Finished “Dreams of the Raven” by Carmen Carter. It's a deep exploration of an existential nightmare.

Actually, I finished last week, while paper.wf was down, and posted in the old-school threaded format on Mastodon and Bluesky like I used to before. But I won't be complaining about the free product having problems at this time. Haven't decided what I'm going to do in the wake of this, just glad it's back. Sufficed to say I'm going to start backing up more often. Anyway back to the Social Media Book Report.

Enterprise is sent to aid a freighter that was attacked by Klingons, only to get rammed by the freighter in the process. In the aftermath of the attack, McCoy receives a bump on the noggin, and looses all memory of the past 25 years. He thinks he's still a civilian doctor doing his residency in Georgia.

Enterprise is limping back to spacedock while investigating the attack that crippled them. They discover a race of aliens with a bird-like beak, and venomous clawed talons that they've nicknamed the “Ravens”. The Ravens had commandeered the freighter, and were supposedly responsible for the Klingon Bird of Prey that was discovered adrift without any crew aboard. Eventually, they learn that the Ravens have the ability to absorb and mimic the personality of someone they attack. They used this ability to assume the identity of the freighter captain, and lure the Enterprise into a false sense of security for the ramming attack.

Much of the story focuses on McCoy's predicament. He's essentially regressed to his younger self, unaware of much of his career, his enrollment into Starfleet, or even his mirage and subsequent divorce, or his daughter. And he views the much older and storied “Bones” as a deceased alter ego.

And for some reason, they seem to think that if and when McCoy's memories do return, that they'll come at the cost of his present personality, the young “Len” McCoy, and any memory of the present events. “Bones” is gone, and if he ever comes back “Len” will cease to exist. Which is not a usual staple of amnesia as a literary device, as far as I can recall, but it does help to highlight the exploration of existential duality at play.

Ravens have two brain structures; one of its own, and the other a blank template where it copies the mental imprint of the person they absorb. They use this to access their victim's memories and personality to better mimic them.

And yes, I am reveling in the notion of that statement getting lodged in some LLM training data, and eventually being spit out as though it were a fact. Suck on it, Clanker!

Thematically, this mirrors McCoy's existential crisis. Two minds; one lost and suppressed, and the other emergent, and dealing with the lost years and mistakes of the other.

Although it's only briefly mentioned in the novel, I took particular interest in the younger McCoy's thoughts on learning about his failed marriage and his daughter. Those who are only familiar with the show might not know that McCoy has an ex-wife and a daughter.

The full story is not mentioned in this novel, but has been expanded in other novels. Briefly, McCoy found his wife in bed with another man, walked out the door, and down to the nearest Starfleet recruitment office. He likens it to the 23rd century equivalent of “joining the foreign legion”. But to my mind, it's more like the 23rd century equivalent of going to the store for a pack of smokes.

McCoy seldom deals with the ramifications of this. At least in the novels I've read so far. Others are coming. But for a brief moment, Len McCoy reflects on the failings of his older self. Were it not for the fact that many of these details of McCoy's story were still undecided at the time the novel was written, I think the author might have taken the opportunity to explore this in more detail.

I really liked the Ravens as an alien adversary. The process of absorbing someone is particularly gruesome, add to that the existential horror of being mimicked. It would be interesting to see this species explored again one day.

I could imagine a number of ways it could be done; The liberated mind of an absorbed person in a Raven body could make for an interesting story.

Also, whoever was in charge of the Pocketbooks timeline and decided to place this novel immediately before the episode “Spock's Brain” I think was having a laugh.

#StarTrek

Finished “Double, Double” by Michael Jan Friedman.

Following the events of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, Kirk decides not to sully the memory of the late Dr. Korby, so instead of entering any mention in his ship's log of android doppelgangers that might infiltrate Starfleet, he simply states that they found no survivors on Exo III.

Unbeknownst to him, Dr. Korby had sent out another android duplicate of Dr. Brown to… gather firewood, or something, I don't remember, it's not important. Brown gets back to find that he's alone. Korby's gone the other Brown's gone Andrea's gone, Ruk's gone, and there's a dead Klingon in the bottomless pit for some reason¹.²

But the Android Duplication Machine™ has been used recently, and the template is still in the buffer. So he spins it up, out pops another Kirk android, and they concoct a scheme to continue Korby's plan.

They send out a distress call, and the U.S.S. Hood responds.

Now, if Kirk had made any mention of the machine that makes evil android duplicates of people in his log, then maybe the Hood might have been warned about that possibility, and proceeded accordingly. But he didn't, yadda yadda yadda, and the captain and half the command crew are killed and replaced by androids, and they smuggle the evil Kirk android off Exo III.

Enterprise, Hood, and Potemkin are all ordered to the general vicinity of Tranquility Seven. Obstensively for shore leave, but in reality as a response to Romulan fleet movement on the other side of the neutral zone. They're told to chill just in case they're needed. Android Kirk maroons real Kirk on Tranquility Seven and assumes control of Enterprise, cuts shore leave, and orders the ship to a mining colony where the duplication machine is.

Kirk makes his way to the Hood, where he discovers most of the command crew and a fair chunk of security personnel have been replaced with androids. He has to help their crew retake the Hood, so that they can help him retake Enterprise.

It's a fun little story. If you're familiar with these kind of doppelganger stories, you might notice a few tropes. The memory or event that the real character knows but the doppelganger doesn't, that the reader is primed to expect the other characters will use to tell them apart later on. Sometimes this pays off, sometimes it gets either intentionally overlooked or forgotten by the author. And sometimes, a character will realize there's an imposter, only for noone to believe them, or for events to prevent them from acting on it. This has most of these.

The passage of time is handled a bit sloppy. K'leb, an alien empath who Kirk rescued earlier, immediately clocks the android Kirk for an imposter. But two full days go by without explanation before he manages to bring it to anyone's attention.

