There is a fine art to reading a Mary Sue. You have to remember how much work the character has put into getting to the point of whatever fabulous opportunity she is going to conquer with her wits, her love, and whatever skills she happens to have at the moment. You have to respect the challenges of that moment. You have to allow yourself to be glad to see her. You have to be ready to throw your arms around her, and wish her all the best. You have to welcome the opportunity.
Diane Carey’ 1986 novels, Dreadnought! and Battlestations! offer a fabulous opportunity to practice your Mary Sue appreciation skills. Lieutenant Piper wants to command a starship. She’s spent years in Starfleet Academy and in command training. She’s worked hard to hone her skills in the hope that she will one day be almost as awesome as her idol, James T. Kirk. And that day has finally arrived.
As Dreadnought! opens, Piper is facing the Kobayashi Maru with nothing but her wits and the communicator in her pocket. She endears herself to Kirk by using the communicator to crash the simulation computers, winning herself reassignment from a posting on the Magellan to a more prestigious berth on the Enterprise, because that is how personnel assignment works in Jim Kirk’s fleet. Taking the only sensible course available to her, she dumps her boyfriend, because he is distracting and she is fabulous, which you already knew if you looked at the awe-inspiring 80s-perm on the cover of the book. She heads for the Enterprise and gets acquainted with her culturally diverse and co-educational group of roommates. Piper also has a Vulcan frenemy, Sarda, who hates her because she revealed his interest in weapons design to Starfleet, resulting in his being ostracized by Vulcan society. This seems like a pretty good guarantee that her life will be interesting.
Before she can even change into a proper uniform, Piper is be dragged into a struggle involving a fascist plot to take over the galaxy and a phone call from Piper’s ex that the Enterprise can only answer if Piper is physically present on the bridge. It’s an entertaining story, with bad guys who are really bad, a dash of moral ambiguity, and a hefty dose of hero-worship for one Captain James T. Kirk. Mainly, it’s a vehicle for Piper to show her stuff. And show it she does.
While locked in the fascists’ brig with Sarda, she shows her libertarianism. Since he can’t run away, she lectures him on the Third World War and the importance of individual striving. As any Vulcan would, Sarda assures her that hers is a completely logical vision of how the world works, and then individually strives to escape their shared cell the second the power goes out. Because he’s a nice guy, he lets her out too. Piper then proceeds to individually strive to release Captain Kirk from captivity by persuading her friends to join her in doing the bunny hop to create a diversion. Somehow, the fascists are then defeated, and Piper gets a medal and a promotion.
And what does a newly-promoted Lt. Commander who is also the youngest ever recipient of a seriously shiny medal do next? She goes sailing with James T. Kirk on a ship named after the social worker he loved and all but shoved under a truck to defeat the Nazis. Piper knows none of this, but it adds some interesting textures to the scene. This seems like a high-pressure vacation for someone with no sailing experience, and indeed, she spends a lot of time trying to eavesdrop on her superiors, who seem to be talking about her a lot. When they aren’t correcting her knots. If we learn nothing else from Piper, let us learn that competitive sailing with people you want to impress does not make for a relaxing vacation. Especially when they get arrested mid-cruise.
It turns out that Sarda has joined a bunch of scientists who have gone rogue with a new transwarp drive and who need to be brought back into the fold. Kirk gets hauled off the boat to testify about it. Piper gets a ship to assist in tracking down the rogue scientists, because Kirk respects her and she knows Sarda better than anyone else not involved in the dastardly plot.
Piper has a huge crush on Sarda. There are no touching scenes in a turbolift or anything, but she thinks about him all the time. She feels his reassuring psychic presence in the back of her mind when he’s around. She’s obsesses over every time he touches anyone, especially her. She’s constantly thinking about how rare and special he is, because he’s from the more rural areas of Vulcan, rather than the major cities where most Vulcan Starfleet recruits come from. With some help from an ethically twisty mentor Spock found for him, Sarda has been attempting to acquire the mental disciplines common to most Vulcan adults, which accounts for his involvement in the conspiracy.
