The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Vol. 2 (Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars)

Rating:
Summary: Eugenics Wars 2
Review: A very satisfying conclusion to what we got treated to in Volume 1...however, this book suffers from being somewhat more predictable than its predecessor, mainly because the author is stuck having to work towards a predestined finale, that must set things up cleanly for Star Trek: TOS's "Space Seed" story. Any problems inherent in Volume 2 are an extension of this basic difficulty. Gary Seven, to my disappointment, only appears sporadically in this installment, and his main purpose here is to concoct a last-ditch plan to curb Khan without executing him (Seven does not like to kill), and, of course, this plan leads to "Space Seed". Meanwhile, Roberta Lincoln takes center stage--she's got guts, this fine lady, taking all the tough jobs when it comes to foiling Khan and his super-troopers whenever she can. This is terrific when it comes to showing Roberta at her finest, in endless dangerous and unpredictable situations, but taken as a whole, her decades-spanning exploits come off as a bit helter-skelter. I would like, in future, to see Roberta Lincoln in an adventure that doesn't require as much jumping around--something with unity of time, place and action.

Then there's Khan. Because The Eugenics Wars novels take the daring approach of trying to "fit" Khan into what we know to be our own history, while at the same time having him live out a scenario that sees him become "a prince, with power over millions", the Eugenics Wars are really a prolonged Secret War. And yet Khan does gain power over millions, so no, he's not a liar in the film Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. Frankly, I would not have minded if these books had abandoned the secret-war approach the farther along Khan's bid for power went; I would have liked to see him become more of a world-ruler, overtly grabbing up power before his great fall. Anyway, no worries, concerning the ultimate melding of truth and fiction, with an emphasis on trying to depict Eugenics Wars that come close to being something that could have actually happened in the mid-90s we really experienced. My one extra quibble is that in Volume 2, Khan is perhaps not cruel enough--in two different instances he backs down from certain aggressive activity, showing him as surprisingly marshmallowy when it comes to getting talked out of his vilest plans, and also a bit too sympathetic towards the general population, considering how bitter he appears to be. Again, Khan is at the mercy of pre-established continuity, plus any strictures automatically placed on him by these books' stubbornness over inserting him into 1996 as it really occurred.

Despite my negative remarks, I heartily encourage anyone seeking dazzling, action-packed SF to check out the rise and fall of Khan Noonien Singh. Delightful reading.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Follow-Up
Review: As much as I enjoyed reading volume one of The Eugenics War, I disliked volume two. When you re-watch "Space Seed," Star Trek: First Contact, or even the recent "Augments" episodes of Enterprise, you get the impression that The Eugenics Wars were this great upheval, but that's not the case in this "historical" novel of Star Trek's past. The Eugenics Wars, as the author imagines it, was a shadowy behind-the-scenes conflict that only a select few humans even know about. That's makes just a bit of a let-down. I will give the author credit: he has done an admirable job of weaving real Earth history into the alternate hisotry of Star Trek, but that is also what makes this book disappointing. The characters remain strong, chief among them Khan, Gary Seven, and Roberta, but they can't raise up an otherwise disappointing story. Furthermore, as with the previous novel, the whole Kirk/Spock/McCoy sub-plot was a waste of time and totally un-necessary. I actually found myself skipping those parts in order to get back to the main story. While I'm glad Mr. Cox -- an otherwise good Star Trek writer -- took the time to fill in this "lost" piece of Star Trek history I just wish it could have been better.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected...
Review: Book 1 was quite plausible and enjoyable, as it was reasonable that the Star Trek timeline not diverge too much prior to 1989. But book 2, which was supposed to show Khan's meteoric rise to world fame and power and his equally sudden fall in just four short years, disappointed me.

I kept waiting, and waiting, and... waiting. I never did see the book explode into a cataclysmic battle where Khan cements his control over a quarter of the globe, establishing himself as dictator over almost two billion people, using biological weapons against his enemies and in general making himself very well-known to the populace as a feared leader, only to be brought down by a combined assault by all the nations which were not yet under Khan's control.

