Customer Reviews

Gulliver's Fugitives (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Think about your closest friends; are they real to you? If you didn't know them in the first place, would they still be real? Now think about your favorite fiction characters; are they real? Think of a world without them; would YOU be real?

After Troi makes an intriguing contact with an "alien" life form from another dimension, thinking that this may be related to the disappearance of USS Huxley a long time ago, Picard decides to investigate inside a nebulae cloud where all subspace communications are blocked by natural sources. They are more than surprised to find a planet named Rampart inhabited by humans inside the cloud. Although human, Rampartians do not like the Enterprise's intrusion because it represents everything they tried to keep away from their society. The fiction in Rampart is a crime and the punishment is death. Since they were departed from the earth, Rampartian science is only excelled in one area: To read and cleanse minds; thus, not only actively involving in creating or consuming fiction is crime, but even thinking of it is... However there is a group of rebels - Dissenters - fighting against the dictatorship with the single weapon they have: Fiction! And Enterprise crew find themselves in the middle of this fight.

While the basic promise of the book seems to tell a simple story of rebels fighting against a dictatorship, the author manages to create a compelling storyline by combining some action and nice characters into it, Trek style. Most importantly you are asked what happens if you're ripped off all fiction, and Troi's dreams and the presentation of Dissenters give you a memorable sensation of how actually valuable your fiction characters to you than you've thought. A nice touch is added with Wesley's revelation that "he" is a part of a bigger "It", and the books ends with a nice twist.

I am almost sorry that this is a Trek book, because otherwise this would lead to a very nice Saga; How and why the colonists left earth, why are they greedy about fiction, how did they developed the technology and so on.

By the way, if you read and like this book, I recommend Ray Bradburry's Fahrenheit 451 too.

I believe that as consumers of mass media, we all value our freedom to choose to read, watch, or listen to whatever we desire. But what would happen if the planet we call Earth became a totalitarian state where the expression of creativity is utterly forbidden? That is the premise of "Gulliver's Fugitives."

In the first Next Generation audio book ever made, read by Jonathan Frakes (Riker), the away team encounters an underground movement of individuals, much like that found in the movie "Demolition Man", who seek to restore the imagination to its proper place of value. This story is an excellent take on censorship and First Amendment issues.

This is one of the worst of the Star Trek novels that I have ever read, the main premise is dubious and it is poorly executed. The USS Huxley is a star ship that vanished over ten years ago and the Enterprise has been ordered to search for any clue as to what happened. This takes them to the area of a planet called Rampart where there is a colony of humans. This is an unknown colony and the culture on the planet is bizarre.
It is a police state where the greatest crime is to engage in works of fiction or to engage in any flights of imagination. To do so is punishable by death of the personality, the rulers have the technical means to cleanse your mind of your previous personality and replace it by a more suitable one. If that tactic fails, then you are to put to a physical death by lethal injection. The rulers of Rampart have a great deal of technical expertise, they have machines called one-eyes that can detect and interpret thought patterns, so that they can react before humans act.
When some of the one-eyes accompany two of the leaders of Rampart to the Enterprise, they begin a battle to take over the ship and the leaders kidnap Captain Picard and beam to the surface. Commander Riker leads an away team to the surface and they are also captured. Troi is part of the away team and she becomes part of a group called the Dissenters that is battling the ruling class. She also suffers from dreams that indicate that there are other intelligences on Rampart.
The problems with the plot are many, starting with the fact that it would not take ten years for the loss of a star ship to be investigated. A rescue mission would have been launched within days of loss of contact. Secondly, the security measures of the Enterprise would not so easily be overwhelmed, the ship is constructed and the crew trained to handle the unknown and handle it quickly. However, the main criticism is that the society on Rampart could never have become so technically competent if they are constantly deleting the minds of their most imaginative people. Technical advancement begins with imagination, the mental creation of items that do not yet exist. Furthermore, the maintenance of such a society also requires a bit of imagination, so once the anti-imagination society were constructed it would collapse very quickly from the internal contradictions.

Once the series had ended, (at least for the time being), and I'd purchased all the DVD's and seen every episode at least 3 times, (I even liked the Enterprise series), I finally started reading the books. This is by far the worst I've read so far. It has numerous plot holes and it makes the characters like Captian Picard and Data appear inept and foolish. Coucelor Troy is portrayed as a quasi-visionary. To top it all off, the story appears to be contrived and obnoxiously politically motivated, (unlike some of its more subtle predecessors).

It portrays an advanced civilization of humans that fled Earth and bases its beliefs on quote "the Christian Bible" to the exclusion of any other beliefs and that has banned all fiction. It's very 'un-Star Trek' to blatantly single out one religion and attack it so viciously.

Given the complexity and thought provoking nature of this particular novel it is hard to believe that this is not only the only Star Trek novel written by this author is it the only novel one can find written by Keith Sharee. I found this novel to be in very good keeping with Gene Roddenberry's principals and ethos of Star Trek as it tells a well told tale that is capable of the "suspension of disbelief" within the Star Trek universe as it is a real future possibility and reminds one of Hitler's attempts to do the same.

The premise:

The Enterprise finds itself on the mission to find the USS Huxley, a starship that has been missing for over ten years, what they did not expect to find is a forgotten human colony named Rampart. Here is where the story takes an unexpected twist as this colony of humans has sought fit to ban fiction of any sort and it is considered to be the ultimate crime. As history proves proper, whenever there is a government that bans something harmless, or proves itself a dictatorship in any way, there is an underground movement and ultimately a civil war. It is that civil war in which Captain Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise suddenly find themselves inextricably in the middle of and must find an acceptable way of extricating themselves and solving this planet's problems...

What follows is certainly one of the better early Star Trek The Next Generation numbered novels that is well worth the time to locate and read for you will certainly not be disappointed. I highly recommend this early STNG novel to any and all Star Trek fans, casual or die hard alike! {ssintrepid}

Which is a shame, because the basic idea had potential: Star Trek meets Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451". And the writing wasn't completely hopeless; as the story progressed, I did find myself caring what happened next, and moved by the fate of the characters. But there were too many flaws for a high rating; the entire subplot of Deanna Troi's visions/hallucinations was superfluous and pointless, and the concept that the planetary culture that the Enterprise was in conflict with could have provided as much of a challenge as they did required too much supension of disbelief for my taste.

Not the worst Star Trek book I've ever read by a long shot, but definitely on the weak end of the scale.

When I read this NG novel I expected another run of the mill story with the politically correct message. I was very surprised and wrong about my assesment by the back cover. In this one any creativity or wrong thinking is fatal. A lost starship crashes on this planet only for it's captain to survive. His mind was wiped of any reference to Starfleet and his former life. While I know the major characters would not meet their demise....it's was very exciting to see how Picard escaped the mind wipe intact. The scenes with the all knowing "one eye" cameras/assault units were the best. Especially when Geordi and Wes had to figure out how they worked.

It would have played well as a television episode. A lot of the novels are very often superior to the TV scripts and this was one of them.

This book has the distinction of being the worst Sci-Fi related novel I have ever read. It combines mediocre writing with a staggering number of cliches, even for a Star Trek novel. It is also a prime example of the early attempts to justify Troi's existence as something other than eye candy, and like most falls into the trap of trying to "prove her mettle" as an adventure heroine. She's an empath, and a counselor. Think the psychologist (Dr. Friedman) from M*A*S*H, not Xena, space-warrior princess.

The entire society of Rampart is unstable, and as presented could not possibly have existed for 200 years. The level of technology given to the Rampartians is inconsistent, both internally and with their alleged backstory.

