Reviewer: Miranda Fave Signed [Report This]
Date: 19 Jun 2013 00:03 Title: Interlude - Silence

Interesting to reread this now after having read the first story. It means that the piece here makes sense in fitting in like a jigsaw piece to the first story. However, when I read it before it was in isolation and carried a hefty whack to it then. You threw the reader into this STO universe and your characters at a very raw moment. It was a very viseral and harsh way for the likes of me to be introduced to much of your universe. However it was a very powerful and a memorable way of introducing your universe. I quite like that I read things the wrong way round - it kinda meant I was expecting the Borg in the first story and so it added to the reading of it and detracted nothing from the reading of this. And strange how the focus here was on Dossau and St. Peter is only a bit player. One imagines that Dossau may come to serve in a role for St. Peter in the future then.

Like the last time, I really loved the flashbacks and I love the focus on a post DS9 Bajoran - one part of Starfleet, one who had faith in the Prophets even if that faith is / has now been challenged by the event of the Borg returning and the loss of life.

I like the fact we are seeing a man struggle and rail against his faith. In a secular society and in the largely secular Star Trek we saw on TV it is great to see a person of faith and all the better to see them struggle with faith and all the better to see them as a normal person and not some mouth piece of the author with some message or with agenda to tar or promote people of faith. He's just a character with faith. Honestly, truly appreciate this.

The writing style and framing of the piece draws the reader into your world which being set in the future (albeit within / beginning in the STO timeline) is largely unfamiliar and that can be daunting. But no, you make a very easy to read read that settles us in to the universe and setting despite the uneasy and unsettling nature of what transpires and the personal anguish of the character within.

Reviewer: Miranda Fave Signed [Report This]
Date: 06 Dec 2011 22:15 Title: Interlude - Silence

I always liked flashback to earlier and then flashforward to the end stories. Often they are used to keep the viewer/reader guessing and to give a complicated path towards the conclusion. Here you use it to build to the end point, showing the journey of horror, grief and rage for Dossu towards the Prophets and seemingly his loss of faith. Of course, if one is railling against the Prophets and demanding to know why it is they did not help, why they allowed this to happen, then it isn't a loss of faith but anger and resentment to a higher beings whose motivations and actions cannot be understood. So a very interesting tackle of matters for Dossu and of course a means of introducing the horror of the situation as it appears in ST:Online. One can imagine easily the complacency, the sense of safety the Federation at large would feel at having such an insatiable force like the Borg finished once and for all - only for that falsehood to come crashing down around their ears. Totally horrifying. Very well played.

Reviewer: Nerys Ghemor Signed [Report This]
Date: 04 Dec 2011 04:21 Title: Interlude - Silence

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I don't know whether you did this intentionally, but this resembled in part the form that many of the Psalms took in the Bible, where the psalmist railed against the perceived absence of God and recounted the horrors inflicted upon him by his enemies and the terrible anger and fear evoked in him by those horrors.  And the Borg, whom you cast as being even more robotic than those we saw in canon (a comparison I cannot speak to since I don't play STO), makes them seem to me like a "living" personification of Sheol--of the grave without apparent hope of an afterlife, which was the perspective taken by the psalmists.

The comparison is even stronger when you consider that at the time the Psalms were written, the degree to which the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was interested in other peoples was often disputed by the people of that time (note Jonah's indignant reaction when he's told that God is interested in the salvation of the non-Israelite people of Nineveh).  I see in Obruz' perspective on the Prophets, where he wonders if it mattered to them that his non-Bajoran friends died a similar sort of tension to what I imagine the writers of the Old Testament sometimes experienced.

The one thing we never see in this story, though, that we see in the Psalms, is the final statement of faith in deity despite all of these painful happenings.  That omission makes me wonder if this is going to be Obruz' breaking point in his faith, or if instead he will work his way through this and eventually find some reason to remain faithful.  (Despite the parallels I mentioned above, I don't think you would have needed to add anything to the story; it works as it is.)

The one detail, as someone who is not into STO, that would have helped would be a bit more of an explanation of how the Borg have changed rather than just one hint that their movements are different.

I still see a lot of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic names, though I was glad to see a person who appears to be of French origin.  And it was a really neat twist to see a member of an alien species (Bolian?  Was it ever specified?) who was clearly adopted and raised by humans, to the point of having a human name.  So while I still think perhaps the humans could be more diverse, you did add some more interest there.

And finally, you definitely captured the horrors of war.  Personally, I think you are making progress as a writer and should be proud of this.