Instead, the Eugenics Wars is supposedly fought in and out of the real events of the 1990s, with shadowy battles with Gary Seven and his associates.

Sorry, but I really don't buy that. Like other reviewers, I know the difference between our timeline and the alternate one of Star Trek, and to see events written in "1992" that never really happened wouldn't throw me for a loop.

If Khan Singh were virtually unknown in the 1990s I have absolutely no idea how this could be reconciled with the knowledge that (a) he is a very vain, intelligent and self-important man and (b) such people do not skulk in corners creating a shadow Khanate through which pre-existing nations do his bidding while pretending to "really" be in control. I have to wonder if Greg Cox understood that his creation is about an alternate timeline, not our own.

Book 1: Leave alone.
Book 2: REWRITE. FROM SCRATCH.

Rating:
Summary: for juvenile trekkies only
Review: In the classic episode "Space Seed", Khan mentions The Eugenics War and how he and his men were transformed into "Supermen" and at the same time were the only ones to survive it by being put into stasis. Centuries later, Kirk and crew find that "ship" and mistakenly awake Khan and his crew.

Khan was a great foe to Kirk. Always could outsmart Kirk and never was able to be defeated until that is Kirk set a trap for him and left him and his men on a desolate planet to die (Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan happens because of this)

Greg Cox, likes writing long long chapters but is nevertheless a wonderful writer. Although I'm quite curious as to how another seasoned writer (Peter David perhaps?) would have imagined this war.. All in all it is about time that it is being explained in Star Trek Land though it would have been better had it been explained on one of the Trek series. Why it wasn't is beyond me...

Archer and crew are you listning?

Rating:
Summary: Cox mixes recent history with Star Trek mythos....
Review: In the original "Star Trek" series, one of the most famous and powerful episodes was "Space Seed", in which the crew of the Enterprise met and came into conflict with Khan Noonien Singh, a survivor from the "Eugenics Wars" of the "distant past" of the 1990s. Now that we have, in fact, bumbled our way through those 1990s without an apparent destructive struggle with Khan and his crowd of genetically engineered supermen, the standard wisdom says that the "backhistory" of the Star Trek universe has become dated; what seemed like a possible future in the late '60s has failed to come to pass.

What this book (and its predecessor) attempt to do is to reconcile the facts given in that episode (and its movie sequel) with the actual history of the previous decade. This might seem impossible, but in fact is managed quite nicely; the machinations of the genetically enhanced would-be world conquerors mostly happened behind the scenes, and was kept out of the mainstream press, in a way that seems far more plausible than might be expected. Further, the characterizations were handled well, and the writing style is excellent.

The only reason that I mark the book down a star is that the "frame story" format, in which the first chapter and the last detail a minor adventure of Kirk and the Enterprise, simply to provide a bit of "face time" for the major characters who some fans might feel cheated without, was basically irrelevant to the main story. I'd have preferred to see the main story told as a stand-alone, with the secondary story fleshed out and given its own book. As it stands, it was just a distraction.

Rating:
Summary: Cox mixes recent history with Star Trek mythos....
Review: Khan.

Although Star Trek has pitted its various starships and space station crews against such formidable antagonists as the Klingons, the Romulans, the Borg, and the Xindi, few of them have had such an indelible persona as Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically engineered "superman" who, according to the Original Series episode "Space Seed" and the 1982 feature film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, ruled one-quarter of the Earth during a period called the Eugenics Wars. As Khan says to Chekov in Star Trek II, "On Earth, 200 years ago, I was a prince, with power over millions."

Whereas Greg Cox's first novel in a two-book cycle sets up the whole Khan backstory (he's the product of an ambitious attempt by brilliant but twisted scientists to "improve" humanity by tinkering with human DNA) by mixing real Earth history from 1974 to 1989 and Star Trek lore, Volume Two tells the story of Khan Noonien Singh at the very height of his power, his failed attempt to unite his genetically engineered brothers and sisters under his banner, and his ultimate exile aboard the DY-100 sleeper ship he will name, aptly, SS Botany Bay.