The one-eyes are supposedly built with "post-Atomic" era technology, but have abilities that surpass those of the modern Federation, except for when they don't. They are capable of deep-scanning an unconscious mind in order to mine O'Brian's transporter knowledge, but can only read surface thoughts when Sharee wants to impress us with Shibiko's "Zen archery" approach to security. Even then, they react to "visual input" to dodge a beam that travels at lightspeed, showing Mr. Sharee understands physics less well than he understands Zen.

It is established early on that the one-eyes communicate using radio frequencies, and all communication planetside uses these same frequencies. It has long been established that Starfleet communicators do *not* use "primitive" radio frequencies. Yet, the one-eyes can jam all communicator frequencies, and can even jam transporter frequencies, an ability which has previously been established to be a function of *shield* technology, not communications. Furthermore, they can jam with sufficient power, using only a small internal power source, that a Starship cannot overpower the jamming, even with a tight point-to-point beam. That would make the power source in a one-eye at least equal, actually somewhat superior, in output to the main anti-matter engines of the Enterprise.

Furthermore, allthis adaptability and creativity is possessed by a computer constructed by a civilization that has banned imagination and creativity. This, by itself, completely undercuts the supposed central message of the book - that creativity and imagination are a necessary part of human intelligence. Instead of being stagnant, the Rampartians are sufficiently adaptable to seriously challenge the Enterprise when, by all rights, they should have been instantly overwhelmed.

The behaviors of the crew as a whole are incredibly inconsistent with the Star Trek Universe background. As a lsot colony of Earth (actually, of the federation, since the colony is only 200 years old), the prime directive does not apply, and all the "we must be careful not to interfere" handwringing of the early chapters is so much foolishness. Of course, so is the ability of the one-eyes to get free in the first place.

All they have to do is lock them in and set up a containment field, something that can be done in all transporter rooms. Even if you choose to believe that the one-eyes can instantly learn everything O'Brian knows about the ship, they still don't have the necessary tools to override. in order for the weapon-systems of the one-eyes to not be detected during transport, and therefore be a surprise later, both O'brian and Worf have to have been on some kind of severely intoxicating drug when the devices were first transported. In order for the crew not to have noticed when monitoring communications that there was no fictional or speculative programming, the entire communications section would have to be criminally incompetent - this is a key part of the pattern any alleged contact team would be trained to look at.

I could go on, but I've already wasted far more energy than this book deserves. The idea of a world where all fiction is banned is interesting, and I'm sure a rebellion against such an oppressive regime would make a fascinating series of stories. This isn't one of them. It isn't even a good addition to the Star Trek canon, since it more inconsistent and more poorly executed than even a typical episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

While I thought the 1984-ish culture was an interesting (and impossible) one, the story gets bogged down in psychadelics as Troi and others hallucinate mythological creatures. The surprise at the end makes for a good (and again, highly unlikely) climax, and the supporting characters are fun, if superfluous. A good little romp, but you'll have to suspend disbelief a little more than usual.

I really think "Gulliver's Fugitives" is one of the better novels of the lot. IMO it wipes the floor with about 95% of all ST novels.

Actually, it's one of the very few 'message' novels in the whole bunch. This is a book about the power of man's imagination and his right to dream. Imagination as one of the most powerful forces that man possesses. It's full of delightful references to mythology and literature. This author sure knows his classics.

And since Star Trek is often called a modern myth, I'm pretty sure the author actually intended this novel to be about Trek fans and their right to like the series without being ridiculed, as sadly often is the case.

These are the kind of messages that Star Trek has always stood for, and it's something that nearly all of the novels have forgotten. Really, there are only a few which have that kind of messages ("Spartacus" & "Metamorphosis" come to mind). I read this book when it first came out, nearly 10 years ago, and I don't remember much of the goings-on, but that powerful statement is still strong in my memory. Sure, it was not very easy to read and I do understand that it could be confusing if you don't recognise all the references. But some effort on the reader's part reveals lots of stuff that really is very interesting food for thought. So, have your "ABC of Mythology" and "Encyclopedia of Literature" near at hand and read this one...