To rescue her not-yet-appropriately-stoic love from bad people with a transwarp drive, Piper and her roomies cross the galaxy in a construction tug, and put on disguises to infiltrate the planet where Kirk once encountered Jack the Ripper (as a libertarian, Piper has a lot to say about the Argelian people, none of it flattering). We find out that Piper makes an unconvincing exotic dancer, and she blows her cover to hurl racial epithets at some Klingons. Kirk shows up just in time to create a distraction with some pigs, Sarda is rescued, and after a series of wacky hijinks in which Piper bends the Enterprise, the day is saved. She’s covered in glory, and Mr. Scott wants a word with her. Piper insists that she’s declining a promotion this time, and she really needs a nap, but if you throw your arms around her, she’ll show you a real good time.
Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer has read these books so often the spines are falling apart, despite the four-page lecture on Earth history and individual striving.
Were I only worthy to individually strive to read these books! Thank you, Ms. Cheeseman-Meyer for having sufficient spunk, charm, and scrappy “Can do” attitude to undertake the task for us.
Now, to find that historically determined vehicle under which I need to be inserted to STOP. THE. NAZIS.
The phrase “bends the Enterprise” sticks in the head quite fervently and _almost_ drives me to read the novels just to get to that point.
Ah, yes, the Piper books. In elementary school I’d always see ST paperbacks like these on supermarket wire-racks, and petition the parents. Later on, with the speed I read them, it was easier to wait for the library to get them.
IIRC these are also from the same time when writers were borrowing canonicity from Star Fleet Battles, as starships suddenly have space fighters onboard(because a Mary Sue would never stoop to using a shuttlecraft). They’re also conveniently left unguarded, because..um, just because.
Herewiss13, just do it! It won’t take long.
The unguarded fighters were a plot thing, I thought. I took them as evidence that Kirk was Arranging Things behind the scenes so Piper could get on to the dreadnought and get to the bottom of the situation, somehow. Kirk’s omnipotence is pretty overwhelming in these books.
I haven’t read these since I was 11. I seem to remember entire chapters of the first book were devoted to establishing that yes, Piper thinks the Enterprise crew are totally the bees knees. And she totally has a BFF from each of the Federation homeworlds. And unicorns fear the innate purity of her blood.
They are now ordered from the library, with a chaser of How Much for Just the Planet?
ITA on the diverse range of BFFs. My favorite example is the Gorn roommate. Who is, for some mysterious reason, serving on board a Federation vessel without using a translation device, as a consequence of which, when she meets Piper, she communicates entirely through hissing and groping. One of Piper’s other roommates (who is from Tennessee, and is not a Gorn) helpfully explains that the Gorn is serving on the Enterprise because of her family connections, and then you never, ever see the Gorn again.
I imagine that she spends the rest of both books sobbing in the shower.
Pam@6
How Much for Just the Planet? is a great book. Very subversive of much of Trek, and extremely funny.
These were my first exposure to the Mary Sue thing. I remember reading them with an ear-burning embarrassment for the author.
Just to say something nice about the author, Diane Carey wrote one of the very best Star Trek novels, Final Frontier, which is about Kirk’s father serving under Robert April on the first voyage of the Enterprise. Excellent and highly recommended.
#10- I recall that novel was one of the best of the line.
A lot of them were in the frustrating “almost good” category. D.C. Fontana once wrote a novel that was a fascinating look at Spock’s career under Pike (years almost completely unexplored by the canon), but it kept getting derailed into this rather uninteresting, predictable murder mystery.
I don’t think there’s any reason for D. Carey to be embarassed here. She wrote a popular book. It found its audience. It hit the NYT bestseller list and she got to write a sequel. There will always be someone who loves Mary Sue. And Carey is on record acknowledging the unapologetic Mary Sue-ness of Lt. Piper. It’s not like she wrote it by accident.
