“Windows on a Lost World” by V.E. Mitchell.
Finished “Windows on a Lost World” by V.E. Mitchell.
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.