The novel opens with Kirk presiding over the wedding of two crew members, Simon Nordell from Engineering, and Leslie Lebrun from Security. A couple apparently in love, despite their constant bickering.

Symbolism!

After the wedding, he receives orders from Starfleet to travel to the Nevis system. The Nevisians have been at war for over 12,000 years. That's not a typo. They've actually been at war that long. They'd begun pushing out into the galaxy doing all the usual spacefaring stuff, exploration, commerce, what have you, until suddenly they were all recalled to their home system, withdrew all their ambassadors, and reverted to isolationism while they persistently fought each other. And suddenly, these cultures who have been at war since humanity first figured out agriculture have declared peace. The Federation is certainly not complaining, but thinks it's unusual enough that they ought to send a starship over to check it out.

The two cultures of the Nevisian system the Distrellians and the Prastorians inhabit 2 different worlds. Enterprise arrives at Distrell, as it's the first on the way, but Prastorian officials are there too celebrating.

Nevis is home to a rare fruit delicacy called Palko fruit, which consists of purple and white parts. Each has part of a binary neurotoxin. As long as you only eat either the purple or the white part, and not both, you'll be fine. But they're deadly if you eat them together.

Symbolism!

Apparently the petty grievance that lead to the Nevisians going to war for 12000 years is who gets to eat the more flavourful purple bits. The solution that lead to their newly found peace was that they both eat the purple bits, and sell the white bits to the galaxy at large. And the entrepreneur who brought them this new marketing opportunity is none other than…(spoiler alert for the guy whose face is on the cover, and also his name in the title…) Harry Mudd!

When we last left Harry Mudd, (Depending on how you feel about the New Visions comic book series (Meh… it's ok, I guess)) Kirk had exiled him on the android planet with 500 android copies of his estranged wife Stella for company. He escaped his imprisonment by convincing the androids that he'd reformed. That he was ready to be released. And that apparently convinced them enough to parole him, but with one of the Stella androids as chaperone.

Symbolism!

Kirk and Mudd exchange a few barbs, they make a scene, and Kirk and crew are asked to leave the party. So they return to the ship.

Mudd begins skulking about the palace, looking for something to loot, when out of nowhere, hostilities resume. Mudd is caught sneaking around the catacombs, and is presumed to have betrayed Distrell by allowing Prastorian soldiers in. Kirk contacts the Distrellians and while the battle is still raging outside, he learns that Harry has been sentenced to be executed. He offers to beam down and take him into Federation custody instead, and the Distrellians agree. So Kirk beams down with a landing party, including the newlywed Lebrun.

I need to put a 🚨SPOILER WARNING🚨here. By this point the reader has likely figured this part out, but I don't want to rob anyone of the fun of piecing it together.

When you die on Distrell you respawn on Prastor, and vice versa, and are expected to begin a new life on that world until you are eventually called up to go to battle again. Their prolonged war has been a 12000 year long Call of Duty LARP, and the Nevisians are eager to get back into it.

Lebrun is killed trying to help Mudd escape. Mudd suffers a fatal injury, and eventually dies. Kirk and the rest of the away team return to the ship, not realizing yet that Lebrun and Mudd are still alive on Prastor.

Stella takes off in her ship toward Prastor for some reason, and Kirk goes after her. Chekov, Sulu, Scotty, and Kirk all die trying to retrieve Stella and escape the fighting on Prastor. Stella is beamed back to the Enterprise, and informs Spock that the away team was killed, and Spock is unaware that they're still alive on Distrell.

🚨Thus endeth the spoiler bit.🚨

So the landing party is separated across the two planets in the middle of a war zone, and need to escape and find their way back to the ship.

It's a fun story. There's some standard banter between Kirk and Mudd. The supporting cast gets a little bit more to do than in recent novels. The overarching puzzle isn't too complex for the reader, but it's fun watching the characters figure it out.

Mudd gets a bit of character growth. He's still a scoundrel, but not wholly irredeemable. And is given the opportunity for heroic self-sacrifice.

And a good time was had by all.

#startrek

The story opens toward the end of the episode “That Which Survives”. Kirk, McCoy and Sulu are trapped on the Kalandan station surrounded by the 3 Losira replicants. Spock and a security guard beam down just in time to shoot the Kalandan defense computer and saves them. Kirk hails the ship for beamout, they have a little chat about beauty surviving.

The end.

After the credits, Enterprise tries to beam up the landing party, but the transporter is interrupted by the biofilter detecting the disease that killed off the Kalandans. The entire landing party is infected, and can't leave until they can find a cure. While they're working on a cure, they continue to explore the station, discovering the Kalandan living quarters, one of the control rooms, some other interesting things. They're able to get some computer access, but since the station is in lockdown, all the vital information is controlled by the defense computer, which the security officer, whose name is Reinhart, by the way, left in a smoldering mess.

Kirk reaches out to command, explains what they've found, and is ordered not to allow the station to fall into enemy hands.

The activation of the Kalandan station yeeting Enterprise 900 lightyears away and Losira's repeated usage of the portal generates a massive power spike, which gets the attention of a Klingon ship, as well as a Petraw scout ship. The Petraw are a kindof eusocial humanoid species. Their scout ships are crewed by a half dozen or so individuals, who scour the galaxy to obtain interesting technology, which they then send back to their homeworld. To get their hands on alien technology, they often pursue elaborate con jobs. They gather as much information as they can, tapping into Enterprise's comms with Starfleet Command, and decide to pose as the descendants of the Kalandans to stake claim to the station.

