Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Absent Enemies

Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies
by John Jackson Miller

November 2385

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2020
Read: January 2023

And we're back to the ebook novellas, a format I have come to appreciate: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing comic (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet.

This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo.

The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage.

It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City (but see below). This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now.

Continuity Notes:

• Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm...
• Various commenters have pointed out that when this book was released, it contained a number of continuity errors: characters present who shouldn't have been, incorrect bits of backstory. One of the benefits of the ebook format is that the publisher can push a change out, so that the edition I read was fine!
  

Other Notes:

• I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience.
• I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral.
  
• Full disclosure: I have never actually gotten around to The City & The City. But I have never read anything by Miéville that wasn't good and interesting, so I am sure it is good and interesting. I am working my way through winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; at my current rate I should get to The City & The City in 2052, so I'll report back then.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic by Jeffrey Lang