“First Frontier” by Diane Carey & Dr. James I. Kirkland.
It has been a long time coming, I tell ya! Finally finished “First Frontier” by Diane Carey & Dr. James I. Kirkland.
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.