Rann:  So I’ve been reading some Star Trek ebooks lately, mostly stuff taking place after the various series ended.

Rann:  Suuuure, let’s go with that.

Anyway, I’ve discovered something about them. Rejoining the various crewmembers I came to care about and identify with during the series at this point is a little bit like taking a friend’s kids you’re rather fond of to the amusement park. It’s its own reward, and there’s a lot of points where you have quite a bit of fun; but they also complain constantly, annoy the fuck out of you, and can make you want to facepalm so hard you’ll have a handprint on your head for days.

First, the pros of these novels. First, for continuity of writing, you can’t really beat them. The problem with previous Star Trek novels was that they were trying to be part of a living, breathing canon. A TNG novel that covered them encountering the Mirror Universe basically wound up fucked up the ass by DS9’s (constant) revisiting of the concept. (Honestly, I found the novel’s take far more gripping, realistic, and interesting… DS9’s mirror universe episodes basically seemed more like an excuse for the cast to fart around and be smarmy and “evil”.) The fact that the time period isn’t constantly ongoing and perpetrating a “living” canon that overrides that of the novels gives them a much tighter sense of continuity, an ability to reference one another and not have to worry about getting shown up by some future episode.

Some of the characters are also written with such clarity and adherence to their original manner and characterization that you can practically hear the actors delivering the lines. When a particular writer hits a particular character right, they REALLY hit it, with that perfection and tone that gives the novel that “actual canon” feel.

The novels also, as is usual of the novel versions of sci-fi shows, have much more leeway in the types of aliens they can have appear, and appear regularly. Nonhumanoids can appear with more regularity, and aliens with distinctly different ways of thinking and looking at the universe can be fleshed out more than just “that kinda smirky guy with the bumpy neck”.

Unfortunately, there’s plenty of cons.

Many of the novels I’ve read have been straight out of the darker days of DS9, and even beyond. There’s lots of death, sadness, depression, and horror. And I mean lots. One series was basically “The Enterprise goes on a series of extremely heartbreaking rescue missions where thousands upon thousands of people die in horrible ways”. They toy with the idea of who’s a main character and relatively “safe”, and who’s going to die in a horrifying, humiliating way. One particular character was around for multiple novels, only to be injured in a shuttlecraft crash, get his leg blasted off, and then try valiantly to defend himself and the rest of the crew (who all died, of course) before getting blasted by plasma rifles. From both sides. The author was even so kind as to make special mention that the bag containing his remains was very small, indicating that there hadn’t been much of him to recover. I’m sure that was a wonderful bit of news to his small son who thought his dad was the coolest thing in the world. Star Trek is supposed to be about hope… what the fuck? It shouldn’t be that depressing even if you’re trying to make a point.

Then there’s the way the characters act. When they’re sent on missions of exploration, going where no Federation ship has gone before, they bitch because they were sent for the wrong reasons. When they have to engage in military actions, they bitch that they’re explorers. When they’re sent on rescue missions, they bitch about the toll it’s taking on them. When they’re sent on diplomatic missions, they bitch that it’s hard and probably impossible, and take numerous shortcuts and easy ways out. Again, the books are practically infected with an overriding pessimism towards everything that happens.

Despite all this, Star Trek‘s own, sometimes rather wonky, value system seems firmly in place, parts of it at least. Though I will say that I think one of those novels having various Enterprise officers actually come out and say “Peace at any price” is one of the few times it’s been so blatant.

Some of the characters also just… don’t fit. They’re wearing the same names and have some of the same mannerisms, but their way of talking, their actions, fit so poorly with the way we’re used to them acting that the brain just disconnects. There’s no sense of fitting, no way to hear these voices in your head or see them doing these things, because the way you’re used to hearing them and seeing them on the show simply doesn’t fit with what you’re reading in the slightest.

On continuity, there are a few novels that seem particularly determined to shove Enterprise down our throats, as if to say “YES! IT’S CANON! THE WORST SHOW IS CANON! SUCK IT UP!” Many of the references are absolutely pointless, such as a contrived excuse for Geordi to run around for most of one novel using a Mark I Phase Pistol, for reasons that are never adequately explained. The various species that Enterprise introduced despite having never shown up before in any other piece of canon are gratuitously stuck in wherever possible, as if they’d been there the whole time. In these particular novels, Archer is mentioned several times as often as actual TNG episodes ever mentioned Kirk.

The fascinating, strange, non-humanoid aliens eventually wear out their welcome, too, especially when the novels seem determined to put in as many of them as possible, and in a constant war of escalation to see who can make something newer and stranger. Despite the constant yammering about how non-humanoids are relatively rare in Starfleet and people should be sensitive to their outlook and needs, there’s more than one novel where you wind up seeing more starfish aliens than, say, Vulcans. This last con is most prevalent in the books I’m reading now, the Titan series.