Although there is a thematically-linked "frame story" set during Capt. Kirk's first five-year mission about the Enterprise investigating a colony of genetically engineered humans that has applied for membership in the Federation, Cox's main storyline focuses on Agent Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln's attempts to stop Khan -- who had briefly worked them in their mission to save Earth from a third world war but then fell out with Seven and followed a darker path -- from blowing up the planet and destroying humanity. To tell this important story in the Star Trek mythos without having the 21st Century reader rolling his or her eyes and going, "Yeah, right. If the Eugenics Wars happened in the '90s, why didn't I hear about it on CNN?" Cox has incorporated the Balkan Wars, the rise of militias in the United States, the "Black Hawk Down" ambush in Mogadishu, and almost every major crisis in the mid-1990s and meshes it with Star Trek "history," which thankfully was not very detailed in the 1967 episode that introduced Khan.

As he does so well in Volume One, Cox blends an exciting Star Trek adventure -- full of references to established "facts" and characters from various movies and series episodes -- with real historical events that took place from 1992 to 1996. He slyly makes social commentary about our recent past and allusions to other famous movies and television series, including an homage to Ricardo Montalban's (Khan) most famous TV role.

The pace is fast and Cox's style is very engaging. He apparently loves Star Trek and its characters, and it clearly shows in this exciting and entertaining series of novels. I strongly recommend this two-book series to Star Trek fans and even non-fans.

Rating:
Summary: The Eugenics Wars Vol. 2
Review: Nothing about this novel makes any sense. None of its events fit at all with the history of this period talked about in "Space Seed." While it's true that records of that time were, by the 23rd century, fragmentary, it was still known that World War III happened. The "supermen" were known to the world, as was the DY-100 space ship. In this novel, where are the supermen who seize power? Where are the men and women Napoleon-like in ability and ambition? (Never mind that in Space Seed the Eugenics Wars were a result of selective breeding, not genetic engineering.) Trying to make invented Trek history fit in with true history was an effort doomed to failure. It doesn't work. It ruins the fantasy. Apart from these flaws, Cox also fills the book (as in volume one) with references to other Trek series. Shannon O'Donnell makes an appearance, as does Rain Robinson. The Kirk-era storyline seems, again as in volume one, tacked on and pointless (and uninteresting). (Even having Gary Seven in it doesn't make any sense, but that's really a complaint for the first book.)
Then there's Cox's writing style. His editor did a sloppy job, but admittedly didn't have a lot to work with. His writing is on the same level as that the average fan fiction writer.

Rating:
Summary: Khan bids to take over world in 1990s...alert CNN!
Review: One of the reasons Star Trek has lived long and prospered has been its memorable characters and storylines, not to mention the way it has developed a sense of continuity. The sense that the various captains, crews, starships, even a space station live in a believable universe not only comes from Gene Roddenberry's original concept of setting his original series at a time when faster-than-light travel might be possible, but from script writers that had the talent and the imagination to create a back story to Starfleet, the starship Enterprise, the Federation, and Earth's "past" -- from the characters' 23rd/24th Century vantage points. By citing such events as the Romulan Wars, first contact with the Klingons, and the Eugenics Wars of the late 20th Century, Star Trek's writers create a subconscious feeling in the viewer's (or reader's) mind that yes, that universe has a history that is believable and adds much to the dramatic story's emotional impact.

Because Star Trek's writers chose to set the original series in a believable future scenario rather than creating a "galaxy far, far away" a la George Lucas, they wrote several episodes that dealt with what in the mid-1960s was still the future. Two of them, including "Assignment: Earth," involved time travel by Capt. Kirk and the USS Enterprise to the Sixties, while "Space Seed," by Carey Wilbur and Gene L. Coon, established the history of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.

Obviously, the writers of the episode had no idea that Star Trek would become such a long-lived franchise or that a feature film would be based on "Space Seed," yet Khan Noonien Singh -- one of Ricardo Montalban's most memorable roles -- and the events of his era loom large in the Trek scenario. So how does a writer of contemporary Trek -- whether it is on film or the printed page/e-book -- reconcile what was the 1960s "future" with our very real and stormy past in a believable way?

