Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 1–3

Star Trek: Vanguard was a series of original novels (plus some novellas) from Pocket Books, released from 2005 to 2012. I read the first five novels (roughly) as they came out... but when the sixth book came out in 2011, my progress through my reading list had gotten quite bogged down, and as of 2026, I still haven't read it! I've been slowly digging my way out recently, though, and am at last ready to tackle it... only at this point the last time I read a Vanguard book was in 2010, over fifteen years ago. I am hardly ready to jump straight into book six in the tightly serialized saga.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Harbinger
by David Mack

Published: 2005
Acquired: July 2005
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: March 2026

So, before moving onto book six, I am rereading the first five Vanguard novels. The first three predate my bookblogging, so I have no written reviews for them. Thus, in this post I'm going to (briefly?) cover all three at once.

Vanguard is a sort of parallel to the original Star Trek television series. The first book starts shortly after the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; I think that the final book takes place around five years later, when the five-year mission is about to come to an end. At the time the series was announced, many fans wondered if it would a "Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century": just as DS9 took place simultaneously to Next Generation and Voyager, but was set in one place, aboard a space station, Vanguard was set in one place, aboard a space station. No traveling across space, with a new planet every week; instead, every installment is set in the same region of space. Vanguard Station (a.k.a. Starbase 47) is located in the Taurus Reach, a newly opened region of space at the fringes of Federation, Klingon, and Tholian space.

The creators of the series, editor Marco Palmieri and writer David Mack, pushed back against that conception. Rereading the series, it seems to me that everyone back then was comparing it to the wrong tv show: this isn't Deep Space Nine in the 23rd century, it's Breaking Bad in the 23rd century. Well, of course no one in 2005 could have said such a thing because Breaking Bad wouldn't debut for another three years. But Vanguard seems to me to be along those lines: one of those "prestige" television shows were we watch characters (usually white men) make difficult choices, many of them morally dubious, where the stories are willing to show the seedy underbelly of the universe and its inhabitants. I suppose more chronologically appropriate would be The Sopranos (1999–2007) or The Wire (2002–08). Really, a lot of those series came along after Vanguard, so I suppose Mack and Palmieri were ahead of the curve!

That said, shows like Breaking Bad and Sopranos and Mad Men did this to explore American conceptions of masculinity—that's not what Vanguard is doing. (Though, perhaps, it would be nice if it did; there's an emphasis on sexual dynamics here, but the books are in general more interested in reproducing them than examining them. There seems to be a mandatory "man she looks good in a miniskirt!" scene once per book. Similarly, self-descriptions like "[t]he slender, leggy young woman" populate the supposedly close third-person narration of the female characters!) Instead, it's exploring the dynamics of post-9/11 security state. When have people gone too far in pursuit of their political objectives? So, perhaps, what the books really are in the end is "Battlestar Galactica in the 23rd century." 

If that was meant to be the case, though, I find the books frustrating. The narrative arc of the first three books seems to be taking Commodore Diego Reyes to a point where he feels like he's gone too far. In the first book, David Mack's Harbinger, he authorizes some heinous stuff done to Tim Pennington, a journalist seeking to uncover the truth about what Starfleet is doing in the Taurus Reach. Throughout all three of the first three books, he coordinates the Federation's ongoing colonization efforts in the Taurus Reach, knowing that this is just to provide cover for the Federation's attempts to obtain the Taurus meta-genome, which places those colonists in grave danger. At the end of book three, Mack's Reap the Whirlwind, this plotline culminates in Reyes's ex-wife and her entire planet dying, and Reyes thus permitting Pennington to publish a story that reveals what should have remained classified, resulting in Reyes's arrest. His court-martial is covered in book four, Open Secrets, so I'll cover that later, but I found this arc unsatisfying. The problem is, as I see it, is that we don't really go into Reyes's head as he makes these decisions; we don't really know how he justifies them to himself or how he ended up in this position. If this is a commentary on the post-9/11 security state, we don't get to see the logic that causes people to make these kind of decisions to begin with. In Reap the Whirlwind and Open Secrets, we're told Reyes has lived much of his life carrying secrets for Starfleet, but why does he believe this is the right thing to do? I'm not sure. Without that justification, the reversal at the end of book three falls flat.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2006
Previously read: May 2007
Reread: April 2026

Indeed, I would say that the main thing that stops me from getting invested in Vanguard is the characterization. I think in principle, the ideas are fine. I do very much appreciate that (as was later done on screen in Discovery) that "main cast" is not necessarily the senior staff, but the set of characters who are influencing and influenced by events. In addition to Reyes, that's: Rena Desai, the JAG officer assigned to the station; Ming Xiong, the scientific lead assigned to Project Vanguard; Jetanien, the ambassador posted on Starbase 47; T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence officer posted there; Cervantes Quinn, a smuggler operating out of the base; Tim Pennington, a journalist based on Vanguard; Ganz, an Orion smuggler whose ship is docked at the station; Ezekiel Fisher, the chief medical officer; and Anna Sandjeso, a Federation attaché who is secretly a Klingon spy. (There are lots of other characters, and not all of these characters play as big of roles as others, but these are the ones we get bios for at the end of book one, so they seem to be the ones Mack and Palmieri considered the leads.)

My issues with the characters, as of book three anyway (I'll have more thoughts on this in my writeup of book five, Precipice) is twofold. The first is that Harbinger seems to be trying to set up that these are more complicated, conflict-prone characters than you might be used to from Star Trek, especially the original series era. Unfortunately, it accomplishes this somewhat ham-handedly, in that the early parts of Harbinger are mostly about character walking around thinking about how much they don't like all the people they meet: Ming doesn't like his roommate on the USS Bombay, Reyes and Jetanien spend meeting scenes grumbling about what the other characters say, and so on. It makes everyone seem passive-aggressive and unpleasant.

My other issue is that there are just too many characters. There are the eight "main" characters, that would be fine... but there are tons of other point-of-view characters sprinkled in here, too. Random crewmembers on the Bombay in Harbinger (presumably to make us sad and surprised when they die), a whole bunch of USS Endeavour crew in book two, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's Summon the Thunder. Why do I care about, say, the Endeavour's chief medical officer? We also get the addition of the S.C.E. characters on the USS Lovell. Too many of these characters are generic Starfleet types, without any interesting hooks, the precise kind of thing it seems to me the series's main cast was designed to move away from. I would have liked to have spent more time with our supposed actual leads, instead of cutting away to all these random people all the time.

Also, maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough, but was there a discontinuity between Harbinger and Summon the Thunder when it came to the relationship between T'Prynn and Sandjeso? Near the end of Harbinger, we find out they're sleeping with each other other—the Intelligence agent and the Klingon spy—but there's no indication that T'Prynn knows Anna's true identity. Suddenly in Summon the Thunder, T'Prynn not only knows but has turned Anna into a double agent at some point in the past. Weird transition, and also weird undermining of the premise's potential drama. (Also the tone in Harbinger was very much convenient-sex-buddies, and then in the Reap the Whirlwind they're apparently actually in love?)

My original reason for doing these three in one go was that they were simply the three I hadn't reviewed before, but I actually think they work pretty well as a complete unit, a trilogy with beginning, middle, and end, as it ends with the "secrecy" arc that began Harbinger being blown wide open. Similarly, books four and five seem to work as a duology as the series shifts its focus—more on that next time.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind
by David Mack

Published: 2007
Acquired and previously read: August 2007
Reread: April 2026

Other Thoughts:

The cover to Harbinger is solid, giving us a nice view of the setting of the series, and I appreciate the inclusion of diagrams of the station in the book. I also like the cover to Summon the Thunder well enough. But the cover to Reap the Whirlwind is excellent, a work of art. Rarely has a "ships in space" cover to a Star Trek book been so dynamic and striking; never has a D7 battlecruiser looked more formidable. Unfortunately, I felt like after this point, the series's covers became pretty generic and mediocre, almost always just a picture of Vanguard with a Constitution-class starship somewhere. (Presumably so your casual bookstore punter would go, "oh, the Enterprise!")

I did not reread the prequel to the series, the crossover with S.C.E., a novella called Distant Early Warning (collected in Corps of Engineers: What's Past*). What is funny to me is the novella came out between books one and two, but takes place before book one... thus in book two everyone starts going on about the "Jinoteur carrier wave," a thing they for some reason never brought up in book one! 

My copies of Harbinger and Summon the Thunder are both signed by the authors; in Summon the Thunder, Kevin Dilmore wrote what is definitely my favorite thing an author has ever inscribed to me: "M-O-L-L-M-A-N-N... see I can spell it!"

Reap the Whirlwind contains a "minipedia" with entries for all the characters and places of the series thus far. I appreciate the assistance in trying to ground the reader in this sprawling saga... but unfortunately you can't use it as reference while reading the book because it contains spoilers for it! Weird call.

* This is in fact the reason I didn't reread it... I don't own it in a form where it's a complete "book" and thus I wouldn't count it as a book read on my reading list! Gotta keep those numbers up, can't waste time on reading that won't contribute.

Star Trek Adventures: Adapting Dayton Ward's Available Light into an Original Scenario!

Often, when I read a Star Trek novel I think to myself, "This would make a good Star Trek Adventures scenario." Novels that have made me think this include John Vornholt's The Next Generation: Masks (1989), Jeffrey Lang's Deep Space Nine: Force and Motion (2016), John Jackson Miller's Prey: Hell's Heart (2016), and especially many of the Next Generation works of Dayton Ward: Armageddon's Arrow (2015), Hearts and Minds (2017), and Available Light (2019). (It's probably not a coincidence that Dayton himself has written a lot for STA.)

That last one I thought would not just make a good STA adventure in general, but would make a good fit for my campaign. The premise of the novel is that the Enterprise finds a derelict ship in deep space. It seems abandoned, but the crew eventually discovers that it's carrying 60,000 refugees from an alien planet, they're just suspended in the ship's transporter buffer—where they can actually live until the ship arrives at its destination. Things are complicated, though, when a group of scavengers turn up.

This would work well for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to make the scavengers into Ferengi instead of an original race. One of my player characters is a Ferengi woman, and she has a brother who works as a successful businessman. If her brother was among the scavengers, it could lead to some good character conflict for her. (Additionally, one of my players requested more familiar races from the show.) Second, way back in our fourth episode, the players acquired an alien superintelligence living in their computer system, the "Engineer" named "Mercury." Unlike most of their people, Mercury wanted to explore the universe; they had briefly done so in an android body (which the players found way back in episodes 1 and 2). However, Mercury had honestly not done a lot since coming aboard, aside when the players briefly consulted them in episode 6. I had the idea that Mercury might complicate things here by uploading themself into the derelict's transporter buffer, which would then let them materialize themself as a living being.

I also did a B-plot, as I've been doing more of this season. The players have been dealing a lot with the Haradin and the ways their nativist movement is disrupting the entire Ekumene sector. I wanted them to help shape Starfleet's response to this, so my subplot for this episode was a conference on the player ship's home base of Deep Space 10, where Rukot and Mooria would be summoned to participate.

Also, at the beginning of the summer, one of my players, Cari, had been torn whether to continue playing her regular character of Jor, the Diversitas's security officer, or a new one-off character she'd played in our ninth episode, Rina K'var, the blue Orion pickpocket, who'd ended up exiled by her aunt. I suggested she could play Rina once, an idea she went for, because I had a good idea how to fit the character into the B-plot of this episode.  

