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octavia_cade 's review for:
The Eyes of the Beholders
by A.C. Crispin
This has a godawful cover. What were they thinking?
The story is actually very good though. I'd give it a four star rating if it weren't for one element that bumped it down an entire star - more on that in a moment. I enjoyed the reveal of what the disturbingly weird space station was, and I liked how everyone worked together to make sure that what needed to be preserved got to be. I liked that there was no real bad guy, either, just something very alien that had been misunderstood. I very much liked the two visiting doctors who were the main guest stars of the book - the gentle pig-faced Tellarite who volunteered for dangerous missions to protect her patients and who kept her cool when the rest of the away team completely lost theirs. And the other doctor, a Vulcan, who developed a caretaker relationship with an orphaned Andorian child... those two were the high point of the book for me. Honestly, either of these two doctors could replace Crusher permanently and I'd be good with it. As I said, I was strongly tempted to give this one four stars, it's the most enjoyable TNG novel I've read in a while.
Apart from a section in the middle, where Riker succumbs to the same disturbing dreams that are plaguing the rest of the crew. His dream recalls an incident from his childhood, where his 15 year old self had an affair with a woman at least three times his age. Crispin presents the whole thing basically positively, and I'm distinctly unimpressed. He was a child. His lover was a predator. Reverse the genders and it screams taking-advantage by a mile. And you know what, I am not always a fan of Peter David's work, but a couple of TNG books before this one, in David's A Rock and a Hard Place, a 16 year old girl with a crush hits on Riker and he shuts that shit down hard, because she is a kid and he is too old for her, and that is what an adult is supposed to do. It is unfortunate that Crispin does not do the same here; I have zero interest in reading young teens get taken advantage of by adults. This is Star Trek. I expect it to do better.
Finally, on a milder note, I wish someone would forcefeed Data a dictionary of idiom and Brewer's Phrase and Fable, because his constant misunderstandings of informal speech have never been one hundredth as entertaining as every single TNG writer seems to think they are.
The story is actually very good though. I'd give it a four star rating if it weren't for one element that bumped it down an entire star - more on that in a moment. I enjoyed the reveal of what the disturbingly weird space station was, and I liked how everyone worked together to make sure that what needed to be preserved got to be. I liked that there was no real bad guy, either, just something very alien that had been misunderstood. I very much liked the two visiting doctors who were the main guest stars of the book - the gentle pig-faced Tellarite who volunteered for dangerous missions to protect her patients and who kept her cool when the rest of the away team completely lost theirs. And the other doctor, a Vulcan, who developed a caretaker relationship with an orphaned Andorian child... those two were the high point of the book for me. Honestly, either of these two doctors could replace Crusher permanently and I'd be good with it. As I said, I was strongly tempted to give this one four stars, it's the most enjoyable TNG novel I've read in a while.
Apart from a section in the middle, where Riker succumbs to the same disturbing dreams that are plaguing the rest of the crew. His dream recalls an incident from his childhood, where his 15 year old self had an affair with a woman at least three times his age. Crispin presents the whole thing basically positively, and I'm distinctly unimpressed. He was a child. His lover was a predator. Reverse the genders and it screams taking-advantage by a mile. And you know what, I am not always a fan of Peter David's work, but a couple of TNG books before this one, in David's A Rock and a Hard Place, a 16 year old girl with a crush hits on Riker and he shuts that shit down hard, because she is a kid and he is too old for her, and that is what an adult is supposed to do. It is unfortunate that Crispin does not do the same here; I have zero interest in reading young teens get taken advantage of by adults. This is Star Trek. I expect it to do better.
Finally, on a milder note, I wish someone would forcefeed Data a dictionary of idiom and Brewer's Phrase and Fable, because his constant misunderstandings of informal speech have never been one hundredth as entertaining as every single TNG writer seems to think they are.