I, Q

I am seriously shocked at how much I didn't like this book... because believe me, I wanted to.

Q ranks among my top five all-time favorite Star Trek characters. I squeal with glee when I recognize the start of an episode as a “Q episode”. I figured with the amazing talent of John de Lancie involved in the writing of this book, what could go wrong?

Apparently everything.

I don't even know who to blame, Lancie, or Peter David, the actual “novelist” involved with it.

The whole novel reads like a fan fiction written by a teenage boy that just recently read Douglas Adams' masterful work and is delusional enough to think he can be just as clever.

Picard and Data are walking plot devices that speak like cardboard cutouts of their true selves. Whether that was intentional because it's told from Q's perspective is debatable, but I feel it's more a lack of awareness on the author's part. Exploring Data's emotional chip results in basically a cartoonish display of anger and all of Picard's dialog sounds NOTHING like him.

Q's intriguingly arrogant, loner, mischief-maker characteristics are completely washed away by the inclusion and plot line of him having a family and going to rescue them. You have a character like Q and you give him the most basic, formulaic quest in all of storytelling history?!?! Any part in the story referencing his established characteristics on the shows is in flashbacks, stories Q tells you about “this one time”. Then there's stolen lines from works of literature that are MUCH better. They legit stole the “Inconceivable” bit from Princess Bride in an insanely unfunny and uncreative way.

I despise the ending.

One of the things I always loved about Star Trek was that any supreme being they came across, claiming to be a god, etc. was shown to be either a fake, or a being with the knowledge that it most certainly was not actually the end all, be all.

This book? This book strips away all that and boom, there's a god, or goddess, and the worst part? Q “prays” to her in the end.

Q.
Prays.
...

The only reason I didn't give it one star, is because I finished it and it wasn't as bad as The Dog Master, the worst book I've ever read, ever.