Jeffrey Lang (1)

One of my favorite novels is Lawrence Durrell's Justine (1957), which is told not in chronological order. Rather, at one point the narrator tells us, "What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant to me." Most Star Trek books are told fairly conventionally from a structural point-of-view; they begin at the beginning and proceed to the end. Even when they jump around a bit, that tends to be pretty structured.

Force and Motion is no Lawrence Durrell novel (for that to be the case, it would have to drop all the very helpful captions and just leave the reader to sink or swim) but it's still one of those rare, refreshing Star Trek novels that seems more interested in being a novel than in being Star Trek, if that makes sense. Nog and O'Brien are visiting Robert Hooke station to meet up with O'Brien's old captain, Benjamin Maxwell of the Routledge (see TNG's "The Wounded"), who is now the station's maintenance engineer.

In the present, there's a crisis: the station exists outside of Federation space in order to enable its residents to pursue a variety of slightly unusual experiments (my favorite was the one researching quantum beekeeping with fractal honeycombs). When Nog and O'Brien arrive, one of the experiments, a living breeding ground for microorganisms, is set free, seeking out a new energy source, threatening the integrity of the station. Nog and O'Brien and Maxwell must work together to save the other researchers and contain the threat. This is fun stuff—it's hard for DS9 as a series to incorporate "strange new worlds" but this one is able to pull in a lot of strange new concepts, and it has a bit of a classic Star Trek feel to it, with clever problem-solving. (In what is always a good sign, I found myself thinking of how I would rebuild it into a Star Trek Adventures module. Fairly easily, I think.) Mother is a neat idea, the spiders are fun, and I liked who the "villain" turned out to be.

That said, I wanted a bit more depth in the present-day stuff. It sets up some strands and ideas when it comes to O'Brien and Nog that I wish had been explored a bit more than they were: Nog and O'Brien needing to make new friends on this new station, Nog's recent trauma with Active Four and older traumas like Empok Nor. These are bubbling in there, but by novel's end, aside from the fact that they had gone through a crisis together, I didn't feel like Nog and O'Brien had grown closer much.

In the past, we see snippets of Benjamin Maxwell: him days after the Setlik III massacre, him just after the events of "The Wounded," him in therapy in New Zealand, him during the Destiny trilogy, him coming home to find his mother dead, him trying to settle into a new life. But these are all out of order scattered throughout the book. And it's not just him either, there are flashbacks to O'Brien during his time on the Routledge, Nog hanging out with Jake after school, O'Brien following "The Wounded," Nog meeting up with Jake for New Year's, and more.

Whenever a novel has a weird structure, I think it's important that that structure be significant. Like, anyone can choose to tell their story out of chronological order, but what prevents it from just being a gimmick? Well, if the form of the novel intersects meaningfully with the project of the novel, then it works. The project of Justine is the narrator attempting to understand Justine but eternally being unable to do so. He writes of one of his failed novels, "In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at that moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. ('Are people', writes Pursewarden, 'continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?') I lacked a belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them." Hence, the book is told out of order because the narrator doesn't believe in the continuity of people.

Force and Motion is told out of order for a very different reason. Benjamin Maxwell may have been a captain, but he started his career as an engineer and he ended it as one too: his goal is to put broken things together. In this case, the broken thing is Maxwell himself—his pieces are scattered all across the novel, and as we put them back together, so does he. Maxwell is a man who wanted to fix what he found, and when he lost his own family, he couldn't put himself back together anymore. Here, he rebuilds himself, not quite as he was before, but into something that works. Given how his first attempt to do so led to him leading a deadly attack, I really liked how his second attempt to rebuild focused on the protection of life at all costs—even the lives of a band of pirates. In the end, he gets to do something he'd never done before, and he gets to protect a new life-form. I loved a lot of the snippets we saw of him across the years: him in therapy telling stories about gerbils and (somewhat surprisingly) him talking to Worf were particular highlights. I've seen some complaints there should have been fewer flashbacks, or they should have been more linear, but to be honest, if that was the case, it wouldn't be a better novel, it would be a different one. It wouldn't come together.

There are lots of thematic connections without them hitting you over the head, lots of depth to mine here. In the end, Maxwell finds some broken creatures and helps them the way he failed to do so many times before. It's a meaningful ending to a good book.

This was to be Jeff Lang's last contribution to the Star Trek line, which is a real shame, because I felt like he was developing into someone like Una McCormack, an interesting distinctive voice with real stories to tell. I sort of felt like they gave him The Light Fantastic as a sop for mining his work so heavily in Cold Equations, but if so, I'm impressed and glad he was asked back to write this.

