The Final Reflection (John M. Ford, reread)

[charlie_ego]

4/5, with the huge caveat that there is a whole lot of nostalgia working in this book's favor, for me. It was one of the first Trek novels I ever read, and the first Ford I ever read, and the copy I have is the original old library copy I first read (which eventually turned up in the library book sale). Ford is, of course, an acquired taste, and

Comments

[charlie_ego]

Which Krenn-McCoy conversation? The one with Grandisson or the one with Kelly? The Grandisson one, I have no idea. I mean, besides the surface conversation of Grandisson trying to convince Krenn that Humans don’t want to be in space, which, bwuh? There seems to be a secondary meaning - Krenn thinks about how it is like actors in a play. But I don’t know what that meaning is. I suspect that if I did, I’d understand the whole Grandisson part of the plot. The Kelly conversation, I think, is pretty straightforwardly about trying to find what kind of biological fusion Kelly is.

So Kethas betrays Krenn (or at least does so from a human perspective, it may very well be the case that a Klingon wouldn’t think so??) by giving the Romulans the information about the next Klingon raid in Romulan space, knowing that Krenn was on that raid.
(Money quote: Kev said, “The Roms wanted some proofs of the negotiators’ intent. They wanted information on the next frontier raid. They got it.”
Vrenn said, “Did the one -”
“The one knew,” said Commander Koll. “The one verified it.”
So there was only the khomerex zha, Vrenn thought, and the pieces of the game were only bits of wood in the fire.)

The bit about Krenn fomenting war with the Federation is solely from the Meth bit of dialogue I quoted in the post.

Yeah… games are a big metaphor both implicitly and explicitly for life (the “Perpetual Game,” as the Klingons call it, the khomerex zha, which a better translation for is “the game of empire”) and for the action, as Krenn states explicitly at the end: “a grand end move of the Reflective Game.” The Reflective Game, “Kethas’ game,” is a game where each player uses the same pieces, and you can see how that maps over to intra-Klingon intrigue. It also maps over to the Federation/Klingon action, where both sides “see themselves reflected.”