I mean. It was okay.
Two things worked against this novel; first, I read it in little bits for over a month. It was read to fill the time at work, when waiting for a late truck to arrive; in the car, parked, while waiting for my wife to emerge from work and in the grocery checkout line. So I never gave it a sustained reading. That said, I never had trouble flipping through a few pages days after the last time I'd read it.
Second, this book is deep into the post-TV and post-movie era of TNG. Most of the books are tightly interwoven and many characters have moved on, been promoted or reassigned so it is sometimes hard to catch up.
In the case of the Titan series, I think I read the first one, which came out in 2005. Riker was then captain of his own ship. This new book was published 10 years later and now Riker has been promoted to admiral.
The strange thing here, in Sight Unseen, is that Riker, being an admiral is still on board the Titan. This is also the first mission since his promotion so there was an interesting tension between the new captain and Riker. But this felt a bit forced, having not read the previous book in the series, and odd since it seem unlikely a new admiral would stay on board the very ship he used to be captain of.
This book expands from a previous episode of The Next Generation TV series, where Riker and other crew members of the Enterprise were abducted and experimented on by beings who live in subspace.
Well now they're back and abducting entire ships. First they attack a vessel from a non-Federation species and then a Federation star ship that was sent to help. Now Titan is sent to investigate and save the universe.
The first half of the book read like a lot of filler since the plot of the book was a cookie cutter story. It only became interesting when Titan and her crew force their way into subspace to confront the baddies and rescue their missing Starfleet officers and destroy the threat.
The other factor that was in play here, that took away from my enjoyment of the book, is the series itself. There is so much going on and dependent on having read the previous books that it becomes daunting to invest in them. That is less a flaw in the author's story and more an aspect of reading tie-in books to begin with. They are meant to reward the dedicated reader over the casual or new one.
And that is okay. It's just that you can feel it while reading.
I don't know.
It was okay.
James Swallow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Swallow
and - http://jamesswallow.blogspot.ca/
and - http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?James_Swallow
 |
| James Swallow |
No comments:
Post a Comment