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A review by lefthandedmatt
Glass Empires by Mike Sussman
3.0
Three novellas telling stories from the, quite insane, Star Trek "mirror" universe. A universe that has all of our favourite characters, but everything is very different. First introduced in the original Star Trek TV series (and giving us the classic image of evil Spock with a goatee), it was revisited several times in Deep Space Nine and then once in Enterprise.
These stories make attempts to fill in the gaps and create a larger history for that universe. The three tales take place across different eras in time: Enterprise, The Original Series and The Next Generation.
Age of the Empress: an Enterprise-era story that picks up immediately from the end of the related episodes and continues Hoshi's tale. It's very dramatic, as with most stuff set in the mirror universe and pretty good fun. I'm not the biggest fan of Enterprise and have very little love for these characters, but these "evil" versions of them have a lot more spirit. Lots of action and double-crosses, silly but I liked.
The Sorrows of Empire: this energetic and political story follows the actions of Spock after the episode 'Mirror, Mirror'. It's grandiose and covers several decades, incorporating characters and events from a number of episodes and films. A bit hard to follow at times due to how fast it moves and how abstract a number of the political ideas are. Spock himself seems more stoic than usual and hard to get a handle on.
The Worst of Both Worlds: probably the silliest, but it's also the most fun. Picard is an amateur archaeologist/adventurer under the thumb of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance when he gets caught up with the rebellion and ends up hunting down the Borg.
The mirror universe is an odd place, often pushed to the extreme. Life is cheap and nobody is trustworthy. That sounds fun at first, but it does get tiresome. All of these stories have a high entertainment factor, but none of them were really all that compelling to me. The Spock story in particular is well plotted and it is quite fun to understand how all the things we grew familiar with in the TV depictions happened.
These stories make attempts to fill in the gaps and create a larger history for that universe. The three tales take place across different eras in time: Enterprise, The Original Series and The Next Generation.
Age of the Empress: an Enterprise-era story that picks up immediately from the end of the related episodes and continues Hoshi's tale. It's very dramatic, as with most stuff set in the mirror universe and pretty good fun. I'm not the biggest fan of Enterprise and have very little love for these characters, but these "evil" versions of them have a lot more spirit. Lots of action and double-crosses, silly but I liked.
The Sorrows of Empire: this energetic and political story follows the actions of Spock after the episode 'Mirror, Mirror'. It's grandiose and covers several decades, incorporating characters and events from a number of episodes and films. A bit hard to follow at times due to how fast it moves and how abstract a number of the political ideas are. Spock himself seems more stoic than usual and hard to get a handle on.
The Worst of Both Worlds: probably the silliest, but it's also the most fun. Picard is an amateur archaeologist/adventurer under the thumb of the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance when he gets caught up with the rebellion and ends up hunting down the Borg.
The mirror universe is an odd place, often pushed to the extreme. Life is cheap and nobody is trustworthy. That sounds fun at first, but it does get tiresome. All of these stories have a high entertainment factor, but none of them were really all that compelling to me. The Spock story in particular is well plotted and it is quite fun to understand how all the things we grew familiar with in the TV depictions happened.