The Klingons arrive first, itching for a fight. Enterprise fights back, but their warp engines are still offline following Losira's sabotage, so they're on the ropes. Then the Petraw claiming to be Kalandans arrive, blow the Klingons to scrap, and introduce themselves. And as icing on the cake, they just happen to have a vaccine treatment that will prevent the sporocite infection from becoming a virus, allowing the away team to safely beam back to the ship.

Kirk is naturally suspicious, but has no proof. So he has no choice but to play along diplomatically until he can gather more information. More Klingons will be on their way, but it will take them a few days to get there. He can't let the station fall into Klingon hands, but he can't be sure the Kalandans are who they say they are, so he's unsure if he can allow them to take it either. He agrees to team up with the Kalandans to explore the station and gather more information. The Petraw commander, Tasm, observed Kirk's attraction to Losira, so she tailored her appearance thinking she could use her feminine wiles to manipulate Kirk. But Kirk finds her advances off-putting.

Their medical officer, Luz, also assumes the form of a beautiful woman, targeting McCoy.

They discover the gateway system that the Losira replicant used to pop in and out of existence. The system that let her instantly appear at any part on the surface of the planet, and even travel to and from Enterprise while it was on its way back from where it was punted. The Petraw want this technology above anything else that might be available on the station. But Kirk recognizes that it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. But anyway, it's locked out by the defense computer, so they've got to get it back into working order before it'll be of any use to anyone.

It's an interesting game of cat and mouse. The reader knows the Petraw aren't really Kalandans. Kirk is suspicious, but not certain. McCoy seems reticent to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when one of those gift horses talks the talk of a brilliant medical officer, and is also kinda hot. McCoy more than most of the crew seems to play the mark. Scotty and Spock are seldom in a position to question the Kalandan's authenticity, and the rest of the crew… well…

One thing I've noticed with a few novels lately is the narrative's tendency to forget that the rest of the crew exist unless they're needed. Uhura and Chekov in particular are on the bridge, do their jobs when called on, but the narrative doesn't bring any attention to them unless they're needed to perform some action to move a particular scene forward. And one gets the impression that if Sulu weren't on the planet at the end of the episode, the novel would have forgotten about him too, except for a few instances where he needs to take command. The novel tries to give some of the background characters something to do, M'Benga, Rahda, Reinhart, and even some original characters we've never seen before. But falls into the common habit of forgetting members of the principle cast.

It's by remarkable coincidence that the recently released Strange New Worlds episode “Off-Hour” reintroduced the character of Lt. Rahda just as I'd finished “That Which Survives” and “One Small Step”. I don't think I've seen anyone else mention this, but both episodes make reference to jettisoning a component; “Off-Hour” shows that Pike had to jettison the ion pod before it exploded. In “That Which Survives”, Enterprise is accelerating out of control, and Scotty is in a crawlway trying to access the flow valve to stop it. Spock orders Rahda to arm the jettison system in case something goes wrong. The crawlway isn't the ion pod, but it gets called a pod in dialog. Most commentary I've seen compares the recent episode to “Court Martial”. I'm not aware of any who have drawn the connection to “That Which Survives,” but it's an interesting mirroring of the situation in “Off-Hour”.

That's just an observation. It's got nothing to do with the novel.

The novel ends with Kirk jumping through the portal in pursuit of Tasm and Luz who absconded with the portal control device.

This is sort of the conceit of the Gateways series. Novels 1 through 6 follow each series' crew as they discover the gateway tech, culminating in one of our heroes jumping through the gateway. The last few chapters are hacked off and presented as short stories, collected in book 7. Whichever hero jumped through the portal needs to complete their mission and find their way back. In Kirk's case, the short story “One Giant Leap,” follows him exclusively as he is on the Petraw birth world, some 40000 lightyears from Earth. He needs to track down the portal control device and destroy it before the Petraw can make use of it, and then find his way home. Kirk explores the Petraw homeworld, learning about their culture and their way of life. To imagine a sapient, humanoid species with a eusocial culture is an interesting exercise, and I think it's mostly pulled off well. There might have been a missed opportunity to make the Petraw more insectoid than humanoid to fit with the whole beehive motif, but that's an aesthetic quibble.

There's no mention of the Iconians. The gateway seems at this point to be Kalandan tech. Though it is mentioned that Losira's people were a breakaway group from a more oppressive regime. That might suggest Iconian influence, though the Kalandans were about 12000 years too late for direct contact. The Kalandans may have found and adapted Iconan tech, or developed the gateways independently. I guess I'll find out when I get to the rest of the series.

#StarTrek

It was short. Even for a short story.

Spock goes on a ritual hunt called the Mok farr, where a Vulcan must pursue a dangerous animal for the purpose of subduing and mind melding with it to get an understanding of its bestial nature. To understand the animals base emotions reminiscent of a Vulcan's own violent emotions. And yes, I'm cribbing a little bit from Memory Beta, because it's really that brief.

Anyway, McCoy finds out about this, and decides to go with him, because he thinks Spock might need help.

Spock finds and melds with a predator called an owltiger. Apparently it got the name because it's a tiger, but its ears are reminiscent of an owl. Something goes wrong. The owltiger takes off, and so does Spock. Apparently the mind meld didn't completely finish, and now Spock thinks he's a tiger. A tiger that's wildly confused that its paws are now hands.

