Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
So last time we finally got to hang with the actual cast of this portion of the franchise and set up yet another problem. One of the previous not-a-plague-or-theme-related problems is coming up as we return to Korsal and Kevin. They were up a mountain last we saw.
I don’t remember having a problem with the subplot count as a kid, and we have quite a few:
- the plague that’s the central conflict
- the potential impact on the IDIC perspective that serves as the theme of the character conflict
- the radical activist types that are tied to it
All that I’m okay with, but we also have:
- Kevin getting into Starfleet as the first half-Klingon
- the generator damage possibly causing power issues
- Kevin and Korsal stuck on the mountain
- an Orion considering turning the plague into a bioweapon for money
- one of the aforementioned activists with a history of the Vulcan version of stalking going after a new target
Admittedly, some of my annoyance now is due to what I’ve gone through recently with Watchmen and the Op-Center novels: too many subplots and character moments that don’t really tie into the main story. It’s the same reasons I never got into soap operas. The one time I saw an interesting story as a kid, because my mom was really into her soaps, they kept moving away from the villain trying to flash freeze the city in a spy story for things I didn’t care about. Again, I enjoyed this book enough to eventually grab the novel it spun off of, but now I kind of want to spend more time with the regular characters than all these expanded characters that have been the focus so far. We still aren’t quite at the halfway mark so maybe we’ll get the regulars more of a presence, but it’s not happening this chapter. We have a different mountain to climb, and this one’s literal.
