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A review by reeshadovahsil
Triangle by Sondra Marshak, Myrna Culbreath
2.0
Ugh. What a disaster. I don't even know where to begin.
New character comes out of nowhere, meets Kirk and Spock, they all immediately fall in love with each other and start acting like they've known one another for years. No good reason is given for this apart from reading each other's Starfleet bios and space adventure news. At no point do they actually learn much of anything about each other that would lead any rational people to want to bond for life.
Of course, this short meeting instantly triggers Spock's pon farr because no real reason. Oh, but don't worry, the new character has a pon farr of her own (except not) so she also must mate or die.
The new character is also a perfect warrior, the most powerful of her species, has incredible psyonic abilities, is the most beautiful—do you see where this is going? There is a certain term people have started to use these days to callously dismiss anything with a strong woman in it, so I invoke it with great caution, but my friends, this character is the Mary Sueist of the Mary Sues.
Listen, I love a good trashy fan fiction. When reading fanfic, I give a LOT of leeway to the authors because it's done for love, it's not professionally edited, and it's essentially just someone in their free time writing out a crazy idea they had in case any other fans would like to read about it, for free. But this is an official Star Trek novel. This crap got greenlit and published. These authors got paid money. This is not AO3 and this mess of a novel doesn't deserve the clemency due a fanfic just because it is written like one.
I haven't even mentioned what's ostensibly supposed to be the real plot, of a group of New Humans trying to rope the entire crew into Oneness, but don't worry because there's a second Oneness out there and they're trying to do the same thing, and somehow that makes the first Oneness the good guys? For extra senseless fun, despite the fact that the whole point of the Oneness is that a bunch of people team up and act as the cells of one large organism, each Oneness is actually encompassed and represented by one madman who's pulling all the strings, including transmitting searing pain whenever anyone tries to do anything the madman doesn't want them to do. Which makes them not Onenesses at all, but a psychically dominated cult, so why is this just okay and left to work itself out?
The ending is laughably ridiculous, with contrived danger that is going to lead to near instant death, which is then just ignored for multiple pages while everyone has a calm and detailed (but annoyingly cyclical) discussion about what they should do now.
Not to mention the authors' propensity to use the exact same phrases in the exact same way by different characters throughout the book, because why write our beloved crew in character or show their individuality? Everyone's just a puppet for the authors' desire to strongarm duality throughout scenes that don't support it. For instance, why is Spock repeatedly clarifying, with emphasis, that Kirk wants to know the status of the ship when Kirk asks for a status report on the bridge? OF COURSE HE MEANS THE SHIP NO ONE WOULD QUESTION THAT and certainly not Spock, who gives status reports ten times a freaking shift.
I just... ugh. I'm making myself angry again just writing this review. I think I've now read all of the Star Trek novels by this writing team, and I can confidently say that they never got any better. If anything, with this last one, they actually got worse. I'm very glad there are no more of their works lurking in my future.
It's so sad and frustrating, because just like each of their other novels, there are hints of a good story here! (Hence the second star.) Having to stop a powerful cult of Oneness and expose the leader as the man behind the curtain to free his hostages and give them back their individuality, all while your crew is starting to fall like dominoes under his control, could make for a fun and interesting classic Star Trek novel. Something fun could certainly be done with a race of powerful psyonics like our Mary Sue, too. But like every other novel they've written, the germ of a good idea is twisted into shapes it can't support, complicated unnecessarily by writers who are so much less profound than they'd like to imagine they are, while characters we love have their characterizations bastardized.
The authors don't even bother fact checking themselves against actual Star Trek, as they both misquote one of the best-loved Spock lines of the series and confuse a Caitian with a Catullan (pretty rough since a Caitian looks like a cat-person and a Catullan looks like a human with cool hair—and both species were seen and defined well before this book was written, in TOS and TAS).
Unless you are a completionist like me, and it will drive you crazy if you don't read every Star Trek novel ever written (or are a hardcore lover of the Mary Sue style of fan fiction and like to see that in book form) I'd strongly recommend avoiding this one.