Yeah, they’re Mary Sues, but they’re darned good ones, sez I. Those technical specs for vehicles at the back of each book were one of the cooler things about the novels (as a teenaged boy at the time, I guess the smushy-mushy stuff was lost on me). I get why Pocket didn’t publish more like these, but I think they have some redeeming value beyond the typical “Mary Sues” – if anything, it reminds me more of what TNG would later do in “Lower Decks,” and maybe these novels even helped pave the way for non-Enterprise centric novel series like “New Frontier,” “Vanguard,” et al.
Make fun of them all you want, they’re two of the best Star Trek novels out there for the original series. They’re exciting and fun, and focus on what makes Start Trek so good for me at least, the camaraderie and optimism.
No disrespect earlier: like Mike@13 these were fun reads as a kid, along with “Final Frontier”.
Earl@11: Do you mean “Vulcan’s Glory”? You have to admit it, the book was worth it just for the subplot about newbie engineer Scotty’s radiation-infused engine-room whiskey.
Okay, so I simply have to read these after the phrase “bends the Enterprise” and the references in to comments to the Gorn-ette roommate.
FWIW, a good Mary Sue story is nothing to sneeze at.
(hell, I am living the dream playing Star Trek Online, as Captain T’vin McHugh, the red-headed Vulcan-human captain of the U.S.S. Atalanta!)
Mary Sue is necessary for Dreadnought!, which is a going off to college story with the Enterprise standing in for college, and Starfleet academy doing a cameo as high school. (Compare and contrast the behavior of Piper’s roommates with that of Judy Abbot’s roommates in the movie version of Daddy Long-Legs.)
You could no more write this story without Mary Sue then you could write “Herb Kent, West Point Fullback” or “Mimi at Sheridan School” without her. Or, in the case of Herb, him. The going off to college story is always a self-insertion fic, a thinly disguised instruction manual for the next phase of adolescent life (and/or a quasi-religious tract intended to convince you to put up with high school). It’s pretty delightful to have an instruction manual for finding your feet as the newest junior office on the Enterprise – makes it easy to embrace the Mary Sue with verve and abandon (especially when she exhibits so much verve and abandon herself).
These books are wonderful because, YOU ARE mary jane. They are written almost entriely in first person. Crazy circumstances keep draging YOU into situations that you learn to deal with. They are a fun pair of books to read and defintely a guily pleasure.
If you ever wanted to get aboard the Enterprise and have an adventure, read these two books. Otherwise read the other greats (Uhura’s Song, Dwellers in the Crucible, Pawns and Symbols, Strangers from the Sky, My Enemy/My ally,etc ) about the adventures themselves, but you won’t be there like you will in these 2 carey books.
My favourite of them all were ‘Ishmael’ and ‘Uhura’s Song’. You just can not get better than Spock in a western and Uhura singing to sea critters (who were not aliens, because they were where they were supposed to be — the folks from the Enterprise were the aliens).
I’ve now finished Dreadnoughts– all I can say is THE BUNNY HOP?
I KNOW!! It’s just weird. But also really creative and unexpected and an interesting approach to the problem at hand, even though one team member needed remedial bunny hop instruction.
@18 – Great point, Dave! It also makes me wish there were some true Star Trek “Choose Your Own Adventures” out there. I know William Rotsler wrote a “Plot Your Own Adventure” book post-Star Trek II, but I believe it is written in the third person, without YOU being the star of the show. (Of course, with the rise of computer gaming and Star Trek Online and the like, I guess such a book isn’t really needed… still, my nostalgia as a child of the 80s sometimes knows no bounds…!)
EllenMCM@7,
and then you never, ever see the Gorn again.
I figured that this is because Saint Jim Kirk doesn’t have a Gorn friend. Spock equivalent- check; McCoy equivalent- check; Scotty equivalent- check. No need for a Gorn.
I also kept hoping that some character would come up with the line Scanner lived in vain during Battlestations.
