Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Moments Asunder

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This is pretty much an impossible book to review on its own merits. The first, most obvious, reason it's that it's the first part of a trilogy, and it's not one of those trilogies that tells three stories; we've very much only read a third of a story here. So as to how good the story told here is, we can't say until we get through Coda, Book III.

Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2021
Acquired: September 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, I was struck by how... weirdly paced the book is. Considering it's the first part of an epic story that has to cram in so much stuff it had to be a trilogy, there is a very long chunk of the book where very little happens. By around page 100, all that has happened to the Enterprise-E characters is that Beverly has seen Wesley in a vision, René has had a bad day at school, and Worf has a bad dream.

Meanwhile, a tedious amount of detail is spent on the death of Ducane, captain of the Federation timeship Relativity (from the Voyager episode of the same name). This guy isn't interesting, spending tons of pages on him doesn't make me feel bad when he dies. I feel like I would have started the book with the (apparent) death of Wesley Crusher, that's the point where I sat up and paid attention. The book is obviously trying to do that comic book thing (more on that later) where we see glimpses of a universal crisis by showing us characters all over the place, but I'm not convinced the Relativity was the way to do this. Nor am I even sure that what works in comics, where you can do a couple quick pages on a side character, even works in the medium of novelistic prose!

The second reason is that though this is the first part of a trilogy, that trilogy came out almost four years ago, and thus a sense of how the series goes has already percolated to me. Perhaps I am mistaken in the specifics, but my understanding is that Coda ends with the entire timeline of the "novelverse" being eradicated. Given that, once people start dying here, it feels a bit meaningless. You know that everyone is going to die, so when people do die, it doesn't land with any kind of significance. If book III is going to kill everyone, then why should I feel anything in particular at the death of T'Ryssa Chen? When everyone can die, then, I would argue, the deaths of anyone don't really matter. (This is the problem I see in "shock" deaths in alternate-universe comic stories like Marvel Zombies; the whole premise fails because it's suffused with a sense that it doesn't matter.)

The obvious touchstone for this book is Crisis on Infinite Earths. That's not to say Dayton Ward was consciously thinking of it when he wrote the book, but that is, as far as I know, the progenitor of this kind of story, the epic of the doom of a franchise universe where you get these glimpses across different times and places of various preexisting characters, many of whom die in order to prove the situation is serious. I have read a lot of superhero comics at this point in my life, and I have found that Crisis is often imitated, rarely equaled. Many of its imitators have a... clear and obvious cynicism to them. In the original Crisis, you felt like the deaths of Supergirl and the Flash meant something, because those were key characters in the pre-Crisis DC universe. Even the deaths of the Earth-Three Crime Syndicate mattered, because you'd read so many other stories with them. (Or, even if you hadn't, which was true of me the first time I read Crisis, you could still feel the narrative weight. I feel like the destruction of the alternate Enterprise-D from Headlong Flight is an attempt to capture this kind of narrative energy but it didn't really work for me, probably because of what I'll discuss below.)

But in a lot of these kind of stories, there are two kinds of deaths: ones you know will be reversed (if Batman dies in Final Crisis, you can feel reasonably sure he'll be back) and ones you know are only allowed because the character doesn't matter. When the Rick Tyler Hourman is killed off, you know it's because no one cares about the Rick Tyler Hourman, and thus it has the opposite effect than intended; it doesn't make you think anyone can die, because, well, it's just a character who last did something anyone cared about in 1988.

What's going here isn't quite that, but it does still feel cynical. We can kill these characters off because they don't matter anymore, because this is a dead end. Mostly who dies here are novelverse-original characters, or characters significantly developed by the novels: T'Ryssa, Rennan Konya, Dina Elfiki, Taurik. The deaths are cruel but I didn't really feel anything at them because you know they don't matter. I liked T'Ryssa, but the book is undermined too by the beigeness of a lot of the original TNG characters. Konya was okay but not someone I was attached to; Elfiki never took off for me at all. The only death of a significant screen character is that of Ezri Dax, but killing her off in a book she's barely contributed to feels cynical again, a cheap way to raise the stakes. (Though it does seem like something is up with her death, so I'll reserve final judgement here.) On top of all that, the novel's prose just doesn't do much to make you care about these deaths. They happen, the end.

The third is something that feels like that old canard of negative reviews—it's not how I would have done it. Well, but I think I can put that better. To be more precise, I don't think this is what I wanted out of a novelverse wrapup. But I'll hold off on my thoughts there until I read book III.

The Devidians did make a return appearance in the comics, but I didn't notice any mention of that here, even though the novels have used the same comics' designation of "Aegis" as the organization Gary Seven works for. That said, I think maybe that whole comic story got erased from the timeline (it's been a while), so perhaps there's nothing that could be referenced!

Continuity Notes:

• There's a real attempt to throw in a reference to everything. For example, a lot of DTI characters pop up (though apparently the appearance of one is a continuity error; I don't remember Shield of the Gods well enough to have caught it myself), and we even get a random reference to Captain Adams of the Prometheus. (Worf is offered a job as his replacement.)
• The bit on p. 80 about how the Typhon Pact "began with great fanfare" but then "sputtered" felt like a metacommentary on how the Typhon Pact plotline was introduced with a four-book miniseries that turned into a nine-book one... and then just got dropped as a thing of significance to the novels.
• On p. 183, we're told the DTI monitors the Devidians, but on p. 220, it seems like no one knows their planet got hit by an asteroid ten years ago! Good job monitoring, people.
• In Armageddon's Arrow, Taurik accidentally got some future knowledge, which has been a small subplot in subsequent TNG novels; here, we finally find out what that was about, but I doubt this was the original intent.

Other Notes:

• There is a subplot about various TNG characters having offers to move on in their careers; most of these have resonance with things we know from elsewhere. For example, La Forge is offered a job designing starships, which would fit with him designing the Jellyfish from Star Trek 2009 (as indicated in some of the tie-ins); Chen is offered a job doing "second contacts," so presumably a California-class ship. I felt like this was a little... cheap. Like, no one is going to take these jobs, so they're just there to generate pathos, like claiming a cop in your action movie is one day from retirement.
• If ever a book ought to have used Rotis Serif for the "Star Trek" logo, it was surely this one! 

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow