Star Trek Next Generation: Dark Mirror [Hardcover]

Diane Duane (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Pocket Books; First Edition edition (1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671714694
• ISBN-13: 978-0671714697
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Diane Duane was born in New York City -- a descendant of New York's first mayor -- and worked there as a psychiatric nurse before leaving the profession for the only one she loved better, the business of writing. Since the publication of her first novel in 1981, she's written fifty more, not to mention numerous short stories, comics, computer games and screenplays for TV and film, and has picked up the occasional award here and there. (She has also worked with Star Trek in more media than anyone else alive.)

Right now she's probably best known for her "Young Wizards" series of young adult fantasy novels, featuring the New York-based wizards Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan -- in business for twenty-five years now, their most recent adventure being described in the ninth YW novel, "A Wizard of Mars" (just released in paperback).

DD shares a two hundred-year-old cottage in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland with her husband, the Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, a laid-back white cat named Goodman, and various overworked computers... an odd but congenial environment for the staging of epic battles between good and evil and the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination. (And a lot of ethnic cooking: her own favorite foods come from the cuisines of central Europe and the Mediterranean.) In her spare time she gardens (weeding, mostly), studies German and Italian, listens to shortwave and satellite radio, and dabbles in astronomy, computer graphics, iaido, amateur cartography, and desktop publishing ... while also trying to figure out how to make more spare time.

Her favorite color is blue, her favorite food is a weird kind of Swiss scrambled-potato dish called maluns, she was born in a Year of the Dragon, and her sign is "Runway 24 Left, Hold For Clearance."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A return to the mirror universe done right, October 26, 2003

By 

Randall Norman Pick (Overland Park, Kansas United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Mirror (Star Trek: The Next Generation) (Paperback)

Easily one of the better entries into published Star Trek, the Next Generation fiction, Dark Mirror does a much better job, er, 'mirroring' the feel of the original Star Trek episode, by leaving enough familiar for us to be truly appalled at the different turns characters with the fundamental abilities of the crew could take. The characters, in both senses, are written very real and very strongly, with even Troi being an interesting character (on both sides of the mirror), and Duane shows her usual flair for creating societies, both in terms of the Mirror Empire, as well as a few new types from in and around the Federation. This book can't carry a higher recommendation, being a mix of action, discovery, and the old Star Trek hope for a better future.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truly Dark Trek, July 12, 2003

By 

jrmspnc (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Mirror (Star Trek: The Next Generation) (Paperback)

Way back when this book first came out I very nearly bought it, greatly intrigued by the idea of Picard grappling with the "evil Spock's" universe. But Diane Duane put me off; I thought her Romulan Way novel was overblown and she'd turned an amusing idea into garbage in Doctor's Orders.

My fears were unfounded however. True, Duane wrote this one with a dictionary (for example, Geordi uses the word "collimated" in casual conversation), but in between the spelling bee words we have an intense, powerful drama that makes Dark Mirror among the best Trek books ever written. Picard, Geordi, and Deanna must deal directly with the evil Enterprise while concealing their activities from their counterparts. Tension is high, emotions are powerful, and the evil Troi is incredibly, powerfully, evil. There are many moments here worth savoring, including the evil universe's versions of The Merchant of Venice and The Iliad, and Duane's theory of what became of evil Spock.

Duane's account of the mirror universe is, to my mind, much more compelling than the "official" take we got in DS9, which seemed to too often fall into parody rather than horror (Kira wanting to seduce herself? Yuck.). I have not read Shatner's version, so can't compare. I will say that Dark Mirror is a very powerful read, that rarest of Star Trek books that is an excellent novel in its own right.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An alternate alternate universe:, July 1, 2002

By 

James Yanni (Bellefontaine Neighbors, Mo. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Mirror (Star Trek: The Next Generation) (Paperback)

Once again, as with her back-history of the Romulans, Diane Duane has the misfortune of writing an excellent book about a subject which subsequently is treated differently onscreen, thereby rendering her version of events non-canonical in retrospect. This book, written before the airing of the DS9 episode "Crossover", is a sequel to the original series episode "Mirror, Mirror". As such, it details what has happened in the mirror universe between Kirk's time and that of the later Trek series; unfortunately, her back-history is radically different from that in the canonical DS9 episode. So what we clearly have, is a DIFFERENT parallel universe. Different from the one in the DS9 series, and different from the one in later novels, notably William Shatner's trilogy, "Spectre", "Dark Victory", and "Preserver", as well as the "Dark Passions" duology by Susan Wright, all of which follow the canonical DS9 history. If one accepts this concept, then the story works just fine. It is well-written, well-concieved, and well-executed, and is excellent in its own right. Granted, I find the concept of a parallel universe extremely dubious; every time someone does something different, it would alter the path of history a little bit, and soon it would be so different that there would be no parallel. But granting the basic concept for the sake of a good story (and I'll admit that it's a fascinating concept, even while it is ridiculously implausable) the writing here is excellent.

Highly recommended.