Parallel universes are, of course, an old standby of Star Trek in specific and popular science fiction in general. What can we learn by seeing the road untaken, other universes where people made different choices or things went different ways? This book sees the Enterprise-E returning to its mission of exploration, which eventually brings it into contact with the Enterprise-D from 2367... but an Enterprise-D from a reality where Picard died during the events of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" and Riker became captain; other differences include the continued existence of Tasha Yar, Pulaski still serving as CMO, and Wesley working as a civilian specialist on the Enterprise.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight |
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Published: 2017 Acquired: January 2024 Read: November 2024 |
David deploys the revelation to dramatic effect, dropping it in (if I recall correctly, it's been at least two decades since I read Q-Squared) at the end of a scene, upending the mental image you had built up over the preceding several pages.The problem here is that the next time we go to the alternative Enterprise-D, we're just told that Riker is captain; there's no drama to the reveal. So why defer it?
An inexplicable lack of drama is consistent through all the alternative timeline stuff. It takes absolutely forever before the two crews are even aware of each other; I felt like the first one hundred pages were just people scanning nebulas. And while in Armageddon's Arrow, Ward built in a lot of nice little moments and small arcs for the E-E crew, here I felt I was just reading about them doing their jobs in the most humdrum fashion. T'Ryssa Chen has a boyfriend... and that's it, nothing is at stake for her. Once the two crews meet, they do so without much drama or interest. Does the discovery of this other Enterprise do anything other than make the crew from the future nostalgic about the old LCARS format and bridge layout? Not really. It doesn't raise any questions for Picard about his life, or La Forge, or Worf, or anyone.
The closest we get is that the alternative Riker gets a bit of closure... but to be honest, why do I care if that guy gets some closure? Again, compare Q-Squared, where if nothing else, Jack Crusher undergoes an existential crisis from learning about his fate in the "Prime" timeline. At the end, Picard makes a potentially interesting decision in giving the alternative Enterprise-D metaphasic torpedoes, but this decision entirely happens off-screen, and its consequences seem to be limited to the fact that if he is found out, he will receive a sternly worded letter from a bureaucrat.
Outside of the alternative timeline stuff, there is unfortunately little going on in the novel. The main antagonists are Romulans from a century ago; unsurprisingly, they are little threat, even aside from the fact they mostly seem to sit around talking replaying beats from "Balance of Terror." I was not able to get worked up about the fate of the aliens in any way, shape, or form, and it's all resolved with surprising ease.
In both cases, information is often imparted to the reader in the least dramatic fashion possible. Rather than learn about the alternative Enterprise-D's history along with the Enterprise-E crew, it's simply given to us in exposition. Rather than have the Romulans dramatically decloak to make things worse, they simply pop up in a chapter from their viewpoint where they just sit around watching people. There's no dramatic reveals, no suspense mind from almost anything here. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what the book was going for. The basic premise seems to be "two alternative crews meet each other... and everyone is terribly nice about it." Perhaps it's a realistic take in a Star Trekky sense, but it hardly makes for interesting reading.
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| the USS Honorius? poster by Matthew and Christopher Cushman |
- Picard thinks of the Briar Patch as a place that gave the Enterprise trouble years earlier... not months earlier!
- The ship class names for the Romulan ships in this book all come from the FASA RPG sourcebooks.
- Picard recalls that the Enterprise-E was originally called the USS Honorius while under construction, being redesignated after the crash of the Enterprise-D on Veridian III. While the origins of this name are obscure, its first mention in prose fiction came in the S.C.E. novella The Future Begins by... oh, how interesting. (Not, contrary to the claims of Wikipedia, in Diane Carey's Ship of the Line.)
- In a bit about how Chen seems to do everything on the ship but her job as contact specialist, we're told that what she spends her time doing includes "composing... detailed analysis of whatever new species the Enterprise might encounter, and recommendations for next steps... with respect to a newly discovered civilization" (p. 27). But if composing such materials isn't part of the duties of a contact specialist, what even are the duties of a contact specialist?
- There is for some reason a totally irrelevant two-page recap of the events of "The Pegasus."
- There is also a whole page-long thing that establishes that Christopher L. Bennett is an in-universe professor at Starfleet Academy. He likes to talk a lot about time travel theories, spinning a lot out of very small comments by other people and unable to stop talking. Hard to imagine, to be honest.
- Doug Drexler's cover image is as undramatic and humdrum as the book it illustrates. And doesn't that Enterprise-D look a bit wonky to you?
I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every
few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack
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