Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Department of Temporal Investigations: The Collectors

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2014
Acquired December 2017
Read July 2019

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

May 2384
I had a mixed reaction to the first two Temporal Investigations books, which had some good ideas and were sometimes fun, but often got bogged down in continuity references that crowded out story. The third installment sees a format change, to novella, which makes it more focused and story-driven, plus we're all out of episodes to explain away, so Bennett has to come up with a plot that builds on Star Trek time travel, but isn't beholden to any previous story.

The result is delightful. Dulmur and Lucsly are inducting a new artifact into the DTI's vault when Agent Jen Noi (a contemporary of Enterprise's Daniels) pops up to claim it for the 31st century instead. Soon, Dulmur and Lucsly are being whisked away to an alternate 31st century, and then even further afield. It's just fun, and surprisingly given its length, it feels big. There's lots of great stuff here: Jena Noi using time technology in hand-to-hand combat, megastructures of the kind we rarely see in Star Trek, the awesome scale (and kind-of logic) of the Collectors' plan, the Borg T. rex(!), the way Garcia and Ranjea rewrite their own histories but don't even notice, Lucsly's reaction to being in the future being to keep his eyes closed so he can't contaminate the timeline, the TIA's method for beating the Collectors (a lot like Mudd's technique in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," actually). Sometimes Bennett's writing can get bogged down and clunky, but that's not true here; this book zips along, playful and entertaining.

It's not all roses; I was little annoyed the 24th-century agents trying to track down Dulmur and Lucsly have no real effect on the story, and the bit where Dulmur and Lucsly solve their personal issues by noting how the Collectors' problems parallel their own and give a speech about it is a bit on the nose. But fundamentally I really enjoyed this, and I look forward to reading future DTI e-novellas. Given how often I feel like Destiny-era novels take to long to get to the point, maybe all Star Trek books should be novellas?

Continuity Notes:

• I did wonder if I was being silly, pausing Cold Equations to read this, but in the end I'm glad I did, because 1) I wasn't enjoying Cold Equations very much whereas I did very much enjoy this, and 2) there are a few small but meaningful references to the Breen plot from Silent Weapons.
• There's a bit about how there was a brief, abandoned fashion for holo-communicators. At the time it was written, it was referring to the Deep Space Nine episodes "For the Uniform" and "Doctor Bashir, I Presume," but these days you can pretend it's a reference to their use in the 2250s in Discovery (although, the tech is said to be clunky, which isn't true of the Discovery version).
• I liked that Rom as Grand Nagus is making the Ferengi more conscious of the perils of time travel; given his experiences in "Little Green Men," it makes sense!
  

Other Notes:

• I continue to like how the 31st-century time agents are to the DTI as the FBI is to local police.
• A couple characters' rants feel too much like Bennett's own rants, and it threw me out of the story: the one about advanced technology the Federation ignores, and the one about how people confuse different alien species with the Preservers.
• It's a Christopher Bennett book, so people are constantly commenting on how attractive the women are.
• Some foreshadowing here-- what is the Body Electric?