Peter Morwood (1956–2025)

Love it. It's a tearjerker, but not trying for it - just telling its story, which is fantastic (in every sense of the word). I wish he'd heard the story of the strange visitors _before_ his dream...but then, maybe there wasn't one before. A great little adventure with some very deep thoughts behind it. Also an excellent invocation of a particular time (or times, actually) in Northern Ireland.

The Romulan Way is widely considered one of the best classic Trek novels for good reason. Written before Star Trek: The Next Generation began to form a more solid canon interpretation of the Romulans, the novel gives an insight into the culture and history of a race millennia old, similar to Duane's treatment of the Vulcans in Spock's World. The Romulans are rendered in careful detail as a powerful, passionate, honorable, and highly independent people who are at the same time highly show more distrustful of outsiders and deeply isolationist. In order to prevent a civil war on Vulcan between the followers of Surak, who prized logic and restraint, and the followers of the Romulan founder S'task, who valued passion and power, the Romulans left to find a new home, and invented their own language and religion along the way.

Interwoven with this account of Romulan history is a framing story involving Dr. McCoy's capture and imprisonment for war crimes by the Romulans -- an incident planned by Starfleet in order to send McCoy to investigate a deep-cover Federation spy on ch'Rihan (Romulus) whom they fear has "gone native." We see the current state of the Star Empire -- in a politically fractious place after the events of the preceding novel, My Enemy, My Ally, in which a high-ranking Romulan officer betrays her own people to prevent government-sponsored atrocities -- through the eyes of both McCoy and the spy, Arrhae, who is masquerading as a servant in a Romulan noble house. Arrhae -- born Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto -- still recalls her loyalty to the Federation, but has grown to love the Romulan people and worlds as well, and the tension between these serves to drive much of her story.

As usual, Diane Duane is a master of her craft; she writes both humans and aliens with believability and fluidity, in a distinctive, lyrical language. The characters always feel like real people, rather than cardboard cutouts. Her cowriter (and husband) Peter Morwood is as skilled an author; to this day I can't tell who wrote what, which I suppose must be a good thing.
Most of all, both of these authors love Star Trek, and it shows. show less

Oh Diane Duane let me love you. (Also Peter Morwood! I went specifically looking for their collaborations, and this did not disappoint.)

This is so full of tasty metafictiony jokes and references and fondness for people being dorks (subjects of dorkery include but are not limited to: historical TV shows, spacesuits, archeology, and food) that I may need a good dose of Lacan to clear my palate. No, wait. I wish every book were this fun. I wish every book had this kind of happiness at its show more core.

The pacing is a little off — I feel like the resolution could have used another....twenty pages, maybe? I can't quite put my finger on it, but for a story which handles the frustrations of its central characters as connected to their motivating bureaucracy, the plot wraps up remarkably quickly. And I am not thrilled that every single character with a precisely delineated Earth-based origin is from the UK (the Midlands, Scotland, and Wales, and there may be one or two others). And please let the word "inscrutable" be stricken from every single scene that an Asian character appears in, in every book, ever. (This happens only once, to Duane & Morwood's credit, but it was not their finest moment.)

Basically: this is a character-based book. The infodumps from the earlier Space Cops books — which I've not read — are handled well, the plot is a little ridiculous and contrived, but Joss and Evan are AWESOME. (I'm a little sad that David, the Asian guy who runs Sichuan, the awesome-sounding restaurant — if that is based on a real place, as I suspect it is, I want to know where — never turns up again after he is so badass, and I would've loved to see Mary Helen be a little more physical in the final fight, but whatever.) I love how much they like each other. I love that they have injokes and things they need to explain to each other and I love they protect each other and I love they understand that the other is a person for whom they don't get to make decisions. I honestly thought they were dating in the first few chapters, and I would have taken odds of them doing so by the end of the book. Thankfully, this is why we have Yuletide.

(Diane, seriously, they are AWESOME. I love them.) show less

An interesting story - as much for what's left out or just mentioned in passing as for what's explained. There's a lot about the Alban culture and the whys of it (though I don't think they ever explain the disdain in which sorcery is held), rather neatly set into the interstices of an invasion story from the point of view of the invader. Aside from the poacher early on, we basically see the whole story from Talvalin's viewpoint, and thus from an (introspective) Alban viewpoint.