Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Enigma Tales

late 2386, weeks after Section 31: Control (according to the Historian's Note) or late 2388, three years after The Fall (according to internal chronological clues)
Sometimes, one might find it easier to write a negative review than a positive one. To write a negative review, one can simply lapse into a catalogue of grievances, and there's a certain terrible joy in that, even if it doesn't necessarily make for a good review. A good negative review, I think, articulates what a book wanted to do and then analyzes how and why it fell short of that—or perhaps even explains why that wasn't a good thing to attempt in the first place.

Similarly, a positive review might simply say again and again, "well here's a good bit about the text." We could start, for example, by mentioning that Enigma Tales is just a joy to read on a word by word basis; there's none of the purposefully beige prose one finds in most Star Trek novels. In my review of Collateral Damage, I discussed the limitations of that third-person limited perspective that most Star Trek tie-ins are written in, and thankfully, McCormack sets out her stall almost immediately in this regard, with a touch of delightful third-person omniscient about Pulaski and Alden on pp. 7-8: "There was a pool on the ship (neither of them knew this) as to how soon she would make him the fourth Mr. Pulaski. There was also another pool (they perforce knew nothing about this either) as to how quickly she would divorce him."

But if you do this, at a certain point a kind of tedium sets in. Oh this was good and this was good and this was good, the end. A good positive review articulates what a book wanted to do and then analyzes how it accomplished that. I'm going to do my best here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales
by Una McCormack

Published: 2017
Acquired: July 2025
Read: August 2025

What did this book want to do? Well, if you ever sit through one of my lectures about literature (3 stars on Rate My Professor), you'll know that in fiction, one of the most important things to pay attention to is when the book you're reading starts talking about books, because that's usually when the book is trying to tell you how to read it. (See my discussion of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith for an example I use a lot.) Enigma Tales tells us how to read it quite early on, on pp. 11-12, when we get a discussion of, well, enigma tales from Natima Lang:

In the enigma tale as we have known it [...] we have evidence that literature—that art—encodes into itself, despite all attempts at extirpation, critiques of the world in which it is created. In the enigma tale, these authors tried to address—through the medium of the puzzle, the riddle—what we could not discuss in public: the nature of our guilt, its role in our past, and its impact on our future.
[...]
Literature such as this creates within its bounds a microcosm for society. In the country houses of the Second Republic, the mansions of Coranum, or [...] the lecture halls and committee rooms of the university, we see our world writ small. The crimes and misdemeanors of the wider world, the perpetrators and offenders, were concentrated and offered for our consideration.
[...]
[M]y question now is—what might the enigma tale look like under our new dispensation? We have seen how, in the past, the question was not which of the characters was guilty, but how were the characters each guilty? Is it possible that in the future an enigma tale might contain a character who is—I can hardly imagine it—innocent?

That's it, that's the book given to you in a nutshell right there! (The book comes back to this on pp. 53-4 and basically says it for a second time, so McCormack really doesn't want you to miss it.) This book uses the University of the Union as a microcosm of Cardassian society, exploring the way that guilt and innocence work. As we see here, the book consistently comes back to an idea from the Deep Space Nine episode "Distant Voices": "The problem with Cardassian enigma tales is that they all end the same way. All the suspects are always guilty." "Yes, but the challenge is determining exactly who is guilty of what." (This itself picked up from what we learned about the Cardassian legal system in "Tribunal.")

Okay, but so what? Part of the joy of science fiction is that it allows us to explore imaginary worlds, permits us to, as Isaac Asimov puts it in the introduction to More Soviet Science Fiction (1962), ask "what if—" and then build up a whole world:

The actual plot of the story, the suspense, the conflict, ought to arise—if this were a first-class story—out of the particular needs and frustrations of people in such a society. The author, while attending to the plot, may well find his chief amusement, however, in designing the little details (the filigree-work, if you like) of the society, even where they do not have any direct connection with the plot. (8)

Una is very good at this kind of filigree work; Cardassia always comes alive in her books, and this one is no exception, filled with little details about what life is like there in general, and how it's changed since the end of the Dominion War ten years prior. There's a compelling subplot, for example, about how some of the part-Bajoran descendants of the so-called "comfort women" raped by Cardassian soldiers are learning how to live with their inheritance in the open.

In that essay, however, Asimov goes on to say something I find completely wrongheaded: "such a story has no lesson to teach with respect to the advanced societies of the here and now" (8). Here, I must part ways with the grandmaster of science fiction and say that I am much more sympathetic to the claims of China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon: "Science fiction is not, whatever its advocates may sometimes claim [...] 'about' the future. It is, like any worthwhile literature, 'about' now, using a technique of rationalized (rather than free-for-all) alienation from the everyday to structure its narratives and investigate the world" (xvii). So, if we believe Miéville, this filigree work (and everything in the novel) shouldn't be telling us stuff about the totally made up world of Cardassia, but also the world we live in.

Again, Una's book lays this out for us from the very beginning. Sure, we get the (confusing) Historian's Note telling us the book is set in late 2386, but the very next page of the book tells us that's not true, that Enigma Tales is "[a] novel about the past, the future, and everything in between"—i.e., the present. The book came out in July 2017, shortly after the election of Trump. I would guess the manuscript was probably entirely or at least mostly finished before that, but of course the book certainly was being written during the election campaign. Probably more relevant from the perspective of a UK author would be the Brexit referendum, in June 2016.

Just like Una's The Fall: The Crimson Shadow, it unfortunately feels like it is about the future, in that the book's discussion of nationalism and authoritarianism are even more relevant in 2025 than they were when the book was written. One suspects that Una probably feels like Emily Tesh, who said this of her novel Some Desperate Glory: "It still shakes me that so many people have picked up the book I started in 2017 based on the worst things I could see in contemporary politics, and responded: yes, this is what's happening right now. I would rather the book were an irrelevant historical curiosity. I hope it becomes so one day." Alas, that hasn't been the case. As an academic in Florida, it was pretty tough to read the discussion here of what happened at the University of the Union when Dukat and the Dominion took over: "Directives came down stating what could and could not be studied. Some teachers complained and were promptly suspended. The shelves in the library thinned once again. Outlandish topics such as [Elima's] were sidelined, with the grants and prizes going to more traditional accounts of great guls and battles won" (p. 70).

In Una's hands, "everyone is guilty" is not just a joke about how bad Cardassians are, though, but a commentary on what it's like to live under an authoritarian regime. In such a society, everyone is guilty, because there's no way to survive without doing something wrong. (Shades of the oft-repeated maxim "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism." Shades also of Audre Lorde's line, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," which is slightly misquoted on p. 215.*) In the book, this appears primarily in a subplot about whether, when serving on a U of U appropriations committee during the old regime, peace activist Natima Lang approved some horrific experiments on children (p. 107). Did she? Even if she did, was it wrong? Lang is a little bit guilty because there is no way to not be a little bit guilty.

