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From: wix@bergil.DEC (Jack Wickwire)
Newsgroups: net.startrek
Subject: startrek
Message-ID: <1990@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25-Jun-84 15:44:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1990
Posted: Mon Jun 25 15:44:58 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Jun-84 03:10:56 EDT
Organization: DEC Engineering Network
Lines: 47


Subj:	Diane Duane's *My Enemy, My Ally*

This is a brief and disorganized review of the latest "Star Trek"
novel, Diane Duane's *My Enemy, My Ally*.  It is not intentionally
a spoiler, but if you are picky you had probably better not read
it.  (If you are picky, you had probably also better not read the
blurb on the back of the book, which ruins the tension of the first
few chapters.)

                 * * ** Slight Spoiler ** * * 

Whee!  This one is a lot of fun.  This is not to say that it has
no serious content.  I'm not sure the timing is right, but it seems
to have been inspired by John Ford's *The Final Reflection*.  To a
lesser extent it does for the Romulans what Ford did for the Klingons.
One of the viewpoint characters is a Romulan Commander; she gets
roughly every other chapter.  There's a fair amount of the Romulan
language (excuse me; the Rihannsu language) and some fascinating
glimpses of Romulan culture and philosophy.  The writing is good,
the characterization dead right (for pre-STII, anyway), the suspense
considerable, the space battles remarkable, and most of the science
plausible, though I think Duane bases her biology on some experiments
the results of which have turned out not to be repeatable.  There
are lots of cunning little references to the TV episodes and a few
oblique ones to things to come.  Highly recommended.
 
(So you'll have some points of reference, let me add that I think the
best of the "Star Trek" novels are Vonda MacIntyre's *The Entropy
Effect*, Diane Duane's *The Wounded Sky*, and John M. Ford's *The
Final Reflection*.  Then there are the competent and enjoyable, but
flawed ones like A.C. Crispin's *Yesterday's Son* or Joe Haldeman's
*Planet of Judgement*, the badly-written but interesting ones like
Sonni Cooper's *Black Fire*, the brilliant but deviant ones by
Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (*The Price of the Phoenix*,
*The Day of the Phoenix*, *The Prometheus Design*, and *Triangle*,
and the godawful ones like Robert Vardeman's *Mutiny on the Enterprise*
or Cogswell and Spanos's *Spock: Messiah!*.  Oh, yes:  and the science
fiction novels that just happen to have people with the same names
as the "Star Trek" characters:  James Blish's *Spock Must Die!* and
David Gerrold's *The Galactic Whirlpool*.  And predictable, trivial,
colorless ones like Vardeman's *The Klingon Gambit*.  That ought to
suffice, if not surfeit.)
 
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