Customer Reviews

Red Sector (Star Trek The Next Generation: Double Helix, Book 3)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The Star Trek: Double Helix series is about a mysterious villain who is releasing biological agents across the Alpha Quadrant. This time he has targeted the Romulan royal family, and is up to Dr. McCoy and Ambassador Spock to find the cure before the Romulan Star Empire collapses into chaos and a potential devastating border war with the Federation.

That's what the book is supposed to be about. Forget all of that. The Romulans, the plague, Ambassador Spock and Dr. McCoy are all on the sidelines. The real story is about two young people. One is a Starfleet officer who desperately wants to live up to the legacy of his ancestors who served with Captain Kirk and fought in the Romulan Wars. The other, Zevon, is a Romulan prince and scientist, wracked with the guilt that a simple experiment he created led to the destabilization of an entire world. Both spent four years together as POWs in Red Sector, an area of space sealed off from the rest of the galaxy because of its political instability and hostility to aliens. Stiles eventually gained his freedom, but Zevon remained. Now years later, it is up to Stiles to rescue his friend and return him to Romulus, for his untainted blood is the last great hope for a cure.

If this all sounds complicated, it is. Diane Carey is a wonderful veteran Trek writer, but the plot jumps all over the damn place. She tries to do too many things in too little space. You've got the plague, the conspiracy behind it, the Romulans and all of their political intrigue, one last adventure for Spock and McCoy, Eric Stiles' maturation from a young ensign to a hero and officer in his own right, and Zevon's fight to bring peace and stability back to the planet his experiment had ruined.

Nitpicks: 1) This is supposed to be a medical thriller but it's not. 2) The mastermind villain becomes so mysterious he's almost like a cartoon character. 3) Red Sector is such an artificial plot device. I just can't believe the Federation, Romulans, and everybody else would seal off an area of space just because of some anti-alien hostility on a primitive world. 4) For various reasons, it makes much more sense to have Dr. McCoy treating the Romulan royals than Dr. Crusher, who starts acting just like him in her bedside manner. 5) The Top Gun stuff gave me a headache.

Despite all of this, the book is still fun to read. Why? Because the characterization is excellent. Ambassador Spock and Dr. McCoy don't appear often, and rarely together, but when they do they shine. You really do feel like you're seeing legends at work. Even more impressive is the creation of a strong character such as Eric Stiles completely out of scratch. His transformation from a young inexperienced ensign to a hero worthy of Kirk makes up more than enough for all of the book's many flaws.

The another book for Double Helix, this book doesn't even mention the virus that's plaguing the series until at least half way through. This book focuses more on the career of Kevin Stiles, grandson of Lieutinent Stiles from the Original Series (Balance of Terror). Also in this story, is the ongoing relationship of Spock and McCoy.

This book is a journey of one man. At the beginning of the novel he is but an ensign in charge of extracting Ambassador Spock from a world in political turmoil, and it does not go the way he intends. The first part of the book is about his life after that mission goes awry, and how he grows up from a young, unsure-of-himself officer to a hardened man. The second part of the book sees him take on a new challenge that is intertwined with the Double Helix plot, of which this book is part 3 of 6.

With guest appearances by Spock, McCoy, Dr. Crusher and other characters in the NCC-1701-D crew compliment, this book centers on the journey of this young man from adolescene to adulthood, and I was gripped from beginning to end by the inner turmoil and outer emotions that the main character, Eric Stiles, is expertly described to undergo by Diane Carey. Ms. Carey's expertise in naval technical details shines in this book, as also seen in her hardback novel, _Ship of the Line_, about the first mission of the Enterprise NCC-1707-E, starring Captaion "Frazier" (Kelsey Grammar from Cheers' TNG character) and the NCC-1701-D crew after the movie Star Trek Generations. Both that book and this one have the characters on board vessels not normally seen in Star Trek TV episodes, for example border cutters (like the Coast Guard) and CSTs -- Combat Supply Tenders, one of which plays a major role in both book 3's plot and the ongoing double helix plot in this novel.

I highly recommend the Double Helix series--at least the first three books which I have read so far. They are entertaining, bring in characters from other eras and Star Trek series, and the underlying virus plot is also a great mystery.

If you're just looking for the further adventures of 130-something year old Bones McCoy, and his green blooded pal Spock, this is a great book. She depicts those characters true to their form from TV and the expanded universe of their appearances in various novels since then. Bravo to Diane Carey! Now I'm on to Book 4....

Red Sector is a fantastic book. It's very refreshing having a book that concentrates almost primarily on a non main character in John Eric Stiles. The character is extremely well thought out and written. The author nailed Spock and a hundred and thirty something Dr. McCoy perfectly. I'm dying to find out who the voice is at this point. Hopefully the next three in the Double Helix series will be as good as this one and the other two. Thank you very much to Diane Carey for an excellent book, even if I don't understand all those sailing terms your books are replete with.

