Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive, Story by Brannon Braga Art by Joe Corroney

 

So, I found this while I was looking for things to link with my Wesley Crusher post and I figured I'd check Star Trek:The Next Generation: Hive out. I'm glad I did, too, because it was a lot of fun. I mean, I've loved ST:TNG since "Encounter at Farpoint" (Yeah, I know the first couple of seasons were slow. Ten year old me was so excited to see Trek episodes that he and his father hadn't seen that he didn't give a rip.) and it looked like something I might be interested in, too.

And I mean it was totally original too, because Trek had never done anything with time tra...

Errrrr...

There was this new species called the Bor....

Uhh...

Okay, so the story was new but the plot elements were familiar. I'm okay with that though. It's like there's a reason that they use this stuff. It must work or sumfin'.

I mean, who hasn't watched "The Best of Both Worlds" and loved it? If you're a Trek fan, I mean. My daughters don't like Trek (Not my fault. I tried) so they probably haven't seen it, but like, non-Trekkies (Trekkers if you prefer, I guess. I grew up using the older term.) wouldn't even know what I was talking about. And, of course, everybody's favorite Trek movie is ST4: The Voyage Home and that's all about time travel and whales and "nuclear wessels" and the Dark Ages, and...

Look, it's been a minute, okay? Let's just say that with Trek you can pretty much throw in time travel and either the Borg or Klingons and it's all good. And Hive was good. The story is all about Picard, and Data and Seven and how they have to save the galaxy from being overrun by the Borg. And yes, there is some time travel involved because Locutus/Picard has to travel back in time to prevent himself from doing something that ruined the whole freaking timeline.  Somebody take his cookie away.

The story is engaging and moves well. It probably comes closer to the TNG movies than the series, but that's true of a lot of the new stuff.  It's an action story and it works. I read the whole thing in about ten minutes using a Kindle app on a cell phone. No, that's not my favorite way to read a comic book/graphic novel but I've got KU so I did it that way to save eight bucks. Although, honestly, if you use the clicky feature that they've created for comics, it does work pretty well. The app automatically pops a window describing how to use it if you're not familiar.

The artwork is magnificent. The Borg are wonderfully rendered. We can recognize the familiar faces that we should be able to recognize. But more importantly, there are big space battles and they look really cool. Yeah, I know I'm supposed to use big technical terms and talk about sight-lines and whatever, but I'm an SF/F geek, not an art geek. You'll have to get your technical lessons from someone else. Seriously. I can barely remember which end of the pen goes on the paper. What I do know is what looks good from a layman's perspective and Hive is beautiful.

I could just page through this thing and look at the pictures and be happy. That's weird for me, because I'm  more of a story guy, but I really did enjoy the art. It was well drawn but it felt familiar. I could look at the pictures of Locutus/Picard (depending on the point in the story) and hear the words spoke in Sir Patrick Stewart's voice, not just because I was a fan but because it looked so much like him and that's kind of a thing for me.

See, when I was a wee little Jimbo and was first getting into comics, I got confused sometimes reading comics with the same characters but different artists. I get that different artists have a different take and that's one of the things I love about comics. It's a lot easier to recognize a variation on a look at forty-six than it was at six, too. The fact remains that we need to know who we're looking at and Corroney gives us characters that have his take on them but are alike enough in appearance to the actors to make things feel comfortable.  And look, I'm not here to debate who drew the definitive Silver Surfer, I'm just saying that familiarity is a good thing, especially when you're dealing with some of Trek's most beloved characters. 

And speaking of Trek's most beloved characters...

The plot of Hive makes an immense amount of sense when viewed through the lens of what one would expect of the characters involved. Some harsh actions are taken but they make sense in context of the people we're dealing with. Say what you want about Picard, he never shied away from doing what he had to when it came right down to it. He'd hem. He'd haw. Then he'd do exactly what he was hesitating about. It more or less works that way here. He does what he has to do because he has to do it.

I've always had a fascination with the Seven character as well and she really shines here. Her actions show an empathy and a humanity, mixed with a bit of Borg and their obsession with perfection. Hive gives her a really well written arc, a mission that only she can accomplish and a believable reaction to the way things go. I really liked the fact that Braga seems to have considered her dual nature and done right by her.

There really aren't a lot of appearances by other members of the various shows. I'm okay with that. They wouldn't have added much to the story anyway. I remember reading something by Leonard Nimoy talking about how he didn't do Star Trek: Generations because his character would have served no purpose. Braga was smart in following a similar principle and not throwing characters in just to say he did.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Vulcan Artifacts

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive
Brannon Braga, Joe Corroney
IDW, 2013

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hive is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

We're Living in a Science Fiction Novel

Technological progress has reached levels previously only seen in the works of science fiction. Things are possible now that were not even seriously thought of when I was just a wee Jimbo. Seriously.  The Terminator (1984) was a  story of a future robot, but no one took thought it could actually happen. Keith Laumer published Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade in 1976 but no one really expected it to come to fruition. Robert Heinlein published multiple novels that included reusable rockets that landed on their tails. The list goes on.