The USS Titan would be more appropriately named the USS Token. It’s all but outright stated that Starfleet took every single-representative (“the first _____ in Starfleet”), or non-humanoid, or non-Federation, or homosexual member of Starfleet and stuck them on the Titan and its sister ships. As a Good Thing, in the name of diversity. Riiight.

If the Titan series hadn’t actually been published as canon, I’d think it was a series of fairly good fanfics. Because they’re decent as far as writing and plot go, but they have some of those earmarks of fanfic, primarily being a little too far up its own butt. But also that sense of not being able to settle down and just work with what you have, constantly reinventing the wheel and sticking new stuff in. The strange, unique, interesting new aliens start losing their luster after the fifteenth one is vaguely described almost solely by its most strange non-human characteristics. It also has that fanfic hallmark of not sticking closely enough to the canon and inventing too much of its own shit. (I’ve done this too, in my own writings, and I’ll probably do it again. But then, I’m not trying to get published.) Primarily… WHERE WERE THEY?! They introduce us to so ridiculously many new species that it becomes near-nonsensical that we haven’t seen any of these races before, even in passing. Yes, they’re strange, nonhuman, and have special needs. But you’re telling us we never saw 99% of the Federation’s member species in the multiple decades worth of visual show canon? Out of universe, the reason’s obvious, the effects budget couldn’t handle just randomly sticking a few dinosaur or mini-elephant crewmembers in the background just for the sake of being more alien-y, but in universe it begins to strain suspension of disbelief that it’s taken up to this point to be introduced to a fairly large segment of the Federation’s population.

The fanfic-y quality comes up as well in some of the canon characters and even species that are made a part of it. Tuvok is the worst and most consistent example of this. The character just… isn’t Tuvok. Other than TNG, Voyager is probably the series I’ve come closest to seeing and being passingly familiar with every single episode of, by dint of in-order nightly reruns at a time when I was usually awake and watching TV for a period of a few years. And with the characters that had any level of consistent characterization at all (read: not Janeway), I would like to think I have a pretty decent grip on how they would act and emote. And the Tuvok in Titan isn’t Tuvok… he’s not even really Vulcan. He’s just some black guy with pointy ears who lingers on the bridge to try and give the series a feeling of “Hey, mingling of TNG cast and Voyager cast, awright!” The Remans also get a sort of fangirl-ish treatment… true, there’s only one movie to judge them off of, but I really don’t think “Klingons that look like Count Orloff, only psychic and emotionally sensitive and awesome” was the way to go there.

The series is also inescapably and blatantly built on the back of white guilt, semi-translated into humanoid guilt, but even then there’s something particularly singled-out about the male Caucasian humans… the all of one that there is, our own Captain Riker. Poor Riker. He’s effectively going through these books with his head low and shoulders slumped, constantly muttering a string of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m soooo sorry”. Okay, it’s not quite as bad as that, but it can get particularly anvilicious at times. There’s some token implication that the non-human species are being intolerant in their own way, but it’s brief and sort of perfunctory, and like these things often do comes back to being partly/mostly the white guy’s (or, in this case, human-type guy’s) fault. And that’s all I’ll say about that, since I don’t want to get into it too much. The only reason I even came out and mentioned it is that it’s a rather blatant part of the novels, with Riker at one point actually moping that he comes from a culture “built on slavery and genocide”.

Still, there are always bright spots to be found. Speaking of which, there’s Spot. Worf winds up having to take her in post-Nemesis, and apparently becomes quite fond of her fairly quickly. He at one point writes Troi a letter saying that her independence, insistence, and directness are all traits that he finds very Klingon. Worf writing “[Spot] has the heart of a warrior” would make up for a whole hell of a lot. If some future book contains mention of him writing a Klingon opera version of “Ode to Spot”, I will go out and buy every book in the series, I don’t even care what else is in it.

Clearly, the Star Trek expanded universe is a mixed blessing. But not so unbalanced in its mixing that I’ve really felt like stopping anytime soon.

Addendum: Nope, I was wrong. Riker spends book three handwringing over the possibility of killing spaceborne animals, even to protect his own ship or other sentients (pausing occasionally to bemoan how evil his ancestors were), and avoiding killing them or telling anyone else how to kill them. Despite the fact that he’s facing down multiple Crystalline Entities. Y’know. Repeatedly almost killed the Enterprise. Do like to kill entire planetary populations. Proven in this book to have about all the intelligence of a pack of starving wolves.

This is bullshit. I’ve never before wanted to print an ebook out just so I could throw it against the wall in anger.