John Jackson Miller

This was definitely my favorite of the last three Knights of the Old Republic volumes. It features the most wacky hijinks of any of them. "Prophet Motive" was my favorite of the three stories in the book; in it, Zayne, Gryph, and company try to put one over on the galactic planet exchange, but end up way over their head, of course. It's fun, it has good roles for all the characters, what else could you want? I love rogues-pulling-a-con-that-goes-wrong story, and this is a nice one. The other show more two stories ("Faithful Execution" and "Dueling Ambitions") are pretty good, too, especially the latter, which has more complicated cons-- and an even more complicated fall-out. show less

I have come to appreciate these ebook novellas: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing comic (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating show more his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet.

This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo.

The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage.

It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City. This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now.

Continuity Notes:

• Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm...
• Various commenters have pointed out that when this book was released, it contained a number of continuity errors: characters present who shouldn't have been, incorrect bits of backstory. One of the benefits of the ebook format is that the publisher can push a change out, so that the edition I read was fine!

Other Notes:

• I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience.
• I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral.

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The most recent Star Trek: Discovery novel once again has no scenes aboard the title ship. Instead, this book follows a year in the life of the USS Enterprise, showing what it was doing during Discovery's first season, leading up to its appearance in the season one finale, and retro-foreshadowing some of season 2.

I've always been a fan of Captain Pike's Enterprise-- I used to have a website on a shitty free hosting platform devoted to it-- and I was disappointed that the first Discovery show more novel, Desperate Hours, didn't quite lean into its Pikeness more. So of course I enjoyed this. At first it's a pretty action-y novel, as the Enterprise explores a dangerous region of space and ends up beset by aliens who kidnap a big chunk of the crew. Fun but disposable. But about halfway through, something dramatic happens, and the novel gets contemplative and atmospheric. I loved the difficult situation everyone ends up in, and I loved how they all handled it, and how it reveals so much about these people. Great big set pieces, awesome visuals of things I surprisingly can't remember being doing in Star Trek before. But also nice little touches, such as Nurse Carlotti's problem, or the role of shipwreck narratives. There are also some nice moments where the book joins

Miller also does a good job with the characters. His Captain Pike captures everything I liked about Anson Mount's portrayal, his Spock is excellent, and he does a strong job with other mainstays like Number One, Yeoman Colt, Nhan, and Doctor Boyce. I also really enjoyed the original character of Galadjian (I hope we see more of him somewhere, but I know by Discovery season 2 he's not around), and I was surprised by he journey Miller took Connolly on. At first the guy annoyed me just as he did in the season 2 premiere, but by novel's end, I understood and liked him and felt bad about how he was depicted in "Brother." Which, I guess, is what a good prequel does!

I'm not totally convinced by every aspect of the joining up, and some of the continuity-smoothing moments are groaners, but overall I really enjoyed this. I've been reading John Jackson Miller's Star Wars comics for over a decade, but this is the first prose fiction and the first Star Trek work I've read from him. He nails it in this universe as much as he did in that one. show less

Read enough of an author's work, and you begin to notice what interests them, their recurrent themes and obsessions. LibraryThing tells me I own twenty-six books with contributions by John Jackson Miller, of which I have read seventeen, from 2006's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to 2023's Strange New Worlds: The High Country. As a writer, Miller is often interest in cons and grifts, hoodwinking other, misdirections, sleights of hand, these are all things his villains love to do, but show more also his protagonists. This is so blatant that in the KOTOR comics he has a grifter actually named "Gryph"! There's a lot of illusion and trickery especially in his novel Picard: Rogue Elements, but a fair bit too in the long con of The High Country. (You can see why they got him to write a Section 31–themed Discovery novel, though I didn't read that one)

Book 1 of Prey is all about a long con, one of the longest cons of all. The Enterprise-E is summoned to help transport various members of the House of Kruge to a ceremony to honor them, in order to set up the House's participation in a vital negotiation between the Khitomer and Typhon powers. The House of Kruge has been leaderless since the events of The Search for Spock a century ago, no squabbling family member able to achieve dominance over another. But when the ceremony comes under attack, it turns out that there's an agenda a work, one that's been in action for a full century!

John Jackson Miller has a good grasp of character voices, but the problem with a novel about a con being run on our heroes is that they largely spend it reactive—and for the most part, the reader is ahead of them. It's pretty obvious that Galdor, gin'tak of House Kruge, is up to something and in league with the assassins who attack the summit even before this is explicitly revealed, but it's something our heroes still don't know after 383 pages. This is a long time to read about main characters who continually react to crisis after crisis, making no headway in understanding what's going on. Like his writer, Galdor is moving all the pieces into position for a dramatic payoff in future installments... but that doesn't necessarily make for riveting reading on its own. (And, unfortunately, as can often be the case with stories of deception, who Galdor was pretending to be was kind of more interesting than who he turned out to actually be.)

Like with Takedown, I felt that Miller handled the screen characters well in the sense of capturing their voices, but less so in the sense that it doesn't really feel like the book matters to them. This is even true with Worf, to whom the events of the book ought to matter a lot. What's at stake for his character? Kahless, I guess? Honor? But these stakes come across as more hypothetical than actual. The nonscreen characters, though, are there in name only, if at all. (Though, it's not Miller's fault if Šmrhová doesn't have a personality.) The previous Next Generation novel, Armageddon's Arrow, did a good job of giving the Enterprise crew little bits and bobs, but this pulls back from that, much as it also pulls back from the Enterprise's suppose renewed mission of exploration yet again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good twists, and some strong action. But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for.

Continuity Notes:

• It feels like a weird thing to complain that I wanted more continuity references in a book that manages to tie the events of Search for Spock to those of DS9's "Captive Pursuit," but I thought it was weird how vague the references to Insurrection were given this takes the Enterprise back to its setting. Picard never thinks, "Oh Anij who I claimed to want to spend hundreds of days with is close by" or anything like that.

Other Notes:

• There's an extended flashback in the middle to the Enterprise-A bumping into the "Unsung" Klingons. I felt like this went on a bit, and again, it seemed like there should be more character stuff at stake, especially for Kirk. Meeting a group of discommoded Klingons who refuses to do anything at all as their ships drift to their doom seems like a good Star Trek Adventures scenario, I'll have to remember that.
• When Cross was unmasked, I immediately thought, "Oh, it's The Wizard of Oz." One page later, Cross is quoting the movie and calling its title character a hero. Korgh thinks that he "rather doubted the hero of any children's story would appreciate the worship of a man who had helped engineer the decapitation of one of the great houses of the Klingon Empire." Korgh needs to read The Land of Oz, where we learn the Wizard was willing to hand an innocent baby off to a wicked witch in order to guarantee his own power, ending a royal line.
• Cross is a nice lively character among the often dour, honor-obsessed Klingon cast. I hope we get a good amount more from him in books 2 and 3.
• I don't feel that Martok came across as very well; he has to be a bit of a dunce for things to work.
• Today I learned that it's spelled "painstik" for some reason.

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