Customer Reviews

The Forgotten War (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I picked up this book on a whim - as its been years since I've read a Star Trek book. At first, it was difficult to get into the writing, as I am used to books that are written on a more difficult reading level, however, when I managed to move past this, I enjoyed the book. The basic premise of having two groups of people whom are stranded on a planet and fighting an ancient, and now resolved, war is fascinating. The differences in the two cultures both from the past and the "present" fuels this book. And the ending,though it is somewhat predictable once you get into the book and understand the feelings of the two warring groups, is definitely interesting. In fact,
I loved the ending. If you're looking for a quick read, I would highly suggest reading this book. It is entertaining and the story is interesting.

I love history and this book actually has a Starfleet historian who gets the chance to meet with a legendary Starfleet Captain, Lucien Murat. Murat is very cool and its neat to see some people from Pike's time period in a Star Trek novel. The plot is great full of the Tarn and Murat's survivors. A must read for a True Fan of Star Trek.

I thought this book was fantastic. I loved William Forstchen's Lost Regiment series, and I found his Star Trek book to be no exception. Oddly enough, I didn't look at the author's name until I finished the book! The plot is well written, and Riker's old flame's personality was well-developed.

A superb formula novel that combines excitement with the cerebral. A thinking man's Star Trek that doesn't just rely on battles and ray-guns. It deals with important issues that transcend the pulp novel genre. The reviewer known as 'Jim from New York' is way off base. Did he read the novel? We need more Star Trek novels like this one.

There are exzcellent Star Trek titles and some perhaps less so, and this is among the best. Forstchen brings the excitement he generates in his Lost Regiment series to Start Trek with a vengeance. Highly readable and well written.

It's a good and entertaining book, but....the author makes several really annoying mistakes. And amazingly, his editor either let them pass or didn't notice them!!!!! He sets the war with the Tarn at around 204 years ago (from the current Stardate of TNG), but then says that Captain Murat (who fought in this war) was a contemporary of Christopher Pike, who was just right before Kirk. Now according to Star Trek chronology, that makes it just around 100 years or so ago! Maybe stretching it, even 150 years ago, not 204 years ago! Another one, this mistake was really stupid...he constantly CONFUSES the word "ancestor" for the word "descendant". In one sentence he has Commander Riker as saying the Enterprise is the ancestor of the Verdun (Captain Murat's ship), but duh! obviously he means the reverse....the Enterprise being a descendant of the Verdun! This is a mistake I would expect a high school student to make, not a published author! Other than that, the story is good.

This book has a lot to recommend it, and the reviewers enthusing below are not altogether off the mark. It is well-written,the story is interesting, the characters are lively (particularly the alien admiral), the battle scenes are vivid, and the ending is clever. However, characters change rank from chapter to chapter, the math is frequently wrong, and the Star Trek continuity errors are glaring enough for a reader with a fairly low-intensity interest in the series (e.g. me) to notice them. It is an enjoyable book, with more cerebral and philosophical awareness than most mass-market novels, but it's not quite a masterpiece. END

I really liked this one. It has some good action sequences and a good plot line. I'm only giving it four stars though, in light of two problems that both the author and the editor's missed out on. One, the author repeatedly refers to "The Forgotten War" having been going on for over two hundred years. This is no problem, right up to point in which he refers to Captain/Commodore Lucian Murat's command being during the same time as Captain Kirk and the Enterprise. Last I checked, there was only approximately a centuries time between Captain Kirk's era and Captain Picard's. My second minor problem is that the author seemed to have the idea that a Galaxy Class starship like the Enterprise has only one transporter. I understand his need for the transporter's to be down to move the story along, however, he should've come up with something else besides what he did.
As I stated before though, besides the two minor problems, this is a really good Trek novel that is in keeping with the "Great Bird of the Galaxy's" principals and ideas of what Star Trek should be.
A really good first Star Trek novel by the author. He captured the Trek regular's personalities really well and came up with some good characters on both sides of the conflict. I really liked the Tarn Admiral Jord. It was especially interesting to see basically twenty century weapons of war being used in a trek book. I hope this author put's another work into the trek library soon. Definitely a book I recommend to any and all who read Star Trek.

A bit weak for a four-star rating, this book was just a tad too good for a three star rating. It is an interesting look at the likely results of a war between two implacable enemies, with both sides equally advanced technologically and neither side able to get enough of an edge to win conclusively. The book is well-written in terms of technical merit and well-edited in terms of avoiding the typos and other similar errors all too common in mass-market paperbacks, and it has good characterizations and good pacing.

One minor quibble is that it postulates a war in the "past history" of the Federation that clearly never happened in the "canonoical" Star Trek universe, (surely, if there had been even a semi-major conflict early in the history of the Federation that involved a species of sentient lizards as the opposition, it would have been mentioned long since -- during the episode "Arena", in which Kirk and the original Enterprise run afoul of a similar alien race, the Gorn, if at no other time) so obviously, this book is an "alternate timeline" story, even if neither the author nor the editors and publisher are aware of that fact. That quibble, plus a sincere doubt that Picard's solution to the problem would have worked (can't say more without offering up a spoiler) are enough to drop the rating a point, and the sub-plot between Riker and his old flame seemed rather superfluous and irrelevant, but not quite enough to justify the loss of a second star.

What happens when a war is over, but not all people get that message? 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda, of the Japanese Army, was sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines. He surrendered on March 5, 1974, after 29 years on the run, only after a direct, face-to face order from his former commanding officer, Major Taniguchi.

In The Forgotten War, add to this equation the vastness of space. Over two hundred years earlier, humans had been at war with the reptilian Tarn. One of the fighters was the legendary Starfleet Captain Lucien Murat. His fate, and the fate of his ship and crew, was unknown,

Centuries later, Captain Picard, the crew of the Enterprise, and a Tarn observer find the remains of Murat's ship, as well as the remains of a Tarn ship. They seem to have destroyed each other.

Then, they find that survivors of both crews had made it to a nearby planet, where the war continued. How does the Prime Directive come into play here, seven generations later?

This would have been an interesting show!