“Captain’s Personal Log, Stardate 55020.9. Consul Vrossaan has invited Mooria and me to a conference on Deep Space 10 to discuss growing Haradin tensions in the Ekumene sector. Professor Orven Jadrel’s understanding of Haradin history, trade, and the meanings of Harad will be essential. The Haradin are not simply facing piracy. They are facing a crisis of identity....”

This is who I had per session:

• Ryan as Rukot, captain (sessions 1-3)
• Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1, 3)
• Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (2-3)
• Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1, 3)
• Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1-3)
• Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (1-3)

...with special guest stars: 

• Cari as Rina K'var, freelance Orion (1, 3) 
• Hayley as Charley Lee, DS10 science officer (2)

I'll write this one up act by act. I did change the episode title to "No One in Here" to fit with my usual pretensions, but maintained Dayton's original title as the title of Act I. To keep with his usual theme of using Rush song titles, I used two other track titles from the same album as "Available Light" as the titles of Acts II and III. 

Act I: Available Light

Mercury appears to Gurg
(image generated by ChatGPT)

It's been an ongoing subplot in our campaign that Gurg, the Diversitas's chief medical officer, has been trying to make contact with Mercury; it was the whole reason he snuck aboard the Diversitas and finagled an assignment there. The episode began with Mercury presenting a genetic problem to Gurg; once Gurg solved it, Mercury appeared on his screen and asked what he wanted. Gurg's big technological goal is to connect people's brains to each other for the sharing of information (a collective, he is always quick to point out, not the Collective); when Gurg told Mercury this, Mercury gave Gurg a set of nearby coordinates.

It took a bit of persuasion for Gurg to convince T'Cant, who was acting captain with Rukot away at the conference, to go there, but he eventually did. There the players discovered the derelict. The three scenes were basically 1) examining the derelict from the outside, 2) beaming over and exploring it, and 3) discovering the Ferengi were aboard. (Kenyon, who plays Nevan the chief engineer, was away for this session, so we just said they left him in command when the players beamed over.) I had to come up with a bunch of Tasks for the players, of course, but I very much benefited from being able to take a bunch of description and such right out of Dayton's novel!

Nejamri derelict
(adapted from the Available Light cover by Doug Drexler)

My players were convinced this was an Alien-esque scenario, so they proceeded very cautiously. I had a bit where I played some Ferengi laughs they heard from the other side of a door, but they were convinced it was something creepy and malevolent! I had planned on having scene 3 be about them dealing with the Ferengi, but things went slightly longer than expected, so I just ended the act with the Ferengi turning up and one of them hugging Frector and exclaiming "sister!"

In Available Light, a fight breaks out between the scavengers and the Enterprise crew, and a mysterious emitter seemingly evaporates the character of T'Ryssa Chen; if there had been a fight, I would have done something like this, but this didn't happen, so I had an emitter evaporate T'Cant seemingly at random—because Debi would be out of town next week! 

In the B-plot, my goal for this act was mostly to establish the NPCs and the parameters. There were a lot, since I wanted a bunch of different possibilities represented for the conference, but most of them were returning. These were:

• Captain Akul, Klingon (episodes 3, 5, 8)
• Professor Orven Jadrel, Haradin academic (episodes 7, 8)
• Lt. Commander Mazio Sanna, Starfleet Intelligence (episodes 5, 8, 10)
• Subcommander Taleria, Romulan (episode 10) 
• Consul Vrossaan, Federation diplomat (episodes 5, 6, 8, 10) 

conference attendees

Plus there were three new NPCs: Della Robbia Roman, the admiral running the conference, (my players were delighted by my southern accent); Commander Derzir Ban, a Trill logistics expert (I wanted a joined Trill who could be snobby about Mooria's failed Initiate status); and Ashrevi, a Return to Harad agitator protesting the conference. And also Gregin Shrek, DS10's bartender, would put in an appearance (he previously appeared in episode 5). Each NPC would have a different take on what Admiral Roman should do about the Haradin: a military solution, a diplomatic solution, an Intelligence solution, and so on.

My other goal was to get Rina K'var involved. Since being kicked out of her aunt's pirate guild, she'd been playing Orion tambourine in Gregin's bar; he asked her to sneak into the conference and get him some information. With some judicious use of Threat, I got the players to intersect, and Rina even overheard some of Taleria's subordinates plotting. The act ended with Professor Jadrel giving a keynote at the conference... and then a bomb going off, injuring Jadrel, Mooria, and Rina. (Mooria's and Rina's players would be out of town the next week, so this worked well with my preexisting idea for a bombing subplot.)

Act II: Hand over Fist

Assistant DaiMon Tozal
(Tog from TNG: "Ménage à Troi")

In the A-plot, I had three basic scenes planned out. The first was the negotiating between the Starfleet crew and the Ferengi; Frector excels at this kind of thing, of course... but I put the whole Federation crew at a Disadvantage in Social Conflict with Ferengi because they were hanging out with a female. So it was difficulty 6... but she still did negotiate to allow continued access to the derelict. Her brother was Assistant DaiMon Tozal, working for DaiMon Plen of the FCA marauder Trickledown Economics.

In the second scene, the players investigated the derelict with some technical Tasks, alternating with social Tasks to deal with the Ferengi—they got up to shenanigans that the crew would have to deal with to proceed. The players were able to pretty quickly put together the clues to figure out that the Nejamri was carrying 60,000 people in transporter buffers, but they were suitably impressed at the concept.

In the third scene, I had an Extended Task planned. I didn't know exactly what it would be, just that it would be Magnitude 5, Work 30, Resistance 1, Intervals 12. I was going to play it by ear based on what was happening: they wanted to open up a communication channel to T'Cant, so I had this cause the derelict computer to recognize she didn't belong and attempt to purge her. Nevan and Gurg took care of this, while I occasionally spent Threat to have the Ferengi do stuff Frector would have to deal with.

