Star Trek: The Peacekeepers by Gene DeWeese

Star Trek: The Next Generation #2: The Peacekeepers
by Gene DeWeese

Published: 1988
Acquired: ???
Previously read: September 2005
Reread: October 2025

This is an old The Next Generation novel, the second original one ever published. At the time Gene DeWeese wrote it, I am not sure he would have even seen any episodes of the show, probably just read scripts. I felt like the influence of "Heart of Glory" was particularly obvious here: like in that episode, a significant early sequence is about Geordi going aboard a derelict vessel, his VISOR allowing him to see what others cannot.

I was surprised to see on LibraryThing that I read this before. Admittedly, it was exactly twenty years ago, but there are Star Trek books I read longer ago that I still have detailed, vivid memories of. Even as I reread this, absolutely nothing struck a chord of familiarity.

I assume this is because the book is dead boring. It's slow, agonizingly so, like DeWeese realized he had a 200-page idea but had to turn it into a 300-page book. Characters have long conversations, the action is repetitive for no purpose. The alien society is not at all interesting, nor is the dilemma that the book tries to set up, even though I feel like it could be. I think it would take a lot of reworking to make these basic ingredients come alive.

Star Trek: Enemy Unseen by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Scott Ciencin, Andrew Currie, Peter Pachoumis, Lucian Rizzo, et al.

Star Trek Classics #2: Enemy Unseen

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2000-01
Read: September 2025

Written by Keith R.A. DeCandido, Christopher Golden & Tom Sniegoski, Scott Ciencin

Pencils by Peter Pachoumis & Scott Benefiel, Dave Hoover, Andrew Currie

Inks by Lucian Rizzo, Jason Martin, Troy Hubbs, Bryan Hitch & Chris Chuckry

Colors by Jeromy Cox, Chris Chuckry

Letters by Ryan Cline, Rob Robbins, & Nagmeh Zand

I got this "Star Trek Classics" collection from Hoopla; it contains three Star Trek: The Next Generation comic stories from the early 2000s, originally published by Wildstorm. The first is Perchance to Dream, a four-issue miniseries; this is set shortly before Star Trek Generations (it even features the film's mismatched uniforms), with the Enterprise-D coming to a Federation member planet where the aliens have three genders—but the new governor is being attacked by terrorists because she only has one partner, not the traditional two. It's a good premise for a TNG episode, but it's not a great comic: way too much dialogue and narration, plus art and coloring that makes the aliens largely indistinguishable from one another. Too many side characters on the Enterprise as well. There's a clever conceit here, in that Picard is sort of like a victim of multiple personality disorder (he also has the minds of Sarek, Locutus, and Kamin in his head), but this feels a bit tacked on as the resolution to the central maguffin, as opposed to being the central conception of the story.

The second story, "Embrace the Wolf," is set during season seven of TNG, and has the Enterprise encountering Redjac, the incorporeal alien from the original series's "Wolf in the Fold" which was supposedly Jack the Ripper. The story's best part is that it has Data battling Redjac in a holodeck simulation of Victorian London, with Data as Sherlock Holmes... but it just doesn't do very much with this idea, which really ought to have been the crux of the whole plot! The art is hit or miss; the artist seems to do particularly poorly with Troi and Crusher.

Also, Worf is randomly in this, but I kind of liked that—it was just how you told an Enterprise-E story in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you had to have Worf randomly pop up.
from Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Killing Shadows #3 (script by Scott Ciencin, art by Andrew Currie)

Lastly, there's The Killing Shadows, where the Enterprise-E (in the year before First Contact) battle evil alien ninjas. It's kind of incoherent and ridiculous, but I sort of admired that about it; it felt like a comic book in some ways, not just an attempt to render an episode on the page. But unfortunately it got dumber as it went on; I found it hard to believe that Riker could defeat a bunch of alien superninjas just because he stole their outfit. The inclusion of Sela is totally random. And I didn't really follow the climax at all.

So, yeah, "classics" may be a bit of an exaggeration, but as a Hoopla borrow this was fine. Glad I didn't pay for the print edition, though.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Collateral Damage

January 2387
Being a consumer of tie-in fiction is weird, to be honest. If you are a "normal" reader, you read books that interest you... and well, you don't read ones that don't interest you. Why would you? Why would anyone spend time and effort reading and reviewing something you don't think you'll like? Yet you do! I consume Big Finish audio dramas, and I used to review them for Unreality SF. I often knew going into a release written by (for example) Matt Fitton or Nicholas Briggs knowing I wouldn't like it. I had learned I usually wouldn't like these writers' work, yet I would slog through it anyway.

The reason is, of course, that no offense to the writers, but you're not there for the writers. People largely don't consume tie-in fiction because they care about who writes it. They consume tie-in fiction because they like the characters from tv and want to know what happens to them next. I may feel fairly certain I might not enjoy the next Matt Fitton audio drama featuring the eighth Doctor... but if the eighth Doctor is my favorite Doctor, I'm hardly going to listen to all sixteen parts of Doom Coalition but not parts 1, 8, 10-11, and 14-15, am I? I want to know what happens to the Doctor and Liv and Helen, even if I have to listen to a bunch of scripts by a writer I don't like to do it.

Thus, what may be a bad thing from the perspective of the reader is actually a good thing from the perspective of the publisher and writer. Sure there are writers who's work I've learned I don't like... but I buy it anyway! I certainly don't do that for John Scalzi. But I need to know what happens next to Captain Picard, and I'm hardly going to skip over a book by a writer I don't like and thus miss a chunk of the story. If you were to go back through this series of posts, I think you would see that I have fairly consistently not enjoyed the work of David Mack. But, you know, I keep buying his books anyway (I own twenty-four of them according to LibraryThing, plus fourteen other books including contributions by him), so while I might be frustrated, he must be happy. (But no one worry, I am not going to read and review Picard: Firewall.)

That was sort of a long intro into what is the second-last Destiny-era David Mack novel I will ever read... but I think this is quite probably my favorite David Mack novel? Certainly it's the one I've enjoyed the most of all the ones I've read in this project. Let's break it down.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage
by David Mack

Published: 2019
Acquired: April 2025
Read: July 2025

Like Available Light, Collateral Damage features two parallel plots, one focused on the Enterprise, and one focused on the Section 31 revelations from Control and Hearts and Minds, specifically about Captain Picard's role in the Min Zife coup. The difference here is that Picard is in the S31 plotline on Earth, instead of the Enterprise plot; thus, Worf is acting captain, and we also get a lot of focus on Aneta Šmrhová.

Thadiun Okona from "The Outrageous Okona" is doing an op with a Husnock weapon from Titan: Fortune of War that goes wrong, and the weapon ends up in the hands of a band of Nausicaan marauders, disenfranchised following the destruction of their home planet in Destiny. The Enterprise must try to recover the weapon while working alongside the obnoxious Okona, battling not just the Nausicaans, but Starfleet's own Intelligence apparatus, and also trying to save a research outpost called Stonekettle Station whose solar shield is failing.

It's quick, action-focused stuff, the kind of stuff that David Mack can do in his sleep, and which rarely works for me. And though I didn't love everything about it, I think there are two things that really did work for me here. The first is the decision to tell chunks of the story from the first-person perspective of Okona and Kinogar (the Nausicaan leader). Back when I read Mack's Cold Equations: The Persistence of Memory, I really enjoyed the section told in the first person from Noonien Soong's perspective there... these sections communicate character and tone in a way that I just don't see in Mack's use of the third person.

I discussed earlier how tie-in fiction kind of traps you as a reader, but I wonder if it hasn't trapped Mack as a writer too, forcing him to use a technique (the fairly affect-less third-person limited perspective of most Star Trek novels) that just doesn't play to his strengths. I found Okona and Kinogar sections lively and engaging, and I wish there had been more of them. (I did find the bit in the afterword where Mack explains his choices a bit insulting to the reader's intelligence, though. Let the work speak for itself! I do appreciate that the book doesn't label the sections, though.)

The other thing I liked about the Enterprise plotline is how it all wraps up. What one watches (and reads, and even plays) Star Trek for, I would argue, is clever problem solving, situations where characters do something unexpected that ties everything up. The Enteprise plot has this in its resolution, with Worf coming up with a way to stop the Nausicaans without resorting to violence... and yet in a way that is entirely in-character for Worf. I thought this was clever, and I really enjoyed the ending, and it made me sad that we've never really gotten any more "Captain Worf" stories.

The other plotline is necessary but ultimately kind of humdrum. Picard is kind of a passive observer to his own legal proceedings, which is probably fairly accurate but also not very dramatic; the solution to his problem comes from other characters. Overall this is fine... but I really did not like what we see of Philippa Louvois, Picard's prosecutor. In Available Light, she came across as principled and aghast at the violation of Federation values; here, she seems to be on a witchhunt, wanting to get Picard because she wants someone to pin the blame on. I feel like the book very much misses the mark here; I wish she had been portrayed as an antagonist, but not a villain, it seems to me that two people can be acting out of good principles but still come into conflict, and I think that would have been 1) more consistent with Available Light, and 2) much more interesting. Overall, I found the legal plotline a bit too twenty-first-century; one might have hoped the Federation's legal system might be more interested in actual truth.

My big complaint, though: anyone who thought the Šmrhová/Okona subplot was a good idea is bad and should feel bad. C'mon, really???

Scarlett Pomers, age 18
(but Naomi Wildman, age 12!?)

Continuity Notes:

• Does it make any sense that Naomi Wildman is already a lieutenant in Starfleet Intelligence? She's fifteen! Even accepting that Ktarians age faster, Voyager only got back to the Alpha Quadrant nine years before this book, and she didn't seem to be of Academy age in "Endgame," and she would have had to go through the whole program and become an experienced officer! I haven't read any of the Voyager relaunch following Full Circle; is this consistent with that?
• I was a bit surprised when there was a reference to Section 31: Rogue. Ranul Keru aside, I had totally forgotten about that book and that that was Picard's first interaction with S31.
• Given how in Picard we learned that Chateau Picard burned down but was rebuilt exactly the same way, it was interesting to see a very different approach taken here. There's also a whole thing here about the location of Chateau Picard which I think must be there to reconcile the location of the real vineyard of that name with the location of the fictional one.
• Dygan is usually (though not quite always) called "lieutenant" in this novel instead of his usual rank of "glinn."