So, Enigma Tales is (as per what Natima Lang herself told us on pp. 11-12) is not just about the U of U and Cardassia, but "the crimes and misdemeanors of the wider world"—that is to say, our world. We all do things to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Unfortunately, in the world we live in, we will increasingly see this everyday. Even if Lang didn't do what she was accused of, she wasn't always the best she could be; she didn't return when the civilian government briefly took power on Cardassia (2372-73) because she was afraid.

But Enigma Tales offers us hope, too. At the beginning of the novel, Lang asks, "Is it possible that in the future an enigma tale might contain a character who is—I can hardly imagine it—innocent?" This enigma tale does. As comes out in a conversation late in the novel, we can't only focus on guilt. Everyone might be guilty to some degree... but this also means we're also innocent to some degree. This develops a line of thought McCormack began in The Crimson Shadow: all we can do in an unethically constructed world is attempt to act ethically ourselves. Of course, this is a sentiment baked into the detective novel, as highlighted by Raymond Chandler: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean." Natima Lang may have been guilty. Garak may have been guilty. (He certainly was!) But also they were innocent, and they can be innocent. Even Garak can be innocent, as he reflects that for once, he was (pp. 343-4). Maybe it's hard to imagine you really can be innocent. But as Garak himself notes, that's why we read enigma tales, that why we read Enigma Tales: "Garak [...] savor[ed] [...] the joy of a fiction in which innocence was not only possible but brought reward" (p. 347).

It also offers us hope in the future. A recurrent theme throughout the novel is that rise of the new generation of Cardassians, who carry with them hard work and determination to not repeat the crimes of their ancestors. Garak will give way to Natima Lang someday, but Lang in turn will give way to people like Elima, who spent their childhood under the old regime but most of their adulthood under the new, and thus can see a way to make it better. Elima, in turn, will give way to her own children, who will never know a world where a part-Bajoran Cardassian couldn't openly wear a Bajoran earring. This, too, is the hope we see in our world, a hope that the future will be better because of those who come after us. This doesn't (as the book highlights) mean that we stop working, because our descendants will fix it, but that we have a reason to keep working, because we know that if we can leave our descendants a world better than we found it, they can make it even better than that.

It's a hard hope to believe in, at times. I've discussed here before that in my Star Trek Adventures RPG campaign, the players are contending with a friendly alien race sliding into authoritarianism. I think they will end up losing to the authoritarians, because in 2025, it's not very clear to me how one wins against them. Enigma Tales gives us hope, because the Cardassians, as the novel explicitly reminds us a couple times, are us: Garak, for example, points out that when he was ambassador to the Federation, they gave him a residence in Paris where Nazis used to live (p. 155); Garak writes to Bashir, "I loved Paris, Doctor, but I knew Berlin. I pass through a city like that every day" (p. 100); later Garak opines that probably only humans have as brutal a history as the Cardassians. If the Cardassians can do it, so can we.

But it's not a naïve hope. I have come to very much despise so-called "cozy" fantasy (two "good" examples: Legends & Lattes and Someone you can Build a Nest in), and an essay I recently read by Abigail Nussbaum did a great job of highlighting the issue I have with it:

the ongoing fashion for "cozy", "optimistic", "kind" science fiction [...] often seems to fail on its own terms. Too often, what these novels call kindness is actually the flattening of all difference, and what they call coziness is a refusal to acknowledge cruelty. This novel recognizes that kindness is hard, that well-intended people can have wildly diverging points of view that can lead them to abuse and dehumanize others, and that conflicts are not won by "destroying" your opponent with a killer argument, but by getting them to see you as someone worth compromising with—even if that means sitting across a table from someone who thinks you shouldn't be allowed to make your own decisions.

This book shows that though there is hope, it is also hard. Pulaski, Garak, Elima, Mhevet, Alden, Lang, even the anonymous Starfleet Intelligence spook Pulaski confronts near the end of the book, are all well-intentioned people "only trying to do right in this wicked world," but that still brings them into conflict with each other, in ways both small and big. I found particularly devastating a scene where Garak needles Peter Alden, who still has PTSD from his time as an SI agent among the Tzenkethi (pp. 202-3). It's very cruel, but it unfortunately rings true for Garak. Similarly, Garak and Mhevet are working to the same end, but they come into conflict regardless, partially because of Garak's long-standing inability to trust others (p. 244). Because it is hard, it is hope I can believe in.

There's a very powerful scene near the end of the novel, where Garak confronts Gul Telek, a member of the Cardassian military opposed to the investigations into what crimes Cardassian committed during the Occupation. Garak realizes that Telek is one of the children who was experimented on; the son of a Cardassian soldier and a Bajoran comfort woman, Telek was subjected to procedures to expunge his Bajoran DNA because his father wanted an heir. As Garak says, "you can't wipe away history like that. Something always breaks through" (p. 310). At first this almost seems like a repeat of the Alden scene, with Garak using his psychological insight to disable an opponent, but then Garak extends Telek the compassion no one else ever has. It's beautiful, and had me misting up a little. Similarly, Peter has to help out the rogue SI agent even though he'd rather not: "I can't escape my past, Kitty. Those experiences made me who I am. I can only live with the consequences" (p. 343).

I'm glad I positioned Enigma Tales where I did, as the last novel of the Destiny era before Coda. I don't think there was a better one. If there was, it could only have been a different one by Una. I loved this book, I tore through it in a day and a half, and I didn't want it to end. I think someday I'll just do a reread of all the Una/Cardassia stories from the relaunch era.

If there's a flaw to this book, it's that it made me imagine another book that we will never get. I think Una would write a brilliant campus murder mystery starring Kate Pulaski with Peter Alden as her hapless sidekick. Just imagine it! Pulaski comes to give a guest lecture somewhere, someone dies in mysterious circumstances, local authorities are baffled, Pulaski's keen eye for scientific detail and willingness to trammel over social niceties solves the case while Alden runs around apologizing for her and getting her out of scrapes. So good!! I'm sure we could contrive a way to make this fit into the Picard continuity, figure it out, Simon & Schuster.†

Continuity Notes:

• The doctor-loving soccer-playing Cardassian shop owner who helps Pulaski while she's on the run (pp. 172-4) is Rugal, right? It has been fifteen years since I read The Never-Ending Sacrifice but doesn't he open a shop in the country?

