{"id":4930,"date":"2014-05-11T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T01:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=4930"},"modified":"2014-05-11T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T01:52:00","slug":"star-trek-tng-the-body-electric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/star-trek-tng-the-body-electric\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek TNG: The Body Electric"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Once, in the Andromeda galaxy, I met eleven alternate-timeline versions of myself and had to persuade them to let me collapse our shared quantum-probability waveform to avoid a temporal paradox. You don&#8217;t know what &#8216;awkward&#8217; means until you&#8217;ve persuaded eleven copies of yourself to let themselves be erased from existence while you get to go on living.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Once again this review spoils a big change in the <strong>Star Trek<\/strong> universe that occurred in the first book in this series&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Spoiler alert<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Data has found his mother, Juliana Tainer. But the Immortal, Akharin, is gone &#8212; taken by the unbelievably powerful\u00a0Fellowship of Artificial Intelligence. Against Juliana&#8217;s wishes, Data contacts the Fellowship. Meanwhile, Wesley Crusher is shocked to see the planet of the Istarral,\u00a0friends of his, sucked into a black hole by a giant machine. He can&#8217;t stop the machine by himself so he visits his old friend Captain Picard.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Body Electric<\/strong> by David Mack was published in 2012. It&#8217;s the final book in the <strong>Cold Equations<\/strong>\u00a0trilogy, following <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/cold-equations-silent-weapons\/\"><strong>Silent Weapons<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t a big fan of Wesley becoming a Traveler. It didn&#8217;t really make sense &#8212; he was a normal human, so where did those powers come from? Given that he&#8217;s here as a Traveler, I was still happy to see him.<\/p>\n<p>This book has a lot to do with artificial intelligence, and the differences and similarities between it and sentient organic life.<\/p>\n<p>Data&#8217;s friend Rhea was introduced in the book <strong>Immortal Coil<\/strong> &#8212; I haven&#8217;t read it but I plan to.<\/p>\n<p>Mack&#8217;s smooth writing, knowledge of the characters, and gripping story will keep you reading. If you&#8217;re a fan of <strong>The Next Generation<\/strong> and you haven&#8217;t been reading the books, now would be a good time to start.<\/p>\n<p>This is an amazing trilogy, and I will certainly read more books by Mack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{4.5\/5} &#8220;Once, in the Andromeda galaxy, I met eleven alternate-timeline versions of myself and had to persuade them to let me collapse our shared quantum-probability waveform to avoid a temporal paradox. You don&#8217;t know what &#8216;awkward&#8217; means until you&#8217;ve persuaded eleven copies of yourself to let themselves be erased from existence while you get to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8,59],"class_list":["post-4930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4930"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4943,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4930\/revisions\/4943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}