 |
| Mass market paperback, 253 pages Published 1989 Reread December 2016 |
by Jean Lorrah
You know, I've never seen "Legacy," the episode of The Next Generation where Tasha Yar's sister turns up, and we learn about the long-dead Tasha's backstory in more detail. Yet I have read Survivors, a TNG novel written during the first season (published during the second) that tells us about Tasha's childhood and early Starfleet career in great detail. In a bit of "head-canon," I suspect that even if I had seen "Legacy," I would still prefer this as the "true" backstory of Tasha Yar. Lorrah depicts the ideal Yar, the one TNG never actually gave us: a damaged woman from a damaged world, and thus someone who believes in the idealism of the Federation even more than those raised within it. The characterization of Tasha and also Data are really the book's strong points: I think Lorrah gets Data better than the show writers did at this point. (I really liked the touch that his rattling off of synonyms was a purposeful affectation.) You can see why Pocket commissioned Lorrah to write a Data-focused "giant novel" in Metamorphosis, because he just jumps off the page here, a perfect mixture of superintelligence and emotional inexperience. There's a lot else I could praise or say about this book, but suffice it to say that it's the best kind of tie-in fiction-- a story we couldn't have gotten on screen, but fitting in perfectly with the ones we did.
I've always wanted to read/be the one to write a tie-in reconciling the two versions of Yar's backstory into a unified whole...
ReplyDelete"Legacy" isn't a Top 10 Episode or anything, but it's still worth a watch on its own terms--and includes at least one guest actor who thought "Appearing on Star Trek" meant "Must Act in Shatner Mode."
What are the inconsistencies, anyway? I suspect they'd mostly be about when the colony collapsed and stuff, based on Turkana IV's MA article. (And, of course, what it's called!)
Delete