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A review by octavia_cade
Ancient Blood by Diane Carey
adventurous
medium-paced
2.0
I usually like Diane Carey's Star Trek books more than this one, but Ancient Blood didn't really work for me. There were parts of it I did like - the focus on conflicting ideas of honour, and what to do when the price for keeping your own honour falls on someone else. There's a very bleak ending to one of the threads exploring that idea, and I thought that worked really well, depressing as it was.
Half the book, though, was Picard and Alexander roleplaying the American Revolutionary War on the holodeck, as part of the latter's Day of Honour celebration. I always wonder, when I read stories like this, if the author mightn't have been better off going to write the historical fiction they've clearly always wanted to write, without the speculative veneer, but anyway: the parallels were a little too didactic for me. Worse, though, and what dropped my rating down a whole star: the fucking holodeck malfunctioned, AGAIN, and part of it evidently dropped on Picard's very bald head, because instead of leaving the holodeck, as was perfectly possible, he consistently took that child back into an active warzone, knowing that the compromised safeties wouldn't prevent Alexander from being hurt by, for instance, all the cannons and rifles being fired straight at them.
Of course Alexander is hurt, when a grown man attacks him with a sword, and Picard is livid. "What kind of swine attacks a child!" he cries. I don't know, Jean-Luc, perhaps the type of swine that endangers said child by letting them skip around a battlefield in the first place?! During the damn battle, for goodness sake. You cannot convince me that the actual Picard would ever do anything so asinine, but this version of him should be hauled up before the courts for child endangerment.
Half the book, though, was Picard and Alexander roleplaying the American Revolutionary War on the holodeck, as part of the latter's Day of Honour celebration. I always wonder, when I read stories like this, if the author mightn't have been better off going to write the historical fiction they've clearly always wanted to write, without the speculative veneer, but anyway: the parallels were a little too didactic for me. Worse, though, and what dropped my rating down a whole star: the fucking holodeck malfunctioned, AGAIN, and part of it evidently dropped on Picard's very bald head, because instead of leaving the holodeck, as was perfectly possible, he consistently took that child back into an active warzone, knowing that the compromised safeties wouldn't prevent Alexander from being hurt by, for instance, all the cannons and rifles being fired straight at them.
Of course Alexander is hurt, when a grown man attacks him with a sword, and Picard is livid. "What kind of swine attacks a child!" he cries. I don't know, Jean-Luc, perhaps the type of swine that endangers said child by letting them skip around a battlefield in the first place?! During the damn battle, for goodness sake. You cannot convince me that the actual Picard would ever do anything so asinine, but this version of him should be hauled up before the courts for child endangerment.