F/SF

Sure to become nearly as much a favorite as Diane Duane's RIHANNSU series. If only this were really the way the Klingons were represented in the main series! Well, maybe I will think differently after watching more DS9 and Worf; still.

brilliant, like so much of John M Ford's work, and i so wish there was more. written after TOS and influential, especially on later series like DS9. told from the perspective of a Klingon Captain, and steeped in game theory. out of this story, in time, came a whole new view of the Klingons, the Federation, and the Star Trek Universe. also, the fact that the book exists, simply by being so good and so influential, makes an argument against suppressing original work that isn't canon. ( )

I picked this up a while back because I had read one Star Trek novel, and one Mike Ford novel, but never any of Ford's Trek novels and I'd heard they were good. And then this happened right after I found it, so it was meant to be. And sure enough, this was a lot of fun.

I'm still probably not the best audience for this, because even though I like Trek a lot, "do some extra world-building in someone else's universe and hope it'll somehow match up with all the stuff other writers are making up" just isn't my favorite kind of writing. I can't help reading this like I would a stand-alone novel, and it doesn't really work that way: even though there are almost no familiar faces (there's the thinnest possible frame story to get Kirk, Spock, and McCoy into it for 10 seconds), it does kind of assume that you'll automatically be interested in questions like "What did people on Earth think about the Federation in its early days?" or "Would Klingons ever tolerate Vulcans in their midst?" or "Who invented the transporter first?".

That said, I can see why Ford's version of this stuff has such a good reputation. The world-building, though it's just as shaggy and hand-wavey as Trek always is because of the need to fit with a not-very-planned-out '60s TV show, is way more elaborate and immersive than anyone would've really demanded for Ford to do. He goes above and beyond with making up Klingon cultural details, most of which did not end up being accepted as canon in the shows and movies, because he clearly enjoys it and because no one's stopping him (you can really see this in the early scenes where he spends a lot of time on a complicated gladiatorial chess game—he describes it well enough that a careful reader could probably figure out what this is supposed to look like, but I doubt he expected most people to bother, he just wanted himself to understand the rules). That's cool, but I still wouldn't be so into it if it weren't also just plain good engaging prose with a good sense of drama and character. It's not easy to take a setting where everyone is a super-violent asshole who's obsessed with honor and revenge, and make the protagonist and his friends consistently interesting if not necessarily sympathetic; Ford manages to do that with his Klingons in a way that the shows and movies only intermittently did, giving us characters who aren't out of sync with their ultra-belligerent culture at all (as for instance Worf is) but are still practical in their own way and can even have a sense of humor about their behavior. That falters a little near the end when the Klingons encounter a human who's a brilliant pacifist, and we get a bit of the "aliens don't understand this wisdom that humans have" tone that was so common in earlier SF—it's overdetermined that the protagonist will come to respect this guy and that'll save the day (although it helps that most of the humans don't understand the guy either). And the political back-stabbing subplots are still kind of tedious, but in the action scenes there's a great sense of legitimately brave people improvising under pressure; where another writer might have taken a screenplay-like approach to those scenes and just narrated who was shooting what, Ford makes those details clear enough but focuses on keeping the characters vivid and giving us enjoyable sentences.

I would totally recommend this to anyone who's curious about what a licensed property looks like when it's done in an eccentric fan-fiction mode by someone who is a massive nerd and also has a way with words. ( )

In my experience, the best Star Trek book ever! Hard to believe it's by the same guy who wrote [b:How Much for Just the Planet|268442|How Much for Just the Planet? (Star Trek, No 36)|John M. Ford|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173289688s/268442.jpg|209995]. Set around the time of the Enterprise series, but written before it aired, I believe, so happily unencumbered. A great look into the depths of the Klingon world and psyche.

It's been a couple years since I read it, but I will definitely read it again. ( )