Wreade1872's Reviews > Avenger

This is probably my favourite of the 5 books in this series i’ve read despite a lot of small issues.
There are a lot of similarities between this and the previous volume, not in terms of story exactly but with the sortof ligaments of the plot.
The way the characters are separated for the mystery elements, misunderstandings and suspicions between characters that the reader already knows the answers to. Very similar action sequences etc.

Also the alterations to kirks past feels quite forced. Its more kirk-centric than the previous book, and i don’t really care about kirk, much more a TNG guy. its still set in the tng timeline though and those characters are still here and but not as much as in the last book.

Oh! and catharsis kirk reaches here, how he reaches it is kinda messed up, if i cared about kirk more i think i’d have had even more issues with the Avenger aspect of the title.

And as a sidenote... the trannin leaves stuff felt like it was King’s Foil from Lord of the Rings. I didn’t mind that so much but why were the leaves from Klingon space? I mean they were found in what was implied to be an entirely different galaxy, where a lot of stuff ended up sure, but f all the planets in all the galaxies why did this one trace back to the Klingon empire?

Ok, so why do i like this so much, well i’ve always wondered why Vulcans aren't evil? I mean in anything else logical thinking is what the killer robots etc. do. The Vulcans even have phrases like ‘the good of the many out way the needs of the few’ terrifying concepts from a human perspective.
I’m not saying this book answers such questions but it does at least explore the concept in a more interesting way than other trek i’ve seen (i do recall a vulcan member of the Maquis in DS9 and some less well done stuff in Enterprise) .

The other aspect i really like about this is the problem the Federation has, it is one which is more relevant today than when this was written (view spoiler)[decreasing variability in food production (hide spoiler)].
It would have been nice is there was more or a pushback against the badguys, your left with a quite depressing situation in which no one has said anything much to suggest the villains were wrong.

Still overall great idea, and the book is pretty well written even as i said its a bit repetitive in detail if you’ve read the previous one.