Star Trek #16: The Final Reflection Book

"I do not acknowledge the existence of the Perpetual Game," Margon said without turning. "Society is Society, war war. If they are games at all, surely they are not all the same game. I deny it."

"That is a favored tactic," Akten said.

The Final Reflection is a strange animal for a book: a TV series tie-in novel that enjoys an excellent reputation, thanks partially to the fact that it's the book John M. Ford wrote immediately after The Dragon Waiting which won the World Fantasy Award, and that Ford only wrote ten novels in his career, two of which are Star Trek novels. The Final Reflection is also unique in that it is told entirely from the point of view of someone other than an existing Star Trek character. This might not actually be unique anymore, but the first time I heard of this book was in a parenthetical note by Howard Waldrop where he claims that Ford is the only person to write a Star Trek novel that isn't from the point of view of anybody on the Enterprise.

Instead, The Final Reflection is a novel within a novel, an unauthorized book called The Final Reflection that is making its way through the Federation sometime after the events of the original TV series, purporting to show the truth about a shadowy event in Federation/Klingon history from the Klingon point of view. In addition to taking us away from the Federation point of view, this is also clever because the theme of the novel is cultures trying to understand each other and the role of stories (particularly political rumours, superstitions and mythology, and above all the narratives of culturally specific games) in that process.

The Final Reflection is about a Klingon orphan named Vrenn, and we see him rise through the ranks until he's trusted with a diplomatic mission and his own sense of ethics embroils him in politics. I won't spoil the ending, but it's not inaccurate to think about this story as following the standard Star Trek interests (diplomacy, space battles, sci-fi inventions) in a culture that values warfare.

That description downplays the most interesting thing about the book, namely Ford's rich and detailed portrayal of an alien society. Klingons, it turns out, are inveterate gamers who, as my quote above suggests, consider more or less everything in terms of gameplay. They're not "less than" humans, more different, and Ford pulls off the trick of making Klingons entirely consistent with the paper-thin antagonists of the original series while granting them another dimension. Because we're following Klingons, we get to see them being thoughtful, and coming to realizations about humans and the Federation that mirror what we come to understand about Ford's Klingons. Wait a minute... mirrors, reflections... say, that was clever.

If I can digress for a moment, the book I read right before this was Brian Daley's novelization of the movie Tron. That book basically fell apart because while it was trying to describe the Electronic World, the only effective way it found to do that was to have an omniscient narrator telling us what "normal" things everything resembles. The narrator would say "instead of ordinary treads, the tank had strips of light" which is a good way to deal with the basic problem of trying to describe Tron with prose, but also takes the reader deep out of the point of view of the characters in that world.

Ford, on the other hand, leaves plenty of things untranslated from Klingonaase, and deftly uses characters thoughts and dialogue to give us what we need. For example, at one point a character explains that the "human" translation for Klingonaase is "Klingonese" because it happens to sound like the name of a language in English, but the "aase" suffix means something rather different to Klingons, something more like "a tool to alter reality." There are plenty of examples, but it all adds up to a book that does an excellent job portraying an alien society looking at "ours."

It's been said (apparently by Jo Walton) that this book would be better if it wasn't a Star Trek book at all. I find that somewhat hard to believe, because so much seems to come from the fact that it's written from the point of view of someone who would show up in Star Trek as a pantomime bad guy, and that the culture that's being described isn't actually our own but rather the familiar one from Star Trek. For example, at one point the Klingons go to Earth and encounter human isolationists, people we've never really seen in Star Trek (I know, I know, Enterprise but it hadn't happened yet when this was written). Interesting as it is to see humans who want the Federation to be disbanded, it's particularly interesting that Dr. McCoy's grandfather is associated with them'it's quite clear that T.J. McCoy doesn't really buy the isolationists, but it puts a slightly different spin on Bones' crankiness about Vulcans. I think the references to other texts actually add a lot of depth to this text that would certainly be very different if it was a standalone novel.

So, is there anything not that great about this text? Well yes. It's one of those stories where the characters become embroiled in state secrets and spying, but it's also one of those stories where the novel doesn't tell you what characters know and when they know it. I found the final third of The Final Reflection difficult to follow for this reason: our viewpoint character Captain Krenn starts doing things for reasons that are unclear to me, because he knows something he's not going to inform me about until forty pages later. If you stick with it, things become clear, but it's a tricky line that novels about secret events walk, and this book does not totally satisfy on that count.

The most minor complaint I had was that there's an Orion character named Rogaine, which I found distracting although it looks like the hair-treatment drug might not have existed at the time.

It's very very clumsy how we find out that T.J. McCoy is Dr. McCoy's grandfather; he makes a weird out of nowhere reference to his grandson's full name, and I would rather that this have been left for us to figure out. Puzzlingly, an substantial encounter with Sarek, Amanda Grayson, and a young Spock is handled exactly this way and it's much better for it.

Many characters are quite intriguing (as part of Ford's agenda to create a densely-populated and complex universe) but we don't spend a lot of time with them. That's a good problem to have, since it basically just makes me really interested to know what is the deal with, say, Kelly; Krenn's half-human old friend who is in the Intelligence service, and who seems like she's had a fascinating life.

The bottom line is that this is a justly high-regarded Star Trek novel, one so good that it's good by the standards of novels that aren't TV tie-ins. It gains a lot if you are familiar with Star Trek (particularly the original series) but I suspect Ford is a good enough writer that it would be good even if a reader who didn't know Trek decided, for some baffling reason, to read a novel that proclaims itself to be the sixteenth in a series and comes adorned with a tasteful oil painting of a Klingon playing chess with young Spock.