Architects of Infinity by Kirsten Beyer 

Her Grace’s rating:  out of 5 stars

Genre: sci-fi

I read it as an: mass market paperback

Source: my own collection

Length: 388 pp

Published by: Pocket Books (27 March 2018)

**Spoilers ahead!**

In Architects of Infinity, the Full CIrcle fleet is dying for some down time. When they discover a planet covered with biodomes and a wholly new element, Adm. Janeway decides this would be the perfect spot to give the crews some shore leave. Teams comprised of officers who normally don’t interact very much are assigned to the surface to do various experiments and research and still enjoy the pure and uncontaminated areas within the biodomes. The mystery of who built the biodomes and where they went is irresistible to the crews of the fleet. However, the mystery soon becomes rife with danger, placing every crew member in peril.

This was a fun and exciting story overall. I enjoyed seeing the interaction of the various ships’ crews who normally don’t interact a lot. I think that was a good idea for Chakotay to send them off in neat little groups like that. I think everyone learned a lot, which was the point. It was also cool that they discovered a brand new element and dubbed it Sevenofninonium. LOL. 

It was a little disappointing that we never figured out or met the people who created the biodomes were, not really. The whole point of that particular plot seems to have been that there are or were people out there even more advanced than the Federation, Borg, or Krenim, and that the Federation isn’t ready for this kind of tech. OK. That was a long book to read for just that. 

I did not like that a major plot point, the evolution of Starfleet officers as individuals and as units within the fleet, were really glossed over. A big component was that the lower decks crew often feel overlooked or devalued because they were not part of Voyager’s original crew that was stuck in the Delta Quadrant for seven years. I can see how that might happen, or how it might at least seem like it happens, but other than some grumbling amongst themselves, and one conversation about it to a command officer at the end, nothing at all is done to address this topic. Did Devi learn from her actions? Did the command staff figure out they need to let the junior officers learn and do things and receive the same respect as original Voyager crew? We didn’t get to find out. 

Also? I still hate, possibly even more so in this book than in the previous one A Pocketful of Lies, the whole Conlon/Kim pregnancy thing. As I said in the review for that book, it’s the 24th century. Can they not turn off their balls/ ovaries until they are ready to have babies on purpose? In this book, the pregnancy ends up being irrelevant anyway, except to add teenage kinds of angst to the story. Before, the pregnancy was needed to give a potential source of a cure for Conlon’s degenerative condition through fetal stem cells. But then they didn’t get enough and the stem cell harvest was irrelevant in the end. What purpose is there for this? Just a means to have some bizarre pro-life discussion since the fetus, after it gets transported to an incubator, is now a separate being with full rights? Why wasn’t it considered such before, if that’s the route the story’s going to take? Why isn’t it viewed scientifically as a thing with the potential for life but no separate life of its own yet? If it just needed to be swapped into an incubator instead of its mother’s uterus, why was it not a problem then that Conlon wanted to terminate her pregnancy? I find the entire logic behind that flawed in the extreme and badly written. This is not what I’ve come to expect from Beyer’s normally airtight writing at all. 

And then the whole pregnancy/baby/Kim/Conlon issue blows up in the end. Literally. It’s Star Trek, so I’m sure they aren’t really all dead. Maybe. They do kill off major characters aplenty, but I can’t tell if this is just a catalyst for future plot development or if the entire crew of the Vesta really did just flame out. In either event, it really doesn’t sit well with me, given all the drama surrounding Conlon and her illness and the rights of a fetus and whatnot. 

I DID appreciate the medical ethics involved in treating Conlon. I am always down for a good discussion on medical ethics and it was interesting to see how Dr Sal convinced Rhys to give blood, a taboo in her culture, to help find a cure for Conlon using the metaphasic cells in her body. Sal was apparently engaged somehow in ethically questionable practices when it came to Conlon’s actual treatment and based on a previous trauma Sal had experienced with a similar disease 30 years prior. She crossed a line, according to Farkas, the captain of Vesta. I am not so sure she did. She did not coerce Gwyn into donating blood, she didn’t force a treatment upon Conlon, and she told the truth to Gwyn as much as she could have while preserving doctor/patient confidentiality. The harvesting of the embryo’s stem cells also seemed fine. Sal got permission from the child’s father to do it, which is his right to grant since the mother was out of commission. Sal didn’t use the cells on Conlon and was going to wait for her to wake up to broach the subject. There is no real issue, I don’t think, in getting ready just in case Conlon changed her mind. It doesn’t mean it was a line crossed, and yet Farkas raked her over the coals for it. It’s like Star Trek: Snowflake, and I didn’t care for that at all. We can be enlightened and progressive and democratic without going around the twist about every little thing. 

Overall, I liked the exploration portion of this but did not like the actual character studies or commentary. It had potential but fell flat in a big way for me, and as I’ve said before, it is not what I expected from Beyer. Maybe she was stretched a little too thin because of her work on Discovery, which is so fucking cool. I’d prefer her to focus on that (and on bringing back/finding Prime Lorca, please) than on writing more novels if this is the way they’re going to go from here on out. 

Favorite lines:

• We all have two lives, Counselor: the one we want and the one we learn to live with. I’m content with both of mine.
• Past failures are not certain indication of future possibilities. If we worked together, imagine what we might learn and achieve in the process.
• Young Tom Paris had made it his mission in life to taste every delight available from the Federation’s most exotic worlds: the fragrant fields of Artan, the soft packed snow on the mountains of Mons Tianus, the pools of tranquility on Sirangai, and an entire menu of delights on Risa. That day, Commander Tom Paris decided that the waters of an unnamed planet in the Delta Quadrant seen through his daughter’s eyes put them all to shame.
• Some errors are essential to discovery.
• “There might have been a time when I found mysteries comforting,” Farkas said. “But not that long ago, I lost hundreds of people to a mystery, and I’m not sure to this day I really comprehend why. The stakes are very real here. They are measured in the lives of those we command. We have a responsibility not to lead them into a false sense of security or complacency.”

“We all do,” Janeway said. “But we also have a responsibility to expose them to the mysteries and challenges that they will have to conquer as we progress in our understanding of the universe.”

• I’ve always believed that attraction was attraction. I would have been open to finding a partner of either gender. 

 

• That’s the difference, he decided, between leaders and followers. No matter what, leaders put themselves last.