McCoy needs to track him down, and entice him to return to camp until the affect can wear off. It's not really hijinks. It's a fairly interesting exploration of the Vulcan psyche, and an exploration of the relationship between the two.

#StarTrek

It's been a rough checks notes uhg! 4½ months, with real life imposing over my reading schedule, which set me back quite a bit. But I finally got back to it.

The story opens with Enterprise about to test an experimental shield system with Exeter and Farragut standing by on monitoring. For reasons that seem completely unnecessary to the plot, Kirk was injured on a previous mission; his leg is swollen. It will be fine eventually, as McCoy is keeping him pumped full of drugs, and insists the healing will go faster if he gets some rest. But Kirk insists on overseeing the experiment despite the injury. This whole plot element seems to serve no purpose except to unnecessarily hobble Kirk without really slowing him down at all, and show him putting on a tough face for the crew, and wouldn't have been missed if it were cut.

During the experiment, something goes wrong. Kirk orders the test aborted, and when they gather their senses, Exeter and Farragut are gone, and they aren't able to reach Starfleet or any Federation contact at all. There is no Federation comm traffic anywhere.

They encounter some Romulans, then some Klingons. The ship designs are clearly Romulan and Klingon, but not quite familiar to what Kirk and crew have encountered already. And they seem more interested in fighting each other, only turning chase to the Enterprise once the other is dealt with.

I honestly forget at which point they rescue a Klingon. It was many months ago that I read that section, and when I finally got back to it, I forgot he was there. He just sort of came out of nowhere. Anyway, they rescue a Klingon, Roth. He has no idea who they are. He's never heard of the Federation or Earth, or Starfleet, and explains that the Klingons have been involved in a protracted war with the Romulans for decades.

And there's another Klingon, Zalt, who is Roth's commander, and I forget at which point he came into the story too.

After giving the Romulans the slip, they set course for Earth. And when they arrive, they find the entire planet covered with prehistoric jungle. No intelligent life at all. The local vegetation is somewhat similar to what should be there, but the fauna is completely alien; Variations of the dinosaurs and other prehistoric species that might have been had they not been wiped out by an asteroid. In fact, they find that the KT boundary shows no signs of an asteroid impact at all. However, the higher strata do show a repeated cycle of industrialization and warfare, as though some intelligence rose up only to wipe itself out repeatedly.

They set course for Vulcan, encountering a Vulcan… I guess… privateer, might be the word I'm looking for; kinda like a merchant fleet, but not above preemptive boarding action. From them they learn that Vulcan did embrace the teachings of Surak, just as they had in known history, but repeated encounters with the Klingons put them on the back foot. With no humans to allay up and form the Federation, they are insular, defending themselves, but not much else. And other would-be Federation worlds are either similarly isolated, or overthrown by the Klingons.

Knowing that something happened in the past to change the course of Earth history, and Earth's affect on the galaxy, they need to travel back to fix whatever went wrong. They can't use a slingshot maneuver, because the Chicxulub asteroid was so far in the past that it would take them years to get there, and since they don't know the exact date of the impact, or the change that altered it, they could be off target by millions of years. So they settle on the next best thing; The Guardian of Forever.

The landing party is Kirk, Spock, McCoy, two science officers; anthropologist Dale Bannon, Reenie, a Tibetan girl who volunteered to be Spock's assistant, and a couple of redshirts; Vernon and Emmendorf. And they bring the Klingons with them. I don't know why; so the dinosaurs can have something to snack on besides Redshirts, I suppose. And the Guardian sends them back to the late Cretaceous period.

Bannon has a bit of an arc in this novel. He was on the first landing party on alt-Earth, and saw a teammate get eaten by raptors. He has PTSD, and is considering resigning from Starfleet. The problem is, there is no Starfleet to resign from anymore, and Kirk needs him to get it back. Kirk goes to 'talk' to him. And it's… not great. It goes so badly that I thought at first the main arc of this subplot was going to be Kirk learning to give better pep-talks.

Once in the Late Cretaceous, the story starts getting good.

Look, I know I can be a bit glib with these summaries, and my snark might come across as negative, but I don't mean to imply that the novel wasn't good up until this point. Diane Carey's Star Trek work is good. I've liked most of what I've read of hers so far, and look forward to the next one. She has an interest in sailing, and that comes through in the narrative, as she brings a nautical flair to the story. I find her space combat scenes quite vivid. You will not be lost in an action sequence.

But the first half was a lot of buildup, and I had some real life matters to attend to, which prevented me from fully appreciating much of it. And there were some flaws that really stood out. Kirk's leg, for one. And his poor handling of Bannon's issues. I mentioned that I'd forgot the Klingons. And I'm not alone. The narrative seemed to forget them as well, and this persists during survival period in the Late Cretaceous. It only brings them up when it needed to remind the reader that they were there, and to make Starfleet security look like bumbling fools when they escape. There's a lot going on, which leads naturally to some loose threads is all. Not a huge deal, but it's not unnoticed.

Anyway, their first priority is survival, followed shortly by figuring out what prevented the Chicxulub asteroid, and how to stop it without a space ship.

