I loved those books. Actually didn't realize at first that The Romulan Way owas a sequeal to My Enemy, My Ally, which I read first. I preferred Duane's Rihannsu to most Romulans from other books of the time.
Duane's Rihannsu Saga
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Diane Duane's Rihannsu series, along with Spock's World, are my favorite Star Trek novels. The Vulcans and Romulans are my favorite races, and I love how Diane Duane has fleshed them out. I've read a few other ST books here and there, but these are the ones I keep coming back to for rereading. I would love to see her write more.
My Enemy, My Allyand The Romulan Way would have been brilliant one-offs, and together built up a wonderfully compelling vision of Romulan culture that has left a strong legacy in the current continuity. Reinforced by Sherman and Shwartz' novels, Rihannsu language, culture, as much of Duane's history as could be salvaged, and not a few of the locations and people Duane wrote about have been incorporated into the past decade's novels.
Swordhunt/Honor Blade were slower books, still eventful but geared towards describing the events of The Empty Chair.
The Empty Chair is a book that I quite like. I don't quite get the problems that some of the people had with the predominance of political themes in the novel, since to me that's the glory of it. Seeing Kirk being an Admiral and command fleets, seeing Arrhae navigate the troublesome swamp of elite Rihannsu politics, trying to avoid general catastrophe--it was great.
Swordhunt/Honor Blade were slower books, still eventful but geared towards describing the events of The Empty Chair.
The Empty Chair is a book that I quite like. I don't quite get the problems that some of the people had with the predominance of political themes in the novel, since to me that's the glory of it. Seeing Kirk being an Admiral and command fleets, seeing Arrhae navigate the troublesome swamp of elite Rihannsu politics, trying to avoid general catastrophe--it was great.
Well, sure, tastes differ. Naturally there are plenty of people who like stories about politics and war, and that's fine for them. But as for myself, just as a personal preference, I'm more interested in the side of Duane's writing that's about worldbuilding and cosmic-scale sense of wonder.
Fair enough: The Wounded Sky was amazing.
Well, in actuality, they were one-offs. There is nothing on the cover or promotional material that told readers that "The Romulan Way" was connected to "My Enemy, My Ally". Of course, readers noticed that Duane's original crewmembers, introduced in "The Wounded Sky", were recurring (but she wasn't the first author to have recurring originals), with more added with each new Duane title. Other authors had started using the term "Rihannsu". But, until the plot of TRW started unfurling, it wasn't obvious it was a direct sequel.
What set off Gene Roddenberry was a convention flier that crossed his desk, which advertised GoH Duane as "the creator of the Rihannsu". (Not Ms Duane's choice of promotion.) When Richard Arnold inherited Susan Sackett's job of vetting all tie-in proposals and manuscripts (in about 1986), he would not let the term be used, and it was only after that that many of us heard about Diane Duane having more ideas for her saga, now on (seemingly permanent) hiatus. John Ordover reactivated the project after Arnold left his position.
I did miss many of Duane's more colourful additions to the Star Trek universe in her later books. I strongly suspect the two rather mundane Constellation-class starships in Swordhunt/Honor Blade were a Richard Arnold approved stand-in for her fantastic USS Inaieu.
Impossible, since as Therin said, it wasn't possible to do those books at all until long after Arnold had left. There was a whole decade or more between Arnold's departure and the writing of Swordhunt.
Still, it's possible that the Licensing department, which was under Paula Block at the time, was putting some limitations on the new book even though it was explicitly out of continuity. Or it could simply be that Duane herself was trying to hew closer to what modern Trek had established. Duane tends to write her long-running series with sort of a Marvel-Comics approach to continuity, updating things to fit more modern knowledge without worrying too much about consistency -- like the way her Young Wizard books progressed through two decades' worth of advances in computers even while the characters only aged a couple of years. (Although she's now released a revised, modernized edition of the first several YW novels.) So I'm not sure anyone would've needed to instruct her to update her Rihannsu continuity to fit modern Trek; it's the sort of thing she might've simply chosen to do on her own.
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He would say that he was simply doing his job and following Gene Roddenberry's directive to keep the novels closer to aired Trek, and supplement the parent show rather than build upon and share other tie-in author's contributions. Certainly, it would have been irritating to see and hear convention banter referring to Diane Duane as "the creator of the Rihannsu". Similarly, GR used to get testy when fans would ask why he wasn't "making use of" Franz Joseph starship designs in canonical Star Trek.
Ah, but Naraht the horta did return!
Really wonder why apparently no one wants to talk about these books now, when
I love these books and what Duane did with the Romulans, since i first read "The Romulan Way" in the 90s.
Picard canonized the concept of the Romulans having secret names that only themselves and the people they love know
I love these books and what Duane did with the Romulans, since i first read "The Romulan Way" in the 90s.
These are some of my favorite series of Star Trek novels by Diane Duane.Diane was interviewed by Jeff Ayers I remember in the interview she said the material for Sword hunt & Honor blade was outlined the year after the Romulan way came out.It was more or less based on the events of that book.But took a lot longer for the last books in the series to finally be published by Pocket books.
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My Enemy, My Alley is one of my favorites. I didn't enjoy The Romulan Way nearly as much the first time around, but when the Bloodwing Voyages came out I bought it on my Kindle and reread all four books before getting The Empty Chair.
Necro thread, but Diane Duane just mentioned this "Star Trek: Picard" factoid on her Facebook page.
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My Enemy, My Ally is my all time favourite Star Trek novel
I've only read The Romulan Way and The Empty Chair, but I remember liking them and thinking the quality of the writing was better than some of the other Treklit I'd read. The Rihannsu book are extremely popular with a lot of Treklit folks, so if you're curious enough to ask, and you have the time, probably give them a go. Plus, you can stop at any time. Decide after each one if you want to keep going.
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How are the FASA Romulans different from the Rihannsu ones?
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How are the FASA Romulans different from the Rihannsu ones?
They're entirely different. Different gods ("Great brothers" instead of the powers/elements), different language (Rom'lasz and Rav's instead of ch'Rihan and ch'Havran)
There's none of the synergy we got with Mike Ford's Klingons in his novels and FASA.
Do you remember any more? Or know a wiki that goes into this?
It's from the FASA sourcebooks The Romulans: Starfleet Intelligence Manual and The Romulan Way: Game Operations Manual. They've got some really fun backstory like the Federation coming into possession of papers from a hastily-abandoned Romulan colony and learning their history and beliefs post-"Balance of Terror". Finding physical copies isn't easy, but there are digital versions floating around for those who know where to look.
I was lucky enough to find the FASA books, and I still have them, but agreed about the digital copies.
In some ways, the FASA depiction works better with the later televised canon than the Rihannsu novels. It depicts the Romulans as an established power upon first contact with the Klingons and he Federation, as a peer to these. Duane, in her original take, had them come late to starflight. Their Star Empire was formed of a comparatively small collection of worlds that they acquired after the Romulan War, a space wholly Romulan in population, as much a buffer state between the Klingons and Federation as anything else.
(She did change that in later books, granted. Not only were there first- and second-generation Romulan colony worlds, there were also Romulan client worlds and species mentioned. I read this as one of her attempts to update the Rihannsu, to have them be more like the great power depicted and in TNG and later series.)
In other ways, FASA works less well. That setting had the Romulans be seeded on their homeworld by the Preservers; Duane may well have been the first to describe in detail the migration of Vulcans to Romulus.
In other respects, the two are similar. Both Romulan civilizations had a deeply-set view of themselves as having galactic destinies; both had political systems much more recognizable to us now than the neo-feudalism of the Klingons.
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