q (e.g. Gorgan, the Beta XII-A entity, "God"), and some were members of the Continuum who didn't bother to identify as such (like Trelane).

 

59 minutes ago, JB0 said:

And more Sela cameos, plzkthx.

Oh. Never mind, the books did that too. And screwed it up.

She was doing pretty well for herself until Double or Nothing and Death in Winter.  She always managed to bounce back from her failures and scheme her way back into power just in time to fail again and be sent back to zero.  Her skills in sucking up to the People Who Matter got her the top job at the Tal Shiar, by which point the writers appear to have run out of ways to abuse her, so she promptly bungled the op to steal quantum slipstream technology from the Federation.  She cocked it up so royally her own people imprisoned her and were preparing to extradite her to the Federation when she committed suicide.

[UN Spacy]

Okay Orville was pretty awful...don't think I'll be continuing it.

Discovery is two weeks away. 

[JB0]

Seto: I'm taking Star Trek Online for Sela canon. She was out of the system when the romulan sun blew up(#thanksspock), most everyone that opposed her was on Romulus and is now so much space dust, a power vacuum existed to exploit, the new empress of the Romulan Star Empire is a halfbreed with parents in two timelines. 

It is still fanfiction glorification of a minor character, but it portrays her in a positive light as someone who Gets Things Done and can seize opportunity when it arises instead of making her the galactic whipping girl.

 

ALL HAIL EMPRESS SELA.

 

 

In seriousness, I liked her occasional appearance as "the romulan officer we already know". Anyone could be there, but she managed to insert a minor additional wrinkle due to that unusual familiarity. Just warped in from time to time to annoy the Enterprise-D on the odd otherwise-minor operation, and stir up that ambiguous-to-the-crew question of "Is she REALLY the child of a parallel-universe time-travelling dimension-hopping Tasha Yar?" once more. 

One of the older books Data admitted to maintaining a database of all their encounters and accumulated knowledge about her in an attempt to eventually prove or disprove her claims(I believe his emotionless butt said it was due to the effect she had on the rest of the crew), and it was a minor detail I enjoyed. Just the idea that this suspiciously-familiar romulan with a crazy story could dredge up all this baggage just by wandering through from time to time.

[Mommar]

I said Orville would be awful and wouldn't be the "Star Trek" everybody wanted.  Nobody listened to me.  Seth MacFarlane isn't that funny when it's anything to do with real-life acting.  There was one singular laugh out loud moment in the entire show that actually played to twisting a sci-fi trope but the rest of it was just terrible toilette/gag humor.. 

[Sandman]

 I didn't realize Orville was out.

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

Okay Orville was pretty awful...don't think I'll be continuing it.

Really?  I figured the first episode of Orville would be pretty weak but my hopes for it are still higher than they are for Discovery.

 

3 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

Discovery is two weeks away. 

Two weeks away, and I'm still more enthusiastic for another godawful Enterprise relaunch novel than I am for it.

It's kind of traditional for the first episode of a new Star Trek series to be dreadfully camp and awkward, so I'm taking it as read that the first episode's script wouldn't get a passing mark in a community college creative writing class.

(As much as I'm expecting the show to fail miserably, I'm hoping they never stoop as low as TNG's "Code of Honor"...)

 

 

1 minute ago, JB0 said:

Seto: I'm taking Star Trek Online for Sela canon. She was out of the system when the romulan sun blew up(#thanksspock), most everyone that opposed her was on Romulus and is now so much space dust, a power vacuum existed to exploit, the new empress of the Romulan Star Empire is a halfbreed with parents in two timelines. 

It is still fanfiction glorification of a minor character, but it portrays her in a positive light as someone who Gets Things Done and can seize opportunity when it arises instead of making her the galactic whipping girl.

 

ALL HAIL EMPRESS SELA.

Ah, I've never played Star Trek Online... I kind of burned out on MMOs back in the bad old days of Phantasy Star Online.  I will admit your summary doesn't sound anything like as bad as Sela's characterization in Star Trek: the Next Generation and the novels, where her arrogance and ambition set her up to fall with all the regularity of Wile E. Coyote.  From what I've gathered, the Online timeline diverges considerably from the Relaunch novels.  Jack Verse mentioned to me there was already an Enterprise-F in that, so what the heck happened to the Enterprise-E?  Did Picard wreck another one?  If so, he's officially gunning for Chakotay's record as wrecker-in-chief.

 

 

1 minute ago, JB0 said:

In seriousness, I liked her occasional appearance as "the romulan officer we already know". Anyone could be there, but she managed to insert a minor additional wrinkle due to that unusual familiarity. Just warped in from time to time to annoy the Enterprise-D on the odd otherwise-minor operation, and stir up that ambiguous-to-the-crew question of "Is she REALLY the child of a parallel-universe time-travelling dimension-hopping Tasha Yar?" once more. 

One of the older books Data admitted to maintaining a database of all their encounters and accumulated knowledge about her in an attempt to eventually prove or disprove her claims(I believe his emotionless butt said it was due to the effect she had on the rest of the crew), and it was a minor detail I enjoyed. Just the idea that this suspiciously-familiar romulan with a crazy story could dredge up all this baggage just by wandering through from time to time.

I've never been able to bring myself to like the character, and felt that she was Denise Crosby's sour grapes attempt to get a piece of Star Trek: the Next Generation after having quit it because she wasn't convinced it'd take off.

What book was it where Data wasn't sure about her origins?  All the more recent stuff plays her "Yesterday's Enterprise" origin dead straight.

[Mommar]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I've never been able to bring myself to like the character, and felt that she was Denise Crosby's sour grapes attempt to get a piece of Star Trek: the Next Generation after having quit it because she wasn't convinced it'd take off.

What book was it where Data wasn't sure about her origins?  All the more recent stuff plays her "Yesterday's Enterprise" origin dead straight.

In her defense the first two seasons were pretty damn bad.

[Einherjar]

I started watching Cheers on Netflix and have a better appreciation for Morn from DS9.

[Sildani]

Met Morn's actor, Mark Allen Shepard, at a con once. Very nice guy, and a tai chi practitioner. He demonstrated some forms to entertain those of us in line for autographs. 

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, Sildani said:

Met Morn's actor, Mark Allen Shepard, at a con once. Very nice guy, and a tai chi practitioner. He demonstrated some forms to entertain those of us in line for autographs. 

I am, for reasons that should be obvious, intensely curious what his voice sounds like... Morn was supposed to be an irrepressable chatterbox, and never once spoke in the series itself.

(If they ever did a DS9 movie, I would expect nothing less than an epilogue in the form of a ten minute long piece to camera by Morn himself.)

[Mommar]

26 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I am, for reasons that should be obvious, intensely curious what his voice sounds like... Morn was supposed to be an irrepressable chatterbox, and never once spoke in the series itself.

(If they ever did a DS9 movie, I would expect nothing less than an epilogue in the form of a ten minute long piece to camera by Morn himself.)

How I wish there was a DS9 movie now.

[Dynaman]

No no, Morn must never speak on Camera.  Kinda like Khan taking off the other glove, it must not happen.