At the end of the act, Mercury used their connection to upload themself into the derelict computer, which also shut off the power. Commercial break! 

Lt. Commander Charley Lee
(image by ChatGPT)

Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Admiral Roman tasked Captain Rukot with investigating the bombing. I had known we'd be down to just four players this week, and suggested to my wife that she could play: she was in my old campaign, but now cares for the kids while I play usually. This would mean bringing the kids and them having a late night, but we thought we could make it work... beside, Kid One was interested in playing! I suggested to my wife she make up a character who could be stationed on Deep Space 10 and help Rukot investigate.

She decided to build a science officer with a Focus in chemistry, a human with a cybernetic hand that gave them an enhanced sense of touch. Kid One designed the visual appearance using an online Star Trek token generator, and Kid Two came up with the name: Charley Lee. A family undertaking!

When it came time to plan the mystery, I thought the only two real possible culprits were either the Romulans or the Haradin agitators. But how to make this not obvious... yet not so complicated the players would struggle to solve it? The idea I came up with was that Ashrevi had planted the bomb, but she had been given it by Romulans posing as Haradin. So the players would find some clues incriminating the Haradin, and some incriminating the Romulans, and some absolving each group: footage of Ashrevi carrying in a package she didn't carry out... but strong evidence she couldn't have brought an explosive on the station. They did a good job making their way through the clues and figuring it out.

I made the third scene an Extended Task as well, a chase where Ashrevi ran away and they had to catch her. Something interesting I did was to play both scenes at the same time, going back and forth. As Kenyon pointed out, this mean the players had to be thoughtful about using Momentum, because they needed to save some for the other group! 

Act III: Presto

DaiMon Plen
(Lurin from TNG: "Rascals")

Debi was back, so we began our third session by showing what T'Cant was up to in the Nejamri "Heaven" (it's called "Haven" in the novel, but c'mon, let's go big). This let her get some key exposition. 

Scene two then set the stage for the finale: The DaiMon of the Ferengi ship ordered Frector's brother to disconnect the Starfleet connection to the computer core of the derelict, so Frector had to stand up for herself. Austin killed it, rolling something like 11 successes, some of which he spent to establish an Advantage countering the Disadvantage I'd set up. They also made contact with Mercury and communicated with T'Cant inside the derelict computer.

I wanted the final scene to be all about transferring power to the Nejamri derelict, but I didn't want to do yet another Extended Task. So I adapted the Extended Task mechanic:

• Every round, the players could attempt a Daring + Engineering Task to transfer power to the derelict.
• On a success, they could roll Challenge Dice like an Extended Task, and the power flow would increase by that amount, on a scale of 0 to 20.
• The difficulty would start at 5, but every time they succeeded it would go down by one.
• But also every round, I would roll Challenge Dice, and the power flow would go down this amount, representing the Ferengi doing things to interfere. 
• I could spend Threat to do things like increase the difficulty of the main Task or add to my Challenge Dice rolls. 
• But the players could also undertake Tasks to either create Resistance on my rolls or stop me from rolling altogether.

If the power flow went back down to 0, the materialization process would begin without enough power to sustain it. If it went up beyond 20, then there would be enough power to sustain the process.

the Trickledown Economics
(image from Star Trek Online)

This I think was pretty fun! There was some grumbling about the fact that since it wasn't an Extended Task, Nevan couldn't use his relevant talent, but I pointed out that if I let him use it, I would have just designed the whole thing to be harder to compensate. There was a nice tug-of-war, but they won in the end. Frector broadcast to the Trickledown crew, pointing out the downsides of their undetaking, causing a work slowdown; T'Cant bent the power transfer beam so the Ferengi couldn't block it. There was one very exciting round where between them all, the players rolled five 20s, giving me 10 Threat!

In the end, the players saved the Nejamri, had some exciting showdowns, and convinced the Ferengi to lay low. My adaptation got looser as it went, but I think overall it worked well.

I'd like to make the A-plot a publicly available mission, but my notes are mostly written for my own benefit and have a lot of stuff specific to my players and campaign, so I would need to do a lot of cleanup first. Maybe someday!

The first scene of the B-plot was mostly to wrap up dangling thread from the investigation: the players got to question Ashrevi, and hear Taleria's side of the story. (The latter told them she'd already sent her subordinates home to Romulus... on a shuttle she feared wouldn't make it!) Then in the second scene, I had them hear each NPC's take and then come up with their own plan. They very much wanted to amplify Professor Jadrel's anti-nativist message... but how?

This was sort of the crux of the episode for me. I could think of a lot of ways to do this, but didn't want Starfleet to just tell them—hence the conference idea. They came up with the plan of hacking into the Haradin transmitter network, and transmitting Jadrel's message through that.

Scene three, then, was convincing other people to go along with the plan. If they could convince four of the six NPCs, they then could convince the Admiral. They worked their way from easiest sell to hardest, making good use of Talents and information to lay out their argument... and then they convinced the admiral. So now I know what to base the season finale around! 

Star Trek: Ekumene:

1. "Patagon in Parallax"
2. "A Terrible Autonomy"
3. "Stinks of Slumber and Disaster"
4. "Angels in Your Angles"
5. "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night" 
6. "When I Get through This Part…"
7. "Only Trying to Do Right in This Wicked World" 
8. "No Place in the Processional"
9. "Legend Grew about Their Daring" 
10. "On the Edge of Nobody's Empire"
11. "No One in Here" 
12. "Your Enemies at Your Side" 

Specials:

1. "Hear All the Bombs Fade Away"
2. "The Word for Word Is Word"

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Moments Asunder

2387
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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Available Light

late 2386
It's so... big! This is the first Destiny-era book to come out after quite a long hiatus, the previous one being almost a year and a half prior (Titan: Fortune of War). Goodbye mass market paperbacks, hello trades! I think this is also the first to make references to Discovery; Georgiou is included among a list of famous explorers. It's also an important last—this is the last-ever use of the (not my favorite) Rotis Serif TNG logo. (Thank goodness.)

