Christopher L. Bennett

Truly 2.5 stars rather than two.
The Buried Age gives us the story of Picard's life between the captaincy and loss of the Stargazer, up until the very beginning of TNG. Fantastic premise, great backstory that ST fans would love to have. Sadly, the execution is spotty and the story itself runs a lot longer than it needs to for the amount of plot we get.
The beginning of the book, detailing the loss of the Stargazer and survival of its crew is fantastic. As is the end up the book detailing show more Picard's taking command of the Enterprise. Characterization is spot on, we get some important plot elements, and it moves along at an acceptable pace. Following the loss of the Stargazer, Picard temporarily leaves starfleet. I don't love this as a plot point given his later anxiety over this same decision post-Wolf 359, but his shift back to working in the field of archeology still feels in character. There's definitely fat to trim in this section, as well as throughout his ensuing romance with an alien of a previously undiscovered race while researching a galaxy wide extinction event in pre-history, but it still moves along okay.
I think the real failing is somewhere between 2/3rd and 3/4s of the way through the page count. There's been a big twist with the archeological research and romance, most of the main and sub-plots are suitably resolved, we've hit climax, passed on into denouement...and yet the story keeps going? There's significant chunk there were it could have skipped straight to setting us up for the start of TNG with no significant impact on the story, but it just, keeps, going. Imagine if after the end of the of a well crafted episode of trek, before the credits, you had about 15 minutes of additional filler. Between that and fat trimming for earlier, this could easily have come in 50-100 pages shorter, which leaves the impression that maybe the author was padding it. show less

I had a mixed reaction to the first two Temporal Investigations books, which had some good ideas and were sometimes fun, but often got bogged down in continuity references that crowded out story. The third installment sees a format change, to novella, which makes it more focused and story-driven, plus we're all out of episodes to explain away, so Bennett has to come up with a plot that builds on Star Trek time travel, but isn't beholden to any previous story.

The result is delightful. Dulmur show more and Lucsly are inducting a new artifact into the DTI's vault when Agent Jen Noi (a contemporary of Enterprise's Daniels) pops up to claim it for the 31st century instead. Soon, Dulmur and Lucsly are being whisked away to an alternate 31st century, and then even further afield. It's just fun, and surprisingly given its length, it feels big. There's lots of great stuff here: Jena Noi using time technology in hand-to-hand combat, megastructures of the kind we rarely see in Star Trek, the awesome scale (and kind-of logic) of the Collectors' plan, the Borg T. rex(!), the way Garcia and Ranjea rewrite their own histories but don't even notice, Lucsly's reaction to being in the future being to keep his eyes closed so he can't contaminate the timeline, the TIA's method for beating the Collectors (a lot like Mudd's technique in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," actually). Sometimes Bennett's writing can get bogged down and clunky, but that's not true here; this book zips along, playful and entertaining.

It's not all roses; I was little annoyed the 24th-century agents trying to track down Dulmur and Lucsly have no real effect on the story, and the bit where Dulmur and Lucsly solve their personal issues by noting how the Collectors' problems parallel their own and give a speech about it is a bit on the nose. But fundamentally I really enjoyed this, and I look forward to reading future DTI e-novellas. Given how often I feel like Destiny-era novels take to long to get to the point, maybe all Star Trek books should be novellas?

Continuity Notes:

• I did wonder if I was being silly, pausing Cold Equations to read this, but in the end I'm glad I did, because 1) I wasn't enjoying Cold Equations very much whereas I did very much enjoy this, and 2) there are a few small but meaningful references to the Breen plot from Silent Weapons.
• There's a bit about how there was a brief, abandoned fashion for holo-communicators. At the time it was written, it was referring to the Deep Space Nine episodes "For the Uniform" and "Doctor Bashir, I Presume," but these days you can pretend it's a reference to their use in the 2250s in Discovery (although, the tech is said to be clunky, which isn't true of the Discovery version).
• I liked that Rom as Grand Nagus is making the Ferengi more conscious of the perils of time travel; given his experiences in "Little Green Men," it makes sense!

Other Notes:

• I continue to like how the 31st-century time agents are to the DTI as the FBI is to local police.
• A couple characters' rants feel too much like Bennett's own rants, and it threw me out of the story: the one about advanced technology the Federation ignores, and the one about how people confuse different alien species with the Preservers.
• It's a Christopher Bennett book, so people are constantly commenting on how attractive the women are.
• Some foreshadowing here-- what is the Body Electric?

show less

After its initial four-book run, there were a number of what I guess you might call "supplemental" books in the Typhon Pact series, beginning with this, the series's only eBook novella. Given my reaction to the original set of books, and this book's short size, I wasn't expecting much out of it, but to my surprise, it's the best Typhon Pact story thus far, the first to really deliver on the concept's storytelling potential, even if in a limited way.