Other Notes:

• Lots of good lines. I like this bit from Elima about the Federation's presence on Cardassia during the reconstruction that really captures Star Trek utopianism in a very casual way: "I loved having you here. All your people—they were so young, so friendly. They laughed a lot, like there was something to laugh about, like they could see that the future was going to be okay. After a while it sort of rubbed off on you. You started to believe them when they said it would be okay. And one day it was" (p. 141).
• Lots of good moments of characterization, especially of Garak. Take this little internal aside from Gark about how he could charm even Bajorans: "Not Kira Nerys. Charm had not been key to winning over Kira. Killing other Cardassians had been necessary to prove himself to Kira" (pp.156-7). Or this bit, when Garak discusses how beneficial Bashir was to him during his exile. "'It was everything he represented. His capacity to see good—even in me—his capacity to strive, to seek to find and not to yield...' He could hear his voice catching. I am delivering a eulogy, he thought, for a man who is not yet dead" (p. 63).
• The book is also quite funny. I loved the bit where Pulaski has to use the comm but says she has no money and the Cardassian who might be Rugal grumbles, "You lot never do." Or when Pulaski goes on a Cardassian 'cast and causes a diplomatic incident. Pulaski is great throughout, as I've alluded to. Or the Or the bit where Pulaksi tells Alden she's been violating the Prime Directive since he was in diapers (p. 255). Or the bit where Mhevet goes "That bloody woman!" and Garak says that when he wrote Picard to ask about Pulaksi, he said the exact same thing (p. 273).
• McCormack has a Ph.D. in sociology, and worked as a professor in higher ed for many years. For that reason, the details of academia always ring true in a way I very much appreciated, such as the recounting of Elima's academic career thus far on pp. 20-21. She knows exactly the scope of a doctoral thesis, knows what kind of work early career academics do and how it gets recognized.
• I enjoyed the occasional comments about human literature Garak read and enjoyed, which includes Douglas Adams (p. 156). Garak even goes on to claim that if he needs to a new career, he'd like to be a book reviewer!
• The book is filled with unsent letters from Garak to Bashir, comatose since the events of Section 31: Control. (This is one of the details that makes the 2388 setting more compelling than the 2386 one; the way everyone talks about Bashir makes it seem like he's been unconscious for years, not months.) In the letters, Garak rues that he has finally gotten Bashir to Cardassia, and Cardassia is the most beautiful it's ever been... and Bashir can see none of it. I was originally a little grumpy that McCormack couldn't write, that no one could write, a story of Bashir and Garak together on postwar Cardassia because of the events of a novel I liked much less, but I came around on this because as much as we might want things to work out perfectly, of course they don't. I myself said it earlier; the book works because making a better world is difficult. The letters are beautiful and they're sad. I'm sure there's an perfectly serviceable audiobook of this novel read by Robert Petkoff, but it's a shame there's not one read by Andrew Robinson.
• The two scenes at the bedside of the comatose Bashir are quite moving: Pulaski's is (p. 298) but particularly Garak's (p. 346-7).

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward

* Surely this is the only Star Trek novel to quote Audre Lorde? I wish it weren't so.
† Wait, wait, I've got it! What if it was set between seasons one and two of Picard, when he's the chancellor of Starfleet Academy! "That bloody woman!" C'mon, it'd be brilliant!!

Star Trek: Asylum by Una McCormack

Strange New Worlds is by far my favorite of the Paramount+-era Star Trek shows, and Una McCormack is by far my favorite of the current stable of Star Trek novelists. Put these two together, and let's say that I was predisposed to like this book.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum
by Una McCormack

Published: 2024
Acquired and read: November 2024

So thankfully, I did. The book has two parallel narratives; in one, the Enterprise is assigned to Starbase 1 to assist with negotiations with a race of catlike aliens. These aliens turn out to 1) have a racial minority that they oppress, and 2) have been encountered by Una ("Number One") in her Academy days. As the novel goes on, the negotiations are complicated by mysterious acts of vandalism on behalf of the oppressed minority. In the other, we follow Una during her Academy days as she befriends those aliens, but also struggles with balancing all the other aspects of life she wants to participate in, including a Gilbert and Sullivan production and the maintenance class taught by the Enterprise's future chief engineer, Pelia ("The Broken Circle"). At the same time, she also meets Christopher Pike for the first time, as he returns to the Academy to give a lecture series for cadets in the midst of a personal crisis of his own.

I zipped through this on a plane ride during my Thanksgiving vacation, beginning it before the plane took off and finishing it before it touched down. McCormack's novels are always easy to read, but in a pleasurable, rewarding way: there's a real depth of characterization here missing from most tie-in fiction, which typically just aspires to make sure you can imagine that the actors are reading the lines. Una is the novel's standout, McCormack deftly using her backstory as someone who must "pass" in a society that discriminates against her to bring out the complexities of such an undertaking. How can Una advocate for other people to be who they are when she herself must deny who she is in order to survive? McCormack was in higher education for many years, and her depiction of Una draws on that to show off a very real type of person from academia, the one who wants to do everything but soon finds themself hitting their limitations.

On top of that, unlike many tie-in novels, it's thematically rich, dealing with the complexities of cultural oppression and cultural resistance. There are sfnal metaphors here for the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen in the US, the UK, and around the world when majority groups confront minority groups, and it all feels very real. I know many tie-in writers don't like it when I say things like this, but every time I read a Star Trek book by McCormack, typically the only thing I don't like about it is that it means McCormack hasn't written the great original sf novel about cultural clash that I truly believe she has within her! I read this at a rough time in my life, but like Bujold's Brother in Arms (which I read around the same time), it reminded me of what I needed to do: fulfill my obligations, both to myself and others, as ethically as possible.

I have some quibbles—Una has to make a mistake I really don't buy to set off the novel's present-day events, the Federation ambassador negotiating with the aliens seems to know curiously little of them—but there's a lot to like here. So far there's only two SNW novels, and I don't know how many more there will be in the long run, but I am willing to wager that this will be the best, unless of course McCormack writes another. (Shame about the incredibly bland cover.)

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Missing

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Missing
by Una McCormack

late November 2385

Published: 2015
Acquired: February 2021
Read: June 2023

Well, look! Following on from Lust's Latinum Lost, our first DS9-branded book in five years, we now get our first actual DS9-branded novel, shelved right next to The Never-Ending Sacrifice.

But as a Deep Space Nine novel, it might seem a bit odd. Its main characters are Beverly Crusher and Katherine Pulaski, both main characters on The Next Generation. Beyond that, there's a lot of Ro Laren, who appeared in TNG on screen, though she became a DS9 prose character way back in 2001's Avatar, Book One. Plus, it follows up some on the events of Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship, a TNG novel in all but name, and it features chapter openers extracted from Captain Picard's logs!

Yet, I said "it might" because until it was pointed out by a poster on the TrekBBS, I didn't even really notice! It felt like a DS9 novel right from the off. I think this is down to a few reasons. One is that Pulaski, prickly and full of personality, but fundamentally decent, fits right in with the DS9 cast. I really enjoyed the way McCormack wrote Pulaski, which felt a bit redemptive, in that I think it's what TNG might have been going for in season two, but didn't quite accomplish most of the time. I liked her developing friendship with Crusher, and McCormack does a good job of writing her as someone whose personality traits are sometimes weaknesses, but which she knows how to leverage as strengths. I never thought I'd say this, but more Pulaski please.

Another plus is the return of Odo to the fold. I guess he was up to something in The Fall that I didn't remember, but here he comes to DS9 to intervene on behalf of an old Cardassian colleague and ends up drawn into the events of the novel. McCormack excels with Odo just as she does so many other DS9 characters, capturing his dialogue—and his occasional lack of it. The scenes between him and the Tzenkethi asylee Cory were a particular highlight, both when he runs into her in the station temple and when he seeks her ought in the station security cells. Plus there's some great stuff with Quark and Odo. (And just Quark in general; he's not a big part of this book, but all his scenes work well.)

