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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thought provoking in a different sense, July 9, 2003
By A Customer
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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Standing up for creativity!, April 23, 2001
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.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
One of the worst Star Trek novels I have read, November 1, 2008
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.
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