Review: Before Dishonor
Nov. 20th, 2009 06:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenI stopped reading Star Trek novels a while back, when they seemed to abandon standalone stories in favour of an increasingly byzantine continuity with seemingly endless crossovers and a galaxy spanning crisis every other month. I’d heard they’d killed off Captain Janeway a while back, but I’d largely forgotten about it until jedinic mentioned it in passing a few days ago. In the interests of getting some idea just what the hell’s been going on since I stopped reading, I thought I’d track down a copy of the relevant book myself – Peter David’s 'Before Dishonour', and see how her death was handled.
The answer? Badly, but no more so than anything else in this train-wreck of a book. Where to begin? Well, there’s the problems inherent in setting a TNG novel after Nemesis – Riker and Troi are off on their own ship and Data’s dead. I’ve got nothing against LaForge and Dr. Crusher, but there’s a real shortage of major characters when they're the most important ones left after Picard. Here, the author pads the cast out a bit by giving major roles to Seven of Nine and Spock. You might ask what role Ambassador Spock could play in a TNG novel about a Borg invasion, and the answer is… well, not a lot. I’m assuming the author just likes Spock – fair enough – but never seems to come up with a reason for him to be present.
I’m sure a decent author could tell a great story about the post-Nemesis Enterprise – but this isn’t it. There’s a bunch of new characters filling in the gaps in the crew – apparently they were introduced in previous TNG novels – but Peter David gives us no reason to like or accept them, culminating in a ludicrous plot where they try and take over the ship from Picard after disagreeing with his decision to ignore Starfleet orders. Again, handled well, this could be an interesting idea – Picard is, after all, not entirely without biases when it comes to the Borg, and in First Contact it did take an outsider, Lily Sloane, to make him see that – but it’s not handled with any subtlety here at all. Peter David has a problem, both here and in his other novels, in that he seems unable to portray opponents of the heroes as anything but bumbling incompetents. Besides, let’s face it – if you have a dilemma and Picard’s on one side, Spock’s backing him up, and the opposition is entirely people we’ve never seen before… well, it’s pretty obvious who the author wants you to side with.
Then again, even the canon characters are pretty poorly characterised; I get the impression David hasn’t actually seen much Voyager, and he seems to be writing Seven as Data. Worf’s a one dimensional caricature, and Picard is lacking any real depth. Besides poor characterisation, the tone of the book is oddly discordant – on the one hand, the narration is trying to convey a sense of imminent doom, while on the other hand, every other character is cracking jokes. The fact that very few of the jokes work doesn’t help –in particular here’s one recurring joke about a gift shop that seems to be lacking a punchline.
As for the plot – well, apparently a previous TNG novel had a Borg ship, cut off from the collective due to the events of the Voyager finale, enter Federation space. Picard stopped it, shutting it down before the ship could generate a new Queen. This book picks up from there, with Janeway heading out to investigate the ‘dead’ cube – which, of course, turns out to be not quite dead yet. The cube assimilates Janeway, uses her as its new Queen, and then starts heading for Earth, absorbing everything in its path.
There’s the beginning of a good idea here, with some early scenes indicating that the Cube itself is as much a Borg as the drones are. You could use that idea and the Cube’s isolation from the Collective as an excuse to return the Borg to what they were in their first appearance – no Queen, no Locutus, maybe even no assimilation; just this implacable mechanical force wandering space. That would certainly be more interesting that what we get, which is Queen Janeway cackling like a b-movie villain while – of all things – discussing her options with a drone ‘second’. I’m almost convinced the whole story is some sort of stealth parody of how the Borg concept has been misused and wasted over the years.
Then, just in case you weren’t already lost by this story being a sequel to a recent TNG novel, the book turns out to also be a sequel to David’s 1991 TNG novel “Vendetta”. Now, let’s be fair – David used to be a damn good writer and Vendetta is one of his best. That’s kind of the problem – this book’s bad enough on its own, and referencing his previous work just serves to remind the reader that he can write the TNG crew well, he can write tense, exciting stories with the Borg – that hell, he used to be able to pull off a story like “The Doomsday Machine vs. The Borg” without it seeming absurd. Here, not so much, and it doesn’t help that his ‘sequel’ contradicts his earlier work in several places – it’s bad enough he’s having trouble writing canon characters and concepts well, but when it’s his own creations he’s having trouble with it’s just pathetic.
As for Janeway – well, she spends most of the book as an assimilated Borg Queen. As Queen, her powers seem vague and her motivations unclear – somehow, Spock mind-melding with Seven at Vulcan is something she’s aware of, and causes her to attack Earth – which she promises to spare if Picard and Seven are turned over to her. In general, the book seems unsure if she’s been possessed by the personality of the normal Borg Queen or if her actions are being influenced by the darker side of Janeway’s own personality. Considering how often assimilated Janeway gets a chapter or two to deliver exposition – one particularly odd scene has the female Q from “The Q and the Grey” appearing in the Cube for seemingly no reason other than to give Janeway an audience – you’d think her motivations would be somewhat less murky, but like I said, the characterisations tend to be so bad it’s impossible to discern anything.