But most of all this works as a Deep Space Nine book because it feels like a Deep Space Nine book. It's about the kind of things Deep Space Nine was about: the legacies of colonialism, empire, and war, the tension between idealism and realpolitik in espionage, and the making of families by people who have none. There's four plotlines here: a group of travellers called the People of the Open Sky come to DS9 and there's something a little suspicious about them, the civilian science vessel Athene Donald launches with a crew including Typhon Pact members and immediately runs into some belligerent aliens, the Tzenkethi expert from Starfleet Intelligence, Peter Alden, comes to DS9 with asylee Cory and she runs away, and Ro and Odo try to track down some Cardassian prisoners who never returned home after the Dominion War. All four plots intersect with those three themes.

Colonialism, empire, and war always run through DS9, of course; here we see them in the People fleeing them, but unable to ever fully leave them behind; Ro must deal with some harsh crimes perpetrated against the people who once did much the same to her people. That tension between idealism and realpolitik is a key one, and the novel keeps it complicated. Should Castellan Garak do what is political or what is right? Is Peter Alden too suspicious for his own good? Is he exploiting Cory? It would be easy to sneer at Peter (some in the review thread for this book on the TrekBBS seemed to find him a caricature), but though Pulaski sneers at him, I don't think the novel does; sometimes he's wrong... but he's also right a couple times, and without his know-how Pulaski would have never saved the day... and in the end, it turns out she's been the one who's too pessimistic.

And then we come to family. The "missing" of the title are the children, family, and friends we've lost. Maybe we left them because we had to walk away, maybe they left us. Maybe we were left by them. The People leave their original society, Odo is left by his people, the Cardassians leave prisoners with the Romulans, Cory leaves Ab-Tzenketh, Pulaski and the Athene Donald leave the Federation, Ro left her people way back when. Even Crusher leaves hers. They are all missing. But what goes missing can be found: the People find a new home and a new family, Odo made his own family on DS9, the Cardassians made a new home and so even do Cory and Peter, Ro made a new family in Starfleet even if it took a long time. And at the end Crusher goes back to her family: missing and found.

That's not all; the book plunges into questions of exploration and first contact in ways that feel very Star Trek but also put some pressure on it—surely the most Deep Space Nine of moves. You can see the influence of Ursula K. Le Guin here; her League of All Worlds, later the Ekumen, comes across as influenced by Star Trek's Federation in some ways, and here the influence comes back, some of the questions Le Guin posed being returned to their point of origin. Crusher even cites Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," and I found this a much more interesting engagement with its ideas than the somewhat ham-handed take on them in Strange New Worlds.

All of this is wrapped up, of course, in McCormack's deft characterization and strong narrative voice. I often feel that Star Trek novels are written by people who want the words to be as unobtrusive as possible, as though the words get in the way of the story. But the words are the story, and McCormack's playful narrative voice is fun to hang out with. It's not perfect—one occasionally feels something important to the plot has been elided or rushed (is there no Defiant to help the Athene Donald?)—but what is important to the book is always there in full so it's hard to be annoyed with it since you're always being entertained by it.

I keep thinking about a line from the very first chapter, what Picard thinks is the ultimate challenge: "the challenge that one sets oneself: to be pitted against the unknown and to find within oneself the capacity to respond not with fear but with curiosity, empathy, and humility." It's a good summation of what Star Trek teaches us we can do, and what this novel reminds us that we must find in ourselves to do again each day.

image courtesy ScreenRant

Continuity Notes:

• Doctor Crusher is taking a leave from the Enterprise to replace Bashir as CMO of Deep Space 9 following the events of The Fall. This was a thing I totally did not remember happening. To be honest, I remembered hardly anything about the status quo of DS9 following The Fall, and had to be reminded and/or look a lot of stuff up.
• I read this after Picard: Second Self but of course it was published first; both books focus on the fallout of the Romulan/Cardassian front during the Dominion War, describing it as one of the most brutal. I don't think this derives from anything on screen, so McCormack is carrying over one of her own ideas from the Destiny continuity into the new one.
  
• One would think if there was an ongoing galactic terrorism crisis targeting space stations where the perpetrators seemingly had the ability to just appear anywhere it would come up in this book set on a space station where the villains have the ability to just appear anywhere. One would think.

Other Notes:

• I felt like there was a bit of meta shade directed at earlier books when Pulaski observed it didn't make sense for someone in a marriage to work through a problem by temporarily splitting up.
  
• O'Brien appears very suddenly and very late, almost like two-thirds of the way through the book someone reminded the writer he was back on the station so she started using him as a character from that point on.
• Starfleet's worst chief of security, Jefferson Blackmer, appears in this book. Not even McCormack can totally salvage a character whose entire personality is "likes space stations," but he is more interesting here than in any of his David R. George III–penned appearances. He offers his resignation to Ro, but alas, she does not take it.
• Oh! Garak is in this. He's well written, of course, but my favorite part was how Odo responds to Garak's new position of authority.
  
• McCormack's inspiration was a tweet from Dan Tostevin, my former editor at Unreality SF. He showed me this tweet back when the novel came out, but I think his twitter has vanished now.
  
• I want to know what "excellent speculative novel" about a first contact Picard mentions reading. It sounds Le Guinnish but doesn't map onto anything I can think of from Le Guin.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Takedown by John Jackson Miller

Doctor Who: Royal Blood by Una McCormack

Doctor Who: The Glamour Chronicles: Royal Blood
by Una McCormack

I've been reading my way through the VNAs* and EDAs,† plus related novels, which have mostly been ones featuring Bernice Summerfield. That brought me to the NSA‡ Big Bang Generation because it guest-starred Benny. It dawned on me while reading it that Big Bang Generation was the second installment in the Glamour Chronicles trilogy, and that I'd quite like to read the first one as well because it was by Una McCormack, so I added Royal Blood to my list. Properly I ought to have read it before Big Bang Generation (I think, anyway), but too late now.

Published: 2015
Acquired and read: April 2023

Royal Blood feels more like a novella than a novel. Not so much in terms of length (it is probably on the short end for an NSA but not overly so) but in terms of structure. It just doesn't have the kind of complicated structure one might expect from a novel. Instead, the Doctor and Clara kind of turn up, observe what's happening, slightly get involved, and then things come to an end. There are not significant turns in the plot. That's not a criticism per se, it just requires you to calibrate your expectations: this would probably work a bit better in a volume of short fiction than as a $10 book. It's an elegaic story about the end of civilizations and the clash of colonizer and colonized and holding true to one's values.

McCormack is generally quite good at exploring this kind of thing, but though I enjoyed the book, I didn't think this was one of her stronger ones. Specifically, the guest characters mostly felt like types rather than people. I wanted to like them, but there just wasn't enough to them, unfortunately. Did we not spend enough time in their heads? Did the short length of the book mean they just didn't have enough to do? I am not sure, but I found them less successful than similar characters in some other McCormack books. I wonder if cutting this down even further would have the answer, make it into a punchy novella in terms of length, and then the level of characterization would feel slightly more appropriate.

