In today’s episode, when Worf signs up for a little light election interference, he realizes too late he double-booked. But when he asks Picard for a favor, some outdated drivers might make Alexander’s history lesson more intense than the captain expects. Can Worf cosplay as a coward? Should you launch a miniseries by immediately subverting the concept? And is it really Alexander who wants to check out his unusual lineage? All this and more in Ancient Blood, the book that has more Common Sense than common sense.

Ancient Blood
Author: Diane Carey
Pages: 280
Published: September 1997
Timeline: Between “All Good Things…” and Generations
Prerequisites: None, which is a little weird in some ways. You don’t really need to be up to speed on Worf and Alexander’s dynamic because they don’t interact much in this story, and knowing how Picard is around kids in general doesn’t play into it because he mostly handles himself pretty well with Alexander. No specific episodes leap to mind.

Upon first reflection, Ancient Blood seemed to me like a prime example of what might today be called “not understanding the assignment”. Then I realized it was actually something much worse: Diane Carey did understand the assignment, but she thought it was stupid, so she turned in something completely different. But before we get into that, we should talk about the concept of the Day of Honor.

John Ordover was chock full of ideas in 1997. First, he got a darker, grittier, more in-your-face version of Star Trek off the ground with Peter David’s New Frontier. Then, with Paula Block, he came up with a holiday called the Day of Honor, a sort of Klingon Yom Kippur “where you take the measure of your honor for the past year.” The idea emerged from the desire to create a piece of connective tissue that linked the various generations without predicating it on a common foe, as the Invasion! series did. Ordover told Jeri Taylor about it, and she loved it so much she decided to make an episode of Voyager about it, marking the first time a Star Trek episode used a concept from the books. The Day of Honor miniseries thus comprises five novels, four regular and one young adult, and culminates in the novelization of the television episode.

As often happened with these kinds of miniseries events, Diane Carey was invited to write the first one, since her name was one that could move copies. Her contribution opens with a shocking tableau of gore and death. The Enterprise is punching way below its weight here, essentially pulling over transports in legal space lanes at the behest of Commissioner Toledano of the colony world Sindikash. Toledano is looking for two unknown “witnesses” who will, at the time they are found, disclose their identities and be remanded to his jurisdiction. But when they beam over to their targeted transport, they find a carpet soaked in blood, several people with their arms torn off, and those whose arms are intact with their throats slit. Toledano claims the scene is the work of a band of rogue Klingons, which of course riles up Worf, but as soon becomes clear, Toledano isn’t simply spouting rank xenophobia.

Toledano wants Worf to infiltrate the aforementioned Klingon gang and obtain two witnesses to an assassination attempt on the colony’s governor. Sindikash law requires at least two witnesses to prosecute any crime, and if Toledano can get them, he’ll be able to put a stop to a special election whose winner will determine if Sindikash secedes from the Federation. The candidate he believes to be responsible for the attempt on the governor’s life, Odette Khanty, is not only the ringleader of the Klingon criminal element, but also the governor’s wife. Riker and Picard act like Toledano is asking them to help him subvert the democratic process, which I thought was kind of a weird logical leap that betrayed a lack of understanding for what Toledano was asking for. It’s more like literally everyone knows Khanty is rotten to the core and he has all the evidence he needs, but it’s all circumstantial because he’s having trouble nailing down this one arbitrary legal requirement on account of how Khanty’s thugs keep killing the witnesses, and it’s just sort of convenient that his target happens to be a candidate for political office whose views differ from his.

Worf agrees to the mission after Picard reluctantly decides to go along with it, but soon realizes it will have him away from the ship during Alexander’s first Day of Honor. Since Picard has honorary Klingon cred, Worf asks him to accompany Alexander through his first significant participation in the occasion, in which he learns about honor by researching an ancestor from his bloodline. Of course, given Alexander’s genetic makeup, that doesn’t limit him exclusively to Klingon choices, and sure enough, he brings Picard a holodeck program reconstructed from Revolutionary War journals that plays out a turning point in the life of one of his human relatives. However, it won’t tell them outright who that relative is; they must locate and identify the man while acclimating to the realities of everyday naval life. The journal program itself is also stupid-old, meaning it lacks the safety protocols one would expect of a more modern creation.

