I admit, my views on Jeter’s book fall outside the mainstream opinion. And I’m not writing this to throw stones in anyone’s direction, but it seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Warped boils down to “It’s just not Star Trek,” which I don’t think is necessarily true, but I do understand — Star Trek can, in general, trace its origins back to the pulp science fiction tradition championed by John W. Campbell and his stable of writers, while Warped harkens more toward the anti-Campbell tradition embodied in the work of Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester, even the literary pulp of A.E. van Vogt. I’ve said it before — if you really want to understand Warped, you have to really understand Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Warped isn’t a true Dick pastiche–if it were, Quark, as the novel’s resident businessman, would have been the one to save the universe, at the cost of his own sanity–but there are conceptual links.
As I said, I do respect and understand the opinions of those who didn’t like Warped, either because they couldn’t finish it or because it wasn’t their thing. And I’m not attempting to change anyone’s opinion of the book. But Warped is not the total loss that some say it is, and I do believe that the book receives more scorn than it deserves. Mileages will vary, obviously. 🙂