What the Glamour is and how it works doesn't really seem to have anything to do with how it was in Big Bang Generation, but this is much more interesting, so I am willing to make that a knock against Gary Russell, not Una McCormack. There is some neat stuff here, the story is of course well told, and it reads quickly. A good NSA, but it's by Una, so I know it could have been a great one.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: Bernice Summerfield: True Stories

* Virgin New Adventures
† Eighth Doctor Adventures
‡ New Series Adventures

Star Trek: Picard: Second Self by Una McCormack

Star Trek: Picard: Second Self
by Una McCormack

I was not much into season one of Star Trek: Picard, and what little I've seen thus far of season two hasn't won me over much either. One of the things that hasn't worked for me has been the character of Raffi; she's fine as part of the ensemble, but the episode of the first season that focused on her was absurdly melodramatic and poorly written. There have been some good Picard novels, however, and I in particular think that Una McCormack is an excellent author with a great grasp on character. So after some early positive reviews, I went ahead and picked this novel up. It helps bridge the gap between seasons one and two of Picard, focusing in particular on Raffi and Elnor.

 

Published: 2022
Acquired and read: October 2022

It was a good gamble. McCormack's characterization transformed Raffi for me; seeing her from the inside makes her feel real in a way the show never really managed. She's just so very good at the small moments between people that make them come to life: Raffi and Picard, Raffi and Laris, Laris and Picard, Rafii and Elnor, Raffi and her old coworkers at Starfleet Intelligence. Seeing what each thinks of the other, how each uses the other, and how each feels the other is using them, makes them all click in various combinations and feel all the more real for it.

 

The book has a nested structure: parts one and five take place in the present of Picard, parts two and four follow Raffi right after the Dominion War, part three is during the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. As always, McCormack also does a great job with the complexity of geopolitics. The book mostly revolves around a Bajoran colony annexed by the Cardassians; the Bajorans were driven out, and then during the Dominion War, Romulans occupied the colony, but then pulled out following the peace treaty; now the Romulans are returning as refugees following the explosion of their star. There's a lot of traumas and histories embedded in the history of the planet, which McCormack's novel explores in depth, along with the personal histories that get embedded in the social ones: who were these Bajorans, these Cardassians, these humans, these Romulans?

If you're a McCormack fan, then you'll know she has the best handle on Garak other than Andy Robinson himself, and the big hook for this novel is that Raffi is tasked with bringing Garak in to appease the Federation's Bajoran allies without aggravating their Cardassian or Romulan ones. In her novels in the so-called "Destiny era," McCormack developed a history for Garak after the show, but this goes in a slightly different direction though it seems to share commonalities up until the events of The Fall: The Crimson Shadow. As always, McCormack really gets Garak, but he also doesn't steal the show from Raffi; he fits perfectly into this story of compromising who you are and figuring out how to live with yourself. There's one passage that almost made me tear up, as McCormack briefly flashes forward from a young Garak to a DS9-era Garak to reflect on what the story's events meant to him. (McCormack's ability to actually have a perspective and narrative style are, of course, what makes her the best working Star Trek author. None of the other ones would dare abandon third-person limited past tense voice to do something interesting like this.)

The book is riveting reading; I think I allotted myself four days to read it, but ended up blasting through over half of the book in one day because I was enjoying it so much. The best Star Trek novel I've read since, well, The Crimson Shadow. (But when will she write her amazing original novel?)

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: Wonderlands by Una McCormack

Published: 2021
Acquired: May 2021
Read: July 2021

Star Trek: Discovery: Wonderlands
by Una McCormack

This Discovery novel isn't a prequel per se, but it does plug a gap; there's one year between the first and second episodes of Discovery season three, where Michael Burnham is stranded on her own in the 32nd century, after "the Burn" caused the collapse of the Federation and much other interstellar civilization. She must acclimate herself to a new time and place, one where the ideals she adhered to might not quite apply anymore because no one else believes in them but her.

It's by Una McCormack, so it's better than the third season of Discovery really deserves. I enjoyed S3 at first, actually, but like a lot of seasons of Discovery it lost me somewhere in the middle (in fact, I would say the much-derided S1 is the one I thought worked well the longest), with its overreliance on unearned sappy emotional moments. McCormack focuses on what worked well in the early parts of the season: the idea that the Discovery crew were special because they remembered the Federation at its height, and thus lived its ideals in a way no others did. She works some of Burnham's history in as effective grace notes in her characterization, and also lays some groundwork as to how the Federation collapsed so easily: even before the Burn, things were strained, thanks to the Temporal Wars and then an unprecedented, rapid expansion of the Federation. Pleasingly, we get a lot more of Sahil, the guy who waited decades for a Starfleet officer, but was seemingly forgotten by Discovery S3 after its first episode until its very last.

It's a good book but it doesn't really stand on its own because it feels like the first act of a longer story; this is about how Burnham is rebuilt in preparation for something else-- but the something else is on the tv show, not here is this book. It might get away with this if the tv show went somewhere worth going, but in fact the strength of this novel made me more aware of how S3 fumbled its landing. There's a big emphasis here on how Burnham carries ideals everyone else has forgotten about, and that also pervaded the first several episodes of S3. So, one might expect that what allows Discovery to succeed in the end of the season is something to do with that. But in fact, when Burnham is made captain at season's end, the Admiral praises her for disobeying her orders... something she did not because of her classic Federation idealism. The Discovery as a whole doesn't succeed because they believe in the Federation, but just because they do better in the big action sequences than the bad guys. (And on top of that, they are mostly pretty dumb action sequences.) Oh, and because the Discovery crew comes up with such a good idea for tracking the source of the Burn it beggars belief that no one else thought of it in a century.

None of this is the novel's fault, of course. But reading it did make me realize we were robbed of a better story than the one we were told; it's a better ste-up novel than the season's poor pay-off warrants.

(Also: I did kinda wonder about the title going in, but it turned out to be a good choice. As we learned back in S1, one of Burnham's defining books was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and of course she's "through the rabbit hole" here, in a world all topsy-turvy and without logic. Additionally, Burnham remembers a piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry she once read about "a man walking through the ruins that the Romans left behind. This ruin is a wonder . . ." What bothers me here is that upon Googling, the only hit I can find for the poetry is Wonderlands itself. What is she quoting!?)

((Also also: I liked how a number of minor characters were named after early women Star Trek novelists.))

Review: Doctor Who: All Flesh is Grass by Una McCormack

Published: 2020
Acquired: March 2021
Read: May 2021

Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: All Flesh is Grass

by Una McCormack

My interest in the Time Lord Victorious "multi-platform event" is mostly based around the eighth Doctor, so I picked up the second novel-- in which he is a protagonist-- and not the first-- in which he only cameos. Plus the second book is by Una McCormack, and the first is by Steve Cole, so, you know. Instead, I came at it from the eighth Doctor's perspective, reading it between the second and third Time Lord Victorious audio from Big Finish. (More about my TLV order in Friday's post.) The premise is basically that in the first book, the tenth Doctor decided he was going to stop death from every coming into existence, and in this book, the eighth Doctor teams up with Daleks and the ninth with vampires to stop him.

