Spoilers DSC: Dead Endless by Dave Galanter Review Thread

That doesn't make sense to me. "Whom Gods Destroy" refers to Garth as a "new inmate" on Elba II since the Enterprise's last visit there. His shapeshifting ability, which he learned around the same time he went mad, was unknown until he used it to escape confinement on Elba. I have a hard time believing that he would've let himself be confined for well over a decade before using the ability to escape and seek revenge. The implication is that his accident was a relatively recent event.

Not to mention that Garth was Kirk's hero when he was in the Academy, and Kirk graduated in 2255. It stands to reason that Garth's disgrace would've been well after that. If Kirk had spent his entire Starfleet career thinking of Garth as a former hero who'd already fallen from grace, then his reaction to Garth's fall wouldn't have been as surprised and sad as it was in the episode.

Then there's the fact that Steve Ihnat was only 34 years old -- younger than Shatner -- when he played Garth. Granted, he did refer to "you Earth people," so he may have been intended to be a humanoid alien (though the novels have made Izar an Earth colony), which could give him greater longevity. But there's no proof of that, and Trek humanoids are generally treated as having humanlike lifespans unless it's a specific plot point that they live longer. So the casting suggests that Garth was meant to be not too much older than Kirk.

 

*shrug* I went with what had been done in previous books and was fine with it. There’s nothing to suggest that, having a shape shifting ability, Garth wouldn’t have made himself look younger, and that he wasn’t in another institution before Elba II, and that the travesty may have been kept secret while Kirk was in the academy and/or not linked to Garth until after adjudication, at least as far as the public was concerned.

Also, I am not the type to go into great twists and turns to try to get everything to fit, I am afraid. They’re all just stories. So I saw what was done in a previous book and did a hat tip to that. Good enough for me.

 

Keeping it secret from the public would be one thing, but keeping it secret from the administration at Elba II? That would be criminally negligent. I mean, there's no way an aggressive, unstable psychotic like Garth would've had the self-restraint to avoid using his shapeshifting for over a decade, so anyone at previous institutions would surely have known he was a shapeshifter and would've notified Governor Corey of the fact.

The explanation with the fewest twists and turns is the one that's clear from the episode itself, that his accident was recent. I don't understand why the writers of that old book thought otherwise.

 

LOL. I gotta say, I can’t really care about it. Hell, for all we know, Kirk got a message to play along with Garth and agree to Axanar being some great thing and it being taught at the academy. So he agreed when Garth said it and Garth was just a former normal captain or maybe not one at all. I mean, when Saru asked for a list of the most decorated captains, Garth wasn’t there. Who knows? I certainly don’t mind it going either way.

Stuff like this just isn’t a big deal to me. It’s a throw away line/inside joke in a 350 page book and the story doesn’t hinge on it. All inconsistencies can be answered by Captain James R. Kirk of the United Earth Space Probe Agency.

 

Which has always annoyed me, because he should have been. There's too much of a tendency today to mistake the way we perceive the universe as fans for the way people within the universe would perceive it. So the only 23rd-century captains that ever get acknowledged as great are the ones we're interested in as viewers -- Kirk, Pike, April. And the fact that we were explicitly told that Garth was the biggest legend of them all in his time, Kirk's own personal role model, gets ignored. That's an unfortunate missed opportunity. Garth should've been in his prime in Discovery's timeframe; it would've been nice if the show had included him as a character and let us see the great captain he was before his tragedy.

 

Instead we'll just get a tragedy of a fan film.

 

We shall have to agree to disagree.

 

Spoiler

The Red Angel anomalies still happened in that other reality. I wonder how those events will go down in that universe.

 

Spoiler

is this story in a close parallel universe, or a temporary one made while Burnham was doing her red angel time jumps?

Just thought of this.

 

Spoiler

The Red Angel events haven’t happened in this universe. Yet. This is just yet another of the myriad universes the Mycelial Network connects to the Prime universe. And it was implied it wasn’t the only alternate universe Prime Culber encountered while trapped in the Network.

 

So if I understand this correctly....

Spoiler

the only character from the prime timeline that appears in this novel is Culber, amirite?

 

Thanks for answering this.

 

Spoiler

Technically Ephraim, too.

 

This week's Literary Trek's is an interview with Dave Galanter on Dead Endless.

With regard to the Axanar easter egg, I was surprised at the point that there was no canon Starfleet ships called the Ares, though I quickly realized I was thinking of a USS Aries with an "i," named after the zodiac goat constellation, and the 21st century Ares Mars landers seen on VOY, which have a bit of an excuse on account of theming. Now that I'm curious, I checked MB, and it has been used as a name in the Rise of the Federation era (named for the aforementioned Mars lander, as part of the "Early Earth Spacecraft" theme), a Saladin-class ship in FJ's tech manual (which also had a Hermes-class USS Aries, to compound all possible confusion), and as a stock name for generic ships in a couple of games.

 

Am I also correct in assuming that...

Spoiler

the novel gives the name 'Ephraim' to the tardigrade we know as Ripper, though it doesn't say whether it's the same Ephraim from "Ephraim and Dot"?

Although the latter would seem to be unlikely, as the animated Ephraim was cute and cuddly and MUCH less aggressive than Ripper. Plus the cartoon Ephraim is much smaller than Ripper

 

Spoiler

Ephraim and Ripper are the same, and this is addressed in the book. His actions on the Discovery are discussed. And the Ephraim you see in Ephraim And Dot is also the same, at least as far as I am concerned, and Ephraim's relative size and demeanor are both addressed as well. Ephraim is... unique. And to be honest, I am not certain that the offspring we see in Ephraim and Dot are not also Ephraim, at least to my mind. That's how they (Ephraim) are.

 

From my point of view, Starfleet wouldn't be naming a ship after a god of war. At least, if they had at some point, I'd ignore that the same way I ignore "James R. Kirk" and every ship having its own insignia: mistakes before it all shook out. :-)

 

As David cgc said, the Ares in my novel was named after the Mars lander from VGR: "One Small Step." So it's named for exploration rather than war.

Really, a lot of Starfleet vessels are named after famous warships, notably the Enterprise itself, as well as others like the Potemkin, Monitor, Merrimac, Yamato, and so forth. Others are named after mythological or historical warriors, battle sites, or weapons, like the Ajax, Crazy Horse, Gettysburg, Lexington, or Excalibur.

And what about Columbia? Christopher Columbus was a genocidal, slave-dealing monster. But there are so many American places, institutions, and entities named in his honor that it's impossible to eradicate the name. You just have to divorce the name from its origin and focus on more recent references. The starship Columbia NX-02 was named for the first space shuttle, which was named in turn for the first American vessel to circumnavigate the Earth. That's good enough.

 

I don't understand that at all.

Spoiler

How could Ripper and animated Ephraim be the same creature? The one from DSC is large and violent and aggressive. The animated one is much smaller, cuter, and hardly aggressive at all (except when it takes a swing at Dot with a wrench).