I read these when I was 14, and thought that you could write and have published Star Trek novels that are basically about your own characters. I wrote part of a terrible Gary Stu novel, fully believing it had a decent chance of being published.
I bet you that after the Piper duology was published, the Star Trek publishers were flooded with every Mary Sue and Gary Stu fanfiction story ever written.
Mary Sue and Gary Stu have their place, on Livejournal or Fanfiction.net. They have no business being published by license holders.
Making 14-year-olds think that they too can one day publish a novel is not a crime. Publishing Mary Sues appears to be a profitable business for license holders.
I’ve been watching Star Trek since the series began in 1966 and I’ve read over a hundred Star Trek novels, including the two reviewed here and while I have to say that Diane Carey’s work is excellent, it is obvious to me that the author of this article knows little about Star Trek and understands even less.
This article inspired me to actually read the novels and I have to say they are not bad at all. They both follow the Trek mythology and are not afraid to have fun with the concept. If only some of the modern novels in the Star Trek line had this sense of adventure. I wish that Lt. Piper had here own series after reading these novels. It’s too bad Diane Carey wasn’t allowed to expand the Lt. Piper character into more novels. With Star Trek:Seeker and Star Trek: Vanguard and even Peter David’s New Frontier novels, Lt. Piper would be a welcome addition.
@27/R. Lloyd – Were Carey writing Trek novels today, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Piper got her own series. I would have read it; I loved both of these when they were new. Haven’t re-read them since the 80s, but I recall enjoying the “lower decks” p.o.v. and the new ship designs; whatever political subtext there is was lost on me as a teen. I also remember especially enjoying the Vulcan character.
I owned the books as a kid, and re-read them not long ago, and thought they held up pretty well. Carey’s political inserts grated, but that’s Heinlein AuthorTract more than Mary Sue. As for Piper being a Mary Sue, um, what’s the definition? Piper’s competent and lucky, but she struggles. She doesn’t get every male character having a crush on her. What she really is is a female Kirk, with more self-doubt and less sex. Complete with Vulcan, doctor, and engineer friends, as noted. If Piper’s somehow bad as a Mary Sue, what’s that make Kirk? Exempted because he’s male?
(And as someone said, the really crazy Xanatos Chessmaster competence is off-screen Kirk, not Piper. Shows up a bit in Diane *Duane’s* My Enemy My Ally too, where he pulls off some insanely good timing.)
I was always willing to forgive Piper’s Mary-Sue-ness because the novels were, to my mind, written with tongue in cheek. To me they seemed to be in the spirit of Star Trek IV — silly hijinks with a side of adventure. I mean, the fact that the Bunny Hop works as a distraction is less absurd than the fact that Diane Carey decided that it was going to be Piper’s tactic… and really tells you how seriously you’re supposed to take the whole adventure.
Having said that, I read these in grade school, so who knows what I’d think of them today. (Certainly didn’t catch any of the libertarianism at the time.)
@30 – I did not catch enlibertarianism way back when either!
The term Mary Sue has taken a lot of criticism of late, and much of it is deserved. But I love this one. Piper is both interesting in her own right and a great opportunity for the reader to see themselves in the story
“The angel falls.”
My personal litmus test for a Mary Sue is ‘does she make me want to shove her into the warp core’? The answer for Piper is no. I liked these books.
I don’t think it’s at all fair to refer to Piper as a Mary Sue, considering that the term is shorthand for a particular form of badly-written character in poorly made stories usually by immature writers and primarily in fanfiction. The only things Piper has in common with such characters is that she is a self-insert character and is a new protagonist in an established setting. Yes, all Mary Sue characters may be self-insert characters but not all self-insert characters are Mary Sues –the determining factor is if it’s well done or not. And has been proven with spin-off characters like Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and others, a new character or entirely new set of characters can take center stage in new stories set in a pre-existing franchise without being Mary Sues.