In my review of Volume One of Star Trek -- The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh I mentioned that author Greg Cox (Assignment: Eternity) chose to focus his two-volume series not on the captain and crew of the NCC-1701 (although they have a relevant "frame" storyline that acts as a launching pad for the "historical's" main narrative) but on the efforts of Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln to save Earth from a major world war as the now-adult children of the Chrysalis Project fight among themselves for world supremacy.

Obviously, the outcome (Khan attempts to conquer world, fails, and is exiled with 90 or so of his genetically superior brothers and sisters aboard the advanced DY-100 sleeper ship SS Botany Bay, to be found 300 years later by Kirk's Enterprise in the Mutara Sector) is never in doubt. No, the fun in reading Cox's novels is in seeing how he manages to blend Star Trek's established history with our own recent past.

After a 23rd Century prologue that continues Kirk's now imperiled investigation of the Paragon Colony on the planet Sycorax (the Klingons have sabotaged the colony and Kirk must find a way to save the genetically engineered humans' skins, as well as those of his own landing party), Cox returns to the 20th Century, this time during the critical early 1990s, at a time when the post-Cold War era is marked by wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, the rise of the "militia" movement in the United States, and all the other events that made the Nineties "a strange, violent time," as Spock says in the original 1967 episode. Cox manages to convincingly portray the unconnected headlines (Revolutionary turmoil stirs in Peru; Ethnic hatred plunges Yugoslavia into civil war!) as part of the Star Trek universe's Eugenics Wars.

Volume Two is just as exciting and funny as the first installment of the series, with more action and inside jokes and references to the culture of the time period, other Trek histories (even Jonathan Archer gets a mention in this one), and even a knowing little homage to Ricardo Montalban's best known TV role ("Welcome, Miss Lincoln, to Chrysalis Island!").

Rating:
Summary: Another Star Trek Rewrite
Review: Part I of this series was quite entertaining, but this one isn't what I hoped for. It's another example of rewriting the Star Trek universe in a vain attempt to fit reality. It doesn't suprise me, because this novel fits perfectly into the philosophy of the new Trek series.
I gave it two stars because it did fit reality in a somewhat clever fashion, but as someone else already stated, it didn't happen this way.

Rating:
Summary: There's No War in This War
Review: When Star Trek originally aired, the millennium seemed infinitely far away. Trek writers liberally seasoned the late 20th century with tantalizing historical convulsions. As time goes by, however, we catch up with these events and disprove them. The hardest concept for Trek writers to grasp, it seems, is that Trek takes place not in the future, but in an alternate universe. This universe has its own timeline, including a 20th century that is similar to our own in many ways but also very different. For example, there is no Star Trek in the 20th century of the Trek universe. How could there be?

Unfortunately, Trek writers have a habit of trying to maintain Trek as some sort of extrapolated present, which necessitates ever more squashing and squeezing as Trek's own past becomes better established. Greg Cox, unwilling to accept that Trek's 1993 is not our own, recasts the Eugenics Wars as something that took place "under the radar," camouflaged by religious and ethnic strife around the world, such that no ordinary citizens were aware of it. To the greatest extent possible, Cox tries to render the events of his book as something that could have happened in our own world, while we weren't looking. The fact that this isn't, after all, possible doesn't bother him. He's forgetting what the point really was: This was not about the rise and fall of a single megalomaniac. It was about humanity's catastrophic flirtation with genetic engineering, and the reason such engineering is still banned in the Federation "today."

It's sad that the Trek franchise has felt it necessary to rewrite so much of its own established history, one that is every bit as exciting and complex as our own 20th century has been. From the depredations wrought by Voyager and Enterprise to this book, the universe of Trek has been rendered watery, inconsistent and uneventful. At this rate, we'll never get to World War III, let alone the invention of warp drive. At some point, we have to acknowledge that Trek is not about the future. It's just a story. And if the franchise is to survive as Paramount obviously hopes it will, they will either have to deal with that or allow it to balkanize into dozens of mutually incompatible individual storylines. I'm not holding out much hope.