Fighting Fiction In Space

Hello all!  I think I have time for a quick rambling before I head back to the grind.  Today's book is Gulliver's Fugitives Star Trek: The Next Generation by Keith Sharee.  Summer by the pool always puts me in the mood for SciFi and I love Star Trek TNG so this sounded like a good idea.  Was it a good read?  First, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

First of all, I'm gonna just say I'm gonna write this like anybody reading it is already a Trekkie and knows the characters I'm talking about.  The books are written with the assumption that the readers, if not already fans of the show, at least have a basic knowledge of the cast and setting.  If you are not part of this group...well...it's on Netflix so you have no excuse :-)
Councilor Troi finds herself in a trance that seems to transport her mind to a world filled with fantastic beings.  She manages to wake herself up, but is disturbed and goes to the Captain with her feelings of concern about a possible alien presence.  Meanwhile the crew has discovered a planet where a lost ship may have crashed ten years earlier. The crew contacts the planet and they are told that a boarding party will have to come aboard the Enterprise to make sure that no contraband or instances of the dreaded Allpox are present.  Two men and a couple of machines beam on board and fairly quickly start freaking out.  Apparently, the planet (called Rampart) is populated by a human colony that left year many many many years ago and established a world built around a lack of any fiction.  To maintain this strict adherence to facts, the government uses a combination of filtering helmet's that filter out any supposed "fiction" and deadly machine's called one-eyes that pretty much shoot lethal blasts of radiation at anybody's who's brain waves register in the fiction zone.  All kinds of hell breaks loose when the one-eyes detect the ever present fiction that thrives aboard the varied enterprise, and considering that the people of Rampart believe that even aliens are a work of fiction, you can see how a ship that employ's various races and species is in trouble.  The Rampart crew captures Captain Picard and the one-eye's wreak destruction upon the Enterprise.  A landing crew consisting of Riker, Data and Troi goes down to rescue Picard and are immediately captured themselves.  All except Councilor Troi who falls in with the Dissenters, a group of people who take on the names and persona's of various fictional characters and rebel against the fictionless government. Picard and Riker are to be "blanked" a process in which people who suffer from the Allpox (which is what they call fiction) have their mind completely erased and a new personality is inserted.  This is the only way the government can work around killing most of it's population.  More chaos and crazieness ensue.  The Dissenters stage a major demonstration and Picard and company are rescued.  Geordi and Worf with some help from the crew save the Enterprise and it is revealed that one of the Rampart guys is actually the brainwashed captain and sole survivor of the missing ship.
Troi discovers her trances are a result of a strange movie she watched based on the mythologies of Earth and the crew moves on to their next adventure.

Soooooo...this book was stupid.  I can't think of a nicer way to put it.  I usually enjoy the Star Trek books, they let me explore a vast universe that I love in greater detail, but this book was very very juvenile.  I think what really killed it for me was the writing.  For most of the book the writing felt cliched, trite and stock.  The author only attributed the simplist of emotions or thought process to very well established characters, dumbing down people who have been shown over and over to be smart, making characters with great depth one-dimensional, attributing all kinds of insta-relationship emotions to characters who were only around for a short while.  It actually took me a really long time to read because I kept having to put it down to unroll my eyes.  The concept was ok I guess, even though we all know that humans are creative by nature, and the standards of fiction on Rampart are especially strict, though I will give it to the author that he acknowledged if the government killed all the dissenters there would be no one left.  I'm not going to spend a lot more time on this 'cause there was just not a whole lot to it.  Essentially I felt like I was reading a very very basic fan fiction version of a Star Trek story.  I give this story a 3 out of 10 Zen bows and am looking forward to reading a GOOD Star Trek story.  Happy Reading Everybody!

This Makes Us All Cranks

Still cold, so so so cold, was at the station running calls in the cold and ice, so so so so so cold. I usually don't mind the cold, but this is excessive and it is making me cranky...you might even say I'm a Crank...which by the way happens to be what the crazy people are called in the Maze Runner series by James Dashner of which I just happened to finish the last book The Death Cure...which also made me a cranky Crank (do you like my babbling segues today?). Anyways  lets get to it, as always SPOILERS AHEAD!

