Tag Archives: book review

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Review: Ghost Ship (TNG Novel)

Let’s take it from the top, shall we?

Since rekindling an interest in Star Trek The Next Generation novels and comics, I’ve decided to have a go at the first in the numbered novel series. That brought me to Ghost Ship, by Diane Carey. [minor spoilers ahead…]

Ghost Ship (1988)
by Diane Carey

As most fiction paperbacks are wont to do, this book tells you what you’re getting into right up front, that is via the back cover. Writing in 1988, the author sets the prologue in 1995, placing us in an as-of-then future historical fiction (heh) when a Russian Aircraft carrier is overtaken by an unexplained force. The prologue is very well written, and I almost wished she’d remained writing a book in the near future of the time in which the author was authoring this. But it does as advertised and promptly jumps us into the 24th century, where Deanna Troi is being plagued by apparitions of those unfortunate missing sailors, their life forces being trapped in an inter-dimensional entity, floating through outer space.

The book explores along a couple of themes. I think the first might be identified as something like “Perception” as it compares things like Troi’s empathy with LaForge’s augmented vision. Picard even undergoes sensory deprivation in the course of the story to try to understand what it might be like to live only as a disembodied consciousness (this is accidentally salient and if done intentionally would have been a great presaging of the future assimilation of Picard).

Another theme being explored is the question of life and its value. The debate held is over the definition of murder versus euthanasia— here we see Riker advocating for the preservation of life and holding out that it’s not the Enterprise’s business to trot about the universe deciding who is suffering or not and act to end their lives. Meanwhile Troi attests to the disembodied souls’ suffering to such a degree that she’ll put herself out of her own misery if she has to continue to endure theirs. Crusher has a side she falls on, and is ready to absolve the command crew of the matter of murder by supplying her own medical approval to count the ghostly contact as consent to die, as if being taken off a cruel form of life support, but she’s also awaiting orders. In the end the book properly turns the tables as, ultimately, situational pressure forces Riker’s hand.

I can see what Picard was doing with the self-installed “blue button”, but it seems the book may have missed out on the existence of the now well established self destruct sequence. In a more updated book it might be more satisfying to see this accomplished instead as a scene between Picard and Riker, where Picard would have instead pressured Riker to pre-authorize the two man self destruct (as established in TV episode “11001001”, the one with the Bynars), so that Picard can have his kill switch. That would have been much less odd than Picard going around setting charges on his own and would have upped the thematic pressure cooker with Riker. “I’ll do it Sir, but only because there’s no one else I trust more with my life and the lives of this crew. If this is what I have to do to prove it, so be it.” And then all the big messy questions would be down to Picard’s discernment.

Coming back to the actual events in the novel, as opposed to this reviewer’s own retcons— Data, meanwhile, takes a harsh word from Riker overly personally and decides that a fair test of his humanness might be to offer himself to the entity and see if it counts him as life or not. Which is kind of an illogical test, since if he is what he hopes to be, he will be trapped as a ghost. But let’s not try to make too much sense out of the personal choices of an Artificial Intelligence. In any event, It’s important enough as a question to him, that he is willing to go rogue to find out. (He also… builds a small cloaking device in a pinch from parts he’s secretly stashed for this potentiality? Which… let’s pretend not.)

Alluded to earlier in the book, Wesley’s current science project du’jour becomes of interest in the climactic scene; if it can be implemented at scale, they might have a way of confronting the entity. And basically the two pages addressing Wesley’s whiny attitude are probably my favorite part of this novel. I felt Wesley and Picard were presented as actually decent reflections of one another. Wesley reminded me of the brash, young, know-it-all that Picard must have been, himself. And Picard knows that a genius needs discipline to harness that potential, which Wesley must be made to appreciate. And I think in the subtext Picard knows these things personally. The author goes a step further than just “Shut up, Wesley” and gives this the weight of a life lesson.

Some of the descriptions in this book are over done. I’m not sure if it’s stylistic choice or word count fluff behind it, but either way, it could have benefited from a heavier editorial treatment. Also, its technical descriptions of the inner workings of data, for instance, seem likewise overwrought. They don’t add much, and it may be the author received some of these details in reference notes, or else made them up, but the relevance is limited.

