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

[hca]

Okay, it's been a really really long time, but I remember walking away from that book thinking Kelly was a human fusion. Child of a human prisoner and Klingon officer? (The book is upstairs somewhere, but I'm not going to go dig it out and look up why I thought so. :) If you see something that you think obviously contradicts that theory, you're almost certainly right; it really has been years and years.)

[charlie_ego]

No, that makes sense -- otherwise why would Krenn and Kelly have gone to a human doctor in the first place? No idea how he figured it out, though...

[stfg]

I'm about 1/3 of the way through my re-read, and I'll come back and comment when I'm done.

One of my big questions is what happened in the conversation between Krenn and McCoy?

I missed the whole bit about Kethas betraying Krenn. I know Kethas took a politically risky position and was struck down for that, but I didn't see that he was specifically acting against Krenn?

I also missed that Krenn was instructed to evaluate whether they should foment war with the Federation. I'm almost at that point in my re-read and will look for it.

I feel like I'm missing things about the games that Krenn played with Kethas. Ford spends a fair bit of time describing them. Are those games played out again in the action later in the book? I can't tell.

[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