Continuity Notes:

• In one flashback, Nog is tending bar while O'Brien and Bashir talk about the Alamo. Did Nog really keep working in the bar when he was a cadet on his field placement?
• Given the book picks up on O'Brien's arachnophobia from "Realm of Fear" it seems weird it didn't also acknowledge him having a pet spider from the same episode.
• One of the flashbacks indicates that as of when Nog and Jake were kids, Nog's mom was already dead; this contradicts Ferenginar: Satisfaction Is Not Guaranteed, where she makes an appearance.
• Unlike some other recent DS9 books, this seems to slot into its location fairly well; the flashback of Nog and Jake on New Year's is set between The Poisoned Chalice and Nog's return to the station in part 2 of Ascendance.

Other Notes:

• I hadn't realized until reading Force and Motion how similar O'Brien and Nog were in one sense—they are both great vehicles for suffering. DS9 is famous for its "O'Brien must suffer" episodes but only upon reading this book did it really dawn on me that we got a string of "Nog must suffer" episodes too: "Empok Nor," "Valiant," "The Siege of AR-558," "It's Only a Paper Moon." I guess just like O'Brien's everyman status makes him a good vehicle for suffering, so too does Nog's innocent status.
• There are lots of good flashbacks, some of which I've already mentioned. The Worf one is excellent: "It might be an honorable course of action... But I do not think he would sleep well." The best day / worst day ones were also good. Also Maxwell waiting for the Borg and frustrated he can't serve in defense of Earth. Maxwell saving a dog. I liked the two with Jake a lot, especially Jake's reflections on what happened to Sisko after Jennifer died, which has some nice but not overdone parallels to Maxwell. Nog watching O'Brien and Bashir when they beat the Alamo was good, but even better was O'Brien's present-day explanation of why that moment mattered so much.
• It's nice to actually have a novel that actually makes some use of O'Brien, even though he's been back on the station for some five novels now, and we get some small updates on his family. I will never believe that Miles O'Brien lived on Cardassia as long as he lived on Deep Space 9, but this book does tell us that Kirayoshi resents having to live on the station. It would be interesting to see a kid who would rather live on Reconstruction-era Cardassia than the new Deep Space 9!
• There are lots of small nice moments of character here; I particularly liked one where Maxwell notices how much in sync Nog and O'Brien are on p. 133. Nog feeling like he's not as good friends with Jake's wife as he'd prefer rings true to my experience of what happens when a long-distance friend gets married.
• "Do they have ships that just clean up the mess after the big ships are finished doing whatever they need to do?" Well, actually, yes! Jeff Lang got that one right many years in advance.

… (altro)

When The Light Fantastic came out, Jeffrey Lang had been absent from Star Trek fiction for eight years, since his short story in Constellations (2006). By the mid-2010s, he was no longer in the Star Trek fiction "stable." But suddenly he was back: it feels like a bit of compensation. "Well, Jeff, we heavily mined your novel Immortal Coil rel="nofollow" target="_top">for a trilogy, but of course you don't get anything for that. Would you like the chance to write a new novel at least?" If this is what happened, I don't mind the results, because I like Jeff Lang's writing, and the editors must not have minded either, because they would later invite him to do a DS9 novel as well.

Cold Equations brought Data back to life, of course, but one of my big complaints about that trilogy was that it actually didn't really do much with him as a character. Data was rarely a viewpoint character, and when he was, things were usually plot focused. It was hard for me to tally this coldly Lal-obsessed person with the inquisitive, friendly android we'd known before he died. I'm pleased to say that one of the big strengths of The Light Fantastic is how it joins the dots here and makes this work. Data has permanent emotions now, and he is still learning how to handle them, and not altogether certain about how to express them. The book really benefits from pairing him with Geordi La Forge, who as Data's best friend, can both empathize with him and call him out when he's going into dark places.

The main plot of the book is that Professor Moriarty, confined to the Daystrom Institute in a memory module with the Countess Regina, has figured out a way to reach out of his prison—and now he wants a real body so he can really explore the universe, as he was promised by Picard and Data. Since Cold Equations, Data and Lal have settled down on Orion Prime, where Data manages his father's casino (among other things) while Lal explores her newfound life. Moriarty kidnaps Lal to force Data to assist him, and so Data and La Forge travel the galaxy, looking both for clues as to where Moriarty is and for leads on what can give him a real body.