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2019
Acquired: February 2025
Read: July 2025

Other than that, though, it half feels like business as usual. This book essentially has two totally separate plotlines. One is very familiar; this is our fourth Dayton Ward–penned exploring-the-Odyssean-Pass-after-The Fall novel, and so you'll know the vibe by now. The Enterprise comes across an interesting situation, there's some conflict, T'Ryssa Chen is in it a lot, Taurik is there. Ward is good at coming up with premises that feel like lost TNG episodes; in this one, the Enterprise and a group of scavengers come upon a derelict spaceship that seems like it ought to have a lot of people aboard... but where are they? There are some clever concepts here and interesting spins on Star Trek technology.

As I have with almost all of these books, I found myself thinking about how I would adapt it to serve as a Star Trek Adventures scenario, which is always a good sign. (I say this a lot, but if my current campaign gets a third season, I think I will actually do it.)

I don't think there's anything bad about these four books per se, but they have felt a bit... stasis-y. Like, all the characters are present and correct, but there's not the vibe you got back at the height of the Deep Space Nine relaunch or in the early days of New Frontier and Titan, that you were watching these characters evolve and grow. It almost reads like a tie-in to a tv show that doesn't exist, like all the characters have to be maintained as they are. Worf does Worf things, La Forge does La Forge things, T'Ryssa Chen does T'Ryssa Chen things, Joanna Faur continues to exist, Beverly isn't in it except as Picard's wife. I don't think I would say I disliked any of the post-Fall TNG novels on their own merits, but unfortunately I do feel like the best one was the first, Armageddon's Arrow; it had a sense that we were moving forward and going somewhere that ended up missing from Headlong Flight, Hearts and Minds, and this book.

The other half of the book is the fallout from Section 31: Control, which is really the fallout from A Time to Heal, a book that came out fifteen years prior! Section 31's existence is now public, but along with this, so is Picard's role in the coup that deposed President Min Zife. This half has its own two halves. In one, we see what's going on back on Earth: how are the politicians and the people dealing with all the revelations about S31, particularly that everything that everything the Federation has ever accomplished in its utopia-building was really the result of unsanctioned black ops? Mostly this is told from the perspective of Philippa Louvois (of "Measure of a Man" fame), now Federation Attorney General, as she begins carrying out investigations and prosecutions. It's fine; I did have the feeling that maybe the revelations of Control were a bit too big to realistically be accommodated into a tie-in book series at all, much less as a B-plot. The Federation has had yet another existential shock but I just don't think you can adequately deal with that and maintain the status quo needed for this to also be a series of books about people having fun space adventures. At this point, is it even realistic that the Federation continues to function? Akaar gives like five different speeches about how human choices do matter but they all feel a bit hollow.

I'm not sure about a couple choices here, like one where a trained Starfleet officer turns into a cold-blooded killer trying to get Admiral Ross because her husband died due to a Section 31 op. Also what's up with all the characters' insistence that Ross was a key player in S31? To the extent that an organization like S31 has formal members, I never had the sense that he was one; I certainly didn't feel like he was guiding policy. He was more just a guy the real players knew they could count on to throw things their way when needed.

The other half of this half is the personal fallout for Picard himself. This I found profoundly disappointing. What is the reaction of every key character finding out that Picard had a role in the illegal takedown of a democratically elected leader. Basically everyone shrugs and says, "oh well sometimes you just have to do a coup i guess." I could buy this of some characters (I can certainly imagine it of Worf, a man who previously killed a democratically elected leader)... but everyone? No one is upset to learn that the principled Jean-Luc Picard totally abandoned his principles? Not Beverly, not La Forge, not T'Ryssa, not Will Riker? I found this disappointing because 1) so much for Federation ideals, and 2) it seems a bizarre dramatic choice. This thing happens that could totally upend your characters' relationships, and you basically just ignore it?

The book ends with Picard deciding to be accountable for his decision and return to Earth, which I appreciate, but it feels pretty random; I wish it had been a natural outgrowth of the way something from this storyline intersected with the A-plot.

Continuity Notes:

• We get a little recap of Phillipa Louvois's career on p. 43 that tells us she left Starfleet after "Measure of a Man," then came back later, than left again. Is this a reference to something? I don't see any likely candidates on Memory Beta, but it seems like a pretty random detail otherwise.

Other Notes:

• I didn't totally buy that Nechayev would go on the run. She comes across as principled to me, not self-serving—they're just not great principles!
• Ward does this thing I'm of two minds about, which is he's always diligently establishing members of the Enterprise-E crew. I like that the book does this thing that's hard to do on tv, make it clear that the crew consists of people who aren't main characters. But on the other hand, most of them are just names on the page; they don't have personalities or anything, just names (always human, which is a little boring, though I'm guessing they're mostly Tuckerizations) and jobs. Sometimes, though, he's a little too diligent about it; it'll be like, "so-and-so was being covered by the beta shift Engineering supervisor so-and-so, but she was on the away team, so she was being covered by the gamma shift supervisor." (At one point, Šmrhová leaves the bridge to get a rest, but she comes back before as soon as something interesting happens but we're still told who covers for her while she's gone.) It's like that bit from Parks and Rec about NPR hosts all substituting for each other.
• Gratuitous Recap Watch: We get a recap of "Paradise Lost" (pp. 51-2), which I can see the relevance of, but goes into an awful lot of detail for some reason, with characters wondering whatever happened to Admiral Leyton, but I don't know why. Also recapped for seemingly little purpose: "The Best of Both Worlds" (p. 213) and Headlong Flight (p. 287).

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage by David Mack

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Hearts and Minds

2031-67 / late 2386
Way back in installments #1 and 4 of this chronological marathon, I read two original series novels, From History's Shadow and Elusive Salvation, because their events would be referenced in a Destiny-era book. Over seven years later, that connection finally pays off with Hearts and Minds, which provides a third and final installment to Dayton Ward's "secret history" sequence of novels about the Aegis and the U.S. security apparatus. Was it all worth it? Well, I may have appreciated the connections more had I read the books closer together, like they were released. That, I suppose, is the downside of reading in chronological order.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2017
Acquired and read: December 2024

Like those original series novels, we have two parallel plotlines here. In one, an alien spaceship crashes on Earth in the early twenty-first century; it and its pilot are recovered by I-31, a secretive branch of the U.S. military. In the other, the Enterprise-E continues its exploration of the Odyssean Pass, coming upon an early war civilization... about which Commander Taurik apparently knows a devastating secret.

What I can say about this book is that it's basically fine. I found the twenty-first century plot more engaging than some of the ones in previous "From History's Shadow" books, probably because it's more focused, just revolving around a couple characters and one inciting incident, instead of trying to work in a whole bunch of stuff. That said, there's still the occasional clunky passage where characters think about all the stuff that happened in their plotline since the last time we checked in on them, as opposed to actually seeing this stuff happen.

The future plotline is also stronger than in some of those earlier books, revolving around the Enterprise coming to this planet that has gone through a devastating war, and slowly uncovering the role humanity might have played in it. Like a lot of Ward novels, I'm starting to realize it would play well as a Star Trek Adventures episode, with an away team captured, some technical challenges and puzzles, an escape attempt or two, and a solution based around diplomacy and the extension of trust. I liked this—enough that I wish there had been a bit more to it. I felt like it had room for some more complications if the Enterprise had got to the planet faster, where the real meat of the story resides.

The two storylines don't just intersect from a plot perspective, but also from a thematic one; both are about extending trust to the "other" and foregoing violence even when it seems like the only option.

On the other hand, there's this subplot about Taurik that doesn't really go anywhere. When the Enterprise returned to Federation space for the events of the Prey trilogy, Taurik was debriefed by the Department of Temporal Investigations about a discovery he made regarding future history in Armageddon's Arrow. At that time, the DTI and Admiral Akaar apparently also fill him in on what is known about the Eizand, forbidding him to tell anyone else. Once Akaar and Taurik reveal this to Picard, this creates tension. I thought this was well done...

... but by the novel's end, it's not clear at all 1) why Taurik got this briefing, or 2) why this information had to be kept from Picard. Like, in the novel's final scene, clearly the place it should be explained, it's all just shrugged aside. What point was there in keeping this information from Picard and undermining his command authority? What was Taurik actually expected to do? It's bizarre, like the book forgot about an idea it set up at the beginning in favor of dealing with the repercussions of Section 31: Control.

So overall, it reads fine and quick, but I think with some decent tweaks, it could have been even better.

Continuity Notes:

• The Historian's Note says this takes place before Section 31: Control, but is best read after it; it's probably more accurate to say the two books overlap, with the final 2386 scene here occurring after the main events of Control.
• The Ares IV mission from Voyager's "One Small Step" is fit into Ward's future history. I read this book only a few weeks after Strange New Worlds: Asylum, where the Ares IV mission also plays a role... and in the acknowledgements, writer Una McCormack thanked Dayton Ward for drawing her attention to it. I guess he's got a thing!
• I did like getting to hear about Roberta Lincoln one last time; the book apparently ties into a Strange New Worlds story about 9/11 that I haven't read.
• We learn that in the 2020s, humanity returns to the Moon, but it's an ECON mission that does it. (The ECON is lead by China and India, and also includes Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, and Vietnam.)
• Gary Seven mentions the Optimum Movement as among the organizations threatening humanity's integration into interstellar society; this is a reference to the novel Federation, where its posited as the organization Colonel Green from "The Savage Curtain" and the twenty-first-century soldiers from "Encounter at Farpoint" belonged to.

Other Notes:

• The twenty-first century plotline has a doctor named April Hebert; this character name would also be used (I presume by Ward) for the commodore commanding Narenda Station in the STA scenarios about the Shackleton Expanse. (I used the character in my own STA campaign, but changed her into a man named August Hebert.)
• Picard is a The War of the Worlds fan. I approve.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward 

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Headlong Flight

mid-2386
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
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2017
Acquired: January 2024
Read: November 2024

The book invites comparisons with any number of parallel universe stories, from TNG's "Parallels" onwards, but the one that jumped out at me was Peter David's Q-Squared, because Dayton Ward performs a similar trick to David. In Q-Squared, some clever work with pronouns makes it unclear during one of the book's earlier scenes that we're in an alternate timeline; we at first thing we're reading about Picard and Beverly Crusher when it turns out to be Picard and a still-living Jack Crusher. In an early E-D scene, Ward has the crew at a card game, and some vague references to "the captain" make you think Picard is the captain when in fact it's Riker.

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.

the USS Honorius?
poster by Matthew and Christopher Cushman

Continuity Notes:

• 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.)

Other Notes:

• 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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Armageddon's Arrow

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Armageddon's Arrow
by Dayton Ward

early January 2386

Published: 2015
Acquired: December 2021
Read: July 2023

What's this... a Star Trek book about... exploring space!?

Armageddon's Arrow finally delivers on the premise promised some fourteen books ago(!), that Starfleet would get back to exploration. It's a decently enjoyable book that takes the Enterprise out into a totally new area of space, where they encounter a derelict planet-destroying weapon from a century in the future, its crew still in hibernation. It's got a bit of a classic TNG procedural feel, as the crew works to uncover what it is and what's going on... only then things begins to escalate as the enemy of the civilization who built it turns up and demands it as the spoils of war.

Like Force and Motion, I kept thinking what a strong Star Trek Adventures RPG scenario it would make: it's got basically three acts, and it piles on the complications. My complaint, though, would be that the opening act is a bit of a plod, because the reader knows more than the characters because of a totally unnecessary (and incredibly dull) two-chapter prologue about the launch of the weapon. (Similarly, the back cover probably gives away more than is strictly needed.) Strip that out and you'd have a tighter mystery. I also felt that the book kind of ignored the potential complications at times: I didn't think it was obvious, for example, that Picard ought to hand the Armageddon's Arrow over to the enemy species, but he did; wouldn't timeline contamination worries trump Prime Directive worries? Maybe not, but this is TNG—I expect a nice meeting scene where the characters debate all this! This skipping over of what seems like an interesting decision happens a couple times, and I kept thinking that in my putative STA game, I'd make the players hash this stuff out a bit more. The temporal issues mostly come in form of the characters repeatedly (too repeatedly) worrying about what the DTI will say about this, rather than worrying about what's happening in the present of the story.

Still, it's got some fun twists and turns, and Ward has a good handle on the characters. Nothing here will knock your socks off character-wise, but they also don't feel forgotten as they did in Takedown. Lots of characters have little arcs and stuff to do; it's the first time the TNG books have actually felt like an ongoing series since Losing the Peace! Hopefully we can get more of this going forward. I found that I'd actually missed T'Ryssa, for example, and Tamala Harstad has more to do here than in all her previous appearances put together. That said, some of the new characters are still a bit nothingburger (who cares about Dina Elfiki? and I guess only Una could make me care about Aneta Šmrhová). On the other hand, Worf gets some truly hilarious one-liners; my poor wife had to listen to me try to explain the one about time travel.

So yeah, I don't think this will set the world on fire... but if I wanted my world set on fire, to be honest, I wouldn't be reading Star Trek books! This is largely what I want out of my tie-in fiction, and I look forward to more TNG books in this vein.

Continuity Notes:

• The reference to the events of Takedown is so vague it seems pretty clear that Dayton Ward had literally no idea what it was about.
• The book carefully references a bunch of previous planet-killer-focused stories: "Devices and Desires" from Constellations, Vendetta, and Before Dishonor. Perhaps a bit too carefully; I got confused by the detailed recap of Vendetta, and I've read it. (Though summarizing Vendetta after summarizing Before Dishonor was disorienting.) The book even claims the idea that the Preservers built the doomsday machine (from Vendetta) is still the going theory; I'd thought modern Star Trek fiction had been a bit more attentive to the fact that the only confirmed Preserver intervention in canon was in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, not the one hundred thousand years ago that the planet-killer dates from, so I was a bit surprised to read this.

Other Notes:

• Picard lampshades that the Xindi weapon test in "The Expanse" makes absolutely no sense, which amused me.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Sight Unseen by James Swallow

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms

Published: 2014
Acquired: October 2020
Read: November 2020

Star Trek: The Fall: Peaceable Kingdoms

by Dayton Ward

October 13-27, 2385
I've been trying to decide what I wanted out of this book. In some ways, The Fall is a loose mini-series; it's not like, say, Destiny, where you could publish the whole thing as one big book. But it is also not Typhon Pact; it's not just a set of books about a common situation, there's a sequence of plot developments that carry from book to book. The events of Revelation and Dust spark the events of The Crimson Shadow and A Ceremony of Losses; A Ceremony of Losses directly leads into The Poisoned Chalice; The Poisoned Chalice directly leads into Peaceable Kingdoms. At the end of The Poisoned Chalice, it's known that Ishan's chief of staff was responsible for the assassination of President Bacco, and Riker has reached out to Picard to try to stop it...

It feels to me this book thus needs to escalate from the previous books. Ceremony of Losses featured Starfleet ships firing on each other; Poisoned Chalice made you think enemies could be anywhere and everywhere across the galaxy. But Peaceable Kingdoms seems to deescalate the tension of the two previous books. It doesn't just do the same things over again, but does them less interestingly. While in Poisoned Chalice we met and got to know Ishan adherents, here they're all distant figures wearing black hats. While those stories went all over the galaxy, in this one, it's mostly about Crusher scrambling around on a desert planet, and the Enterprise investigating a freighter. It feels small when we need big. If this is a test of values... one never actually feels that Picard and the Enterprise crew are doing anything other than an ordinary mission. Give me Picard on the run or something.

It's also, well, boring. I never felt any tension during the bits where Crusher and (Tom) Riker were trying to stay out of the way of the people trying to stop them from uncovering Ishan's identity, and the Enterprise seemed to aimlessly meander. I struggled a lot with the flashbacks, too. The way Ishan's big secret plays out is too easy; we learn it early on, and from then, the only tension-- such that there is any-- isn't anything about Ishan, but just if Crusher can deliver the information. It was so easy to learn Ishan's secret, I expected some kind of further twist, but it never came.

It doesn't help that the bad guys are just not very good. In one part, La Forge gets a tip from Sonya Gomez that the da Vinci transported a special operations team pretending to be engineers from one civilian transport to another, and it was obvious to her that they weren't engineers. If you are in special operations and so bad at pretending to be engineers, why use a Starfleet Corps of Engineers vessel as your transportation for no readily apparent reason?

