Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Hall of Heroes

April 2386
Well, if you've been following my reviews of the Prey trilogy thus far, you'll know it hasn't set my world alight. Me on book 1: "But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for." On book 2: "This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated... Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels."

Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes
by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2016
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2024

Well, unfortunately, a hundred pages into book 3 and I was dreading it. A hundred pages into this book and it seemed like almost nothing had happened. In the Enterprise plot, the crew scrutinizes a series of astronomical bodies looking for hidden ships; you know you're in trouble when Picard is complaining about how boring this is. Meanwhile, Worf and Kahless seem like they keep having the same conversation with the Unsung again and again; meanwhile meanwhile the Unsung themselves are just sitting in canyons hiding; meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile we keep cutting to what the very one-note Korgh is up to. It was tedious and very little sense of forward momentum.

Eventually the Kinshaya invade, but by this point I was too disengaged to care. And to be honest, whether the Kinshaya invade the Klingon Empire, whether they fall subject to Breen manipulations, I found it difficult to care about. It's all pretty political and pretty abstract in terms of stakes. As I repeatedly commented about the first two books, it never really feels like anything is at stake here for the characters. Why do these events matter to Picard, to Riker, even to Worf? I very rarely felt as if they did. Over one thousand pages is ultimately a lot of time and space to devote to something with no there there.

The shame of it is I felt like there could have been something really substantial to this, especially for Worf. Worf was discommendated himself on screen but I don't think he ever hit the point of actually questining the discommendation system, even if he himself was done an injustice. I think an arc about Worf at first thinking what was done to the Unsung was just, and then coming to reflect on what was done to him, and the limits of Klingon honor, could have been very interesting. But that's not here; even if the book ends with Worf proposing some changes to the system, it doesn't feel like the book does much to lead up to it. Or a book about Worf struggling to convince Kahless of this—now that sounds like an epic struggle. But mostly Worf just seems to chill out with Kahless and the Unsung, and then it all climaxes and ends.

I find it hard to say much about this series. Until this volume, which got pretty boring, I would have said it was competently written. As I've said before, Miller captures the voices of the preexisting characters well, but doesn't really give them interesting, characterful choices to make; his original characters could be interesting (I thought Shift had real potential), but are in practice fairly one note. It's weird, this is a thousand-page story in an era where Star Trek books can in theory do whatever they want... but it feels like the trilogy was written back in the late 1990s, with the goal of making sure all the characters and all the politics had to be end up back where they began so as not to upset anything the tv show might do.

a Kinshaya, from the old FASA Star Trek RPG
via Memory Beta

Continuity Notes:

• There are a lot of callbacks here to Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, which I don't think had ever been referenced in any other books before. I did appreciate Miller folding the political upheaval in those books into a broader narrative about the Kinshaya, though I don't think most Star Trek writers have been capable of handling the Kinshayan theocracy in an interesting or compelling way, and Miller is no exception.
• One of the High Council members here was also in the Prometheus trilogy, a very minor sliver of continuity that connects those books to the English-language Destiny-era novels. It is very minor, though; I had to ask the author on the TrekBBS what the connection was, because I had read there was one but had not noticed it at all!
  

Other Notes:

• There's this whole exchange about the term "Unsung" on pp. 128-29 that makes no sense to me. Kahless asks if in Klingonese "Unsung" is rendered as lilIjpu' bomwI'pu' or ghe'naQDaj qonta' pagh, and then Worf tells him it was actually Hew HutlhwI'pu'. But... how are they having this conversation, if not in Klingon? Like, in what language is Kahless actually saying the word "Unsung"? How can he not know how the Unsung referred to themselves in Klingon if he must be talking to them all in Klingon? Did I miss some kind of reference indicating the Unsung are all speaking some other language? But even if they are, surely Kahless is speaking Klingon and communicating with them via the universal translator?
• As I did after reading Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, I continue to think that the Breen are an incredibly neat worldbuilding idea—solving continuity conundrums and creating cool story hooks—that books have never really done anything clever with, but this book comes the closest so far.
• The last scene where Riker hunts Korgh down is genuinely clever in its final line.
• I think Doug Drexler is very good at what he usually does... but cover art featuring characters is not what he usually does. What is going on with Worf's hair?

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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Jackal's Trick

Star Trek: Prey, Book 2: The Jackal's Trick
by John Jackson Miller

March 2386

Published: 2016
Acquired: May 2023
Read: March 2024

The Jackal's Trick picks up the plot threads from Hell's Heart, but shifts focus in terms of character somewhat. Whereas Hell's Heart gave us a lot of the Enterprise crew as its main Starfleet characters, this one, especially in its earlier chapters, focuses more on the Titan crew. Hell's Heart had no mention of anything from Titan: Sight Unseen except for Riker's new job; suddenly, here there are recurring characters from Titan like the new XO, Riker's aide, and Ethan Kyzak the North Star cowboy and references to specific scenes in Sight Unseen. (Did James Swallow turn in the manuscript after Miller wrote book 1 before he wrote book 2?) This works to the book's benefit; while Hell's Heart had somewhat bland Enterprise characters reacting to Klingon machinations again and again, The Jackal's Trick has a lot of fun scenes with the Titan crew as they manage to actually deal some setbacks to the Klingon cult.

I enjoyed Worf's strand a fair amount, as he is taken prisoner and tries to teach an Unsung child about honor... only he killed that child's father in honorable combat! Kahless gets some fun moments. Probably the real MVP of the book is Valandris, who is going through a challenging time in terms of values and circumstances. I enjoyed following her narrative, and I look forward to seeing where it—and that of the rest of the Unsung—goes in book 3.

Still, though, if the novel as a form is about characters who grow and change, it feels like Prey is curiously short of them given it's made up of three novels. Surely there's more fun to be gotten from a Tuvok/La Forge team-up than this? A big part of the problem are the two principal villains, Korgh and Cross. Both are very one-note... but feel like with a few tweaks, they could have been more fun and have more depth. Korgh is a wronged man, and one who has used dishonorable methods to reclaim his honor. Surely we could have more sympathy for him, and experience more of his turmoil? But whenever we go to his perspective, he's just cackling manically (inwardly) at a fullproof plan. Whatever interest I saw in Cross from book 1 was undermined almost right away in book 2 when he turned out to be a creepy psychopath. I feel like he could have been the kind of villain you kind of want to win because he's so clever, but again all his scenes feel the same.

This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated. I think in those old days, when Star Trek fiction had a lot of three-book series but not much of an ongoing story, you could have a trilogy that told an exciting story but didn't really move much forward. But this book is part of an ongoing tapestry—and yet it feels like no one in it is allowed to change or develop, even the characters original to it. Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels.

Continuity Notes:

• "The Federation has been at peace with the Klingon Empire since Kirk visited Khitomer." Well, you know, except for the war!

Other Notes:

• Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd guess there's a straight line from Miller enjoying writing Kyzak here to The High Country.
• On p. 116, Cross is proud of himself for using a particular Klingon word... is he supposed to be speaking tlhIngan Hol the whole time? Because if so it would be easy to use a particular word! If not, it raises a bunch of questions best left avoided.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Gamma: Original Sin by David R. George III

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: Hell's Heart

Star Trek: Prey, Book 1: Hell's Heart
by John Jackson Miller

February 2386 / Summer 2286

Published: 2016
Acquired: April 2023
Read: March 2024

Read enough of an author's work, and you begin to notice what interests them, their recurrent themes and obsessions. LibraryThing tells me I own twenty-six books with contributions by John Jackson Miller, of which I have read seventeen, from 2006's Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to 2023's Strange New Worlds: The High Country. As a writer, Miller is often interest in cons and grifts, hoodwinking other, misdirections, sleights of hand, these are all things his villains love to do, but also his protagonists. This is so blatant that in the KOTOR comics he has a grifter actually named "Gryph"! There's a lot of illusion and trickery especially in his novel Picard: Rogue Elements, but a fair bit too in the long con of The High Country. (You can see why they got him to write a Section 31–themed Discovery novel, though I didn't read that one)

Book 1 of Prey is all about a long con, one of the longest cons of all. The Enterprise-E is summoned to help transport various members of the House of Kruge to a ceremony to honor them, in order to set up the House's participation in a vital negotiation between the Khitomer and Typhon powers. The House of Kruge has been leaderless since the events of The Search for Spock a century ago, no squabbling family member able to achieve dominance over another. But when the ceremony comes under attack, it turns out that there's an agenda a work, one that's been in action for a full century!

John Jackson Miller has a good grasp of character voices, but the problem with a novel about a con being run on our heroes is that they largely spend it reactive—and for the most part, the reader is ahead of them. It's pretty obvious that Galdor, gin'tak of House Kruge, is up to something and in league with the assassins who attack the summit even before this is explicitly revealed, but it's something our heroes still don't know after 383 pages. This is a long time to read about main characters who continually react to crisis after crisis, making no headway in understanding what's going on. Like his writer, Galdor is moving all the pieces into position for a dramatic payoff in future installments... but that doesn't necessarily make for riveting reading on its own. (And, unfortunately, as can often be the case with stories of deception, who Galdor was pretending to be was kind of more interesting than who he turned out to actually be.)

Like with Takedown, I felt that Miller handled the screen characters well in the sense of capturing their voices, but less so in the sense that it doesn't really feel like the book matters to them. This is even true with Worf, to whom the events of the book ought to matter a lot. What's at stake for his character? Kahless, I guess? Honor? But these stakes come across as more hypothetical than actual. The nonscreen characters, though, are there in name only, if at all. (Though, it's not Miller's fault if Šmrhová doesn't have a personality.) The previous Next Generation novel, Armageddon's Arrow, did a good job of giving the Enterprise crew little bits and bobs, but this pulls back from that, much as it also pulls back from the Enterprise's suppose renewed mission of exploration yet again.

Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good twists, and some strong action. But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for.

Continuity Notes:

• It feels like a weird thing to complain that I wanted more continuity references in a book that manages to tie the events of Search for Spock to those of DS9's "Captive Pursuit," but I thought it was weird how vague the references to Insurrection were given this takes the Enterprise back to its setting. Picard never thinks, "Oh Anij who I claimed to want to spend hundreds of days with is close by" or anything like that.

Other Notes:

• There's an extended flashback in the middle to the Enterprise-A bumping into the "Unsung" Klingons. I felt like this went on a bit, and again, it seemed like there should be more character stuff at stake, especially for Kirk. Meeting a group of discommoded Klingons who refuses to do anything at all as their ships drift to their doom seems like a good Star Trek Adventures scenario, I'll have to remember that.
  
• When Cross was unmasked, I immediately thought, "Oh, it's The Wizard of Oz." One page later, Cross is quoting the movie and calling its title character a hero. Korgh thinks that he "rather doubted the hero of any children's story would appreciate the worship of a man who had helped engineer the decapitation of one of the great houses of the Klingon Empire." Korgh needs to read The Land of Oz, where we learn the Wizard was willing to hand an innocent baby off to a wicked witch in order to guarantee his own power, ending a royal line.
  
• Cross is a nice lively character among the often dour, honor-obsessed Klingon cast. I hope we get a good amount more from him in books 2 and 3.
• I don't feel that Martok came across as very well; he has to be a bit of a dunce for things to work.
  
• Today I learned that it's spelled "painstik" for some reason.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Prey: The Jackal's Trick by John Jackson Miller

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Takedown

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Takedown
by John Jackson Miller

late November 2385 (concurrent to The Missing)

Published: 2015
Acquired: May 2016
Read: June 2023

The premise of this book sounds fun, and potentially interesting: Admiral Riker has gone rogue, and Captain Picard has to stop him. Picard has spent a career bringing in evil admirals... but what if that evil admiral is the man he trusts most in the universe? Immediate Hunt for Red October vibes. It's a cracker of a premise.

Unfortunately, if you're a writer, you have to work back from and figure out what circumstances would bring this about. And, alas, there's not really any. Riker is not going to become an evil admiral. So it's got to be mind control. And if you're John Jackson Miller, you fish through old Star Trek episodes to find one that's ripe for a sequel. (I feel like every Star Trek book of his I've read has done this, bar The Enterprise War.) "The Nth Degree" is a perfectly logical choice for a follow-up; well, I guess so, anyway, as it's one of those TNG episodes I've never gotten around to! But it seems to have some intriguing loose ends, and the powers of the Cytherians make good sense for giving Riker both a motivation and an advantage.

But once you construct it like that, I feel like the premise is fulfilled only in a purely mechanical way. All this is to say, I thought the first half of the book, where the characters and the reader are trying to figure out what's going on, worked well. It's fast, it's sharp, it's tense.

...but the Picard vs. Riker thing never really materializes. Riker is so smart, no one can really compete with him at all. So what we get instead is more Riker vs. Riker, Riker's conscience vs. Riker's programming. But this is all external, because Riker isn't a viewpoint character once he's possessed. And Riker comes up with plan after plan; we don't see Picard having to do clever things to outwit his old friend. Indeed, the cleverest ploy comes from Dax on the Aventine when she fiddles with the lights.

The second half of the novel, I thought, really fizzled away the potential of the first. Once you find out what's going on, it doesn't even really feel like anything's at stake. In the first half, you're like, who's trying to short out communications across the galaxy? what's this all in aid of? In the second half, the answer is it's not really in aid of anything, it's just an end in itself. There's not actually really any kind of danger coming. The book swerves into making the Cytherian-controlled people other than Riker into a new threat, but this never really convinces; one is a comedy Ferengi whose plan is to sell the Federation mortgages. On top of this, I found the action around the climax fairly confusing.

One of the things tie-in books live or die on is characterization: do the writers capture the characters from the shows? But in reading Takedown I came to realize this actually has two parts. One is, obviously, capturing voices, the feeling that you can imagine the actors delivering the lines. Miller is great at this. But there's another: the feeling that you learned something about the characters you didn't already know. Sometimes this is a change in character, but I think it can be a new situation, a new turn, something you didn't expect. Takedown doesn't really achieve this. (And I know Miller can do this, because I think he did it in both Pike books.) Riker, Picard, Dax... they're all just kind of there, reading their lines as they go through the plot. The non-tv characters feel pretty thin. I think there's potentially a great Riker-as-admiral book to be written, but I still don't feel like I really know that Riker yet. Riker went through this whole experience, but it didn't give me much insight into him; Picard had to potentially do a big thing, but I don't know him any better either.

Maybe I'm being unfair. It has a good zip to it, and the first half is solid. But I feel like a better book with this basic premise exists somewhere in the multiverse, and I wish I'd read it.

Continuity Notes:

• Somehow in the middle of this galactic terrorism crisis, no one mentions the other galactic terrorism crisis everyone is experiencing right now!
• The events of Absent Enemies are repeatedly referred to as "months" ago, but in fact took place in the same month.
  

Other Notes:

• Riker experiences a holoprogram of the Titan, and one of his clues it's a fake is that some of the ranks are wrong. "Always getting the ranks wrong," sighs the creator of the program. "I forget how closely people pay attention." Miller's Titan novella, Absent Enemies, received some flack for getting the ranks wrong, so it's a cute reference.
• I found the account of the political career of Senator Bretorius totally hilarious, especially the jokes about his biographers and his (lack of) participation in Shinzon's coup. His last line is also great.

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

Star Trek: The High Country by John Jackson Miller

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country
by John Jackson Miller

John Jackson Miller provides the first Strange New Worlds tie-in novel—only he also wrote the earlier The Enterprise War, which was a SNW novel in all but name. I really enjoyed The Enterprise War, and have been really enjoying SWN season 1 (as of this writing, I am up to "Spock Amok"), so I was looking forward to this book quite a bit.

Published: 2023
Acquired: February 2023
Read: March 2023

I'm not attempting to diminish the book by saying it ought not to be a hardcover, but a mass-market paperback. That is to say, this book has to do what Star Trek books always used to have to do (but didn't do very much after Nemesis brought a halt to screen adventures for the twenty-fourth century) and slot in between existing episodes. Yet those old novels often  struggled to feel like novels, coming across more as inflated episodes. The High Country threads that needle nicely, giving us events big enough to merit a novel, but not so big that they feel like they disrupt the narrative of the tv show. A strange phenomenon causes Pike, Spock, Number One, and Uhura to be scattered across a strange planet, out of reach of the Enterprise. The novel follows the four of them as they explore this planet and reunite with one another, with some side scenes about the Enterprise crew. What initially seems to be a simple Prime Directive situation soon reveals itself to be part of a complicated, ancient undertaking that could threaten life throughout the quadrant.

The biggest strength of the book is its character voices; I felt that Miller particularly captured Pike, (Ethan Peck's) Spock, and Hemmer. The book is filled with good twists and turns and interesting imagery and cool concepts and neat side characters. I liked the Menders, I liked who rescued Spock, I liked Hemmer's plan, I liked the clever ways the Enterprise crew penetrated the strange phenomenon around the planet. I had a lot of fun with it, and it reads quickly.

I have two complaints, really. One is that a lot of the book hinges on a relationship between Pike and a guest character, and I wish we had more of a sense of it. I usually wouldn't advocate for such a thing, but a prologue flashing back to them in younger days might have been a good idea, and there's one weird bit where we're told they eat dinner together but don't actually get to see it. We're told what they don't talk about, but under the circumstances it's difficult to imagine what they do talk about, and it would be nice to see more of these two old friends. The other is that at the end, things got a bit fuzzy and drawn out, first with lots of talk of rondures, and then with what felt like a few too many epilogues, like watching The Return of the King.

But on the whole I enjoyed this. It captures the spirit of the parent show while also doing something it could never do, spend a protracted span of time exploring a single planet, its culture, and its population.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Absent Enemies

Star Trek: Titan: Absent Enemies
by John Jackson Miller

November 2385

Published: 2014
Acquired: November 2020
Read: January 2023

And we're back to the ebook novellas, a format I have come to appreciate: when they're good, they're fun, and when they're bad, they're short. Absent Enemies is... neither? The Star Trek prose fiction debut of the writer of my favorite Star Wars ongoing comic (and my wife's, in that it's the only one she has ever read) is a short Titan story picking up shortly after The Fall. The Fall gave us a new status quo for Titan: Riker is now an admiral with increased scope of responsibilities, though he seems to be plating his flag on Titan for now, and Vale is in command, but hasn't been permanently assigned as CO yet.

This seems like potentially fertile ground for a story, but Absent Enemies didn't make much use of it. With Riker leading a mission to a planet while Vale remains in command of the ship, you could imagine this playing out basically exactly the same way in the previous status quo.

The book is fun enough: Titan is set to a planet the Enterprise-D visited back in the day; the planet was initially settled by the Vulcans but abandoned and then claimed by two feuding groups of colonists. The Federation comes periodically to service the equipment but can never make any headway with negotiating a peace. The Enterprise's trip was right after "The Next Phase"... and the settlers filched La Forge's draft paper about interphase and in the past decade managed to work out how to do it themselves! Riker and Tuvok and company have to figure out how to deescalate a war, get the settlers to stop using this dangerous technology, and stop the Typhon Pact from taking advantage.

It's fun but it's all a bit, well, insubstantial. There's nothing really at stake for the characters. There are some good action sequences using interphase, but I feel like the idea of two civilizations existing on top of each other is one that could have more done with it, a sort of Star Trek science take on China Miéville's The City & The City (but see below). This isn't a bad ebook novella (e.g., Q Are Cordially Uninvited..., Shield of the Gods), but it's also not the format at its best (e.g., The Struggle Within, The Collectors). I hope future Titan novels explore the characters more, particularly what it means for Riker to be an admiral now.

Continuity Notes:

• Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "Wow it's a shame that instead of helping deal with the galactic terrorism crisis where millions of people are being killed we're babysitting dilithium miners and dealing with whiny settlers." Hmmmmm...
• Various commenters have pointed out that when this book was released, it contained a number of continuity errors: characters present who shouldn't have been, incorrect bits of backstory. One of the benefits of the ebook format is that the publisher can push a change out, so that the edition I read was fine!
  

Other Notes:

• I think the book's attempts to play the enmity between the two groups of settlers as comic is belied by the fact that 90% of them died in their civil war. Like, that's a horrific humanitarian crisis, not a comedy inconvenience.
• I did like the bit where Riker realizes he's become a bit pompous now that he's an admiral.
  
• Full disclosure: I have never actually gotten around to The City & The City. But I have never read anything by Miéville that wasn't good and interesting, so I am sure it is good and interesting. I am working my way through winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel; at my current rate I should get to The City & The City in 2052, so I'll report back then.

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

Review: Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2021
Acquired: August 2021
Read: October 2021

Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements
by John Jackson Miller

My reaction to Picard was mixed enough that its tie-in novels are not automatic buys for me. Rios was a character I think I could have liked, but the melodramatic—and highly coincidental—backstory we eventually learn about undermined the good work Santiago Cabrera did with his performance, and so I wasn't enthused about a prequel novel focusing on him. But 1) I do like Jack Jackson Miller, and 2) I heard the Iotians, from my favorite original series episode, were in it.

I wanted to like this, and I was into it at first—Miller has a good handle on what makes the people of the gangster planet fun—but at a certain point the book began to drag, even with its rapid-fire antics. Or perhaps even because of them. Why, exactly, should I care? The novel didn't always succeed in making its case, unfortunately, and it seemed to just pile on complication on top of complication to the point of alienation. It does all come together in the end... but I was never terribly invested in whether it did or not. Plus, I get that it's a tie-in to a series called "Picard," but the number of people Rios meets who had previously met Picard began to pile up to the point of improbability.

That said, the jokes about the holograms were good, I liked what we learned of La Sirena's previous owner, Rios himself is handled well as a character, and many of the original characters are good fun. I liked a lot of the ingredients, but this feels to me like a novel that demands to be blown through... and instead I kind of plodded. I am not normally an audiobook guy, but I would imagine that a sympathetic audiobook reading would do a lot to life the material here, turning it into the rapid-fire caper it so obviously wants to be.

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: The Enterprise War by John Jackson Miller

Trade paperback, 420 pages
Published 2019
Acquired July 2019
Read August 2019

Star Trek: Discovery: The Enterprise War

by John Jackson Miller

The most recent Star Trek: Discovery novel once again has no scenes aboard the title ship. Instead, this book follows a year in the life of the USS Enterprise, showing what it was doing during Discovery's first season, leading up to its appearance in the season one finale, and retro-foreshadowing some of season 2.

I've always been a fan of Captain Pike's Enterprise-- I used to have a website on a shitty free hosting platform devoted to it-- and I was disappointed that the first Discovery novel, Desperate Hours, didn't quite lean into its Pikeness more. So of course I enjoyed this. At first it's a pretty action-y novel, as the Enterprise explores a dangerous region of space and ends up beset by aliens who kidnap a big chunk of the crew. Fun but disposable. But about halfway through, something dramatic happens, and the novel gets contemplative and atmospheric. I loved the difficult situation everyone ends up in, and I loved how they all handled it, and how it reveals so much about these people. Great big set pieces, awesome visuals of things I surprisingly can't remember being doing in Star Trek before. But also nice little touches, such as Nurse Carlotti's problem, or the role of shipwreck narratives. There are also some nice moments where the book joins

Miller also does a good job with the characters. His Captain Pike captures everything I liked about Anson Mount's portrayal, his Spock is excellent, and he does a strong job with other mainstays like Number One, Yeoman Colt, Nhan, and Doctor Boyce. I also really enjoyed the original character of Galadjian (I hope we see more of him somewhere, but I know by Discovery season 2 he's not around), and I was surprised by he journey Miller took Connolly on. At first the guy annoyed me just as he did in the season 2 premiere, but by novel's end, I understood and liked him and felt bad about how he was depicted in "Brother." Which, I guess, is what a good prequel does!

I'm not totally convinced by every aspect of the joining up, and some of the continuity-smoothing moments are groaners, but overall I really enjoyed this. I've been reading John Jackson Miller's Star Wars comics for over a decade, but this is the first prose fiction and the first Star Trek work I've read from him. He nails it in this universe as much as he did in that one.

Review: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Volume Ten: War

Comic trade paperback, 116 pages
Published 2012
Acquired and read May 2013

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Volume Ten: War

Script: John Jackson Miller
Pencils: Andrea Mutti
Inks: Pierluigi Baldassini
Colors: Michael Atiyeh
Lettering: Michael Heisler

It was around three years ago that I finished up Knights of the Old Republic, the only Star Wars comic series so good that I persuaded my wife to read it. War is a coda to it, which I finally picked up so that she could have an uninterrupted reading experience. It's okay. Zayne has gotten hit by a bit of an idiot ball at the beginning, and KotOR just isn't KotOR without most of the supporting characters, but once the big cons start coming, it feels just like the Knights of the Old Republic I knew and loved. I just hope this isn't the last we see of Zayne and the gang.