These few chapters kicking off the back half are fairly typical of the genre; protagonists awestruck by the immensity of dinosaurs while simultaneously running from them so as not to get eaten and/or stepped on. What the novel does fairly well here is to cover the cliché by highlighting the density of the environment. The land is teaming with life in this period. Your typical CG animated Discovery Channel documentary doesn't really do it justice. The landing party has to navigate dense jungle under the feet of massive sauropods, and pursued by carnivores, including the obligatory T-Rex. The jungles are dense, the rivers are teaming with fish, and the beasts themselves are not just a hazard by their immensity but by their numbers.

They discover some dinosaurs who aren't supposed to be there; Dinosaurs from the future. Decedents of Troodons who call themselves Clan Ru, transplanted on another world, presumably by the Preservers or some other ancient alien intelligence, who themselves came back in time on a mission to divert the asteroid.

The Troodons had a large brain cavity compared to other dinosaurs its size, and more dexterous forelimbs. They've often been speculated to be a species with the potential to develop intelligence, possibly to the point of tool use, were it not for the asteroid. I don't know how seriously that factoid is taken in scientific circles now, or when the novel was written in the '90s; the co-author of the novel, James Kirkland mentions it in the forward, and naturally they're building a pulp sci-fi novel here, so they're going to stretch it to its logical extreme. And the only other source I've ever encountered that mentions it was very pop-sci leaning, so I'll just mention that it's not unheard of, and leave it at that. Troodons were smarter than the average dinosaur, and were it not for the asteroid, maaaaaaaybe might have had a shot at becoming the dominant intelligence on the planet.

The discerning fan may want to know, then, if Troodons were so smart, then why did the Voyager writers go with hadrosaurs for the Voth? I don't know; just to be different, I guess. Maybe the writers were aware of the novel, as it was only a couple years old at that time, and even though they're not obligated to canonize licensed works, wanted to avoid some obvious comparisons, so choose the next dinosaur over. That's just speculation. Doesn't matter. And if you're wondering, yes, there's a stampede of hadrosaurs in the novel as well.

I have some thoughts on comparison with the Voth that I want to mention though. It's a bit of an aside, but this is my project, and no one can stop me. This is something that “First Frontier” manages a fair bit more success with. And it all comes down to the origin of Clan Ru and the Voth.

“Distant Origin” is a pretty good episode. Not just for Voyager, but in general. The writing is fairly well done, the performances and direction are often praised. But the Voth in concept have often bothered me, and some other fans as well, for how they fail to mesh with what we know of real life science.

Star Trek is not hard sci-fi; it's fairly soft, downright squishy at times, and its science is often slap-dash. It occasionally tries to start with a solid scientific premise and expand on it for entertainment, but it didn't always do that, and sometimes fails when it does. Especially in biology. In fact, well into the Voyager era, it kindof gave up on it altogether. And that's fine; I know it's fiction, it doesn't always have to mesh with real life science…

Look; There are many ways to engage with a piece of media, ranging from mindless popcorn munching to detailed literary analysis, and if some of us want to analyze the scientific basis of the premise, then that's fine too. It's all in good fun, and there's no need to piss on someone else's good time. So if you're one of those “huweah, but it's all fiction anyway, so who cares, weah” types, then feel free to go for a soda and come back when we're done.

Basically, it's speculated in the episode that the Voth evolved on Earth, became intelligent, and moved out into space before the asteroid hit, and somehow left no trace.

No, that doesn't mesh. There's a lot we still don't know about the prehistoric periods of Earth, but we know it well enough that if something like that had happened, we would see it in the geological record. And it just isn't there.

If you look at humanity, where we are right now, we have industrial pollutants in the atmosphere, alloyed metals, plastics. There's shit in the air, shit in the water, shit in the soil, we even have shit in orbit. We, as humans have had such a massive impact on our planet that we've named our current geological epoch the Anthropocene after ourselves. And we're only on the cusp of becoming spacefaring, assuming we ever do. If humanity was wiped out tomorrow, and 100 million years from now, the apes, or dolphins, or whatever species rose up to replace us developed the science to understand their planet's past, they would see an unmistakable human shaped footprint. And you're telling me that dinosaurs did that, and the evidence for this is on some distant sunken continent? The willing suspension of disbelief is doing too much work already to heap that premise on top of it.

“First Frontier” and “Distant Origin” both started with that similar base premise; What if ... Dinosaurs!? “First Frontier” succeeds at this.

“Distant Origin” absolutely succeeds at what it's trying to do; start with the premise, and use it to tell a story based on the trial of Galileo. It does this very well, and in the process it can't help but become a commentary on the evolution vs. creationism debates that were prevalent at the time (and arguably still today, though to be honest we've kindof got bigger fish to fry these days). It doesn't outright fail at the base premise, but it staggers. That's not what it's trying to do, but I can't help but be a little bit disappointed that they didn't try to do that just a little bit harder.

“First Frontier” avoids this by invoking the Preservers. To be sure, “The Paradise Syndrome” is a problematic episode from TOS, and I'm sure there are more than a few TV writers in the '90s who preferred not to invoke it. Especially as a line spoken by Chakotay, which would only highlight Voyager's own failings in that area, which by this point they'd become well aware of.

There's a fan theory out there that alien visitors like the Preservers, but not necessarily the Preservers are a better explanation for the Voth than the twisted logic Chakotay mutters. Star Trek writers in this era were often discouraged from mentioning deep lore like that. But the Preservers are a part of Star Trek lore that already exists, and addresses the problem much cleaner, and with less effort. And yeah, there's no evidence in real life for the Preservers either, but pick your poison. An alien visitor like the Preservers would leave a lot less trash behind than an entire technological civilization. Trash that they could either pack out themselves, or would have left such trace amounts behind that it would have been well within the margin of error in the geological record.

Anyway, enough of that.

Speaking of science in Science Fiction, the representation of science in the novel is delicious. I mentioned the co-author Dr. James I. Kirkland already. But he brought some delectables to the party that are quite welcome.

The narrative could have kept better track of its moving pieces, the Klingons, the bridge crew, the Away team party, but what it lost in the chaos, it made up for in the setting, in the detail of the action. The scientific details blended with background worldbuilding. The Late Cretaceous was a busy place. Carnivores are vicious, ravenous monsters, and jungles are dense and heavily populated. Probably one of the better Star Trek with Dinosaurs adventures I've encountered so far. The Strange New Worlds episode “Valles Marineris” is a close second, and that's grading on a curve, because it is a TV show and not a novel. I feel like maybe there was a comic too that I'm forgetting.

#startrek

That is to say I've finished the first half of a novel in which the second half is Next Gen. I intend to finish it, later, when I get to Next Gen. Which probably means that I'm going to have to re-read part 1 when I get there to remind myself what happened.

Kirk is ordered to a point outside of claimed space to intercept a smuggler who Starfleet believes is carrying information about the Romulan plasma weapon that they'd first encountered in “Balance of Terror” way back in early Season 1. They find the titular Badlands, which Starfleet is apparently largely unaware of. They capture who they believe to be the smuggler, and bring them aboard, and have an entanglement with a Romulan Bird of Prey. There's a radiation burst, which destroys the Romulan ship, and the Enterprise crew is hit with dangerous and mysterious form of gamma radiation. A bunch of the crew get sick with radiation poisoning.

The Klingons show up, and they play cat and mouse with them for a while, while Kirk tries to get information about the plasma weapon out of their captured smuggler.

I'm going to reserve comment on it, since it's only the first half of the first novel of a 2 novel series. When I get to Part 2, I might have more to say. But it's a pretty reasonable start so far.

#StarTrek

The Enterprise is on its way to a science conference at Deep Space Station M-20 when it picks up an automated distress call from a runaway starship, the U.S.S. Sphinx, coming out of the Lantaru sector. They catch up to the Sphinx and manage to pull it out of warp, only to find that the entire crew are dead. There is also an unidentified individual aboard who is not on the crew roster. This stowaway was apparently killed on the bridge in a fight with the captain.

Enterprise begins its investigation. They find a datachip belonging to the stowaway, but the only words recoverable are “from thirty-one”. Scotty discovers a trace of gravitons consistent with the use of a Romulan cloaking device, similar to the one they... ahem... appropriated some weeks prior. This suggests that the Sphinx was in range of a Romulan cloak recently. But Enterprise eventually ordered to proceed on their previous course M-20, bringing the Sphinx in tow, and hand the investigation over to a special task force upon arrival. When Kirk enquirers about this, Commodore Jefferson informs him that the captain of the Sphinx, Jack Casden, while he had a solid record, was also know to have political leanings that were a little bit dovish. So Starfleet believes this may have lead him to conspire with certain... Klingon or Romulan elements.

The station commander of M-20 is an old friend of Kirk's, Gage Darres. But Darres also knew Casden, and knew him to be absolutely loyal to the Federation. He believes Casden was being set up. But the investigation is out of their hands.

Much of the first half of the novel focuses on setup, and general milling about. Spock attends the science conference, while Kirk strikes up a dalliance with one of the attendees, Dr. Jain Suni.

Meanwhile, McCoy is performing the annual crew physicals, including his own, and discovers that he has contracted Xenopolycythemia. He spends much of the novel coming to terms with his diagnosis, and eventually tries to track down an old friend Dr. Karen Patterson who had done some research on the condition. But she has fallen completely off the grid. He asks Chekov for help, because Chekov bragged about being able to track down anybody.

Darres contacts Kirk stating that he's found something in relation to the Sphinx investigation that he needs to discuss in private. But dies in an apparent transporter accident while beaming over to Enterprise. The Enterprise transporter checks out, so Scotty investigates the transporter on the station, and finds a magnetic signature that could mean nothing, but under highly specific circumstances, could potentially cause an accident similar to the one that killed Darres. Highly circumstantial, and not at all conclusive.

Darres has an encrypted data chip on him that he said before his death contained details of his investigation, and proof of a conspiracy that he'd uncovered. But when Uhura manages to decrypt the contents, it turns out to just be the Starfleet charter.

Kirk attends a panel with Suni, in which one of the panelists, Suni's college, a one Bendes Kettaract has an outburst bemoaning the Federation's slack in pursuing certain technologies for fear that the Klingons or Romulans will outpace them.

Chekov reports back to McCoy that he was able to pick up Patterson's trail, only for her to go even further off the grid along with a handful of other scientists, and the ship that took them off the grid was... The U.S.S. Sphinx.

Spock speaks with Kettaract concerning some of his early research into a theoretical particle that could potentially be used as an alternative power source. But their conversation is cut short when Kettaract receives a cryptic message. He hails Suni, compelling her to cut her date with Kirk short as well, and the two of them take off to parts unknown.

And the plot thickens.

The novel is quite front-loaded with setup, but it's not unwelcome. Not only does it set the stage for the mystery to come, but it also gives us a glimpse of some of the characters going about their day to day business. And the McCoy subplot ties into the episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”. Where on the show, this diagnosis is just backstory that comes out of nowhere, here it's given a bit more exposition.

It's a little bit convoluted how all these seemingly unrelated subplots all seem intertwined. It's a little bit 'small galaxy' but I guess it's subjective how much you're going to let it bother you. I'm fine with it. It's a bit odd, but... it's fine.

The back half of the novel ramps up the tension as Enterprise rushes to the Lantaru sector to catch up with Kettaract and Suni, and try to stop them before they can complete a highly secret and dangerous experiment that Spock believes is doomed to end in disaster.

The main cast doesn't interact directly with Section 31, but the reader can see their fingers in everything. They are involved. But the extent of their involvement remains a mystery. The breadcrumbs are being carefully laid out for the remainder of the series.

Kirk and Suni's brief but interrupted flirtation was interesting, from an interpersonal perspective. And McCoy's subplot related to his diagnosis felt like much needed context to the episode that follows.

It was a little lite in dealing with the supporting cast; Sulu had little to do. Uhura and Chekov at least were given a chance to contribute to the plot, but Uhura's part in particular felt a bit like an afterthought.

And a couple of elements that share similarities with recent Trek entries that I have to figure were just plain coincidence, and weren't at all planned. Near the end, Sulu is reminded of an end of the world myth where a goddess gives birth to a shadow, and the shadow becomes darkness. And when the mother dies, the darkness strikes out in grief and everything would end forever. I'm not sure what myth this is referring to, though I only looked briefly. If anyone happens to know off the top of their head, hit me up. But it immediately reminded me of the source of the Burn in Discovery Season 3. It's possible the Disco writers were referring to this, but more likely I think they were just drawing on the same myth, or came up with it on their own.

And the coded message that Kettaract and Suni receive shared a similarity with the code that Ake gave the Doctor in the recent season 1 finale of Starfleet Academy. Way more tenuous. And again, probably not planned, and just a coincidence. But it was fresh in my mind, so it got noticed.

It was an interesting exploration of background events in Trek lore that we've never seen on screen, while fleshing out some of McCoy's character development that the TV show had precious little time to expand on.

#Startrek #Section31

There's a bit of a meme going around the last year or 2 about how evolution keeps making crabs. Or trending toward crab-like body plans. It's known in biological circles as 'carcinization'. It's not quite as pervasive as the meme might lead one to believe, but it's a real thing. This novel asks the question “what if crabs at the evolutionary pinnacle were xenophobic dicks?”

The Enterprise brings an archeological team to Careta IV to do some archeology. Chekov is assigned to accompany one of the archeologists, Talika Nyar, a Djelifan. Djelifa is a highly matriarchal society that was only recently admitted into the Federation. Talika talks like Yoda, and thinks herself superior to males in general, and Chekov in particular. Chekov doesn't like her much either, but tries his best to put up with her.

Chekov and Talika discover an unusual jamming field causing their tricorders to see conflicting readings; sometimes something, then step to the side and the something disappears. They alert the archeological team and Captain Kirk, who lead an excavation, and discover a large stone box sealed shut. It's obvious that whoever buried this box went out of their way to make sure it would never be discovered, so whatever's inside must be dangerous. So… let's open it up and see what it is!

You could argue that yes, whatever it is, probably is dangerous. So better that we look inside than the Klingons or Romulans. You could argue that. But nobody ever does. They just open it up. And are immediately sickened by a gas released by the casing surrounding the artifact that is clearly part of the deterrent system meant to keep anyone from discovering what's inside.

Never one to take a hint, the Enterprise crew beam up, recover from the gas, have a meeting, and then beam back down.

What's inside is a large frame like structure with what appears to be an empty landscape on the other side. They're not able to get any significant readings through the frame because it's tuned to only allow living matter through, or non-living matter accompanied by living matter. So a probe, or a tricorder on a stick don't seem to work. Somebody will have to go through the frame to operate the tricorder. But the frame really wants to pull someone in once they go a little ways past the surface. So it's decided that Chekov will stick his tricorder arm through while Talika holds on to him. It doesn't work, and they're both pulled in and disappear.

Kirk beams down. Two people who passed through the frame are missing. No trace of them anywhere. But ship's sensors detect two large crab-like creatures at another location. They seemed to appear around the same time Chekov and Talika disappeared, and are just sort of meandering down across the empty field, over the hill, and down towards the shoreline. And it turns out there's another frame nearby they weren't previously aware of because it was similarly hidden from their sensors.

By this point, the reader has probably figured out what happened. But the characters apparently have not. So Kirk leads a party of Redshirts through the frame and…

Is turned into a crab.

There's an interesting sequence here where we see the situation from the crab's perspective, but also from Kirk's as he is basically just along for the ride. The crab is an ancient, long extinct species called Kh!lict. They have two brain structures; the lower brain, which seems to be at least somewhat intelligent, and contains the bulk of the creature's motor control, instinct, and a not insignificant amount of knowledge and social conditioning, and the upper brain, which contains the creature's consciousness. And in this case, Kirk is trapped in the upper brain. Since the lower brain does much of the driving, Kirk at first has no control over the creature's body. Though he's able to infer a lot about Kh!lict culture and lifecycle from the lower brain. Eventually he's able to wrest some amount of control over the Kh!lict body against the protestations of the host. But he's the only one who's able to maintain his human identity, and exert any amount of will on his host body; The others are operating on a mixture of instinct and Kh!lict social conditioning.

