The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms

I've been trying to decide what I wanted out of this book. In some ways, The Fall is a loose mini-series; it's not like, say, Destiny, where you could publish the whole thing as one big book. But it is also not Typhon Pact; it's not just a set of books about a common situation, there's a sequence of plot developments that carry from book to book. The events of Revelation and Dust spark the events of The Crimson Shadow and A Ceremony of Losses; A Ceremony of Losses directly leads into The Poisoned Chalice; The Poisoned Chalice directly leads into Peaceable Kingdoms. At the end of The Poisoned Chalice, it's known that Ishan's chief of staff was responsible for the assassination of President Bacco, and Riker has reached out to Picard to show more try to stop it...

It feels to me this book thus needs to escalate from the previous books. Ceremony of Losses featured Starfleet ships firing on each other; Poisoned Chalice made you think enemies could be anywhere and everywhere across the galaxy. But Peaceable Kingdoms seems to deescalate the tension of the two previous books. It doesn't just do the same things over again, but does them less interestingly. While in Poisoned Chalice we met and got to know Ishan adherents, here they're all distant figures wearing black hats. While those stories went all over the galaxy, in this one, it's mostly about Crusher scrambling around on a desert planet, and the Enterprise investigating a freighter. It feels small when we need big. If this is a test of values... one never actually feels that Picard and the Enterprise crew are doing anything other than an ordinary mission. Give me Picard on the run or something.

It's also, well, boring. I never felt any tension during the bits where Crusher and (Tom) Riker were trying to stay out of the way of the people trying to stop them from uncovering Ishan's identity, and the Enterprise seemed to aimlessly meander. I struggled a lot with the flashbacks, too. The way Ishan's big secret plays out is too easy; we learn it early on, and from then, the only tension-- such that there is any-- isn't anything about Ishan, but just if Crusher can deliver the information. It was so easy to learn Ishan's secret, I expected some kind of further twist, but it never came.

It doesn't help that the bad guys are just not very good. In one part, La Forge gets a tip from Sonya Gomez that the da Vinci transported a special operations team pretending to be engineers from one civilian transport to another, and it was obvious to her that they weren't engineers. If you are in special operations and so bad at pretending to be engineers, why use a Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel as your transportation for no readily apparent reason?

The big weakness at the heart of the novel, and thus The Fall, is Ishan himself. As I highlighted in my review of Crimson Shadow, it's weird reading The Fall in 2020, because it so clearly reads as a commentary on movements like Trumpism and Brexit in some ways, even though it was published 2013-14. The revelation that Ishan is actually a Bajoran collaborator who killed the real Ishan and took his place during the latter days of the Occupation... it reads like wishful thinking about Trump. I feel like there was a school of thought out there that Trump was some kind of Russian plant, and if we could just unmask him, this would all be over. But the scary thing about Trump wan't that he has some kind of secret (though admittedly he has pretty bad secrets), the scary thing about Trump is that he was exactly who he said he was. That Ishan should have this secret dark past is wish fulfillment and an easy out. Oh, you don't like this guy's policies? Well, conveniently for you, he's actually a murderer and a liar. But what if Ishan had been above board? Or at least clean enough not to get caught? What would our heroes have done then? I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting (if difficult) novel than the one we got.

Continuity Notes:

• One reason I thought the Ishan story was fishy and too easy was that I felt like the novel was working so hard to convince that Ilona Daret was an old friend of Crusher's. There's this chapter where Picard and Crusher think about three different previously unseen adventures where they encountered Daret (pp. 26-7). My feeling was then whenever a Star Trek story tries to convince you a previously unseen character is such a pal, they're being set up for a betrayal (e.g., The Stuff of Dreams just a few books ago). Imagine my surprise when I looked something up on Memory Beta halfway through the novel and it turned out that Daret was in fact a preestablished character, from an insignificant anthology called The Sky's the Limit. No traitor at all, and not previously unseen, either. Except Dayton Ward spelled Daret's first name wrong. I bet the guy who wrote the original story was pissed.
• One of the flashbacks to Crusher and Daret is set on the Enterprise-D and includes Miranda Kadohata. Kadohata first appeared in the TNG relaunch novel Q & A, but it established that she had served about the Enterprise-D as well. Despite that, no work of fiction I am aware of had actually shown her on the Enterprise-D until now, some six years after she was introduced-- and some four years after she was written out!
• On p. 370, zh'Tarash says she will be serving out the remainder of Bacco's term... but A Time for War, A Time for Peace and Articles of the Federation seemed to establish that the new president after a special election serves out a complete four-year term, resetting the cycle. But in general there are a number of inconsistencies with the way presidential terms have worked in Destiny-era fiction.
  

Other Notes:

• People complain about Dayton Ward's tendency to recap too much; I didn't notice anything here, except in ch. 14, where Picard repeatedly thinks about things we know already from ch. 11. "In truth, the cargo run to the colony world was but one part of the ruse Admiral Riker had engineered as a means of giving Picard maneuvering room while the captain carried out a different, clandestine mission" (122). Yes, I know, because I read about it not even 25 pages ago! Later in ch. 14, there's a page-long recap of things the reader already knows about Bacco's assassination if they've been reading this very book.
• I said the bad guys were not very good... but on the other hand Velk has to be a Palpatine-esque master manipulator for this plan to work. How did he know that if Bacco was killed, he could persuade enough people on the Council to select Ishan as president pro tem?
• I have come around to the idea that Andorian readmittance would be fast-tracked... I am less persuaded by the idea that an Andorian could become president so quickly. It seems like pretty presumptive to begin campaigning for an office before you are even eligible for it!
• I might have missed something so I am hesitant to call this out... but is it a coincidence that Daret discovers incriminating information on Ishan at this exact moment in time?
• "Peaceable kingdom" is apparently a theological term, but I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that it is also the title of a song by Rush.

I also wrote up some overall thoughts on The Fall on my blog here. show less

So poorly written - not only do we get recaps of all the previous books constantly, we also get within book recaps all the time?!?. I had to finish it though, the series as a whole was so good.

...but... what happened to Kira?

Good conclusion

I enjoyed reading the end of this series. It brought back many memories of friends and acquaintances who I have not heard from in years.