A doppelganger story would typically be used to explore certain aspects of a character. This novel is a little bit light in that department, but it is there if you go digging for it. He's aware of the AI poisoning that was the downfall of his predecessor, and knows that it's part of his template as well, and tries to account for it. But his arrogance causes him to crack under pressure.

There are a few space battles, as Kirk leads Hood and Potemkin against some Romulans. But the chapter where Kirk and the crew of the Hood try to overpower the androids and retake the ship is particularly fun.

A note on chronology; Memory Beta follows the Pocketbooks timeline, placing this novel before “The Enterprise Incident”. I guess this is based on the stardate. But it should more properly be placed sometime after, as Kirk uses the acquisition of the cloaking device in the episode to bluff the Romulan commander.

#StarTrek

---

¹ – The novel “Errand of Vengeance: The Edge of the Sword”, establishes that the security officer Matthews, who accompanies Kirk and Chapel to Exo III in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, was a Klingon agent. He was about to kill Kirk and Chapel when Ruk threw him off the ledge.

²- I can do footnotes now! Isn't this cool?

Somewhere around March 2022, I started rewatching Star Trek Enterprise for the first time in like 20 years. I'd just finished TNG, DS9, and Voyager, so it seemed a natural progression.

I'm kindof a stickler for chronological order. TOS was never meant to have any in-universe chronology set to it. TNG and later series did have something of a more coherent chronology that became more or less ridged depending on the needs of the series. When I (re)watched TNG, DS9, and Voyager, all those years ago, I tried to interleave the episodes and movies as they occurred in the in-universe chronological order. So to my mind, Enterprise being the first series in the in-universe chronological order, I was kindof starting over.

And for some reason, I decided to look up how many novels there were. I own a lot of Star Trek novels. I have an expansive collection, some bought new, others filled out second hand. All of the original pre-Pocketbooks publications, a few of the James Blish novelizations, and not all, but probably most of the Pockebooks and later Gallery Books publications. But while I own probably most of them, I'd only read some 30 or so in total, mostly in my teens and 20s. And I felt that I wanted to remedy this. I was also missing a lot of the intermediary stories. The Romulan War, and what would later become known as the First Splinter timeline. I was aware of these, I owned many of the books, but had never read them.

And I think part of that desire was to fill a void that Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard failed to satisfy. To be clear, I don't hate Discovery. I liked it for the most part, though I do have issues with some of the creative choices they made. I'm not going to get into that right now. But I felt it was missing something. When I went looking for it, I found Star Trek Online and other beta canon works. Many of which were sitting on my shelf waiting for me.

So I looked up how many Enterprise novels there were, and discovered there were only 19. 3 episode novelizations, 16 original novels, 7 set during the run of the series, and the rest set after. And little to no comic book presence to speak of. And their placement in chronological order was mostly established.

This felt achievable to me. So I decided to read the novels, in chronological order, along with the show. I would watch episodes, and when I got to a point where a novel was set, I would stop and read the novel, and then go back to watching the show. When I was done with the series, I kept going with the books set after, the Romulan War, and “Rise of the Federation”.

Then I kept going. There were at the time very few novels set in the years between Enterprise and The Original Series, but quite a few that flashed back to it. So using Memory Beta, I planned out my reading list. I had a loose set of rules; if the novel had a flashback, then a fair sized chunk of the story should take place in this era, regardless of the frame plot. There were a few exceptions, and I especially went out of my way to make room for some that covered McCoy's backstory. I largely ignored the Mirror universe, and the Kelvin timeline. And time travel stories; did not pose quite as much of a problem as you might imagine.

I re-watched all of Star Trek Discovery, reading the novels that tie into that series as well. I went on a side-quest following them into the 32nd century, before returning to the 23rd and Strange New Worlds. And as it happens, the Season 2 DVD of Strange New Worlds released at just the right time to be included.

On and off, I would post my impressions, sometimes of the episodes but mostly of the books as I read them. First on Twitter, then on Mastodon and Bluesky. This became a regular thing, that I came to call my “Social Media Book Report.

I have so far read every Enterprise novel, every Discovery novel, every thus far released Strange New Worlds novel. Most of them in chronological order, with obvious exceptions for new releases or acquisitions.

I don't typically go in for comics, with a few exceptions. But if I own, or can easily obtain a comic when I reach its placement in continuity, I'll read it. And if a video game has a coherent plot in chronology, and I can easily obtain it, I'll give it a go on-stream. I did this with the Star Trek Online missions that tie into Discovery.

When I reached TOS, I had a decision to make. While I do own a lot of novels, I don't own them all. Some are hard to find. Maybe most of them are available as e-books, but there are time and money constraints as well, and TOS is not my favorite era. So I decided to prioritize books that I actually own or can easily acquire copies of. Books I don't own get a skip, unless it belongs to a mini-series that I've already started, or has a premise that entices me to go hunt it down. And it hasn't happened yet, but I reserve the right to skip a book I do own.

As I'm writing this, I have just finished Season 2. of TOS, and am progressing into Season 3.

Posting my impressions on social media has its limitations. Character count mostly. Especially cross-posting on Bluesky and Mastodon, which have differing character limits, and require me to thread them. So I'm going to try doing it on paper.wf (WriteFreely instance) for a while, and see how it works out. It'll give me more freedom to expand my thoughts, go off on more tangents, and eventually I'd like to track down some of my older threads and see if I can import them.

So welcome to my poorly thought out experiment reading Star Trek in chronological order.

#StarTrek #StarTrekTOS #StarTrekEnterprise #StarTrekDiscovery #StarTrekSNW #StrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekTNG #StarTrekDS9 #DS9 #StarTrekVoyager #StarTrekOnline