Other Notes:

• I appreciate the idea of the cover, but don't actually like it in execution. Ugly colors.
• The characters in this book: Section 31's use of extralegal force is bad.
  Also the characters in this book: Starfleet Intelligence has a hidden black site where it imprisons Federation citizens without trial. I guess that's okay.
• It is a little disappointing that the Sarai subplot James Swallow introduced in the Titan novels gets wrapped up as a side thing in a completely different series... but I guess when this book was written, it was probably a reasonable expectation that there would never be a Titan novel again.
• It seems to me that David Mack has never known what to do with T'Ryssa Chen, to the extent of overlooking moments where a contact specialist would very obviously have something to contribute (e.g., Cold Equations: Silent Weapons). Here, she does a lot of generic science lab stuff, when it would have been nice to have her contribute to Worf's understanding of the Nausicaans.
• Intellectually, I understand that Naomi Wildman, the cute kid from Voyager, must someday become an adult and have all the drives and interests that adults have. But still I don't think I needed to read a Star Trek book where Naomi Wildman says, "A straight shot at the sweetest booty I've seen in years. Mm-yeah!"
• No one is ever going to make me believe that Geordi of all people can be in an open relationship with two attractive women. He is just not that smooth.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Available Light

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

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

Published: 2019
Acquired: February 2025
Read: July 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuity Notes:

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

Other Notes:

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

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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Hearts and Minds

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

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

Published: 2017
Acquired and read: December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuity Notes:

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

Other Notes:

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

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

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Headlong Flight

mid-2386
Parallel universes are, of course, an old standby of Star Trek in specific and popular science fiction in general. What can we learn by seeing the road untaken, other universes where people made different choices or things went different ways? This book sees the Enterprise-E returning to its mission of exploration, which eventually brings it into contact with the Enterprise-D from 2367... but an Enterprise-D from a reality where Picard died during the events of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" and Riker became captain; other differences include the continued existence of Tasha Yar, Pulaski still serving as CMO, and Wesley working as a civilian specialist on the Enterprise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2017
Acquired: January 2024
Read: November 2024

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

David deploys the revelation to dramatic effect, dropping it in (if I recall correctly, it's been at least two decades since I read Q-Squared) at the end of a scene, upending the mental image you had built up over the preceding several pages.The problem here is that the next time we go to the alternative Enterprise-D, we're just told that Riker is captain; there's no drama to the reveal. So why defer it?

An inexplicable lack of drama is consistent through all the alternative timeline stuff. It takes absolutely forever before the two crews are even aware of each other; I felt like the first one hundred pages were just people scanning nebulas. And while in Armageddon's Arrow, Ward built in a lot of nice little moments and small arcs for the E-E crew, here I felt I was just reading about them doing their jobs in the most humdrum fashion. T'Ryssa Chen has a boyfriend... and that's it, nothing is at stake for her. Once the two crews meet, they do so without much drama or interest. Does the discovery of this other Enterprise do anything other than make the crew from the future nostalgic about the old LCARS format and bridge layout? Not really. It doesn't raise any questions for Picard about his life, or La Forge, or Worf, or anyone.

The closest we get is that the alternative Riker gets a bit of closure... but to be honest, why do I care if that guy gets some closure? Again, compare Q-Squared, where if nothing else, Jack Crusher undergoes an existential crisis from learning about his fate in the "Prime" timeline. At the end, Picard makes a potentially interesting decision in giving the alternative Enterprise-D metaphasic torpedoes, but this decision entirely happens off-screen, and its consequences seem to be limited to the fact that if he is found out, he will receive a sternly worded letter from a bureaucrat.

Outside of the alternative timeline stuff, there is unfortunately little going on in the novel. The main antagonists are Romulans from a century ago; unsurprisingly, they are little threat, even aside from the fact they mostly seem to sit around talking replaying beats from "Balance of Terror." I was not able to get worked up about the fate of the aliens in any way, shape, or form, and it's all resolved with surprising ease.

In both cases, information is often imparted to the reader in the least dramatic fashion possible. Rather than learn about the alternative Enterprise-D's history along with the Enterprise-E crew, it's simply given to us in exposition. Rather than have the Romulans dramatically decloak to make things worse, they simply pop up in a chapter from their viewpoint where they just sit around watching people. There's no dramatic reveals, no suspense mind from almost anything here. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what the book was going for. The basic premise seems to be "two alternative crews meet each other... and everyone is terribly nice about it." Perhaps it's a realistic take in a Star Trekky sense, but it hardly makes for interesting reading.

the USS Honorius?
poster by Matthew and Christopher Cushman

Continuity Notes:

• Picard thinks of the Briar Patch as a place that gave the Enterprise trouble years earlier... not months earlier!
• The ship class names for the Romulan ships in this book all come from the FASA RPG sourcebooks.
• Picard recalls that the Enterprise-E was originally called the USS Honorius while under construction, being redesignated after the crash of the Enterprise-D on Veridian III. While the origins of this name are obscure, its first mention in prose fiction came in the S.C.E. novella The Future Begins by... oh, how interesting. (Not, contrary to the claims of Wikipedia, in Diane Carey's Ship of the Line.)