The first two books in this series had sub-plots that went nowhere -- Worf in #1, Kira in #2. Here the sub-plot becomes the main plot; the story of Eric Stiles is more interesting than yet another medical "thriller" when we've already seen the plague fought twice. However, as another reviewer points out, some of the substitutes Carey uses for "He/she said" are bizarre. And everybody leers -- Dr. Crusher leers! Somebody should have edited this one. It's a shame when a well-thought-out plot is side-tracked for the reader by distractions in the writing.

Diane Carey *does it* for me. She spins a great tale, a sidebar to the Double Helix plotline - but, wait a minute, no, it's not a sidebar at all.

Much character development in the form of a young ensign who starts out determined to do everything by the book and then ends up learning that "by the book" might not get you very far.

Great interaction between our old favorites, Spock and McCoy, and some mighty fine Crusher moments, as well. (Her scene with Data and the Romulan guards is priceless.)

Meantime, the plot thickens, the virus twists again, we've already learned there's a "bad guy," and we're all hating like heck that he keeps getting away!

I was looking forward to this book, but it ended up being an utter disappointment. The virus storyline that should've been the main plot was reglated to subplot status, which made me question the point of even doing this book as a "Double Helix" book. Heck, the virus isn't even mentioned until page 122! And when it was mentioned, it was done in a very offhandish way.

It seemed to me that the author was more interested in telling her story about the commander (Eric Stiles) than she was about the supposed purpose of the book, and that just seemed utterly disrespectful to me. That story should've been saved for another novel, and the main focus should've been on the research to discover a cure.

I found the ending to be way too pat for my tastes. I've never been a fan of "surprise endings" in which we are dumped a pile of information that we didn't previously know and the author goes "ha! gotcha!" as if that's supposed to make us feel like dupes for not figuring out the mystery (even though there's no way to figure out the solution given just the clues in the book). This happened with the "surprise" revelation that Zevon had a child, and this child is the last "uncontaimed" Romulan royal family member.

There were also some plain-out weird word choices in this novel. I can't remember any other book where I've paused so much after reading a certain word or phrase. Using the word "edited" in a dialogue tag, and Dr. Beverly Crusher remarking that perhaps she would change her career to being a professional wrestler (when I'm fairly sure no such thing exists in the ST future) were just two of the many examples that caught my eyes.

All in all, a very disappointing story, one that I wouldn't recommend at all. Perhaps the worst Star Trek story I've ever read.

I really enjoyed the way all the events in the books melded together. How friendship and courage and decency became the glue that cemented the whole of the story. To me, as a 25 yr Star Trek fan that is the appeal of the series and the Star Trek characters. The character of Stiles was a refreshing one. He seemed within the emotional reach of the reader and his self-discovery and self-realization lead the story along, while providing a wonderful avenue for bringing the more familiar characters of Spock and Dr. McCoy and Dr. Crusher into the tale. Diane Carey has done her usual job of making the details and science of the Starfleet ships and crew seem very believable, also. I am not overly concerned with technology and sometimes feel bogged down with details in some of the books,but Carey makes me want to read about the workings of a StarFleet ship and makes it an interesting part of the story. The medical aspects of the whole Double Helix series has been interesting to me and prompted my initial interest in the series. I think they are a keeper and I can't wait to read the next three!

This is a pretty fair to middling Star Trek story, much better than usual for Diane Carey in the she MOSTLY resists the temptation to get overly cute with the language (except for her pathological inablility to use the phrase "he said", and her tendancy to really reach sometimes to avoid it.) This allows her to concentrate on character, plot, and pacing, which are usually her strong suits as a writer. None of the three are as good in this book as she has sometimes been, but none are bad, either. If there's a flaw to this book other than just not quite measuring up to her usual standards (if one discounts her usual silly games with the language) it's that the backstory is rapidly getting old; this is really not a plot that can hold up over six books. It was getting a bit stale in the second of the series, and is truly starting to smell by this point. Fortunately, Carey doesn't emphasise the medical aspects as heavily as they were emphasised in the first two books, which helped. Also, some fans might consider it a flaw that the book is listed as being a "Next Generation" title, but has barely a few cameo appearances by the Next Generation characters: a bit of Bev Crusher, a chapter in which Picard, Riker, Data and Worf get a couple of lines apiece, and that's it. The main characters in the book are a young ensign named Stiles, and Ambassador Spock, which makes it somewhat dubious as a "Next Generation" story.

This is one of the better books in the series of the Double Helix. The book was full of Action, Romance, Evil, Royalty and great characters. There was plenty of action involving phaser duels between characters and between ships. It was like many of the other books in the series. The book had a good guy and a corrupt power holder. A catastrophic event happens and The Federation comes to the rescue once again but this time there is Romulans. There are characters from two of the most powerful species, The Federation and The Romulans. There is a great meaning behind the book. It shows that two people who come from different places can hold on two each other in times of need and that maybe there is a chance of peace in the galaxy. I would recommend this book to who ever is interested in a good Science Fiction book and whoever likes Star trek.