Piper and her friends are not Mary Sue characters because they belong where they are –they’re not special chosen ones who came out of nowhere to steal the spotlight. They are excellent officers, yes, but that’s to be expected of people good enough to earn an assignment on one of the 12 Constitution class ships. To do that takes skill, talent, training, and hard work along with years paying dues to get to that point and Piper and co qualify. She took no shortcuts through the Academy, she earned her graduation the right way. She also didn’t luck into an assignment on the Enterprise, she earned it by being a solid officer who did her job and did it well. She was promoted to LT and assigned to Enterprise for her dedication to duty and her job performance, fair and square. She displays the skills and talents and attitude you’d expect from someone of her rank and her station aboard Kirk’s ship, no more and no less. Her attributes are the same ones you could expect to find in anyone who had earned the same rank and position.
The only difference is that unlike most others, she and her core group of Academy friends stumbled into a situation where they had to take action and perform heroic deeds in the line of duty. The story isn’t “here are the grand exploits of the most awesome person who ever lived”, it’s a story of “what if circumstances force an LT and a small group of her co-workers into a situation where they have to assume the role and responsibility of heroes before they would ordinarily be expected to do so? Can they step up to the challenge, or will they fail? What trials and tribulations will they face along the way, and how will they grow and change as characters due to being thrown in the allegorical deep end of the pool to sink or swim?”
That’s good storytelling, and the author never fails to portray three key facts: One, that without the skills, conditioning, and knowledge provided by their Starfleet training they would never stand a chance. Secondly, it could have been any set of lower-middle rank officers who got drawn into that situation, it just happened to be them. Thirdly, the characters feel like they’re in over their head from the word go and even with all the tools their Starfleet training has given them they are struggling against the odds. They’re scared, worried, under pressure, overwhelmed, and having to hold themselves together and move forward on willpower alone. They don’t know if they can even survive, let alone succeed, but they have no choice. They have to do or die.
A Mary Sue character would never feel threatened, never struggle, and would just overwhelm every challenge with ease and style because they’re just that amazing. Or to put it another way, Piper idolizes Kirk and works her ass off hoping to impress him. A Mary Sue would end up with Kirk idolizing and trying to impress her!
As apposed to JJ Abrams’ Kirk, Spock and McCoy et. al. Who are pulled out of the academy and promoted to senior officers for no good reason.
I’ve enjoyed re-reading this, even as an adult non-libertarian. I don’t get the “Mary Sue” thing; she’s basically a younger female Kirk with more self-doubt and less sex. If she’s a Mary Sue, what’s Kirk? (Besides even more OP in these books than he is normally.)
The political lecture is a bit heavy handed, but not too long, and the extrapolation of Vulcan culture is pretty cool. As is bending the Enterprise, and other tricks.
I never thought of her as having a crush on Sarda, though I guess I can see it.
@36/Damien: Kirk had his share of self-doubt too, e.g. in “Balance of Terror” or “The Ultimate Computer”, and a younger Kirk (Piper’s age and rank) probably would have had even more.
What’s OP?
I don’t mind a good Mary Sue; what I mind is having Carey’s Libertarianism shoved down my throat.
OP = overpowered
*grin* I haven’t read these books and don’t intend to, as I’m not into science fiction. But as a Suethor — self-insert wish-fulfillment fantasy is what I write and why I write it, always and forever — it’s refreshing to see a Sue get praised as such. People accused of reading or writing Sues or Stus usually claim, and possibly believe, that the characters in question are not Sues or Stus. I didn’t have the sense to see this accusation as the insult it was meant to be, and proudly adopted the term when I discovered it. I write my Sues for myself and don’t expect other people to like them (and I usually dislike other peoples’ despite reepecting the intention behind their creation), but it’s a rare delight when someone does. Nice to see that other people can enjoy the concept as well.
@38, personally I found it refreshing.