Other Notes:

• In a bit about how Chen seems to do everything on the ship but her job as contact specialist, we're told that what she spends her time doing includes "composing... detailed analysis of whatever new species the Enterprise might encounter, and recommendations for next steps... with respect to a newly discovered civilization" (p. 27). But if composing such materials isn't part of the duties of a contact specialist, what even are the duties of a contact specialist?
• There is for some reason a totally irrelevant two-page recap of the events of "The Pegasus."
• There is also a whole page-long thing that establishes that Christopher L. Bennett is an in-universe professor at Starfleet Academy. He likes to talk a lot about time travel theories, spinning a lot out of very small comments by other people and unable to stop talking. Hard to imagine, to be honest.
• Doug Drexler's cover image is as undramatic and humdrum as the book it illustrates. And doesn't that Enterprise-D look a bit wonky to you?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Armageddon's Arrow

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

early January 2386

Published: 2015
Acquired: December 2021
Read: July 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Continuity Notes:

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

Other Notes:

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

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

Star Trek: Masks by John Vornholt

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Masks
by John Vornholt

A grad school friend who had been a bit of a Next Generation fan in his youth passed on to me the four TNG books he owned; one of them was Masks, which I was happy to have an excuse to reread, since I remembered getting from the library a few times in my own youth and enjoying it. (Though I also remember seeing the episode "Masks" for the first time and wondering why they were so different!)

 

Published: 1989
Previously read: ??? (mid-1990s)
Acquired: October 2013
Reread: June 2023

The premise is that the Enterprise is reestablishing contact with an Earth colony settled by a mixture of back-to-nature types and theatre nerds; the constant danger of volcanic ash in the environment means that everyone wears full-face masks, and an elaborate feudal culture has built up around them. No one can be seen in public without a mask; different masks connote different roles. To wear the mask of a craftsman, for example, one must demonstrate an appropriate amount of skill or be subject to a challenge. The Enterprise is ferrying an ambassador to the planet, who bears the gorgeous Ambassador's Mask that he bought off the Ferengi, who are also interested in the planet.

Set during season two, it's a solid adventure of the exact kind you might want from a tie-in novel. Later in his Star Trek career, Vornholt would turn out some pretty mediocre stuff, but this is good: a nice grasp on the characters, particularly Picard, where Vornholt picks up on the nascent strain of romanticism that I think the tv writers wouldn't lean into much until later. Characters like Data and La Forge and Worf get some good scenes, too. The best part of the book is the culture of the planet, with its permutations and complications; the Enterprise's away teams must start at the bottom and work their way up.

I did find the middle a bit weak, as it felt like the two different Enterprise away teams were wandering around in a bit of an aimless muddle trying to find each other. I also felt that the character of the ambassador seems very important in the early part of the novel, but kind of fades away unceremoniously by the end. On the other hand, I kept thinking about how I would adapt the whole thing to be a Star Trek Adventures RPG module, which I think would work very well—which indicates to me that this book captures the Star Trek vibe exceedingly well no matter its faults.

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 Destiny Era: The Light Fantastic

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Light Fantastic
by Jeffrey Lang

November 2385, plus copious flashbacks (including to September 2384, immediately after Cold Equations)

Published: 2014
Acquired: December 2020
Read: January 2023

When The Light Fantastic came out, Jeffrey Lang had been absent from Star Trek fiction for eight years, since his short story in Constellations (2006). By the mid-2010s, he was no longer in the Star Trek fiction "stable." But suddenly he was back: it feels like a bit of compensation. "Well, Jeff, we heavily mined your novel Immortal Coil for a trilogy, but of course you don't get anything for that. Would you like the chance to write a new novel at least?" If this is what happened, I don't mind the results, because I like Jeff Lang's writing, and the editors must not have minded either, because they would later invite him to do a DS9 novel as well.

Cold Equations brought Data back to life, of course, but one of my big complaints about that trilogy was that it actually didn't really do much with him as a character. Data was rarely a viewpoint character, and when he was, things were usually plot focused. It was hard for me to tally this coldly Lal-obsessed person with the inquisitive, friendly android we'd known before he died. I'm pleased to say that one of the big strengths of The Light Fantastic is how it joins the dots here and makes this work. Data has permanent emotions now, and he is still learning how to handle them, and not altogether certain about how to express them. The book really benefits from pairing him with Geordi La Forge, who as Data's best friend, can both empathize with him and call him out when he's going into dark places.

The main plot of the book is that Professor Moriarty, confined to the Daystrom Institute in a memory module with the Countess Regina, has figured out a way to reach out of his prison—and now he wants a real body so he can really explore the universe, as he was promised by Picard and Data. Since Cold Equations, Data and Lal have settled down on Orion Prime, where Data manages his father's casino (among other things) while Lal explores her newfound life. Moriarty kidnaps Lal to force Data to assist him, and so Data and La Forge travel the galaxy, looking both for clues as to where Moriarty is and for leads on what can give him a real body.

Like Immortal Coil, it loops in a number of previous Star Trek stories about AI: most notably this time, "I, Mudd," "The Most Toys," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", and most notably "Elementary, Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle." Plus, it features appearances by Star Trek's two other most famous holograms, Voyager's Doctor and Deep Space Nine's Vic Fontaine. In the abstract, there's a real danger that this kind of thing could feel gratuitous, but I think the novel just about gets away with it. Each of the returns comes across as a natural extension of what we've seen so far, and serves to deepen the novel's exploration of what kind of rights one has to exist when one is "merely" a program. I liked the return of Kivas Fajo, for example, and Alice—one of the Mudd androids—is probably the novel's best original character. The one thing I would cut is that the conversations with Vic and the Doctor felt redundant; we probably could have done just fine with only one of them.