And then she gets killed when Seven of Nine delivers the anti-Borg software puzzle from “I, Borg” into the collective. Why the assimilated Janeway is destroyed by this while Seven survives – despite the novel mentioning several times before that it would be a suicide mission – isn’t explained. Then again, the next scene has Janeway being guided to the afterlife by the female Q, so coherency and explanations have largely been abandoned by this point in the novel.
Now, personally, I rather fell if you’re going to kill off a captain, you should do it in their own continuity, not as part of someone else’s novel. You probably shouldn’t have them spend practically the entire book as a villain either. Then again, I might be willing to be more charitable if any of this was at all well written – Peter David has been a decent author in the past, which makes this so baffling in its lack of quality. It reads like a first draft written by someone with only the most minimal knowledge of Star Trek or its characters.
I’m sure a decent author could tell a great story about the post-Nemesis Enterprise – but this isn’t it. There’s a bunch of new characters filling in the gaps in the crew – apparently they were introduced in previous TNG novels – but Peter David gives us no reason to like or accept them, culminating in a ludicrous plot where they try and take over the ship from Picard after disagreeing with his decision to ignore Starfleet orders. Again, handled well, this could be an interesting idea – Picard is, after all, not entirely without biases when it comes to the Borg, and in First Contact it did take an outsider, Lily Sloane, to make him see that – but it’s not handled with any subtlety here at all. Peter David has a problem, both here and in his other novels, in that he seems unable to portray opponents of the heroes as anything but bumbling incompetents. Besides, let’s face it – if you have a dilemma and Picard’s on one side, Spock’s backing him up, and the opposition is entirely people we’ve never seen before… well, it’s pretty obvious who the author wants you to side with.
Then again, even the canon characters are pretty poorly characterised; I get the impression David hasn’t actually seen much Voyager, and he seems to be writing Seven as Data. Worf’s a one dimensional caricature, and Picard is lacking any real depth. Besides poor characterisation, the tone of the book is oddly discordant – on the one hand, the narration is trying to convey a sense of imminent doom, while on the other hand, every other character is cracking jokes. The fact that very few of the jokes work doesn’t help –in particular here’s one recurring joke about a gift shop that seems to be lacking a punchline.
As for the plot – well, apparently a previous TNG novel had a Borg ship, cut off from the collective due to the events of the Voyager finale, enter Federation space. Picard stopped it, shutting it down before the ship could generate a new Queen. This book picks up from there, with Janeway heading out to investigate the ‘dead’ cube – which, of course, turns out to be not quite dead yet. The cube assimilates Janeway, uses her as its new Queen, and then starts heading for Earth, absorbing everything in its path.
There’s the beginning of a good idea here, with some early scenes indicating that the Cube itself is as much a Borg as the drones are. You could use that idea and the Cube’s isolation from the Collective as an excuse to return the Borg to what they were in their first appearance – no Queen, no Locutus, maybe even no assimilation; just this implacable mechanical force wandering space. That would certainly be more interesting that what we get, which is Queen Janeway cackling like a b-movie villain while – of all things – discussing her options with a drone ‘second’. I’m almost convinced the whole story is some sort of stealth parody of how the Borg concept has been misused and wasted over the years.
Then, just in case you weren’t already lost by this story being a sequel to a recent TNG novel, the book turns out to also be a sequel to David’s 1991 TNG novel “Vendetta”. Now, let’s be fair – David used to be a damn good writer and Vendetta is one of his best. That’s kind of the problem – this book’s bad enough on its own, and referencing his previous work just serves to remind the reader that he can write the TNG crew well, he can write tense, exciting stories with the Borg – that hell, he used to be able to pull off a story like “The Doomsday Machine vs. The Borg” without it seeming absurd. Here, not so much, and it doesn’t help that his ‘sequel’ contradicts his earlier work in several places – it’s bad enough he’s having trouble writing canon characters and concepts well, but when it’s his own creations he’s having trouble with it’s just pathetic.
As for Janeway – well, she spends most of the book as an assimilated Borg Queen. As Queen, her powers seem vague and her motivations unclear – somehow, Spock mind-melding with Seven at Vulcan is something she’s aware of, and causes her to attack Earth – which she promises to spare if Picard and Seven are turned over to her. In general, the book seems unsure if she’s been possessed by the personality of the normal Borg Queen or if her actions are being influenced by the darker side of Janeway’s own personality. Considering how often assimilated Janeway gets a chapter or two to deliver exposition – one particularly odd scene has the female Q from “The Q and the Grey” appearing in the Cube for seemingly no reason other than to give Janeway an audience – you’d think her motivations would be somewhat less murky, but like I said, the characterisations tend to be so bad it’s impossible to discern anything.
And then she gets killed when Seven of Nine delivers the anti-Borg software puzzle from “I, Borg” into the collective. Why the assimilated Janeway is destroyed by this while Seven survives – despite the novel mentioning several times before that it would be a suicide mission – isn’t explained. Then again, the next scene has Janeway being guided to the afterlife by the female Q, so coherency and explanations have largely been abandoned by this point in the novel.
Now, personally, I rather fell if you’re going to kill off a captain, you should do it in their own continuity, not as part of someone else’s novel. You probably shouldn’t have them spend practically the entire book as a villain either. Then again, I might be willing to be more charitable if any of this was at all well written – Peter David has been a decent author in the past, which makes this so baffling in its lack of quality. It reads like a first draft written by someone with only the most minimal knowledge of Star Trek or its characters.