To say something I didn’t four years ago: libertarian Sue or not, the books are *memorable*. Granted I re-read them as a kid, and as an adult, but that doesn’t always work. (I literally forgot about the Blue Sword twice.) The bunny hop, Piper on the sailing ship, Piper reading about Vulcan education, Piper and Sarda as cadets in Starfleet: Survivor training, the warehouse and phaser rifles, bending the Enterprise, the schematic of Starfleet/Federation governance, all the shiny toys that went into the eponymous dreadnaught, Perrin… they’re full of people and events and images that I enjoyed reading and that stayed with me.
@39/Damien: Thanks!
Is he, though? Overpowered? He’s smart and resourceful, but that’s as it should be – after all, he’s one of only twelve people Starfleet picked to run their elite starships. And he makes mistakes and doesn’t see through everything the way he does in this novel. He’s a good fighter, but that’s likely just basic Starfleet education. He has a talent for oratory – well, some people do. He can do surprise checkmates… okay, that qualifies.
I’ve finally read the book, and I found it weird. Some random thoughts in no particular order:
I liked the first person view and the lower decks approach, but I didn’t like the narrator much. That made it hard to care.
So this is where the Evil Admiral Trope originated.
“Vulcans don’t have gods”? According to “Yesteryear”, they do.
Why would Spock assume that the terrorists who presumably stole the Star Empire were people with “leftist attitudes”? Aren’t there any other kinds of terrorists?
In “The Galileo Seven”, Boma was a frightened young man who would never have become as insubordinate as he did if McCoy hadn’t egged him on. In this book, Scotty apparently arranged for a court martial which ended with him being thrown out of Starfleet and then told him that it was okay for McCoy to attack Spock, but not for him. In other words, Scotty came across as an asshole. Also in this book, Kirk called Boma “a racist”. Pretty harsh.
Kirk invites a junior officer to a sailing cruise? Isn’t that favouritism?
Sarda gave Piper a poem which ended with “When all is done it is not to die – It is to die well.” Contrast this with the conversation Kirk and Sulu had on the subject in “That Which Survives”: “What a terrible way to die.” – “There are no good ways, Sulu.”
On top of the “die well” thing, there was also a moment when Piper involuntarily said: “Honor’s everything.” Did we take a wrong turn somewhere and end up in the Klingon Empire?
In “Space Seed”, we learned that the Eugenics Wars were caused by “a group of these [selectively bred] young supermen [seizing] power simultaneously in over forty nations” and then fighting each other. Moral: “Superior ability breeds superior ambition.” In this novel the eugenics experiments came about because “people lost the idea of individual action and started looking for great leaders”. I’m a bit unclear about that. They were looking for great leaders, so they manufactured some? Because there weren’t any candidates left among them? That’s not only highly unlikely, it also contradicts “Space Seed”, where the improved humans seized power.
Shortly before Piper related these events, she praised people who were “fired by self-interest”. After Piper saved everyone, Kirk lauded her for her altruism. How does this go together? Piper and Sarda readily agreed that “there is no such thing as ‘common good’”. Wouldn’t peace in the galaxy, the thing they themselves faught to preserve, count? The eulogy Piper received together with her medal also mentioned Starfleet’s “humanitarian code”. How can you have a humanitarian code if you think that there is no common good? This is confusing.
After that, the eulogy became decidedly weird: “You’ve displayed the rare gift of uniqueness within the system. Star Fleet takes pride in your strength of individuality.” I can’t imagine Dorothy Fontana or Gene Coon writing anything like that. On the other hand, it’s deliciously parodyable. I could say it to my daughter the next time she does something unexpected in school: “You’ve displayed the rare gift of uniqueness within the system.”
The book was fun to read, but it takes place in a strange parallel reality.
Another oddity is the way Piper/Carey describes people’s eyes. Most of them are gems: Osira (the Gorn) has “sapphire eyes”, Sarda’s are amber or topaz, Scotty’s are hematite. Only Merete’s eyes are “apple green”. Spock has “eyes like polished nitaglase” (or “nita-glase”?). And Kirk’s are “dark aurelites in a plume-pool at mating time”.