Lang's novel feels like an actual novel, not an ersatz tv episode; it jumps around in time and focuses on the characters and their thoughts, not the actions. I really enjoyed the story of Moriarty and his growing disillusionment with the universe. His is a tragic tale, and he ultimately makes a strong antagonist. The story of Alice and Mudd is good, as I said. The character of Albert Lee is a fun one, though I did have to look him up to see if he was from a TNG episode I'd missed! I enjoyed Data here, though I still occasionally found him off-puttingly strange. I like, for example, him posing as a fry cook and him struggling to work out parenthood, but his single-minded ruthlessness as a parent didn't always ring true. I get characters in the novels have to evolve beyond what we see on screen, but there's a balance to keep in that they also have to feel like those screen characters, and I think Lang got this most of the time, but not all. That said, La Forge calls him out on some of it near the end, and that helped me.

The weak point of the novel is the ending, which is abrupt. I didn't totally get where Moriarty was / where he had brought Lal and Alice to, and Data's deception of him seemed surprisingly easy. I did like, on the other hand, that Moriarty ultimately didn't suffer for his decision. I did not like the way the characters cavalierly treated Alice. Given the whole book focused on the consequences of how even Data could disregard the sentience of another AI, it seemed weird for them to repeat that mistake with Alice, in allowing her to become reenslaved to Harry Mudd.

There is some fun dialogue here, and some snappy cons and heists, which I always enjoy. Lang is good at small moments that show character and don't necessarily relate to the big plot while also not feeling gratuitously wodged in because the author suddenly realized their characters should be people, like Moriarty trying not to stare at Alice's legs, or Mudd thinking he can still con Uhura. The stuff about color in Moriarty's world is a nice detail, very evocative. Kivas Fajo becoming a Data fanboy was a logical development (not so keen with what his release implies about 24th-century mental health).

It's not as good as I remember Immortal Coil being... but then, I harbor a suspicion that Immortal Coil might not be as good as I remember Immortal Coil being! I am not convinced that what I valued in Star Trek fiction in 2002 still holds true today. On the whole, though, this is fun with some interesting moments, and I am happy to see the return of Jeff Lang's voice after an eight-year gap. Unfortunately, though this book sets Data up to be his own person and even gives him a new mystery to investigate, and though Data would turn up in some more novels, he was never a main character again as far as I know. I would have liked to see where he would have gone next.

Continuity Notes:

• An engineer named "Lee" is mentioned, but does not appear in, "All Good Things..." during the 2363 flashbacks. I guess this must be Albert; the character is really named after Jeff Lang's dog!
  
• There are multiple references to Indistinguishable from Magic here, a book that seemed kind of glossed over in earlier Destiny-era novels. Suddenly La Forge is in a relationship with Leah Brahms again; he thinks briefly about Tamala Harstad, but agrees with me that she's too boring to be bothered with. There's also a reference to the apparent death of Captain Scott in that novel, though Picard speculates he might return some day—as, indeed, we know he must from Engines of Destiny.
• Interestingly, the book would seem to be incompatible with basically any post-"I, Mudd" stories we've ever seen, as it establishes Harry Mudd was trapped with the androids on their planet for decades. No Mudd in Your Eye, no "The Business, as Usual, during Altercations," even no "Mudd's Passion"! This idea would be invalidated by the Short Treks episode "The Escape Artist"... at least, if you buy my arguments about that story's chronological placement!
• Vic says Miles was pretty busted up when Data died. But at that time, O'Brien would have been living on Cardassia Prime, and nowhere near Vic!
  
• Sentences no one in this book ever utters: "The galaxy is on high alert for small, fast vessels thanks to a galactic terrorism crisis. Doesn't that make your ship a bit suspicious, Mr. Data?" Hmmmmm...

Other Notes:

• There's a weird scene at the beginning of chapter 15. The scene is captioned "Aboard the Archeus" (that's Data's ship), where Data and La Forge are, and they are comm-linked to Lee back on Earth. All of Lee's dialogue is in italics, the Star Trek fiction convention for people who are speaking on a communicator. But the scene is told from Lee's perspective, describing his thoughts and actions throughout; nothing in the scene is actually narrated from the perspective of anyone on the Archeus! It's very odd and off-putting.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Deep Space Nine: Lust's Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part V: Novels and Books, 1993-Present

Continued from last month's discussion of older Star Trek books...

To understand how I came to even write this series, you might want to know how I shelve my Star Trek mass market paperbacks. (If you don't want to know this, and I don't blame you, just jump down to the break.)

In the past I have used various complicated systems (at one point, internal chronology! do not recommend), but now I just break them down by tv show: the original, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. (To date, there are no MMPBs based on the CBS All Access shows.) Then after that go all the books that tie into no particular series; these could be original-to-prose ongoing series like New Frontier and S.C.E., miniseries that span multiple series like Day of Honor and Gateways, miniseries that don't do that like Dark Passions and Typhon Pact, or standalones not based on one tv show like Articles of the Federation and Excelsior: Forged in Fire.

I shelve all my books in publication order, except that I put all the books in one series together at the point where the first was published. These books are immediately to the left of my desk and so I gaze at them a lot while avoiding work, and as I did so often, I started to realize there was a changing trajectory over time of how Star Trek books have dealt with the logos when there's no one tv show to tie into.