Kirk speculates that the frame is similar to a transporter. And the Kh!lict were a highly xenophobic and supremacist culture that believed they were the only intelligent beings in the universe. So the frames were programed to assume that any intelligent being that passed through them must be Kh!lict, and so they came out the other end with a Kh!lict body.

What the seasoned Star Trek connoisseur might find disturbing here is that for at least part of this section, the Kh!lict is intelligent. Self aware. Sentient. Kirk is literally living rent free in his brain, but the Kh!lict is acting with autonomy. And this fact is never brought up again. Our heroes just assume that the lower brain is limited to animistic instinct.

Kirk eventually makes contact with Spock to explain what happened, and they work together to find a way to wrangle up the Kh!lict and return them to human form. And along the way they discover more about Kh!lict culture, society, lifecycle, and the vicious, violent and cruel interactions with other intelligent species. They figure that some other long extinct civilization either had direct interaction with the Kh!lict, and/or discovered Kh!lict ruins and artifacts just as they did, and decided they were too dangerous to be discovered again. So they buried them deeper with jamming fields and such to prevent the same fate from befalling someone else. And the Enterprise crew, along with the archeological team, agree to quarantine he planet. Which, fair enough.

I don't disagree with the conclusion, but I have to raise an objection to part of the reasoning that leads them there. They conclude that the Kh!lict were so vicious, violent, and xenophobic that the galaxy is better off for their extinction. Which isn't very Starfleet. The Kh!lict died out over 200,000 years prior, and by predominantly natural causes, so it's not like anyone is to blame. And the point is largely academic. But still, you'd think Starfleet ideals might compel them to at least give a second thought before casually disparaging an entire race of sentient beings.

There's a shift I often observe with Star Trek novels where it seems to set up one story, only to turn around and do another. Here, there seems to be a Chekov story, or at the very least a subplot in the making, as it sets up the tension between him and Talika. And Talika seems to be the only one who expresses any kind of personal growth from the experience. But we see very little of the story from their perspectives. As soon as they pass through the frame and become crabs, any participation in the plot seems like an afterthought. And the narrative focuses largely on Kirk, as he tries to navigate crab life, and Spock, as he tries to find a way to return the Kh!lict to their human and\or Djelifan form. Are Star Trek authors discouraged from focusing too much on the supporting cast, and mandated to shift to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy if they drift too far away from the Big Three?

McCoy's aggressive needling of Spock also comes across as forced and uncharacteristic. The Spock\McCoy dynamic is a staple of the series, but here it feels like McCoy is doing it for no real reason; just because that's what McCoy does. The narrative even seems to hint that McCoy is frustrated, and bothering Spock for no other reason but to blow off steam.

This novel could be a companion piece along with “Dreams of the Raven” and “Ghost-Walker”. They all deal with themes of consciousness and identity to a certain extent, and it's somewhat serendipitous that chronologically they seem to occur fairly close together. And “Windows on a Lost World” invokes the split-brain phenomenon observed in some individuals who have had their corpus callosum severed, so their two brain hemispheres behave independently, much how Kirk and his Kh!lict host contend for control of their shared body. It also raises questions about bodily autonomy, where the Kh!lict host found his bodily control usurped by an alien intruder. There may well be a psychology paper or two one could get out of this if one wanted to.

#StarTrek

Enterprise is ordered to transport a somewhat belligerent Federation Council member Conrad Franklin Kent and his aide Hazel Payton to Starbase 12. Along the way, they encounter a Klingon ship that is investigating the disappearance of several Klingon ships in the general vicinity. Kent mentions that the Federation and other powers, including the Romulans have also had ships gone missing, and seems to imply that he knows more than he is letting on, but generally being unhelpful.

At Starbase 12, they're ordered to investigate the disappearances. Thankfully they leave Kent behind, but they bring along Payton, and an enigmatic Professor Omen, who happens to be a weapons expert, and designer of the Enterprise's current loadout.

Spoiler alert for a 32 year old novel, and to anyone unable to pick up on subtle foreshadowing, but the cause of the starship disappearances turns out to be a weapon designed by Professor Omen himself. He calls it the Aleph, and it works by trapping ships in a random pocket dimension. Enterprise is thrown into one of these pocket dimensions, and needs to find a way back to their home dimension to stop Professor Omen before he strikes again.

There are some interesting bits in the nature and description of the Aleph, which might sound familiar to anyone with a passing interest in cosmology. Not too heady, but no more than is needed for a pop culture understanding.

It was a serviceable novel; not too dense, in fact, it felt a little oversimplified in places. I don't think I have much else to say about it. It was an OK read, but not particularly remarkable, save for the interesting physics quirks that only get explored as much as necessary to move the plot along.

If I had one complaint, it would be Kirk's occasional lament that Payton is already in a relationship. But it's not the first novel to lean a little too far into Kirk's playboy reputation, and it only comes up a couple times.

#StarTrek

The Merkaan raider Hamesaad Dreen seizes a Federation mining colony, holding them hostage, and forcing them to mine ore for him. Some 10 years prior, Dreen had attacked Federation transport ships, before he was thwarted by Captain Pike and Spock. This defeat was a humiliation that he's only recently built himself back from.

