Star Trek: The High Country by John Jackson Miller

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country
by John Jackson Miller

John Jackson Miller provides the first Strange New Worlds tie-in novel—only he also wrote the earlier The Enterprise War, which was a SNW novel in all but name. I really enjoyed The Enterprise War, and have been really enjoying SWN season 1 (as of this writing, I am up to "Spock Amok"), so I was looking forward to this book quite a bit.

Published: 2023
Acquired: February 2023
Read: March 2023

I'm not attempting to diminish the book by saying it ought not to be a hardcover, but a mass-market paperback. That is to say, this book has to do what Star Trek books always used to have to do (but didn't do very much after Nemesis brought a halt to screen adventures for the twenty-fourth century) and slot in between existing episodes. Yet those old novels often  struggled to feel like novels, coming across more as inflated episodes. The High Country threads that needle nicely, giving us events big enough to merit a novel, but not so big that they feel like they disrupt the narrative of the tv show. A strange phenomenon causes Pike, Spock, Number One, and Uhura to be scattered across a strange planet, out of reach of the Enterprise. The novel follows the four of them as they explore this planet and reunite with one another, with some side scenes about the Enterprise crew. What initially seems to be a simple Prime Directive situation soon reveals itself to be part of a complicated, ancient undertaking that could threaten life throughout the quadrant.

The biggest strength of the book is its character voices; I felt that Miller particularly captured Pike, (Ethan Peck's) Spock, and Hemmer. The book is filled with good twists and turns and interesting imagery and cool concepts and neat side characters. I liked the Menders, I liked who rescued Spock, I liked Hemmer's plan, I liked the clever ways the Enterprise crew penetrated the strange phenomenon around the planet. I had a lot of fun with it, and it reads quickly.

I have two complaints, really. One is that a lot of the book hinges on a relationship between Pike and a guest character, and I wish we had more of a sense of it. I usually wouldn't advocate for such a thing, but a prologue flashing back to them in younger days might have been a good idea, and there's one weird bit where we're told they eat dinner together but don't actually get to see it. We're told what they don't talk about, but under the circumstances it's difficult to imagine what they do talk about, and it would be nice to see more of these two old friends. The other is that at the end, things got a bit fuzzy and drawn out, first with lots of talk of rondures, and then with what felt like a few too many epilogues, like watching The Return of the King.

But on the whole I enjoyed this. It captures the spirit of the parent show while also doing something it could never do, spend a protracted span of time exploring a single planet, its culture, and its population.