Will New Frontier continue?
- Thread starter n3aak
- Start date
Nothing said.
I doubt it though.
I doubt it though.
I too am not expecting anymore. With tie in books for (at least) three new shows plus the obligatory 5YM books eacch year, there’s not going to be room for much else in the schedule.
I doubt the post-Nemesis litverse being nuked would have much effect, to be honest. New Frontier is only tenuously connected to it. There's very little cross-pollination.
This is much more likely.
That was a pretty good story. Really, if you combine the 3 parts you pretty much get another full length novel. It wraps some things up but there is definitely more stories that can be told, including some new threads.
That's my feel as well. And Peter David had noted somewhere several years ago that Pocketbooks has not been in touch with him. He did get to do "The Returned" after that, but it was only an E-book. In theory, nothing stops Pocketbooks from having another author write a New Frontier book (I remember reading that somewhere too) but I certainly don't see anyone but David writing a NF book. But it's my feeling as well that with all the new series coming out there will be tie-in novels for those and other series like NF, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise (along with any other extra universe stuff like Seekers) will be crowded out.
I had a tradition over the last several years of reading NF book when I went away on vacation. They were always fun stories to read, perfect for a vacation book. I finally finished The Returned a little over a year ago, so my plans are to start again from the beginning and re-read them on my yearly vacation. It's has been almost 10 years since I read the first NF novels so it will be interesting to re-read them knowing what I know now about all the characters and the ship. My favorite NF were the first several on the original Excalibur, before the 3 year gap. It'll be fun to see all the characters together again.
Boy, did I hate The Returned. I'd be happy not to see any more "Star Trek" stories about violent self-destructive thugs, relationships that involve sexual assault, people who prefer hereditary monarchy to democracy, etc. I mean, yeah, I was burned out on New Frontier already, but...
This is Star Trek written as Marvel comic, complete with superheroes. The dialogue tends to be wisecracking banter or portentous and stilted. And a lot of stupid setups are required to let the regulars get their buttkicking highlights. One of the most important planets in the galaxy is guarded only by a dozen Starfleet marines, instead of ships, satellites, force fields, automatic weapons arrays, sensors, and other 24th century tech. Why? So Mackenzie Calhoun can kick butt and almost do something he shouldn’t. Characters consistently make dumb decisions so they can blow up in their faces later. Characters who should be able to think of obvious solutions to technical issues fail to, so that other characters can reveal their brilliance. It gets tiresome.
Throughout all three parts, characters are much too eager to jump into violent hand-to-hand combat as their preferred method of dispute resolution. Captain Calhoun in particular commits some acts of violence that should have him drummed out of Starfleet and into a psych ward, but at the end of the book everyone seems to be happy with him staying in command of his ship. A surprise guest star whose identity is revealed at the end of the second part is also played as much more of a bloodthirsty and physically violent character than we’ve seen him in a very long time. The flipside to all this is that characters keep deciding the only way for them to resolve an issue is to let themselves get killed. It’s kill or be killed, except during the sex scenes, and one of them is pretty unpleasant, too. Nobody is capable of thinking their way out of a situation. What the D’myurj do doesn’t make much sense; what their enemies do doesn’t make much sense; how Calhoun tries to deal with them doesn’t make much sense. No one pays attention to what should be obvious developments just so they can be shocked by utterly predictable things they missed.
One minor example of the characters’ not thinking about anything but just blindly acting based on emotion, and this isn’t much of a spoiler: one Starfleet officer has had a baby with the late leader of an alien empire. She takes it for granted that the baby must some day lead that empire because of the divine right of kings or something, and no one questions it; no one says, maybe this empire would be a much better place as a democracy. It’s just not an issue. Of course this months-old baby is the only logical choice for leader of an interstellar empire not allied with the Federation because that’s what his dad wanted, and of course Federation/Starfleet people should interfere with the empire’s internal politics to make it happen.
Throughout all three parts, characters are much too eager to jump into violent hand-to-hand combat as their preferred method of dispute resolution. Captain Calhoun in particular commits some acts of violence that should have him drummed out of Starfleet and into a psych ward, but at the end of the book everyone seems to be happy with him staying in command of his ship. A surprise guest star whose identity is revealed at the end of the second part is also played as much more of a bloodthirsty and physically violent character than we’ve seen him in a very long time. The flipside to all this is that characters keep deciding the only way for them to resolve an issue is to let themselves get killed. It’s kill or be killed, except during the sex scenes, and one of them is pretty unpleasant, too. Nobody is capable of thinking their way out of a situation. What the D’myurj do doesn’t make much sense; what their enemies do doesn’t make much sense; how Calhoun tries to deal with them doesn’t make much sense. No one pays attention to what should be obvious developments just so they can be shocked by utterly predictable things they missed.
One minor example of the characters’ not thinking about anything but just blindly acting based on emotion, and this isn’t much of a spoiler: one Starfleet officer has had a baby with the late leader of an alien empire. She takes it for granted that the baby must some day lead that empire because of the divine right of kings or something, and no one questions it; no one says, maybe this empire would be a much better place as a democracy. It’s just not an issue. Of course this months-old baby is the only logical choice for leader of an interstellar empire not allied with the Federation because that’s what his dad wanted, and of course Federation/Starfleet people should interfere with the empire’s internal politics to make it happen.
In practice, too. Peter doesn't own New Frontier and has no legal rights to it. The NF books are work-for-hire that CBS owns just like every other piece of Trek fiction. Hell, several of the characters are ones he didn't actually create (Shelby, Lefler, Selar, Arex, M'Ress, Nechayev, Jellico).
That's why we were able to do the No Limits anthology back in '03.
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