Can anybody tell me what all this stuff is? What is nita-glase? What are aurelites? And what’s a plume-pool?
I read these when I was 15 and I loved them. Even then, all the talk about (what I now know is) libertarianism came out weird.
In any case, Carey problems appeared later, when she dedicated in the DS9 and ENT novelizations to bash the franchise. I remember particularly the novelizations of The Way of the Warrior and Sacrifice of Angels and it was awful. When she got to Broken Bow, it just was tacky. Anyway, someone didn’t do the homework back then.
I’ve always found the most embarrassing thing about these novels is their treatment of Boma, which smacks of a Spock fan girl going “Wah, he was mean to my hero!” and turning him into an evil racist who gets kicked out of Starfleet and demonised. He even points out that he didn’t say anything that McCoy doesn’t say on a regular basis, and Scotty’s carefully thought out response is that McCoy’s allowed to. Because Carey likes him, presumably.
As I recall it’s because Bones is a fellow officer and the medical officer with a right and even a duty to call out command officers.
I did however think it was a little unfair to Boma who was also under pressure at the time. I personally believe he had a quiet word with Spock afterwards stating that while he stood by his opinions he realized he’d been seriously out of line expressing them as he did. ‘I am very sorry, sir.’ to which Spock would reply. ‘I perhaps made insufficient allowance for understandable human emotions. We need not discuss this further.’
But I like these books. Flaws and all.
That may have been the idea but the novel didn’t seem to feel any need to vocalise it: I don’t think there was any explanation beyond “Doctor McCoy’s allowed to”. It felt like Carey putting the things she wanted to say to Boma into the characters’ mouths (not for the last time…) and came across as the old boys’ network ganging up on the outsider. (This becomes even more problematic when you realise it’s a bunch of white senior officers piling on a black junior…)
At least the first novel had a tiny amount of nuance, in that despite Boma being portrayed as a caricature, he does at least still have enough of a shred of decency to distance himself from the conspirators when he realises how far they’re going to go. Then, suddenly, in the second one, a slightly insolent officer who might have been rude to Spock but still went back to save him at the risk of his own chance of getting away and was last seen sharing a joke at Spock’s expense with the characters who we’re supposed to believe had him thrown out of Starfleet, suddenly becomes a quasi-genocidal Bond villain blackmailing the world government with a superweapon. The whole thing comes across as Carey creating a hate sink character and then giving him the name of a canon character she didn’t like. (Mary Sue Versus OC Stand-In!)
Thankfully, we now have Dayton Ward’s much more plausible alternate take on Boma’s fate, where he transferred off the ship for a fresh start and ended up working quite well with Spock when they met up again older and wiser, so it’s even easier to ignore all that.
Dreadnought happens to be one of my all time favorite Star Trek novels. I liked that it treats Franz Joseph’s work as canon. (He did, after all, do everything he did with the knowledge and approval of Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry only objected to Joseph’s creative choices and work years later, after the fact, and for dubious reasons…)
Carey’s interpretation of a Dreadnought starship was cool. I really dig the USS Star Empire, and the excellent illustration of it on the cover. I wish there’d been more, perhaps some schematics of the Dreadnought inside the book to go with the diagrams of the shuttles included.
Dreadnought isn’t a Mary Sue novel. I read a few years ago where the publishing team looked at the novel with great skepticism, until they read it and realized it wasn’t a Mary Sue at all. For one thing the main characters (the classic TOS crew) never cease to be the main characters in the story. Piper and her crew don’t come in to save the day because everybody else is incapable of doing it. Rather, by allowing the reader to view Kirk, Spock and the others from the corner of the room, they let us view the story from a similar perspective in the book as we would if we were watching an episode of the show. The author’s new young characters are portrayed as green and flawed, and couldn’t have saved the day unless our heroes were there to help them. Not the other way around. Hence Ms Carey’s Piper is not some Mary Sue who comes in to save the day for the Enterprise crew, instead she’s just there to help them and learn from them. This is how a “lower decks” type story should be done.