Things I might borrow from this book: Inter-dimensional ghost ships, Wesley’s science project that amps up phasers, Picard’s cool escape maneuver using a gas giant, and the science dingy Riker pilots to go after Data.

I’d say this book is on par with an average Season 1 Next Gen episode— it’s worth watching if it happens to be on.

books, Logbook

Review: Maps of the Imagination

Someday (soon I hope) I will be sharing more of my stellar cartography efforts for all to appreciate and to use in their mission/ campaigns or to be inspired by when writing or talking about Star Trek, but on the way between now and then, I sometimes read material tangential to all of these efforts. Last year was marked in my life by a considerable amount of time spent in waiting rooms. Aside from taking more naps while sitting upright (a learned skill) I tend to read more books in these situations, and one of the books that helped me pass the time last year was Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, by Peter Turchi.

I think for anyone who has been in the writing craft for a while, it’s likely to have encountered the concept of ‘the mind palace’ which is a storytelling memory device of walking through your narrative as if going through a home or a castle and traveling from room to room. Memory seems to map experience with place, and so the writer can take advantage of this. I have heard many orators explain this as their practice of how to deliver a talk with minimal, if any notes, and in pre-literate society without the technology of alphabets, papyrus, or electromagnetically-recorded binary-encoded type, the mind palace or similar imaginary “maps of the mind” must have been an essential tool for educated minds to transmit epic stories, deliver hard-won wisdom, and preserve generational knowledge.

Turchi moves a little further afield and suggests that far beyond writing, almost everything we engage in is a matter of trying to create or use a denotation system in order to make massively overwhelming reality into navigable, comprehensible, and communicable portions which we can take with us via either memory or by any of an innumerable methods of demarcation (maps!), and which we can ultimately share with or pass on to others. What is an alphabet if not a mapping of sounds? Are words and phrases not a legend for meaning? We use all of this to compress the universe into digestible bits and then to expand them again when we look to go back out into the terrain to explore more of the world. Animals often have their own methods of this too. A bee may dance to tell tell other bees where she has found pollen, and they memorize and exchange this compressed information, trading the complexity of the world for a few signals that can lead them to success and security for the hive. Although there is no written or recorded persistence of the insect’s game crossover between “charades” and “telephone”, the little bee has made herself and her sisters a map.

A clever map comparing lengths of rivers and elevations of mountains around the world
An example of one of the diverse selections of maps in the book’s figures: the comparative lengths of rivers and the elevations of mountains are arranged on a single spread!

When you read Turchi’s book, you may get the feeling that everything we do and all the media we engage with is maps. We might even argue that reality therefore is a map as well, just the highest and most detailed form (you can see where simulation theorists might be caught up in thoughts of this nature! But Turchi doesn’t spend much time worrying about this). In Turchi’s opening page he proposes that: To ask for a map is to say “Tell me a story.” And the book is filled with a diversity of ideas expanding on what kinds of things are maps and what it means to be a cartographer and how we choose what to focus on in our mapping systems and ultimately, what use the approach of mapping means for us as writers; ultimately what is writing if not an exploration on which we are trying to bring along another person?

So we as writers might say: here is the story, and how it unfolds, and if you follow along on the path I’ve marked out, you will share an experience in the thought palace, and if I’m especially perceptive and well honed as a writer, I will have mapped out something about the shared human experience that will be unpacked in your own journey as you follow the trail I’ve drawn, such that you and I will have seen the same landscape but from our own eyes, in our own unique perspective. And maybe you too will be inspired to make another map for another traveler.

A map drawn by the author's young son
The author includes a map made by his young son focused on the best winter sledding routes on their local college campus.

The range of explorations in the book is too wild to summarize, both serious and whimsical, popular and esoteric, and yet all pulled together in a way that feels like an enlightened “aha!” The imagination will not be made up of straight lines, of this it is clear, but the journey along with this author through rabbit trails of history and fiction, of sledding with his son and reading the plot of his father’s land, of tracing cows daily plodding through pasture, of the cartography of common board games and the logic of Sunday morning cartoons, of non-linear stories and of treasure maps, of higher geometries on 2-D planes – it all is a guided map tour charting a course through the ways we navigate our interior and exterior lives using story as our cartographic stars by which we are guided, and along which we may point others. ~