It was fine. It doesn't quite feel right, like it was written in a hurry, or written to be expanded, and never was. On the one hand, I liked the moments where the three Doctor interacted; McCormack as always has a great handle on character voice and motivation. The gag about the potted plant that was a companion was great, and I liked the interactions with the vampire leader. Plus there are some neat ideas here (which I won't spoil). On the other hand, thematically it didn't really cohere-- if the tenth Doctor was supposed to learn something about himself, I'm not sure when it actually happened. It's like he's "bad" and then he's not. The book breathlessly skips from plot to plot: at first it's about stopping the tenth Doctor, then it's about battling Daleks, then it's about something else entirely. By the end, it feels like the climax comes from a different story than you started reading, and it's not really satisfying as a result. Which is a shame, because, you know, this is by Una. But it didn't really work for me.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: The Fall: The Crimson Shadow

Published: 2013
Acquired: September 2019
Read: November 2020

Star Trek: The Fall: The Crimson Shadow

by Una McCormack

24 August–4 September 2385
"Make Cardassia great again!"

If this sentence is ever actually uttered in The Crimson Shadow, I missed it; the back cover uses "restore Cardassia to its proper place and glory" which seem a bit unwieldy for a baseball cap. Despite being published in 2013, the book has clear echoes (pre-echoes?) of populist movements like Brexit and Trumpism: a yearning for a better past which was actually not better than the present. Institutions designed for democracy are being co-opted for undemocratic purposes. It would be depressing if it wasn't for the fact that Una McCormack is able to see a way out of it all, but more on that in a bit.

Just as Revelation and Dust was a Deep Space Nine novel de facto if not de jure, The Crimson Shadow has the Enterprise-E on the cover, and thus seems to be a Next Generation novel de facto. But like a lot of McCormack books, it actually feels like a novel, not a pale reflection of a tv episode. One of the things I really like about her approach is that she picks and chooses her viewpoint characters based on thematic relevance-- every character who we spend time with doesn't just advance the plot, but the ideas of the novel. This means several Enterprise characters don't really appear; the novel gives us the ones we need for the story being told: Picard, Šmrhová, and (in what turns out to be a great surprise, so don't read on if you mind spoilers) Glinn Dygan. On the other hand, we also get a significant storyline featuring Arati Mhevet, a senior investigator in the Cardassian constabulary. And, of course, Elim Garak. Together these characters create a tapestry of post-Dominion Cardassia, and a story about how to behave ethically in the face of institutional pressures to do otherwise.

I really liked Mhevet. She's a cop in the new postwar Cardassian constabulary, one that tries to be answerable to the people-- not to the interests of power like prewar Cardassian institutions. But though she does her best, her complacency and short-sightedness do her in at first before her investigations kick into gear. I really liked every scene featuring her as she tries to navigate what is the right thing to do in some tricky situations where she is the only person trying to do right at all. But even when it seems like it's just her against the planet, she sees things through.

There's a scene featuring her and Garak near the end that brings the whole novel into focus:

Folding his hands around hers, he [Garak] gave her a steady, sky-blue look. "But you understand, don't you, that the institutions don't matter? The Obsidian Order, Central Command, the True Way, Starfleet, empires, unions, federations-- these are names and names only. They are tools. They count for nothing if the purpose is flawed. That was mistake for a long time-- confusing the purpose with the instrument. It took me a long time to learn the truth."
     "What is the truth?"
     "The truth?" Garak laughed, softly, as if he had never imagined that he would be asked such a question. "The truth is that the institution flourishes only when the people who comprise it flourish. And if the people are sick, the institution will be sick." He squeezed her hand. "If there's anything I could teach you, I'd teach you that."
     "I think I knew that. But I became complacent, or frightened, or something.... Whatever it was, I held myself back from what was going on."
     "Yes," he said, nodding, "that was your mistake, Arati. But it doesn't stop, you understand? It doesn't ever stop. We can never hold ourselves back." (267)

Ostensibly this is about Mhevet, but it is also the idea underpinning the strands about Picard and Šmrhová. Cardassia is on the verge of seeing the Federation withdraw when President Bacco is assassinated over in Revelation and Dust, and the new interim Federation president is a Bajoran who is less kindly disposed toward Cardassia. He gives some orders that will cause harm to the planet and its standing: and Picard and Šmrhová both have to find ways to do good within an institution that inhibits their ability to do it. Šmrhová has been a regular character since Destiny, but like with Bowers in McCormack's Brinkmanship, this was the first time I felt she had a personality, as she takes the action she thinks is right-- violating a presidential order-- and in doing so saves the day. There's a great scene between her and Dygan at the end. Dygan is a serious young man, prone to overthinking everything. He has to participate in some awful stuff here, but he and Šmrhová find solace in each other: her being the Starfleet officer who doesn't think, and knows when to bend the rules, him being the career Cardassian officer who learned to know when his institutions were leading him astray.

This is Una McCormack, so on top of all this thematic richness, there's of course Garak and Cardassia. McCormack does a great job of threading the needle with both of those, making them recognizable yet evolved at the same time. I loved a scene where a bunch of Cardassians get discomfited by the idea of peacefully rally. A bunch of people freely stating their opinions in public!? This is a proud people but a stubborn people, too; they are weighed down by their past instead of empowered by it. I also thought McCormack did a good job with the politics of it all, especially in the way Castellan Garan gets pushed into an untenable position.

And yeah, Garak. His letters (picking up from A Stitch in Time) are a constant delight, as is his dialogue. McCormack nails his voice; the idea that he had a long-term friendship with Bacco is a great one, as is the way Garak expresses so much of himself through the discussion of literature. (Garak loving Austen isn't a thing I would have expected but it makes so much sense as soon as you are told it.) She even makes the idea of Garak becoming leader of Cardassia plausible! Well, kinda. I buy it from a character perspective; I don't quite buy that Cardassia would vote for a former Obsidian Order agent. But I think this will open up interesting avenues in the future, and I look forward to seeing its ramifications in future books.

Like I said, this is a book that anticipated Brexit and Trumpism. But it also anticipated a way out: Cardassia cannot be made "great again" through its institutions. But it can be made great if its people are great, as long as a rose grows in the ruins and someone is willing to speak truth to power. This book is a moving, meaningful celebration of the Cardassian (and human) ability to stop, to say what must be done, and in doing so change both one's self and the world.

Continuity Notes:

• It's not the fault of the book, but my memory of postwar Cardassian history was a bit fuzzy. Specifically, I hadn't realized that "The Calling" from Prophecy and Change had been pinned down chronologically (by The Never-Ending Sacrifice? or maybe A Singular Destiny, going by Memory Beta). That means Alon Ghemor is dead, succeeded by Raken Garan as castellan of the Cardassian Union. And I barely remember The Lotus Flower at all, which is referenced a few times. I did piece it all together eventually.
• If my sums are right, Garak was Cardassian ambassador to the Federation for more than seven years. It's weird to think he would have lived on Earth longer than he lived on Deep Space 9!* But in this case, I do believe it; Garak has been changed by his time on Earth in a way that was not true of O'Brien's time on Cardassia in Revelation and Dust.
  
• Damar and Dukat had no first names on screen; the fiction has dubbed them Corat Damar and Skrain Dukat, respectively. I get why prose needs to do this, but I always find it a bit jarring. (Plus I hate "Skrain.") What particularly jars here is that every time Damar is mentioned (and he's mentioned at a lot, having become a postwar hero for his resistance to the Dominioin), he's called "Corat Damar." Corat Damar this, Corat Damar that. We got through four years of him on tv without his first name being mentioned, but here we can't go four minutes!

Other Notes:

• There are just a lot of nice little touches in this book. The little kid informant with a voracious appetite that Mhevet rescues is one of them; I enjoyed how Šmrhová was punished by Picard with babysitting duty, and how the girl insists she needs to eat breakfast with "the nice old man." And a part where seeing this girl in mortal danger causes Picard to text Crusher to hug René for him was a nice touch, too.
• There is a great bit of comedy where Garak complains that unlike Picard, Sisko would have let him overthrow a democratically elected leader. I would have loved to have seen Patrick Stewart and Andrew Robinson play some of these scenes on screen.
• The thing about how coffee has become so popular on Cardassia is great, as is what its unavailability symbolizes.
• Picard gifts Garak a copy of The Master and Margarita, a book I own but have not yet got around to reading. I must do so!
  
• I didn't find a place to mention it in the main body of my review, but man can McCormack write. Above and beyond any other working Star Trek writer, her prose has a real sense of voice. I love those scenes where she does something like move outside of the generic third-person limited perspective that dominates Star Trek fiction, especially when she also plays with tense. The end of Part One, where we get a summation of where everyone is at the moment Picard finds out Nan Bacco is dead (pp. 118-21), for example, is powerful.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Fall: A Ceremony of Losses by David Mack

* Pedants take note that I said "Deep Space 9," not "Terok Nor and Deep Space 9."

Review: Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack

Hardcover, 322 pages
Published 2020
Acquired January 2020
Read July 2020

Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope
by Una McCormack

This prequel novel to Star Trek: Picard sets up the basic premise: that Picard undertook a massive effort to do the right thing, and lost. It covers about five years, from when Picard learns about the need to evacuate a massive number of Romulans because of an imminent supernova, up to when the renegade synth attack on Mars utterly destroys his plans. It's a quick, strong read, as you might imagine of Una McCormack. She has a good handle on Picard: one he sees what the right thing to do is, he pursues it utterly. What distinguishes Picard from The Next Generation is that every time Picard stands up for what's right in TNG, it works out for him. Picard is a tragedy, the story of the time Picard's moral convictions lead to his downfall. McCormack does a good job taking the base attributes of Picard from TNG and transposing them into a new situation, and also surrounds him with a strong cast of characters, a mix of ones from the show and ones original to this book. I really liked how she wove in and out of them: Raffi, Clancy, Tajuth, and Koli were my favorites aside from Picard. There are a number of good scenes, but I liked Raffi talking about Romulan music and the scene in Paris between Jurati and Maddox after the attack the most.

(Two objections: I don't buy the novel's revelation that Jurati is Starfleet, and I wish we had seen where Laris and Zhaban came from.)

McCormack is a top-tier tie-in novelist, and that's partially because she has a voice: almost every Star Trek novel (my own included) is told in a bland third-person limited format. McCormack The Last Best Hope has a neat retroactive, omnipotent voice that occasionally intrudes, telling us what happened to character years later. It adds to the sense of tragedy, and helps deepen the sense of character. To be honest, I feel like her talents are wasted on tie-in novels. Where's her original sf novel?

This novel kind of makes me mad, though, because I found that Picard abandoned its potentially interesting premise as it went on. The idea of Picard dealing with and confronting his great failure was downplayed in favor of a really dumb story about an ancient Romulan conspiracy and rogue androids that had no character weight at all. The Last Best Hope does a good job showing how the Federation could pretty justifiably let down the Romulans so badly. It does such a good job setting up Picard's failure that it made me mad about the show's direction all over again. Why wasn't it working with this material instead of doing... whatever the hell it decided to do?

Review: Once Upon a Parsec edited by David Gullen

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2019
Acquired October 2019
Read December 2019

Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales
edited by David Gullen

This science fiction anthology has a fairy tale theme: some of the stories are in the form of fairy tales, others are about the telling of tales. Some are both! The title uses the word "alien" but sometimes it means humans on alien planets-- though many others are alien creatures on alien worlds with no acknowledged connections to humanity at all. Like any anthology outside of a really good "best of," the stories are hit and miss; I found the ones that just were fairy tales (but for alien cultures) to be on the weaker side, often too weird and inscrutable-- or too straightforward. The ones more about the telling of tales were usually better, in my opinion, going beyond the frame to say something about why we tell fairy tales.

Along those lines, it's probably bad for the book that one of its best stories is its first, "The Little People" by Una McCormack. It's about human settlers on a distant world, alternating between a second-person narrative about the child of settlers telling themselves the story of colonization and the third-person narrative of the actual colonization. Like all sf, it reflects back on our own world... in this case, quite damningly... but it is (as always for Una) beautifully told. I also liked Liz Williams's "Starfish," which takes as its subject the difficulty of doing something like translating a story from an alien culture to a human one.

That said, Chris Beckett's "The Land of Grunts and Squeaks" was a very good example of what you can do with a "straight" alien fairy tale. It's a tale from the culture of insect species that's in telepathic communion, and it's about a curse: the curse of having that taken away! "Children were left alone with fears which no one else could see. Lovers could no longer feel each other's love. A woman would look at her life's companion and think, 'I'm sorry about those angry feelings I had earlier on. I truly love you with all my heart', but her friend would have no idea she'd had that thought. Tender caresses lost their meaning, becoming no more than one skin touching another." Imagine such a terrible world! It works because it communicates an alien value system and sensibility at the same time it tells a pretty simple story; the weaker examples just tell a system but don't communicate a worldview. Other good stories of this type included "The Tale of Suyenye the Wise, the Ay, and the People of the Shining Land" by Gaie Sebold and "Pale Sister" by Jaine Fenn. There were, perhaps, a few too many like these, though, and after a while, the book got a little monotonous. I want to say that the best stories were up front, but maybe it's just that I got used to most of the themes contained within.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship

Mass market paperback, 334 pages
Published 2012
Acquired November 2012
Read July 2019

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship

by Una McCormack

November 2383
Brinkmanship rounds out the eight-book Typhon Pact saga, though the Pact itself will obviously continue to cast a shadow over galactic events. It could feel like an odd coda after Plagues of Night and Raise the Dawn pulled all the previous threads together (I suspect it reads weirdly in the context of The Khitomer Accords Saga omnibus), but it's the best of all these books, and so a good stopping point.

There is no better writer of Star Trek tie-ins than Una McCormack. One of the things that makes her so good is her careful consideration of point-of-view; this book is told from three perspectives, those of Ezri Dax, Beverly Crusher, and Neta Efheny (a Cardassian spy on Ab-Tzenketh). The choice of viewpoint characters isn't incidental, or just done for reasons of plot, as it often is in tie-in fiction, but suffuses the entire book. In both Ezri and Crusher, we get principled women whose principles keep getting broken on the rocks of realpolitik. Both are healers (kind of), and have an earnest belief in what the Federation does; both have made hard choices in their day but refuse to believe that values have to be abandoned in order to be saved.

I liked this depiction of Ezri. I often struggle to connect the character the Destiny-era novels call "Ezri" with the one from television; Brinkmanship threads that needle by showing how Ezri's occasionally foolish compassion informs her command style. The Aventine doesn't get much action here, but we get to watch Ezri do her level best to prevent a war in the usual Star Trek tradition. She's tested by her discovery of what one of her friends from the Academy has become in this dark new era, and that works as a stand-in for what Starfleet and the Federation as a whole have been through. I liked the Aventine's solution to the stand-off, which manages to be humanitarian and manipulative at the same time.

Crusher was an unexpected choice for viewpoint character of the Enterprise-E thread; she's often an observer, not a mover. But this is what makes her work as a main character. As Picard points out, he already knows how to play this game, but Crusher still has her ideals. I liked her interactions with various participants in the negotiations, especially Madame Ilka, the Ferengi ambassador (I hope we get to see her again). Crusher ends up playing essentially no plot-relevant role, but that's not a bug, it's a feature. Like Ezri, she learns what it's like to balance ideals with realpolitik. This book, incidentally, is probably the first to make me feel like Crusher and Picard are actually married, with nice little details of their relationship (such as how they work a room at a reception), though to be honest, I think it would have worked just as well with them as friends.

The remaining third was the best one, about an undercover Cardassian on Ab-Tzenketh. It's got great touches, such as how she recognizes that one of her associates is also a spy, but for the Federation, and how that spy works out that she's a Cardassian. Efenhy is a patriot, but adrift in the less regimented post-Dominion Cardassian society, she finds solace in the strictly regimented Tzenkethi society. This was an excellent spy thriller, as Efenhy makes a number of awful but entirely comprehensible choices-- but one potentially really empowering one.

I also really appreciated the insight we got into Tzenkethi society; this is the one Typhon Pact book to really deliver on the series premise and explore an alien society, doing the kind of thing that I think Zero Sum Game aimed for but missed by using infiltration, as well as by using a pair of Tzenkethi cops.

I'm not sure this series really accomplished its aims on the whole, but this novel did, demonstrating (like Struggle Within) the worth of the concept was there, even if the execution was often lacking.

Continuity Notes:

• Glinn Dygan, a minor protagonist here, originally appeared in Plagues of Night; I kind of suspect he was created by McCormack for Brinkmanship and seeded back into the earlier novels.
  
• There's weirdly little direct references to the earlier Typhon Pact books; the whole time the Federation is trying to defend their skepticism toward the Tzenkethi to the Venette, I kept expecting someone to mention the time the Typhon Pact powers conspired to, I dunno, blow up Deep Space 9!? That might make a little caution justified on the part of the Federation.

Other Notes:

• This is really the only book other than The Struggle Within to take the idea (from A Singular Destiny) of an expanded Khitomer Accord seriously; we get to see what it's like for the Federation, Cardassians, and Ferengi to all work together in common cause, something unimaginable a decade prior. (And still pretty difficult to pull off!)
• Picard might not be a viewpoint character, but McCormack writes him some good Patrick Stewart speeches anyway.
  
• The excerpts from the output of the Venette syndics are touching, and effective in making you fear for this never-before-mentioned race.
• I think one chapter of this book gave Sam Bowers more personality than all previous Aventine-focused novels put together.

Review: The Undefeated by Una McCormack

Trade paperback, 109 pages
Published 2019
Acquired May 2019
Read June 2019

The Undefeated by Una McCormack

This Tor.com novella is by Una McCormack, who I know from her excellent work on Star Trek and Doctor Who tie-in fiction-- so excellent that I've long thought she needs to do more original stuff, so I'm happy to see her in such a high-profile venue as this. An aging journalist returns to her home planet, even as the area of the galaxy it's in has been evacuated in the face of an unstoppable onslaught. The book combines her youth with her return into one narrative. It is, as always, well written. I always like Una's narrative voice, and the book marshals a sense of inevitable tragedy in all its time frames, and its grasp of character and social dynamics is astute. I did find myself wishing the ending had been sharper; I felt like I ought to have learned something that I had not actually learned, and I don't know what.

Review: Star Trek: Discovery: The Way to the Stars by Una McCormack

Trade paperback, 276 pages
Published 2019
Acquired and read January 2019

Star Trek: Discovery: The Way to the Stars

by Una McCormack

The Way to the Stars is the backstory novel for Sylvia Tilly, chronicling Tilly's life at age 16. This means it kind of reads like a young adult novel, but that's no complaint. It might be more accurate, though, to say that this is a bildungsroman, or at least part of one; this is how Sylvia Tilly struggles to fit herself into society but then discovers the place where she belongs. Tilly is harangued by her mother, goes to space boarding school, tries to succeed in academics and extracurriculars, struggles to make friends, and eventually makes a momentous decision. That's the point where the book-- which had always been good-- becomes great. The Way to the Stars takes Tilly further than she's ever gone before, as she meets a variety of people who accept her and shape her and help her to grow. It's really heart-warming without being saccharine, optimistic without being blinkered. It's just a really good book about growing up and finding your place.

I enjoyed every page of it, zipping through it in just over a day. There's a lot of nice side characters, like Tilly's grandmother and her grandmother's husband, plus a crotchety space mechanic, even just random bureaucrats. I particularly enjoyed the USS Dorothy Garrod and its captain. It's cool to see a dedicated science vessel in Star Trek in something other the role of victim. (Do we think it's Oberth-class? I think it would fit what we're told. One thing I didn't buy was that the engineers were the only non-scientists aboard; what about helm and security?)

Una McCormack totally gets Tilly (who is a favorite in our household), the awkward overachiever who wants to be a space captain, and the character at her best is on display here. McCormack has always been one of my favorite Star Trek writers because she understands character, and how to represent it on the page. It's not just capturing the dialogue of the actors, but embodying a way of thinking in the action of the story. Tilly makes some wrongheaded choices here, but the reader understands exactly why she does it even as they know she shouldn't be.

It's also successful as a prequel. I mean, there are obvious ways for it to be so: Tilly mentions her mother on screen in one Discovery episode, and she appears briefly in Short Treks, and Tilly's mother is a good extrapolation of those bits. But there's a deeper, better way for a prequel to work, which is when you're watching the original again, you experience resonances in things that worked fine on their own the first time around. Like, Tilly's father tells her there's something of her mother Siobhan in her, in the way Siobhan can command a room. Tilly doesn't believe him. But she must have realized he was right when she had to pretend to be her mirror counterpart. After reading The Way to the Stars, it's easy to imagine that she's drawing on her mother in those scenes, even if she herself doesn't realize. It's moments like that that make a good prequel into a great one, and this is the most enjoyable Discovery novel thus far.