Like most of the Typhon Pact series, it show more falls squarely into one ongoing series despite lacking one on its title page; in this case, it's a Next Generation novella, focusing on the Enterprise-E dealing with some of the political fallout of the formation of the Typhon Pact. In classic Next Generation style, we have A- and B-plots focusing on different characters. Picard, Worf, and Crusher on the Enterprise work to bring the Talarians (from TNG's "Suddenly Human," an episode I've actually never seen) into the expanded Khitomer Accords (the NATO to Typhon's Warsaw Pact), while Jasminder Choudhury and T'Ryssa Chen travel to Janalwa, the capital planet of the Kinshaya, where there's democratic political unrest against the theocratic government of the Pact's most reclusive member.

Each story on its own is interesting, and explores the repercussions of the Typhon Pact in a nuanced way. On Talar, negotiations are disrupted when women begin to demand more rights than the patriarchal government will allow them, which puts Captain Picard in an awkward position: the Federation promotes democratic ideals, but it also needs the Talarian government onside as a signatory to the Khitomer Accords, and so can't be seen to be supporting the rebels, even philosophically. It's a classic TNG-style moral dilemma, that only increases in complexity when Doctor Crusher is kidnapped by the female rebels.

The Janalwa plotline is also interesting. Freedom of movement has increased between Typhon Pact signatories, and Spock's Vulcan/Romulan reunification movement has been legalized on Romulus, meaning a contingent of Romulan reunificationists are travelling to Janalwa in solidarity with suppressed Kinshaya dissidents; the Kinshaya cannot act against these citizens of an ally they way they might against their own citizens, providing something of a shield for the Kinshaya. Choudhury and Chen in disguise join the Romulans, and the story explores some of the complexities of nonviolent resistance with fairly explicit references to both Gandhi and the Arab Spring, in a way that also ties into Choudhury and Chen's emotional development.

I enjoyed this plotline for how it extrapolated some of the political ramifications that might come from the establishment of the Typhon Pact. In creating an "anti-Federation," the Federation's enemies inadvertently enabled some of the Federation's ideals to flourish. In most of the Typhon Pact novels (Rough Beasts of Empire excepted), the Typhon Pact has mostly been evil antagonists without much complexity, so it's nice to see that reversed here.

If there's a complaint that I have, it's that I'm not convinced a novella should have both an A- and B-plot. Either plotline could have been expanded more: I can imagine another version of the Talar plotline where Picard did more, instead of fretting about what to do. And while I appreciate finally getting some insight into the Kinshaya here, we just scratched the surface on them; the set-up of the plot means that it felt like most of the friendly characters we met on Janalwa were Chen and Choudhury's fellow "Romulans." Seeing more of Kinshaya society would be nice-- as would be probing the limits of political resistance more. Bennett specifically cites Egypt as his primary inspiration, but the Arab Spring in Libya, for example, was wantonly violent at times. (Admittedly, the death of Gaddafi happened the same month the book came out, so Bennett couldn't exactly take it into account!) I could also imagine a version of this story where making the choice to be nonviolent is personally harder for Choudhury, as well.

But a novella doesn't give you the space for this, of course; I think The Struggle Within would have been even stronger as a short novel, or as a novella focused on a single plotline. But despite that, it's the best Typhon Pact story to date.

Continuity Notes:

• Choudhury shaves her hair and adopts mourning tattoos when she disguises herself as a Romulan, in the style of Nero and company from Star Trek (2009), picking up on a retcon first established in, I believe, the Countdown miniseries.

Other Notes:

• The scenes of the Kinshaya leaders using Breen troops to fire on their own citizens were very effective.
• Maybe I'm something of a prude, but Picard/Crusher sex jokes just don't sit right with me.

show less

I really liked this book. It centers around the star-jellies that we were first introduced in TNG S1E1 at Farpoint station. If you can I would recommend watching that again before you read this.

I felt they did really good exploring modern day political issuea, like gun control and hunting rights, in a way that TNG failed to do as if all human issues were already solved.

There are still too many characters to keep them all straight even 3 books in, and the premise of just how many giant space show more monsters this area of space has is a little unbelievable preventing this from getting 5 stars. show less