---

This is more of a sidebar, but it's worth mentioning. In Aug. 1993, Simon & Schuster released Worf's First Adventure, the first Starfleet Academy middle-grade novel from its Minstrel Books imprint. These books would jump around the timeline, filling in the Starfleet Academy adventures of Worf, La Forge, Data, Picard, Crusher, Riker, and Troi (what, no Pulaski or Yar?). It was thus the first Star Trek book to feature (I think) a four-level title: Star Trek, series, subseries, book title. For the subseries, book title, and author name, the books would use Crillee Italic, the credits font from The Next Generation. This series ran five years and fourteen installments.

It lead to two more Starfleet Academy series, one for the original (with novels featuring Spock, McCoy, and Kirk) and one for Voyager (featuring Janeway). These maintained the Crillee Italic branding even though that had nothing to do with those tv show.

As I said in my last installment, around the time The Next Generation came out, the logos of Simon & Schuster's Star Trek books finally achieved some level of show-consistency and stability. But things would soon get complicated by the fact that S&S/Pocket started publishing Star Trek novels that didn't tie into any one series. What logo would you use then?

At first, they stuck with the original-series film logo, the logo that was also being used on Deep Space Nine and (soon) Voyager. The first time this happened was with Federation (Nov. 1994), an original series/Next Generation crossover novel. As you can see, this uses the slightly simplified, more generic version of the logo that was more prominent in the 1990s.

In June 1997, S&S released a novelization of the Interplay computer game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Weirdly, the novelization didn't use the game's logo design, but rather used Crillee Italic, tying it (design-wise, anyway) into S&S's middle-grade Starfleet Academy books.

In July 1997, Pocket introduced its first original ongoing Star Trek series. Peter David's New Frontier took place in the 24th century and incorporated a number of popular Next Generation guest stars into its cast. In a sense, it comes across as a third "show" to run alongside Deep Space Nine and Voyager. So it makes sense that like them, it uses the movie font for its title and subtitle. One of the things that I have always liked about this logo is that it incorporates a silhouette of the hero ship, the USS Excalibur; if I recall correctly, in promotional material there was a unique "NF" symbol in that spot, but then someone pointed out it was basically the same as the logo of the National Front! In the long run of this series, though, the Excalibur would be destroyed and replaced by a new ship of a different class; it always bothered me that the logo never updated to reflect this.

Pocket released another independent novel in Feb. 1998, Susan Wright's The Best and the Brightest. This followed a group of Starfleet Academy cadets across a two-year period. The cover uses the Next Generation logo, but I think this must have been a last-minute change to improve marketability, because the title page actually just calls it "Star Trek: The Best and the Brightest." The logo used is the film one, indicating it's a generic Star Trek product, not tied to any one series. I shelve it by spine logo, though, because that looks nicer.

(An early draft of the cover, which you can see on Memory Alpha, actually used the same Starfleet Academy logo from S&S's middle-grade books, along with the generic film logo. I get why they ultimately wouldn't want to use middle-grade branding for an adult-aimed novel.)

Similarly, Strange New Worlds, a series of anthologies with short stories spanning all four (later, all five) tv series launched in July 1998, and used the movie logo.

One of my favorite logo choices, however, came with Where Sea Meets Sky (Oct. 1998), an installment in The Captain's Table miniseries. This novel focused on Captain Pike, but instead of using the generic original series logo, it used a very bland one that had previously only been used on the unaired pilot featuring Pike, "The Cage." I don't know what your average book buyer thought of this deep-cut choice, but this book buyer had a big smile on his face when he discovered the book in Barnes & Noble, and even e-mailed editor John Ordover to thank him! (I would have been 13.)

Other original series novels would move away from the standard logo, too, usually to signify the era in which they were set. Though usually original series novels use the original logo even if set in the movie era, the New Earth miniseries of Summer 2000, for example, was set in the decade-long gap between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan, and used the film logo to signify that, meaning they stand out from the books on either side of them on the shelf.

I'm not always sure what the thinking was, though. The Case of the Colonist's Corpse (Dec. 2003) uses the Motion Picture logo but takes place during the original series. And I feel like the older logo would have better with the book's retro vibe!

On the other hand, I appreciate that Ex Machina (Dec. 2004), a direct follow-up to The Motion Picture, not only used the film logo, but used a version of it that aped the one used on the film, with long lines coming off the "S" and the "K."

There was a set of original series novels that actually used "The Original Series" in the logo, beginning with The Janus Gate (June 2002). I hate the use of "The Original Series" as a formal title (it's just Star Trek, damnit!), and I particularly don't like the way it was done here, which just looks clunky. These novels were marketed as re-telling the story of the original series from the point-of-view of an expanded cast, a sort of "TOS relaunch," but apparently no one told the authors this. After six novels in three months, the concept was quietly dropped, and future original series novels were just Star Trek once more.

The next original-to-prose series concept to come along was in Aug. 2000: the ebook-original S.C.E., about the adventures of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Like New Frontier, this was set in the 24th century, and like New Frontier, it used the DS9/Voyager logo as its base, but the logo used on the first three books is, like most elements of the first three covers, pretty crappy. Like, c'mon, what is even going on there? The weird downward curve on the "S.C.E." would be bad enough on its own, but the way it has to work with the periods makes it even worse.

Clearly, though, those involved recognized that, and by the fourth book (Feb. 2001), a new logo would be introduced. The font used on the subtitle (as well as in the titles of the books) is "Crillee Italic," the font used in the credits of The Next Generation, so a nice Star Trekkian choice.

