Amber Age reviewed Die Ehre des Captain by David Dvorkin (Star Trek: The Next Generation, #8)
Review of 'Die Ehre des Captain' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
I dug this out again the other day to re-read it (not having read it for a few years) and my thoughts could be summed up as 'this was less awful the first time'.
If this book was a fanfiction, the comment section would be full of complaints about Mary Sues and OOC. Few of the characters behave anything like their TV selves (save for Riker, who goes about his business as usual, messing everything up by getting into strange women's pants). The premise, while intriguing, is rendered absurd early on, when 'Magna Romans serving in Starfleet' (a promising concept) turns into 'bare-naked ladies and former slaves serve Roman delicacies to a Starfleet crew in full Roman armour' (hardly plausible).
Whereas the TNG crew never had any problems calling out unethical behaviour from their Starfleet colleagues onscreen, this one instead goes against their nature in every possible way. The protagonist …
I dug this out again the other day to re-read it (not having read it for a few years) and my thoughts could be summed up as 'this was less awful the first time'.
If this book was a fanfiction, the comment section would be full of complaints about Mary Sues and OOC. Few of the characters behave anything like their TV selves (save for Riker, who goes about his business as usual, messing everything up by getting into strange women's pants). The premise, while intriguing, is rendered absurd early on, when 'Magna Romans serving in Starfleet' (a promising concept) turns into 'bare-naked ladies and former slaves serve Roman delicacies to a Starfleet crew in full Roman armour' (hardly plausible).
Whereas the TNG crew never had any problems calling out unethical behaviour from their Starfleet colleagues onscreen, this one instead goes against their nature in every possible way. The protagonist of the story, an original character with the rank of ensign, makes everything worse by not only falling in love with a Roman - in the way usual for fanfiction, meaning implausibly fast, literally within minutes of meeting him - but also barely contributing anything useful to the story, other than a ridiculously obvious infodump in the form of a continuous inner monologue.
Most of the usual cast remain sidelined here - while LaForge and Data make a few cameos, most of the pages are spent on following Riker's and de Luz's politics-and-affairs chaos, with the occasional guest starring of Picard's. The new characters, including the Romans, seem flat and unlively as well, usually only serving to deliver some key dialogue or (unsubtly so) perform carricatures of what I assume are supposed to be emotions. All in all, the book is best summed up as a mediocre plot which is entirely at odds with its entire lack of Trek-ness. What starts out with 'this makes zero sense, Starfleet doesn't work like this, ever' doesn't really get better over the course of the next roughly 200 pages.