It's hard to fathom just how far we've come in a remarkably small amount of time. I'm forty-one years old. When I was a kid, the eight track was the newest form of musical media. It was amazing in that you could immediately find the track that you wanted simply by pushing a button and switching to the right track. It was about the size of a stack of pancakes. Of course, by the time I hit my teenage years you could flip on the TV and watch Captain Picard call up a song to listen to on the computer. But that would never happen, right? WRONG. There are people who have entire hard drives filled with music now and who can find the specific song they want to listen to in seconds. We haven't reached the level of being able to produce an actual holodeck, but with Netflix you can instantly pull up a movie or television episode in a similar manner. And while reproductions of novels may not be available there, ala Picard's playing in the Dixon Hill novels and Data's  propensity to imitate Sherlock Holmes, it would definitely be possible. If HBO can do Game of Thrones, someone should be able to do Sarah Hoyt's A Few Good Men. (Hint: I'd pay to see AFGM.)

Yesterday, Space X launched their Falcon Heavy rocket with a spaceman dummy riding a Tesla car inside of it. In case you missed it, at least on person drove their Tesla for six-hundred and seventy miles on one charge. That's further than most cars will go on a tank of gas. I drive a cab for a living. I go through half a tank at about two hundred miles when it's warm. (I have a tendency to leave the engine on between runs so the heat will work when temps are in the single digits.) Six hundred and seventy miles is really impressive.

After that launch, two of three boosters were successfully recovered. One ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean at three hundred miles an hour, damaging the recovery ship. Still though, the two that were successfully recovered landed on their tails on a pad in front of a crowd. Although Elon Musk says they won't be used again (apparently they're an older version and only newer versions will be used going forward. (Unfortunately?) it appears that Musk has overshot his mark and the capsule will end up in orbit in the asteroid belt instead of near Mars. Oops.

I want to take a minute and appreciate that though. A human-made spacecraft capable of transporting  a living being is headed for an in the asteroid belt. That seriously happened. Now that does not immediately equate to asteroid mining. There are serious technical and medical issues to be solved first, not the least of which is that the Falcon Heavy isn't expected to get back for a billion years. The economic benefits of getting a load of ore back a billion years later are dubious at best. It is a long step in the right direction though. A way of returning is going to be key. The science fiction reader/(as yet unpublished) writer in me wants the solution to both returning a spacecraft to Earth after a trip to deep space and the medical issues experience by astronauts to be a spacecraft capable of generating a continuous (not, not measured in impulse-seconds, CONTINUOUS) one-g of thrust, which would cut out only for a few seconds to rotate the craft in space in order to generate a continuous one-g of thrust in the opposite direction, thus bringing the spacecraft to a stop. What can I say? I'm a romantic.

It's not just that though. High-powered lasers are a real thing now. Right now, the scientists and engineers producing them are focused (no pun intended) on using them for further research but anyone who can't see the military applications here has never read John Ringo's Hot Gate series, or watched Star Wars or... Well, you get the idea. Also, I read somewhere that the United States is not participating in the current research but I wonder. It's entirely possible that we're sleeping. The US is, after all, the country that had to import captured German scientists and engineers to build a rocket in the post World War II era because it had done no research. On the other hand, I did a paper about the Manhattan Project and the security surrounding it as an undergrad and I have to wonder if there's not a Top Secret project out there. I have zero evidence that there is but it's possible.

Think about this too. Computing power has reached the level of insanity. We have literally gotten to the point where a calculator has more power than the entire Apollo mission. A cell phone has more. Forget about your laptop/desktop. It's crazy what computers can do now.  In her 1999 novel, The Veiled Web, Catherine Asaro posits a search engine that is the rough equivalent of Dogpile. With all due respect to Mrs. Asaro (and I'm a HUGE fan) there is no way that it would be able to keep up with the modern iteration of Google.

Robot technology is taking off as well. Sex bots are a thing now. Sony has a robot dog that can do amazing things. Russia has a robot tank and claims that it can outperform manned vehicles. The US Army is moving toward robot vehicles to accompany its M1 tanks. It already uses robots to accompany its helicopters on missions as per the same article. Of course,  the military has been using drones for quite awhile now, but this seems to be something different. These are autonomous or semi-autonomous. Things keep getting better.

I can't help but wonder what's next. I'm only forty-one and would appear to have at least a couple of decades left barring anything unforeseen. Is it possible that I could actually live to see an offworld colony established somewhere? Could Luna Base become a real thing in my lifetime? Is it really possible that I could flip on the news one night and see a human bootprint on the surface of Mars? Ten years ago, I'd have laughed at both thoughts. Now I think it might seriously happen and no, I'm not talking about those goofballs from Mars One. I'm talking about something that might actually have a chance to succeed. I can't wait to see what the future holds. For once in my life I'm optimistic not just for myself but for the future of my species. It's all about to come true my friends. We need to aim for the Good, prepare for the Bad and find a way to prevent the Ugly but we're finally moving forward in a meaningful way. I'm headed into the future with a smile on my face. Come with me, my friends. The future is us. The future is now. The future is bright. Let's seize it with both hands.

Some future related merchandise is available at the links below: