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| Hardcover, 322 pages Published 2020 Acquired January 2020 Read July 2020 |
by Una McCormack
This prequel novel to Star Trek: Picard sets up the basic premise: that Picard undertook a massive effort to do the right thing, and lost. It covers about five years, from when Picard learns about the need to evacuate a massive number of Romulans because of an imminent supernova, up to when the renegade synth attack on Mars utterly destroys his plans. It's a quick, strong read, as you might imagine of Una McCormack. She has a good handle on Picard: one he sees what the right thing to do is, he pursues it utterly. What distinguishes Picard from The Next Generation is that every time Picard stands up for what's right in TNG, it works out for him. Picard is a tragedy, the story of the time Picard's moral convictions lead to his downfall. McCormack does a good job taking the base attributes of Picard from TNG and transposing them into a new situation, and also surrounds him with a strong cast of characters, a mix of ones from the show and ones original to this book. I really liked how she wove in and out of them: Raffi, Clancy, Tajuth, and Koli were my favorites aside from Picard. There are a number of good scenes, but I liked Raffi talking about Romulan music and the scene in Paris between Jurati and Maddox after the attack the most.
(Two objections: I don't buy the novel's revelation that Jurati is Starfleet, and I wish we had seen where Laris and Zhaban came from.)
McCormack is a top-tier tie-in novelist, and that's partially because she has a voice: almost every Star Trek novel (my own included) is told in a bland third-person limited format. McCormack The Last Best Hope has a neat retroactive, omnipotent voice that occasionally intrudes, telling us what happened to character years later. It adds to the sense of tragedy, and helps deepen the sense of character. To be honest, I feel like her talents are wasted on tie-in novels. Where's her original sf novel?
This novel kind of makes me mad, though, because I found that Picard abandoned its potentially interesting premise as it went on. The idea of Picard dealing with and confronting his great failure was downplayed in favor of a really dumb story about an ancient Romulan conspiracy and rogue androids that had no character weight at all. The Last Best Hope does a good job showing how the Federation could pretty justifiably let down the Romulans so badly. It does such a good job setting up Picard's failure that it made me mad about the show's direction all over again. Why wasn't it working with this material instead of doing... whatever the hell it decided to do?
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