You thought you'd be safe from a review just 'cos it's rerun time...think 
again.  :-)  I'm not going to be particularly formal this time, though, and 
I'm definitely NOT going to give a synop of a 400-page novel.  I'll be 
mentioning several things that happen, though, including the ending, so those 
of you who haven't read the novel yet definitely should NOT go past this 
point.

Whew.  Still with me?  Good.

Many thoughts came to mind while reading this last night.  "Holy shit" was 
often one of them.  "Yeep!" was another.  "Superb" was also one of them from 
time to time.  But, at least until the last 20 pages or so, the overriding 
phrase in my brain was

PUT THIS ON FILM!

I'm serious.  Most of this book would make a terrific TNG movie.  (There's no 
way it would all fit into one episode without being horribly cut.)  Certain 
bits really struck me as cinematically apt.  For example:

--The planet-killer heading off into the star, and everyone breathing a sigh 
of relief.  UNTIL, that is, it comes barreling right on through the other 
side...that was one of the "holy shit" bits I referred to above.  

--In a similar vein, the Borg ship getting enclosed in the Enterprise's 
warp-bubble, and then managing to escape it using Kolker only knows what.

Definitely filmable.  The one thing that changed that, however, was the 
ending. 

I didn't object to the ending; far from it.  I found it to be one of the more 
chilling fates I'd seen for an adversary, and one that unfortunately made 
loads of sense for Delcara.  However, there's absolutely no way to film it and 
do it right.  About the closest would be the end of "Time After Time", but 
that's not quite the same idea.  Besides, there's no way to keep the final 
page intact as such on film, and I would most DEFINITELY want it there.  Oh, 
well.  It was only a pipe dream, anyway--they don't adapt novels, and they 
definitely wouldn't adapt anything from such a persistent thorn in Richard 
Arnold's side.

There were a couple of minor things I didn't care for in the novel, though not 
many.  For the most part, they can be summed up by saying that I think Peter 
occasionally tried to put in a few too many ties to previous situations.  
Specifically, I thought bringing in Pulaski and the Repulse was a little bit 
gratuitous (LA Law inside joke or no :-) ), as was making the commander of the 
Tholian fleet be Loskene.  It's kind of like the reaction I'd have had if Worf 
had been commanding the Klingon force in "Yesterday's Enterprise":  a little 
too contrived.  But in most of the other cases, it wasn't gratuitous at all.

I definitely DID like the theorized origins for the planet-killer, and some 
background on the Borg.  It makes a great deal of sense to me, and follows up 
both the TNG Borg shows and TOS's "The Doomsday Machine" very nicely and with 
good regard to detail.  Of course, these origins as presented here will never 
ever appear anywhere else.  Sigh.

And, of course, one thing has stayed constant between _Strike Zone_ and here: 
Peter's gift for dialoguing the TNG crew.  In fact, I think it's been 
improving, considerably.  In _Strike Zone_, I remember being surprised at how 
few places I found where it didn't ring true; here, I can't remember any that 
directly involved the TNG core members.  (I did have trouble with some of 
Shelby's lines on the Chekov, however--that's my only other objection.)  
Thanks to talking over stories and scripts and so forth with various people 
(and trying my hand at writing a "serious" parody a few years back [serious in 
that the only silly thing about it was the plot; I tried to get the characters 
right]), I've managed to refine my own rule of thumb for reading TNG dialogue 
on paper:  if I can't hear the characters saying it on-screen, and can't hear 
it echoing in my skull for at least a few seconds, it doesn't work.  (And 
that's one of the biggest problems with a great many novels; the dialogue 
doesn't so much echo as sort of slowly thud.)  I definitely heard the echoes 
last night.

Considering that there aren't THAT many r.a.sers who seem to habitually read 
the novels, and fewer still who get to them this quickly, I think I'll stop 
babbling on for now.  But I definitely advise those of you with an interest to 
go out and buy _Vendetta_ as soon as possible:  it's easily the best TNG novel 
to date.

In fact, it lets me end my novel obsession with a bang.  Y'see, I'm not going 
to be regularly buying them every month any more.  As I told Paramount 
licensing in the letter I sent them, both the iron-handed interference of one 
who remained nameless in the letter (though he's been described by some as 
"the biggest windmill I know" in one of the best backhanded dedications I've 
ever seen ;-) ) and the interference's effect on the quality of the novels, I 
no longer see my way clear to buy them routinely.  From now on, it's mostly 
author-dependent.  (I will continue to buy Peter's stuff, for example, and I 
will never ever pay money for one of Michael Jan Friedman's novels again...)  
But I knew that this stream was going to end with _Vendetta_; definitely a 
nice way to end.  Bravo.

Tim Lynch (Cornell's first Astronomy B.A.; one of many Caltech grad students)
BITNET:  tlynch@citjuliet
INTERNET:  tlynch@juliet.caltech.edu
UUCP:  ...!ucbvax!tlynch%juliet.caltech.edu@hamlet.caltech.edu
"They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times
I'll ever know..."
			--B. Joel, "Summer Highland Falls"
--
Copyright 1991, Timothy W. Lynch.  All rights reserved, but feel free to ask...
 