May 2001 brought a major change in Star Trek publishing. The so-called "Deep Space Nine relaunch," debuting with the Avatar duology, was a continuation of the DS9 television shows, telling its own ongoing stories, mixing old characters with new. It was also the first time Pocket had deliberately chosen to not use the logo of the television show. I seem to recall editor Marco Palmieri saying the new logo, which was thicker and simpler, would work better and be more flexible on book covers. The font was an appropriately DS9-y one, though; "ITC Handel Gothic" was the font the show had always used for credits and episode titles.

There weren't many of them, but the original DS9 logo continued to be used on books set during the run of the show, such as Prophecy and Change (Sept. 2003) and Hollow Men (Apr. 2005).

The original Star Trek fiction series Challenger used the movie font, too, like to many others. It lasted a whopping one book (Aug. 2001). (Author Diane Carey made fun of script of the Enterprise series premiere in her novelization of it, and when the producers realized this had happened, she promptly never wrote another Star Trek book ever again.)

And, finally, the first two books of Star Trek: Stargazer (May 2002) used the film logo. There were any number of standalone non-series novels using it too; I'm not showing you everything! I always kind of liked this one; the sunburst in the "G" is cute.

But that would be it, because Dec. 2002's The Brave and the Bold duology would eschew the original film logo for the "Serpentine" one used on the Next Generation films. As you will recall from earlier installments of this series, this logo had debuted with 1994's Star Trek Generations, but outside of film novelizations, hadn't seen use on the covers of Star Trek books. (Serpentine was, however, used for the names of books and authors on Next Generation novels from Oct. 1995's The Last Stand through Mar. 2002's A Hard Rain, the so-called "rainbow stripe" era of cover design, exemplified by Best and the Brightest above.)

From then on, basically every Star Trek book didn't tie into a specific series (or that spanned multiple ones) would use Serpentine. Preexisting series even had their logos adjusted to fit the new Serpentine paradigm, such as Stargazer, which debuted a new look with book three, the creatively titled Three, in Aug. 2003. (Book five would introduce yet another new logo, though still Serpentine-based, and then the series would be cancelled with book six.)

Strange New Worlds would also switch over with book eight. This was published in July 2005, so it was a couple years behind on the switch.

That was nothing compared to New Frontier, though, which finally changed over in Apr. 2009. The new logo is pretty bland (I think almost all the Serpentine-based logos are, to be honest), but at least it meant the anachronistic silhouette was gone.

The best Serpentine-based logo was the one for Titan, the series about Riker's command, which began with Taking Wing in Apr. 2005. It's the one that best mimics what the films were doing: like on the poster logos for Generations, First Contact, and Insurrection, the subtitle is written in a tall narrow sans serif ("Seven," apparently). Plus a strong sense of composition (Cliff Nielsen, of course), and on the physical book, the subtle embossing on the second TITAN all combine to create a striking package.

One of the most apt uses of Serpentine, however, came with the A Time to... maxiseries that began with A Time to Be Born in Feb. 2004. This nine-book saga chronicled what the Enterprise crew had been up to between Insurrection and Nemesis, and one thing I liked was that though they were all The Next Generation novels, none of them used "The Next Generation" on the covers. But of course, neither did the films they were connecting, so it was entirely appropriate. 

Because of the logo, I opt to shelve these books with my non-series novels, because it looks nice. In fact, the stretch from Stargazer: Three to Articles of the Federation is one of the longest on my shelves of a relatively consistent logo.

There was one exception during the Serpentine era: Star Trek: Vanguard, which debuted in Aug. 2005. This was a rare original ongoing with a 23rd-century setting, and for that reason, I assume, used the original Star Trek logo as its basis. (The spine design even kind of makes it look like a Star Trek novel called Vanguard: Harbinger, as opposed to a Star Trek: Vanguard novel called Harbinger.)

This is kind of a side note, but I did really like the "livery" that was wrapped around the original series logo for the 40th anniversary in 2006. All original series novels publishes that year had it, and it looks classy as heck.

When Voyager had its own post-series "relaunch," it didn't change its logo-- but The Next Generation did. Death in Winter (Sept. 2005) began a new approach for TNG novels, following on from Nemesis, and a totally new logo. As you can see, it's a total departure from the original Next Generation logo, a pretty generic serif. It took me a while even with font-matching web sites to figure out what it was, because there are a million like it. Some say it's "Palatino," but the "T" isn't right; I finally matched the "T" to that of "Rotis Serif." (And then found an old post by editor Marco Palmieri where he said what it was.)

When it first debuted, I was in a mental mode where I had to defend all of S&S's editorial choices, so I defended this. Now though... I think it's going for "classy and elegant" and ends up coming out "bland." I mean, you could do worse, but it just doesn't look science fiction-y at all. Which I suspect is kind of the point, but that's a bad point. I get why maybe someone wanted the 1980stastic original to go, but I don't believe this was the best replacement. It wasn't just applied to "TNG relaunch" novels either, as this logo also appeared on the prequel The Buried Age (July 2007) and the mostly-set-during-the-series anthology The Sky's the Limit (Sept. 2007).

In the meantime, we got a couple other unique logos. The Terok Nor miniseries, which began with Apr. 2008's Day of the Vipers was a prequel to Deep Space Nine, and used the variant of Handel Gothic originally developed for the DS9 relaunch for a unique logo.