The big weakness at the heart of the novel, and thus The Fall, is Ishan himself. As I highlighted in my review of Crimson Shadow, it's weird reading The Fall in 2020, because it so clearly reads as a commentary on movements like Trumpism and Brexit in some ways, even though it was published 2013-14. The revelation that Ishan is actually a Bajoran collaborator who killed the real Ishan and took his place during the latter days of the Occupation... it reads like wishful thinking about Trump. I feel like there was a school of thought out there that Trump was some kind of Russian plant, and if we could just unmask him, this would all be over. But the scary thing about Trump wan't that he has some kind of secret (though admittedly he has pretty bad secrets), the scary thing about Trump is that he was exactly who he said he was. That Ishan should have this secret dark past is wish fulfillment and an easy out. Oh, you don't like this guy's policies? Well, conveniently for you, he's actually a murderer and a liar. But what if Ishan had been above board? Or at least clean enough not to get caught? What would our heroes have done then? I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting (if difficult) novel than the one we got.

Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata
(photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think)

Continuity Notes:

• One reason I thought the Ishan story was fishy and too easy was that I felt like the novel was working so hard to convince that Ilona Daret was an old friend of Crusher's. There's this chapter where Picard and Crusher think about three different previously unseen adventures where they encountered Daret (pp. 26-7). My feeling was then whenever a Star Trek story tries to convince you a previously unseen character is such a pal, they're being set up for a betrayal (e.g., The Stuff of Dreams just a few books ago). Imagine my surprise when I looked something up on Memory Beta halfway through the novel and it turned out that Daret was in fact a preestablished character, from an insignificant anthology called The Sky's the Limit. No traitor at all, and not previously unseen, either. Except Dayton Ward spelled Daret's first name wrong. I bet the guy who wrote the original story was pissed.
• One of the flashbacks to Crusher and Daret is set on the Enterprise-D and includes Miranda Kadohata. Kadohata first appeared in the TNG relaunch novel Q & A, but it established that she had served about the Enterprise-D as well. Despite that, no work of fiction I am aware of had actually shown her on the Enterprise-D until now, some six years after she was introduced-- and some four years after she was written out!
• On p. 370, zh'Tarash says she will be serving out the remainder of Bacco's term... but A Time for War, A Time for Peace and Articles of the Federation seemed to establish that the new president after a special election serves out a complete four-year term, resetting the cycle. But in general there are a number of inconsistencies with the way presidential terms have worked in Destiny-era fiction.
  

Other Notes:

• People complain about Dayton Ward's tendency to recap too much; I didn't notice anything here, except in ch. 14, where Picard repeatedly thinks about things we know already from ch. 11. "In truth, the cargo run to the colony world was but one part of the ruse Admiral Riker had engineered as a means of giving Picard maneuvering room while the captain carried out a different, clandestine mission" (122). Yes, I know, because I read about it not even 25 pages ago! Later in ch. 14, there's a page-long recap of things the reader already knows about Bacco's assassination if they've been reading this very book.
• I said the bad guys were not very good... but on the other hand Velk has to be a Palpatine-esque master manipulator for this plan to work. How did he know that if Bacco was killed, he could persuade enough people on the Council to select Ishan as president pro tem?
• I have come around to the idea that Andorian readmittance would be fast-tracked... I am less persuaded by the idea that an Andorian could become president so quickly. It seems like pretty presumptive to begin campaigning for an office before you are even eligible for it!
  
• I might have missed something so I am hesitant to call this out... but is it a coincidence that Daret discovers incriminating information on Ishan at this exact moment in time?
  
• "Peaceable kingdom" is apparently a theological term, but I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out that it is also the title of a song by Rush.

The Fall Overall:
This five-book series contained one excellent novel, one highly enjoyable novel, and three novels that did little for me. It doesn't seem to be a coincidence, either, that the best of the five has the least connection to the main premise of the series; the idea of an increasingly authoritarian Federation coming into conflict with Starfleet idealism seems like an interesting one, but the series did little to make this plausible or compelling. But if it had done this, and had made Ishan less of a black hat, then that might have been too much politics for what is fundamentally an action-adventure series. I guess this is why I'm not very into the political turn of Star Trek fiction: the politics take over the story to the exclusion of what I enjoy about Star Trek... but the politics aren't complicated and realistic enough to convince, because then the books would be something totally different. They're sort of in the uncanny valley.

Weirdly, though The Crimson Shadow has little to do with the plot of The Fall, it probably is the only novel with something interesting to say about the themes of The Fall. None of the other novels really did much with the ideas of how institutions succeed and fail that Crimson Shadow spoke so eloquently to... but they should have. Based on the way real world politics have gone since these books were published, it seems like we could have had a series about a rising tide of nationalism across local space, tying them together more clearly and thematically.

I did like the dominoes thing-- the last three books each hand off to each other, but focus on largely completely different casts of characters. I think really the issue is Peaceable Kingdoms doesn't do anything that the two previous books don't do. It's the same domino we've already seen fall! (to stretch this metaphor to its breaking point)

Peaceable Kingdoms ends with President zh'Tarash stating the Federation is going to get back to exploring things, and there's an interview with James Swallow that describes this as an out-of-universe goal of The Fall as well: "I think we’re going to go back to some of the more traditional mode of what Star Trek is, which is about going to the strange new worlds and exploring all the cool stuff out there." But, you know, if you think Star Trek fiction should be telling more stories about exploring space, you could just commission stories about exploring space. I would have just opened the next TNG book with Bacco sending Picard an e-mail: "Dear Jean-Luc, everything the Borg wrecked has been sorted out, the Typhon Pact is all smiles, go out there and find some weird squid aliens and get into a moral dilemma or something." I'm not persuaded you needed to do a five-book political series to set up that there won't be more big political series! (Clearly this is why my Star Trek tie-in career went so well.)

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg