Strange New Worlds is by far my favorite of the Paramount+-era Star Trek shows, and Una McCormack is by far my favorite of the current stable of Star Trek novelists. Put these two together, and let's say that I was predisposed to like this book.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum |
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Published: 2024 Acquired and read: November 2024 |
So thankfully, I did. The book has two parallel narratives; in one, the Enterprise is assigned to Starbase 1 to assist with negotiations with a race of catlike aliens. These aliens turn out to 1) have a racial minority that they oppress, and 2) have been encountered by Una ("Number One") in her Academy days. As the novel goes on, the negotiations are complicated by mysterious acts of vandalism on behalf of the oppressed minority. In the other, we follow Una during her Academy days as she befriends those aliens, but also struggles with balancing all the other aspects of life she wants to participate in, including a Gilbert and Sullivan production and the maintenance class taught by the Enterprise's future chief engineer, Pelia ("The Broken Circle"). At the same time, she also meets Christopher Pike for the first time, as he returns to the Academy to give a lecture series for cadets in the midst of a personal crisis of his own.
I zipped through this on a plane ride during my Thanksgiving vacation, beginning it before the plane took off and finishing it before it touched down. McCormack's novels are always easy to read, but in a pleasurable, rewarding way: there's a real depth of characterization here missing from most tie-in fiction, which typically just aspires to make sure you can imagine that the actors are reading the lines. Una is the novel's standout, McCormack deftly using her backstory as someone who must "pass" in a society that discriminates against her to bring out the complexities of such an undertaking. How can Una advocate for other people to be who they are when she herself must deny who she is in order to survive? McCormack was in higher education for many years, and her depiction of Una draws on that to show off a very real type of person from academia, the one who wants to do everything but soon finds themself hitting their limitations.
On top of that, unlike many tie-in novels, it's thematically rich, dealing with the complexities of cultural oppression and cultural resistance. There are sfnal metaphors here for the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen in the US, the UK, and around the world when majority groups confront minority groups, and it all feels very real. I know many tie-in writers don't like it when I say things like this, but every time I read a Star Trek book by McCormack, typically the only thing I don't like about it is that it means McCormack hasn't written the great original sf novel about cultural clash that I truly believe she has within her! I read this at a rough time in my life, but like Bujold's Brother in Arms (which I read around the same time), it reminded me of what I needed to do: fulfill my obligations, both to myself and others, as ethically as possible.
I have some quibbles—Una has to make a mistake I really don't buy to set off the novel's present-day events, the Federation ambassador negotiating with the aliens seems to know curiously little of them—but there's a lot to like here. So far there's only two SNW novels, and I don't know how many more there will be in the long run, but I am willing to wager that this will be the best, unless of course McCormack writes another. (Shame about the incredibly bland cover.)
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