While Picard and Alexander get up close and personal with American history, Worf and Ross Grant, a UFP Intelligence agent and family friend of the Rozhenkos, go undercover on Sindikash. Worf is disgusted to learn that the Klingon gang Toledano spoke of is real, and doubly so to witness how readily they pledge their fealty to a human. (Never mind that he does exactly that in his day job, but it’s okay when he does it, because Starfleet.) His distaste for how they handle things moves him to take their operations into his own hands, catching Mrs. Khanty’s eye and earning her trust. Once they infiltrate deep enough to do some good computer digging, Grant sees Khanty slip a fatal toxin to her comatose husband. But Worf doesn’t—and when Grant asks him to lie and say he did in order to fulfill the Seniard1Citizens of Sindikash are called Seniards. When asked why, Toledano fires back with a question of his own: why are people from France called French and not, say, Francian? two-witness requirement, he refuses to perjure himself out of his own sense of honor. The unwillingness to play along ultimately blows Worf’s cover, but while he’s merely exiled back to the Enterprise, Grant—a civilian—must stay and await Seniard justice, which will probably take longer to resolve than Khanty’s particular brand of reckoning…

Let it never be said of Diane Carey that there is any conceit she cannot twist, gnarl, or otherwise force into alignment, however clumsily, with her twin loves of sailing and military history. It is of course not uncommon for authors to “write what they know”, but few do it as artlessly as she. Other writers are far better at making such things seem as though they develop organically from within the characters. Carey simply slaps her personal interests over the top of any narrative with no care for seamless blending. So when Alexander says “I wanted to see what’s in my human background” (p. 51), it rings false. Alexander didn’t want to see that; Diane Carey did. And the reason for that is disarmingly simple: she doesn’t give a crap about Klingons.

That isn’t something I’m speculating about or reading into the text. It’s straight out of her own mouth. I generally feel lucky if I get one usable tidbit out of a Voyages of Imagination interview, but the one for Ancient Blood is a treasure trove. Although she offers a critique on the long-term sustainability of a warrior culture that holds its flavor for a few chews,2“Somebody had to build their ships and clean the hallways. Everybody can’t be [sic] a warrior, and they can’t hold those who aren’t warriors in contempt, or their society would collapse.” (p. 422) it’s surrounded by some otherwise dopey statements. Like this one: “I don’t like one-dimensional characters and I certainly don’t like one-dimensional cultures, a too-common element in science fiction.”

This strikes me as a really weird thing for someone who liked Star Trek enough to write dozens of novels set in its universe to say. First of all, basically all non-human Trek cultures are monolithic entities with a single defining quality: Vulcans and their relentless pursuit of logic over emotion, Romulans and their penchant for subterfuge, Ferengis’ hyper-capitalist greed, and on and on. But that’s a feature, not a bug: in so being, those cultures give us a variety of prisms through which to examine and better understand aspects of ourselves. But also, if you think a fictional alien culture lacks dimensionality, add dimensions! You’re a writer! You have that power! Back in the early 80s, when there were still only like four episodes dedicated to Klingons and Romulans combined, authors like John M. Ford and Diane Duane didn’t look at the paucity of information available, throw their hands up, and say, “Well, this is stupid. Let’s just focus on humans, we already know how great they are.” They fleshed those cultures out! They made something from (almost) nothing! They did what writers do: they created.

The true gem of the Voyages segment on this book, however, is the final, damning sentence: “Real honor is in the human idea of honor, not the Klingon idea.” Her story certainly backs that sentiment. Without exception, it is always a human whose concept of honor is noble and/or the “right” one. Human war is somewhat acknowledged to be a bitter business that strains family loyalties, but it’s just as often fetishized as some kind of civilized game where men have gentlemen’s agreements to not shoot each other in the back. An off-the-books extraction mission to rescue Grant is about two hours too late: he’s found dead of torture as bloody as that seen at the beginning of the book, and Carey goes to great lengths to emphasize that Grant’s suffering is superior to Worf’s honor because it was in service to a planet of strangers he believed in rather than himself. According to Carey, Klingons have nothing to teach us. It is everyone else who could stand to learn from humans.

