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A review by octavia_cade
Here There Be Dragons by John Peel
3.0
Two and a half stars, rounding up to three. A likeable enough read, if uneven in places. Picard and most of the bridge crew end up on an alien planet where a human colony is basically living in the Dark Ages, complete with dragons. When I read books like this I kind of wonder why the author's writing science fiction when clearly they're rather be writing fantasy but then I thought what the hell, may as well go along. It's entertaining even if I can't take it very seriously.
Fun read though it was, however, I can't get over two of the logical problems at the centre of the narrative, and that's what's keeping it from getting the full three stars from me. Firstly, and I realise that Peel is somewhat constrained by canon events from TOS here, the total stagnation of the culture in question... it's just not plausible. Sorry. It wasn't plausible in the canon inspiration for this novel, and it's not plausible here, though Peel does give it a good try what with the effects of outside interference with the dragons. The plot hole that's entirely down to him, however, is that of the gravity bombs, which through handwavium are exerting the gravity of suns and nearly tearing apart the Enterprise... which is all well and good except the Enterprise is orbiting a planet, and these sun-sized gravity effects have absolutely no effect on the planet or the solar system that it's in.
So basically, the whole thing is implausibility on top of implausibility, and while one of the characters references Clarke's law (you know, indistinguishable from magic and so forth), the only magic here is what caused the entire editing staff of Pocket not to notice that gravity affects planets as well as starships.
Fun read though it was, however, I can't get over two of the logical problems at the centre of the narrative, and that's what's keeping it from getting the full three stars from me. Firstly, and I realise that Peel is somewhat constrained by canon events from TOS here, the total stagnation of the culture in question... it's just not plausible. Sorry. It wasn't plausible in the canon inspiration for this novel, and it's not plausible here, though Peel does give it a good try what with the effects of outside interference with the dragons. The plot hole that's entirely down to him, however, is that of the gravity bombs, which through handwavium are exerting the gravity of suns and nearly tearing apart the Enterprise... which is all well and good except the Enterprise is orbiting a planet, and these sun-sized gravity effects have absolutely no effect on the planet or the solar system that it's in.
So basically, the whole thing is implausibility on top of implausibility, and while one of the characters references Clarke's law (you know, indistinguishable from magic and so forth), the only magic here is what caused the entire editing staff of Pocket not to notice that gravity affects planets as well as starships.