Della Van Hise (1955–2021)

i know this isnt a proper novel its a star trek tie in, but that doesnt excuse it from being utterly terrible (theres no way this would have been published otherwise, i expect they just wanted lots of star trek novels and didnt care if they were rubbish). one thing i can say of it is that is was fairly entertaining to read, and had an interesting concept, but it was executed terribly.
the plot of the romulans altering time and the enterprise crews lived being changed too was decent, if not particularly original (it was quite similar to the basic plot of an average star trek episode, but you cant really blame it for that). however it didnt make much sense in a lot of places, and could have been written better, some parts were undeveloped and some parts were overly repetitive. there was too much time spent on repetitive character passages, and not enough on developing the plot.
and as for the characters, they were even worse than the plot, which at least had something going for it. the actual characters from star trek were almost unrecognisable, they didnt behave at all like the characters on the tv show did, and there was only really focus on the two or three main ones (i know most of the episodes are like that so i cant really blame the book for that though). the characters that were made up for this book for unoriginal cliches, although i though the enterprise crew members were alright actually, but the romulans were terrible, the romulan emperor was actually a captain in one of the star trek episodes, and her characterisation in this book wasnt really too inconsistent with that, but it also didnt bring anything original.
a large part of the plot of this book was concerned with the characters being in different roles than usual and the problems therein, and the author barely even understood the characters in the first place, so it ended up being largely ineffective. i wasnt sure what was going on with the romulan commander, she started off as cliched but with potential, but then her character got more or less dropped in favour of the emperor. the character interactions were also way off, the actual characters would never act that way and it was actually quite weird at times, and completely out of character.
another thing was the actual writing, as well as the characterisation and plot, the prose was perhaps the worst i remember reading in a novel. it was extremely repetitive and often flat and cliched, and the sentence structure especially was really annoying to read, with the same basic structure being repeated over and over again. i basically never even notice this sort of thing so it must have been bad. and although i think its pointless to go on about consistency too much, the author got mind melds completely wrong, they never worked like that in the show and it stood out as annoying, and it didnt even serve the plot or a good purpose.
overall, this novel reads like it was written by a teenager, (or someone whos had no experience writing and is writing their first book as a media tie in because thats easier since the works half done already with the characters and setting and concept and tone already existing). if that had been the case it might have showed some potential, but since as far as i know it wasnt, its just an extremely badly written but sometimes entertaining novel with some interesting ideas and a lot of rubbish. as a star trek novel, meh, as a proper book, one of the worst ive ever read.… (lisätietoja)