Course Correction Studio

Tag: Book Reviews

  • Captain’s Glory: Say it Ain’t Sue!

    Captain’s Glory (Star Trek: Totality #3) by William Shatner, Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens

    Published August 22, 2006 by Pocket Books/Star Trek

    I may have had issues with the previous installments in this series starting out slowly, but this one definitely starts with plenty of action. That is an improvement. The depiction of Kirk’s son Joseph is not. Even though Joseph has been present in each of the two previous books, something about the way his character is written still feels incredibly hokey, almost Mary Sue-ish. It’s something I just haven’t been able to get used to. An example is the way he refers to Bones and Scotty as “Uncle Bones” and “Uncle Scotty”. While it makes perfect sense that Joseph would refer to them in this manner, given their relationship with his father, it just comes across weird.

    Captain’s Glory is probably my favorite book in the Totality series. It’s so exciting, and it feels more like a Star Trek book than the others because of the heavier Starfleet presence in the plot. It feels like a Trek movie.

    Now that I’ve finished the whole series, I can confidently proclaim that Totality is all about how special Joseph is and how he is destined to be some kind of divine being who saves the universe. Captain’s Glory is definitely the best book of the series, with non-stop action almost all throughout, but the premise reeks of Mary Sue-dom. I guess when you think about it, it kind of is, being about Kirk and his son and having been written by William Shatner. Even though I went into into this knowing that, totally eyes-open, my Mary Sue meter still went crazy on this one.

    While the plot of Captain’s Glory was full of action, and the book is the best of the series, the ending leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, and this is as an ending for the entire series, not just Captains Glory. It was a good book, but it’s Mary Sue characteristics detract from it severely. It would have been better if Joseph could’ve ended up just being a normal kid in the end, even if he did help defeat Norinda. I mean, he turned into light – he was light to Norinda’s darkness. Wow. All I can do is shake my head at that. Wow – just, wow.

  • Captain’s Blood: Kirk’s Kid is Not What I Expected

    Captain’s Blood (Star Trek: Totality #2) by William Shatner, Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens

    Published December 9th 2003

    Plot

    Spock is assassinated and James T. Kirk, with the assistance of Captain Will Riker and Captain Jean-Luc Picard, sets out to investigate the murder.

    Some Questions

    • Regarding the description of Kirk and Teilani’s kid – what in the world was Shatner thinking when he came up with the idea for Joseph. I think I understand the effect he was going for, but why does the kid have to have only three fingers and a thumb on each hand???
    • Since when does Kathryn Janeway fence?
    • What’s up with the hyphenation every time Joseph says “Dad”? It’s always written “Da-ad” or “Daa-ad”. That’s really annoying. At first, I thought it was supposed to mimic the way teens address their parents when the parents have done something to embarrass the teen, or when otherwise pleading with the parent, but it’s written too often here and though the uses aren’t necessarily out of place, the frequency makes them annoying.

    Final Thoughts

    As I’d hoped, this book was better than the first in the series. Much of that can be due to the fact that it didn’t take so long for the action to begin. I’d already begun reading Captain’s Glory, the last book in the series, before going back and reading the first book, so I’ve already had a sneak peak of what’s to come. I’m certain that I’ll enjoy the final book, particularly because now I know the backstory.

  • Captain’s Peril: A Good Book, but it Has a Few Issues

    Captain’s Peril (Star Trek: Totality #1) by William Shatner, Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Judith Reeves-Stevens

    Published January 27th 2004 by Pocket Books (first published October 1st 2002)

     

    Captain’s Peril is a good book, though, I have some concerns with the way the Bajorans are depicted. The book seems to start out a little slow, which is one of the reasons I had trouble getting into story initially. It took nearly a month for me to finish this title. But that wasn’t only due to the pace of the book. It was also because I was reading it on a new device, and it took me a while to figure out which settings worked best for me (font, font size, screen brightness). After I found the combination of settings that was most comfortable for me, I flew through the second half of the book in a total of about 6 hours.

    One of my major qualms with Captain’s Peril, perhaps the biggest one of all, is the way that the Bajorans are portrayed. I find it difficult to believe that Bajorans would be as ignorant of off-worlders as they are portrayed to be here, even for rural Bajorans. In Captain’s Peril, the Bajorans are hostile to Picard and Kirk’s presence on their planet, which I can understand, but their beliefs and the knowledge that these Bajorans lack – I don’t understand it. In more than one instance in the novel, the Bajorans stated that they didn’t know or believe that off-worlders were capable of love or other emotions, or even of forming friendships. In all of the Star Trek canon that I’ve encountered, I’ve never seen any indication that Bajorans believe this. It’s possible, I suppose, but it certainly does seem out of character. If they had specified that they didn’t know that humans, specifically, felt this way, it would have been more believable than just lumping all “off-worlders” into one group, though, it does sound like something Bajorans might say about Cardassians. Also, I could understand how one Bajoran might feel this way, but the undercurrent is that it’s a mainstream sentiment in Bajoran society.

    Are these Bajorans really that isolated? Possibly. One explanation could be that the Bajorans we meet in Captain’s Peril are part of a subgroup that has never been presented in canon before. Maybe they belong to a different religious group. It’s an interesting prospect. This book presents the possibility that there is more than one Bajoran religion, excluding the Cult of the Pah-wraiths. The Captain’s Peril Bajorans believe the same basic principles of what I’ve come to think of as the dominant Bajoran religion we see most prominently in DS9, but some of the details differ.

    To be fair, Captain’s Peril is the first of the three-book Totality series, so I’m expecting the next installment to have a faster pace earlier in the book. This is the third Shatnerverse series I’ve read. I’ve read the Mirror Universe series and the Odyssey series (except for The Ashes of Eden, possibly), so generally I like the Shatnerverse novels. I don’t remember the plots of the books in those series feeling as if they began as slow as Captain’s Peril did in the beginning. The action in Captain’s Peril picks up nicely towards the middle, though, and the ending is top-notch, and a surprise that I hadn’t anticipated. Good stuff. Next in the series: Captain’s Blood.