Wait, how on earth am I just hearing this?
I thought they left the novel timeline to rot with Picard.
They actually went and blew up the timeline?
Wow.
One thing the Treklit writers were, was respectful of their audience (mostly because it was so small, and thus could be directly engaged with).
So, I'll give him credit for this. Disney is incapable of even this sort of acknowledgement.
Yes.
The Coda final from what ive read has cool ideas and concepts , but I really take offense with how... soul crushingly dark it seems. This is how you want to end it all? It's not just a simple reset button, it's not something as banal and friendly as some of the TNG episodes. It's a several years worth of book canon being butchered. Basically everyone sacrifices themselves to give picard a chance to hit the deuniverse button and boom.
(It is clearly stated that the book universe is not the prime timeline, and that everything must die so that the live action universe lives and the Devidians dont get the idea to eat universes ever again. The IDEA mind you not their existence, so they could conceivably figure it out again later. )
Why? Why did they feel the need to do this? People weren't pissed off that star wars didn't properly end the EU, they were pissed off it wasn't properly UTILIZED.
The plot of how the devidians got the idea to start eating entire timelines is interesting, and the idea that multiple timelines branched out after the events of First contact is neat too. It's just so glaring how this book is pushed out to force everything to end. The authors had a sick kind of glee from killing off all these characters needlessly until picard and his family were the only ones left.
One plus is that every book in this series has a version of Wesley dying horrbly, I think the bad guys even harvest his organs at one point.
Riker going off the deep end is explained away as temporal sickness from his AU counterparts dying, but the whole thing feels like an excuse plot to get him to fight Picard, especially after earth gets destroyed and he somehow takes command of starfleet. Not even the William Shatner novels took that low hanging fruit with Sulu.
Im not going to tell you all the star trek novels were perfect or anything, but it was somewhat comforting to know that there was a Picard out there who banged Crusher, had a kid and wasn't some old has been on a winery.
Oh and they felt the need to shove Benny Russell in there at the end writing about star trek picard novel The Last Best Hope....
The one where Picard repeatedly fucks up and is a complete debie downer.
They also invalided star trek countdown. Where Picard retired to be an ambassador like spock. I actually liked that quite a bit.