The colony administrator, Bradford Wayne, served with Spock under Pike all those years ago. He was a helmsman on a different shift, and not a main character, so he and Spock knew each other, but weren't particularly close. He and the other colonists are eventually able to get a distress call out.

Kirk is leading an away team exploring the ruins of a long extinct civilization. The party split up, with Sulu taking a group to explore another area. Kirk's party experiences localized tremors, which Sulu's group doesn't. Shortly after, they discover the cause of the tremors; a giant grub worm of some kind. It attacks Spock, and stings him with its tentacle causing him to convulse and lose consciousness.

McCoy beams up with Spock, while Kirk remains on the planet to regroup with the rest of the away team. But before they could reunite with Sulu's party and return to the ship, another tremor causes them to fall into a sinkhole.

Just then Admiral Kowalski contacts the Enterprise, and orders Scotty to abandon the search for Kirk's party, and respond to the colony's distress call.

Now I'm no expert, but if I were in that kind of situation, what I might do is leave a search party behind on the planet with supplies and equipment to continue the search, while the ship is called off-station to respond to the crisis. Maybe a shuttlecraft, in case they needed to move around, or retreat into orbit. And if the search party manages to recover the missing crew and captain, they can explain that the ship was called away on an emergency, and will be back in a few days. But apparently standard Starfleet procedure is to fuck off leaving 4 missing crew including the captain behind on the planet, buried alive, without so much as a Post-it note, and hope for the best. But what do I know?

Anyway, Spock recovers enough to resume command, or at least fake it convincingly. Nobody's fooled, but it's pretty typical Spock, so they just sort of roll with it. He retreats to the library to study the colony situation, Merkaan culture, and his previous encounter with Dreen to formulate a plan. He occasionally has to meditate to regain control over his wonked out metabolism. And in this state, he relives snippets of his time serving under Pike. We only get a few brief flashbacks to disconnected adventures. Details relevant to their encounter with Dreen, Spock recounts to McCoy and Scotty while lucid.

Meanwhile, Kirk and his party are left to dig themselves out of a cave-in and survive in the jungle for however many days using only their ingenuity, and whatever standard kit they had on them that didn't get buried in the cave-in. 2 communicators, a tricorder, and a phaser with a dead power pack.

It's a pretty standard adventure. Fun enough on its own, but not particularly groundbreaking. There's some clever setup, as the Enterprise tries to devise a means of communicating their plan to Wayne. But the narrative is a bit heavy handed in a couple places about withholding certain information from the reader until the right time.

It was fun to see snippets of Pike's earlier days; pre SNW, but several yars following “The Cage”. They sometimes read like ideas the author had in mind, but had never gotten the opportunity to flesh out. Like a back-door pitch, maybe. A couple bad-ass moments for Mia Colt that would have been fun to see in more detail.

It's pretty standard Michael Jan Friedman, really. He's capable of deep character and theme explorations, but he doesn't always do that. Sometimes he just does fun pulp sci fi, and that's OK too.

#startrek

Phew! I gotta tell ya, it's a novel alright.

Honestly, I don't know if I'm giving the Vanguard novels a fair shake. For those who don't know, most of the Vanguard novels occur in parallel with TOS, and span several months to a year in-universe. And since I'm watching and reading Star Trek in chronological order, I read the Vanguard novels in parallel, and try to pace them more or less in line with how Memory-Beta has them laid out. Which means a few TOS novels and episodes occur during a single Vanguard novel.

And I notice I've been slowing down a bit lately. I don't know if I've just been busy, or not taking as much time to read as I used to. But I was burning through a novel in 1-2 weeks, and now they seem to take a month or more. I'd actually thought about shuffling “Ghost-Walker” further down the timeline to fit Vanguard in better. But I'm glad I didn't because I ended up liking “Ghost-Walker”.

But as it stands, looking back on my notes, “What Judgements Come” took about 4 months in parallel with the main series. And while I can say that I've read it cover to cover, I've forgotten some stuff in that time. Some day in the future, maybe I'll re-read these in isolation. But not today.

Diego Reyes is in exile aboard the Omari Ekon, having requested asylum with the Orions. T'Prynn contacts him surreptitiously through Pennington and Fisher, and enlists him to access the Omari Ekon's navigational logs to try and find out where the Orions got the Mirdonyae Artifact.

Defiant responds to a distress signal resulting them getting tied up in escalating tensions between the Tholians and the Klingons. The Tholians wipe out a Klingon colony. Defiant investigates the aftermath. This does give us a chance to spend time with the Defiant crew before they meet their fate.

While I'm sure that this subplot is intended to flesh out the events leading up to the Defiant's looming fate, and to give us a chance to meet the crew, I found it difficult getting invested knowing where it was going.

Xiong tries to communicate with the Shedai Wanderer trapped inside the T'Kon crystal. The Wanderer is pretty pissed off, though pissed off seems to be her baseline. She ignores the attempts to communicate, but is able to communicate with the Shedai Progenitor who is trapped in the Mirdonyae Artifact. And I don't know; I'd imagine the Progenitor is gonna be pretty pissed off too after being imprisoned for 200,000 years.

Jetanian presides over the collapse of Nimbus III.

And Quinn presides over the collapse of his liver.

Like many of the Vanguard novels, the unfolding intrigue is interesting, and the action sequences are fun. They often feel lite on character development, as multiple character arcs tend to spread out across multiple novels.

#StarTrek #StarTrekVanguard