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A review by bory
The Final Fury by Dafydd ab Hugh
2.0
I gave this a try last year and I ended up DNF'ing it. For whatever reason, a couple of day ago I decided to give it another go and actually managed to finish it. It's... not great.
Like most Voyager books written by authors not named Christie Golden or Kirsten Beyer, The Final Fury fails to accurately portray the character, as we know them from the show. Now, this is probably at least partially due to the The Final Fury being written a little under a year into the show's original run. Not that many episodes for Dafydd ab Hugh to get a proper feel for the crew of the NCC-74656. But then again, The Murdered Sun, Christie Golden's first foray into the Star Trek universe, preceded the Final Fury and Golden did an excellent job at writing Janeway and co.
I would have been more willing to excuse ab Hugh's many mistakes, like, for example, saying that Janeway could have been Starfleet's best chief engineer had she not become a captain - Kathryn Janeway, while indubitably a competent engineer, was a science officer before she switched to the command track, if the book was fun. It's not. The Final Fury is way too dense, and way too clunky. The ending is both too convenient, in that it allows the Voyager crew to wash their hands of the ordeal guilt-free, and grossly unsatisfying. So we just leave these ancient terror masters of the Alpha Quadrant to just float in space, cosmos know where? Okay.
The idea of genetic memory is an interesting one, but it was not well executed.
This is not the first ab Hugh Star Trek book I've read. Fallen Heroes, a DS9 novel, also fails at accurately porting the characters from its mother series. Overall, from what I've seen, ab Hugh does not write Trek well, and I will not be reading any more of his book in this universe.
Like most Voyager books written by authors not named Christie Golden or Kirsten Beyer, The Final Fury fails to accurately portray the character, as we know them from the show. Now, this is probably at least partially due to the The Final Fury being written a little under a year into the show's original run. Not that many episodes for Dafydd ab Hugh to get a proper feel for the crew of the NCC-74656. But then again, The Murdered Sun, Christie Golden's first foray into the Star Trek universe, preceded the Final Fury and Golden did an excellent job at writing Janeway and co.
I would have been more willing to excuse ab Hugh's many mistakes, like, for example, saying that Janeway could have been Starfleet's best chief engineer had she not become a captain - Kathryn Janeway, while indubitably a competent engineer, was a science officer before she switched to the command track, if the book was fun. It's not. The Final Fury is way too dense, and way too clunky. The ending is both too convenient, in that it allows the Voyager crew to wash their hands of the ordeal guilt-free, and grossly unsatisfying. So we just leave these ancient terror masters of the Alpha Quadrant to just float in space, cosmos know where? Okay.
The idea of genetic memory is an interesting one, but it was not well executed.
This is not the first ab Hugh Star Trek book I've read. Fallen Heroes, a DS9 novel, also fails at accurately porting the characters from its mother series. Overall, from what I've seen, ab Hugh does not write Trek well, and I will not be reading any more of his book in this universe.