Like Immortal Coil, it loops in a number of previous Star Trek stories about AI: most notably this time, "I, Mudd," "The Most Toys," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", and most notably "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Plus, it features appearances by Star Trek's two other most famous holograms, Voyager's Doctor and Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine. In the abstract, there's a real danger that this kind of thing could feel gratuitous, but I think the novel just about gets away with it. Each of the returns comes across as a natural extension of what we've seen so far, and serves to deepen the novel's exploration of what kind of rights one has to exist when one is "merely" a program. I liked the return of Kivas Fajo, for example, and Alice—one of the Mudd androids—is probably the novel's best original character. The one thing I would cut is that the conversations with Vic and the Doctor felt redundant; we probably could have done just fine with only one of them.

Lang's novel feels like an actual novel, not an ersatz tv episode; it jumps around in time and focuses on the characters and their thoughts, not the actions. I really enjoyed the story of Moriarty and his growing disillusionment with the universe. His is a tragic tale, and he ultimately makes a strong antagonist. The story of Alice and Mudd is good, as I said. The character of Albert Lee is a fun one, though I did have to look him up to see if he was from a TNG episode I'd missed! I enjoyed Data here, though I still occasionally found him off-puttingly strange. I like, for example, him posing as a fry cook and him struggling to work out parenthood, but his single-minded ruthlessness as a parent didn't always ring true. I get characters in the novels have to evolve beyond what we see on screen, but there's a balance to keep in that they also have to feel like those screen characters, and I think Lang got this most of the time, but not all. That said, La Forge calls him out on some of it near the end, and that helped me.

The weak point of the novel is the ending, which is abrupt. I didn't totally get where Moriarty was / where he had brought Lal and Alice to, and Data's deception of him seemed surprisingly easy. I did like, on the other hand, that Moriarty ultimately didn't suffer for his decision. I did not like the way the characters cavalierly treated Alice. Given the whole book focused on the consequences of how even Data could disregard the sentience of another AI, it seemed weird for them to repeat that mistake with Alice, in allowing her to become reenslaved to Harry Mudd.

There is some fun dialogue here, and some snappy cons and heists, which I always enjoy. Lang is good at small moments that show character and don't necessarily relate to the big plot while also not feeling gratuitously wodged in because the author suddenly realized their characters should be people, like Moriarty trying not to stare at Alice's legs, or Mudd thinking he can still con Uhura. The stuff about color in Moriarty's world is a nice detail, very evocative. Kivas Fajo becoming a Data fanboy was a logical development (not so keen with what his release implies about 24th-century mental health).

It's not as good as I remember Immortal Coil being... but then, I harbor a suspicion that Immortal Coil might not be as good as I remember Immortal Coil being! I am not convinced that what I valued in Star Trek fiction in 2002 still holds true today. On the whole, though, this is fun with some interesting moments, and I am happy to see the return of Jeff Lang's voice after an eight-year gap. Unfortunately, though this book sets Data up to be his own person and even gives him a new mystery to investigate, and though Data would turn up in some more novels, he was never a main character again as far as I know. I would have liked to see where he would have gone next.

Continuity Notes:

• An engineer named "Lee" is mentioned, but does not appear in, "All Good Things..." during the 2363 flashbacks. I guess this must be Albert; the character is really named after Jeff Lang's dog!
• There are multiple references to Indistinguishable from Magic here, a book that seemed kind of glossed over in earlier Destiny-era novels. Suddenly La Forge is in a relationship with Leah Brahms again; he thinks briefly about Tamala Harstad, but agrees with me that she's too boring to be bothered with. There's also a reference to the apparent death of Captain Scott in that novel, though Picard speculates he might return some day—as, indeed, we know he must from Engines of Destiny.
• Interestingly, the book would seem to be incompatible with basically any post-"I, Mudd" stories we've ever seen, as it establishes Harry Mudd was trapped with the androids on their planet for decades. No Mudd in Your Eye, no "The Business, as Usual, during Altercations," even no "Mudd's Passion"! This idea would be invalidated by the Short Treks episode "The Escape Artist"... at least, if you buy my arguments about that story's chronological placement!
• Vic says Miles was pretty busted up when Data died. But at that time, O'Brien would have been living on Cardassia Prime, and nowhere near Vic!
• Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "The galaxy is on high alert for small, fast vessels thanks to a galactic terrorism crisis. Doesn't that make your ship a bit suspicious, Mr. Data?" Hmmmmm...

Other Notes:

• There's a weird scene at the beginning of chapter 15. The scene is captioned "Aboard the Archeus" (that's Data's ship), where Data and La Forge are, and they are comm-linked to Lee back on Earth. All of Lee's dialogue is in italics, the Star Trek fiction convention for people who are speaking on a communicator. But the scene is told from Lee's perspective, describing his thoughts and actions throughout; nothing in the scene is actually narrated from the perspective of anyone on the Archeus! It's very odd and off-putting.

… (altro)