New character comes out of nowhere, meets Kirk and Spock, they all immediately fall in love with each other and start acting like they've known one another for years. No good reason is given for this apart from reading each other's Starfleet bios and space adventure news. At no point do they actually learn much of anything about each other that would lead any rational people to want to bond for life.
Of course, this short meeting instantly triggers Spock's pon farr because no real reason. Oh, but don't worry, the new character has a pon farr of her own (except not) so she also must mate or die.
The new character is also a perfect warrior, the most powerful of her species, has incredible psyonic abilities, is the most beautiful—do you see where this is going? There is a certain term people have started to use these days to callously dismiss anything with a strong woman in it, so I invoke it with great caution, but my friends, this character is the Mary Sueist of the Mary Sues.
Listen, I love a good trashy fan fiction. When reading fanfic, I give a LOT of leeway to the authors because it's done for love, it's not professionally edited, and it's essentially just someone in their free time writing out a crazy idea they had in case any other fans would like to read about it, for free. But this is an official Star Trek novel. This crap got greenlit and published. These authors got paid money. This is not AO3 and this mess of a novel doesn't deserve the clemency due a fanfic just because it is written like one.
I haven't even mentioned what's ostensibly supposed to be the real plot, of a group of New Humans trying to rope the entire crew into Oneness, but don't worry because there's a second Oneness out there and they're trying to do the same thing, and somehow that makes the first Oneness the good guys? For extra senseless fun, despite the fact that the whole point of the Oneness is that a bunch of people team up and act as the cells of one large organism, each Oneness is actually encompassed and represented by one madman who's pulling all the strings, including transmitting searing pain whenever anyone tries to do anything the madman doesn't want them to do. Which makes them not Onenesses at all, but a psychically dominated cult, so why is this just okay and left to work itself out?
The ending is laughably ridiculous, with contrived danger that is going to lead to near instant death, which is then just ignored for multiple pages while everyone has a calm and detailed (but annoyingly cyclical) discussion about what they should do now.
Not to mention the authors' propensity to use the exact same phrases in the exact same way by different characters throughout the book, because why write our beloved crew in character or show their individuality? Everyone's just a puppet for the authors' desire to strongarm duality throughout scenes that don't support it. For instance, why is Spock repeatedly clarifying, with emphasis, that Kirk wants to know the status of the ship when Kirk asks for a status report on the bridge? OF COURSE HE MEANS THE SHIP NO ONE WOULD QUESTION THAT and certainly not Spock, who gives status reports ten times a freaking shift.
I just... ugh. I'm making myself angry again just writing this review. I think I've now read all of the Star Trek novels by this writing team, and I can confidently say that they never got any better. If anything, with this last one, they actually got worse. I'm very glad there are no more of their works lurking in my future.
It's so sad and frustrating, because just like each of their other novels, there are hints of a good story here! (Hence the second star.) Having to stop a powerful cult of Oneness and expose the leader as the man behind the curtain to free his hostages and give them back their individuality, all while your crew is starting to fall like dominoes under his control, could make for a fun and interesting classic Star Trek novel. Something fun could certainly be done with a race of powerful psyonics like our Mary Sue, too. But like every other novel they've written, the germ of a good idea is twisted into shapes it can't support, complicated unnecessarily by writers who are so much less profound than they'd like to imagine they are, while characters we love have their characterizations bastardized.
The authors don't even bother fact checking themselves against actual Star Trek, as they both misquote one of the best-loved Spock lines of the series and confuse a Caitian with a Catullan (pretty rough since a Caitian looks like a cat-person and a Catullan looks like a human with cool hair—and both species were seen and defined well before this book was written, in TOS and TAS).
Unless you are a completionist like me, and it will drive you crazy if you don't read every Star Trek novel ever written (or are a hardcore lover of the Mary Sue style of fan fiction and like to see that in book form) I'd strongly recommend avoiding this one.