Ex Machina

Until reading his Star Trek novel Ex Machina, I'd only known author Christopher L. Bennett as a commenter on the Tor.com website, primarily on the various Star Trek re-watches to be found there. Bennett's comments on Tor are regularly insightful and thoughtful. Sometimes, too, those comments can be overly long and pedantic, as is Ex Machina. Using two Star Trek productions as its source material, the mediocre and muddled third-season episode "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky," and the tedious and overblown first movie, I guess the odds were stacked against Ex Machina being a novel I was going to like very much. Ex Machina has long, too long, didactic passages about history, about philosophy, about religion. Bennett's insights into the psychologies of Star Trek's main characters are deeply thought out, but the long passages of psychological insight are frequently placed to interrupt the flow of the infrequent action sequences. On the plus side, Bennett writes science well and is very good at inventing alien species that are truly alien and not just humanoids with forehead ridges; most notably, the Megarite named Spring Rain Upon Still Water has a refreshingly non-human way of communicating and of viewing and interpreting her surroundings. Overall, Bennett does write very well. And he is apparently a thoughtful and insightful writer. But Ex Machina reads very much like a series of dissertations on various academic topics, at the same time also reading very much like a think piece, like a mental exercise to rewrite the "For The World Is Hollow..." episode to reconcile and explain its various plot problems. I enjoy Star Trek for various reasons, one of which is its blend of philosophy, science, action and adventure, and humor. Bennett's novel contains this blend but it is off-balance, with too much teaching, too many talking heads, and too little leavening with action and humor.