When we last left our tortured her Thomas he had just been "rescued" by WICKED a group that is supposedly working on a cure for a deadly disease by torturing teenagers.  Thomas is finally released from his padded cell and reunited with his fellow torturees.  The apparent head Doc whom the group calls Ratface informs them that they are almost to the last step of the cure and that they will now give them there memories back (remember part of the whole maze deal was that there memories got swiped).  Thomas along with his fellow Gladers Minho and Newt decide that they don't trust WICKED to put back their original memories and decide to stay clueless about there past.  This leads to a confrontation with Ratman who has decided that they don't get a choice in the matter. He tells them that one of the reasons that they were all chosen for this torture experiment is that most of them are immune to the Flare and that they are trying to map their brains to see why they are immune.  We also find out that Newt is one of the non immune, he gives Thomas a letter and tells him not to open it until the time is right.  Thomas is restrained and taken to get his memories back when he spots Brenda (a friend he made while slogging through the scorch) who with the help of Jorge (another Scorch friend) helps the boys escape.  They end up in Denver where a Flare outbreak is decimating the city.  They also learn that Immunes have been disappearing all over the place and that WICKED is going to start the Trials over again as they did not seem to get the information they were looking for. As they are running around the city they find out about a group called the Right Arm, a quasi-military group who is very anti WICKED and join them.  Meanwhile Newt has started to go crazy because of the Flare and sends Minho and Thomas away.  Later Thomas remembers the note and reads it, the contents essentially ask Thomas to kill Newt when he starts going crazy. Next time he encounters Newt, Thomas does as he wishes and kills him. The group eventually hooks up with the rest of their friends and plans an attack on WICKED.  Thomas goes in alone as Ratman has told him that he is the final candidate and that his brain holds the last piece of the puzzle for the cure for Flare.  The point is for Thomas to get in and plant a device that renders all weapons useless and then be rescued by the Right Arm.  Unfortunately Ratman has other plans, turns out that the final piece of the puzzle is literally Thomas's brain, that they in fact have to cut it out and dissect it, meaning Thomas would die. Thomas is put under and he wakes up in an empty room with nothing but an envelope with his name on it containing instructions on how to get the captive Immunes and escape with them to a preprepared place.  Explosions, fighting and death occur, but in the end Thomas, Minho, Brenda, Jorge, Teresa, and all the rest of the Immunes are transported to a peaceful meadow like area where they can start a new life and eventually repopulate the world with other little Immunes.  In a final epilogue memo we find out that the government purposely released the Flare virus as a means of population control after the devastating sun flare.  The memo also goes on to state that while the attempt to find a cure was noble, a second try was not worth it and that the author of the memo was sending the Immunes somewhere safe.  And so ends our long and torturous journey of pointlessness.

I actually found this book to be a tad less problematic then the previous two. Some of the decisions and reactions were actually plausible and the action tended to have some kind of point to it.  That being said, it was still way to...I don't know how to put it, I just wanted it to be done.  I found myself wanting to skip all the angsty pages and move on to the next sparse tidbit of storyline which does not make for an enjoyable read.  Ok things I did not hate.  I liked that they made one of the core friends sick and that he did not survive, but was reduced to the "enemy" that they all feared so much.  I liked that Thomas and at least some of his friends decided to quit being the puppets of WICKED (no matter how much Teresa insisted that they were good) and finally fought back.  I also appreciated how so many people finally came to the realization that the resources, time, and angst that were being poured into the Trials to find a cure would have been better spent containing and treating the symptoms of the Flare, instead the whole world went to hell while they were waiting for this nebulous possible cure.  Thomas having to question what a cure was worth in terms of both personal, and the groups well-being.  Was it ok to torture a couple hundred people if it could potentially save millions?  At what point is torturing and killing people for a cure going to inflict a damage that out weighs the benefits of a cure?  All good ethical questions.  Things I did not love.  The whole, non explained (not really) reason that torturing Immune teenagers would result in a cure was not sound in any way shape or form.  I work in the medical field and I have never ever remotely heard of a virus infecting somebody because of the way they think...or at least not in the way the book tried to present it.  While positive or negative thinking can have an effect on your health...it won't "cure" anything.  I hated that their was absolutely no mention of them even trying to find a cure or vaccine from more traditional virus killing methods that actually work in real life.  Nope it was all about the killzone (which is the stupid name they gave the brain 'cause the virus makes you go crazy).  So obviously since it is a brain infection...only a thought pattern can cure it, hm I'll have to tell that to my next viral encephalitis patient.  I also thought that the fact that the Flare was released on purpose was pretty non-plausible, I mean what government purposely releases a horrible, non-lethal (it's not the virus, but the going crazy and not being able to take care of yourself part that kills you), uncontrollable, uncurable, unvaccinable virus into the world, seriously who does that...oh right only crazy people.  This was annoying  cause it made an already implausible story pretty much as unpossible as possible (and that is totally a word, Lewis Carrol says so).  I hated that the government did not think to isolate at least some of the immunes, heck or even healthy people once they saw the scale of destruction that was happening.  They obviously had a place prepped, they new the Trials may fail...so why not save as much as humanity as possible?  You could even still run the pointless trials while preserving the human race?!? This book made more sense then any of them, but it was still a very frustrating read.  Questions were still not answered (what the hell were the Trials for?  How were they gonna use the patterns?  What was Teresa, Thomas and Aries role in the beginning?) which may be answered in the prequel...which I will read 'cause why not.  Also a lot of stuff that got set up in earlier books was completely pointless by the end of this book, again a case of the second book of a trilogy being beyond completely pointless, in fact all three books could have probably been combined into one semi-decent book.  In case you haven't figured it out, this is not my favorite series.  I keep hearing people comparing it to the Hunger Games trilogy which while not perfect, at least had a point.  Just because a book is about a bunch of tortured teenagers does not put it on the same level as a set of well written books that also happen to be (among other things) tortured teenagers. I will read the prequal The Kill Order because one I already have it and two just in case it gives me any more information.  I give this book 3 out of 10 Death Cures.

What did you think of this trilogy?  Was it comparable to the Hunger Games?  Will you watch the movie when it comes out and tell me what you think so I don't have to?