All of this raises the question: why would you kick off this miniseries with a book like this? Carey’s stubborn loutishness compromises the whole thing from the jump by subverting the concept before it can even get off the ground. Why play with someone who thinks your game is stupid to begin with? At times like these, I think about how Carey often got pole position on projects like this because having her name on the cover sold books. Increasingly, however, all that seems to prove to me is that Trek readers of the time had execrable taste.

MVP & LVP

• Now here’s a sentence I never thought I would write: the MVP for this book is Alexander. His is one of the few characterizations Carey executes well. Adults consistently try to talk around or down to him, and he is having none of it. He’s full of very good questions that are hard to answer to the satisfaction of someone his age and without hard-won experience, and he fires them off in uncomfortably rapid succession. Picard’s discomfort and lack of facility with children are of course well-documented, but he handles himself and his young charge rather nicely, all things considered. Alexander, though, is surprisingly forceful in his demands to be taken seriously, and in this case, I found it a refreshing swerve from his typical whininess.
• This book’s LVP, at least among characters who make an appearance (more on that below), is Riker. For the most part, he only pipes up to make little wisecracks that don’t help anything. Annoying.

Stray Bits

• There is no compelling reason for this book’s title. It almost feels like a generic placeholder. It’s not a title drop, and it doesn’t derive from anything in the book. Granted, I don’t have a better one loaded in the chamber, but nothing about this book feels especially ancient (despite most of it playing out in Revolutionary War times) or bloody (despite two very graphic ex post facto torture scenes).
• This is anecdotal, but I’m pretty sure I nodded off more times reading this book and trying to write this review than with any other. Which is bad, because since this site started, I’ve done all my reading and writing at an overnight job that depends on me staying awake at ungodly hours. Though not for much longer! As of this review’s publication, I only have three shifts left at that job, and I start my student teaching in less than two weeks—and then the true test of how regularly I can keep this site updated begins.
• Is there any reason they couldn’t have postponed Alexander’s Day of Honor stuff by a week or two so Worf could go through it with him instead of palming it off on Picard? Do you have to submit a form that says you completed it by a certain stardate? Does Gowron enforce it personally or something?
• Geordi and Deanna don’t show up in this story at all, and even the limited presence of characters like Data and Beverly feels perfunctory. I suppose it would be a bit unreasonable to expect a Klingon thing to be an ensemble piece, but don’t just flat-out forget about them!
• It’s common for Diane Carey to let at least one loathsome personal philosophy slip through the cracks. This time, she wastes no time whatsoever, getting it out of the way as early as the dedication: “Dedicated to our great-aunt Katie Simon, who, by not retiring until the age of 89, taught us and our kids all about hard work and its wonderful rewards.” Ah yes, nothing like the virtue of suckling the company teat until you have practically nothing of the rest of your life to enjoy for yourself and/or with your loved ones. Truly, an act of saintly selflessness, and not at all the deranged rationalizations of people licking the boot that holds their head to the ground.
• Carey has trouble keeping her seamen straight toward the end. A character named Wollard appears a couple of times on page 260 after getting blown away seven pages prior.

Final Assessment

Terrible. A series ostensibly imagined to be about Klingon introspection is sabotaged in its first entry by an author with no interest in the culture, resulting in Terracentricity at its very worst. Carey can’t put her obsessions away for long enough to actually engage with the concept in front of her, so she simply slaps them on top of whatever she was supposed to be doing, turns it in, and calls it good. This is barely tolerable in her solo stories, but when she starts doing it in conceptual spaces created by others, it’s unbearable.

NEXT  TIME: The Honoring of Days continues with Armageddon Sky