The most recent tie-in novel to the best of the Paramount+ Star Trek shows comes from James Swallow, who is probably my second favorite of the current working Star Trek novelists. So this is a combination I was particularly looking forward to, especially as I very much enjoyed the previous SNW novel, Asylum.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Toward the Night |
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Published: 2025 Acquired: April 2025 Read: June 2025 |
Toward the Night is set during the second season (there is a bizarrely specific "Historian's Note" explaining this) and focuses on the Enterprise tracking down a distress signal from a Starfleet vessel lost a century ago, from the Federation's early day. (There are a number of callbacks to Enterprise, but also Star Trek Beyond; the lost ship is Freedom-class, just like the USS Franklin the crashed ship from a century ago that the Enterprises finds in that story!)
There's a certain breed of tie-in novel, though, that I find frustratingly disappointing. Now, I think writing tie-ins can be tricky—and this is only made even moreso when you're trying into an television program that is still ongoing. But ideally, what makes a tie-in novel worth reading is that it can approach the characters novelistically, that it can give them a different kind of depth than a tv show can. Tv shows can give depth, of course, but the novel can carry you into the thoughts of someone in a way no visual representation ever can. I think the best tie-in novels leave you feeling like you learned something about a character you didn't already know. The obvious way is to do this via backstory—that's what McCormack did in Asylum—but it's not the only way. Ideally, the character is put in situations you haven't see and you get to see them react. John Jackson Miller did this to good effect in what is essentially the zeroth SNW novel, The Enterprise War, by showing us the Enterprise crew in a situation we hadn't seen them in before.
The trap that Toward the Night falls into—though I don't think "trap" is a terribly fair word for it, because this isn't remotely a bad book—is that Swallow does have a great handle on all the characters. In terms of voice and action, Swallow does a great job across the board, in small moments and big. Pike is recognizably Anson Mount, there are some good moments of apt humor from Spock; in particular Ortegas and (my favorite) La'an get some threads, and they are who they ought to be from the show. But though the book has the potential to tell us something new about these characters, I found it didn't really hit that point. We learn about about Ortegas's backstory, which I appreciate; one of the characters on the crashed ship is in her family, long thought dead of course. But I didn't think we learned much about her as a person, something about how she thinks or acts that we didn't already know, even though it seems like the potential was there, of course.
It's well put together, of course; like I said, Swallow is good at capturing character voices. The basic scenario is strong (I want to rip it off for an STA scenario, which is always a good sign), and the action is interesting and well done. (I did find the resolution to one dilemma particularly obvious, though.) But ultimately it's frustrating because I think the elements are here for a slightly better book than we got.
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