The Destiny miniseries (Oct. 2008–Feb. 2009) also sported a unique logo, using the same font as Generations and First Contact did for their in-film logos, ITC Benguiat. Now, this is a classy serif, and I feel like would have made a much better basis for the TNG relaunch logo. But it was only used on these four books.

After this, though, Rotis took over. It suddenly became not just the font for The Next Generation novels, but the go-to font for non-series novels, beginning with the Typhon Pact miniseries in Oct. 2010, and subsequently continuing into Department of Temporal Investigations, The Fall miniseries, and the last two Section 31. Serpentine is out! (Except that Titan has never updated its cover font.) Only the most recent Next Generation novel, Oct. 2019's Collateral Damage, has moved away from it, restoring the classic tv logo, probably because with Picard, a more casual audience is more likely to be looking at TNG novels once more. (Though what that "casual" audience would make of Collateral Damage, which pays off a fifteen-years-running subplot from the novels, I've no idea.)

I actually used Rotis to resolve an ambiguity: James Swallow's Cast No Shadow (July 2011) is just called "Star Trek." It takes place several years after The Undiscovered Country, and features Valeris from that film. So is it an original series novel? Or a non-series one? Well, given it uses a Rotis logo, we can safely assume non-series, because it looks nicer shelved between Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History and The Fall: Revelation and Dust than it would between The Children of Kings and A Choice of Catastrophes. 

With Jan. 2013's Allegiance in Exile, these things would become much less ambiguous, as "The Original Series" was restored to the logo again, and this time it was here to stay. Thanks, I hate it, but at least it was done tastefully this time.

William Shatner released ten Star Trek novels beginning with June 1997's The Ashes of Eden, which all followed the branding trends of their time: the original film logo for the first seven, Serpentine for the next two. However, the last one, Oct. 2007's Academy: Collision Course, used a very non-science-fiction looking logo in a generic sans serif. If there had been more "Academy" novels, I imagine they would have gone on the same, but I think they came to an end because the incoming reboot films were covering similar ground.

When S.C.E. relaunched as Corps of Engineers in Nov. 2009, I suppose it was just a bit too early for the Rotis revolution. I wonder if it would have used Rotis if it had come along a mite later, but as it was, it kept the movie font for the "Star Trek." For the subtitle, it switched to what I think is a Jeffries Extended font, the typeface used on the hull of Starfleet vessels, which was previously used as a logo on Enterprise and subsequently on Discovery. Note that the name changed because it was felt "S.C.E." was pretty inscrutable. It is, but I'm not sure putting the word "CORPS" biggest screams fun action-adventure. If they really wanted to make the series more accessible, they should have called it Star Trek: Miracle Workers!

S&S began a new Starfleet Academy series in Nov. 2010, this one tying into the 2009 film, showing what the original crew got up to during the three-year jump between Kirk enrolling in the Academy and the attack by Nero. These used the classic original series font for "Starfleet Academy"... but nothing at all for "Star Trek"! No Star Trek books have done this before or since as far as I know (except for, of course, the ones based on Enterprise).

July 2014 began another original series, Seekers. Seekers is a Vanguard spin-off, and its cover aesthetic is inspired by the old James Blish novelizations (covered in my previous post), by way of a series of tributes by artist Rob Caswell. I like the idea, but I found Caswell's for-fun tributes more successful than the actual published Seekers covers. I think it's because the cover ended up having five different typefaces on it! One for "STAR TREK," one for "SEEKERS" and the author name, one for the giant number, one for the New York Times bit, and one for the title. It just loses all sense of cohesion, and I don't get why some of those couldn't have been the same. (I am pretty sure the Seekers subtitle is Jeffries Extended again.) The original Blish covers and Caswell's original tributes have a simplicity and power this overly busy cover fails to recapture.

The most recent novel-original concept is Star Trek: Prometheus. This trilogy, begun in July 2016, was originally published in German. Its logo is, in fact, a war crime. The "STAR TREK" part is okay. It uses what I think is "Cimiez RomanDemiSerif," which has actually been used as a typeface for titles and author names on a number of Next Generation covers, including The Cold Equations trilogy and The Stuff of Dreams. But what's up with those big lowercase "e"s? And just because the mythical Prometheus gave fire to humanity doesn't justify something as tacky as MAKING YOUR LOGO ON FIRE! (Plus it's totally unsuited to the slow, plodding nature of the trilogy.)

When Titan translated the novels into English (beginning in Nov. 2017), they kept the Cimiez, but came up with some much duller for the "PROMETHEUS." I'm grateful, I suppose, but this is actually so boring I feel like they overcompensated.

 

 

 

 

And that, I think, brings us up to date! I'm sure there's some keystone cover of modern Star Trek books I've missed, but I think those are the significant font and design choices of the last two decades of Star Trek fiction. This whole five-part (and probably, eventually, six, though geeze I need a break) series is down to me noticing all the Serpentine on my shelf, so finally I got to talk about that bit!

Most cover art supplied by LibraryThing. Specifically, most of that was due to one dude, CoreyScott, who has uploaded tons of high-quality scans of tie-in book overs to LibraryThing over the years. Thanks also to the commenters on the TrekBBS for their feedback, especially user DarkHorizon who alerted me to the solicitation cover of The Best and the Brightest; I made some updates on 16 Feb. because of it, adding all the various Starfleet Academy novels.