Star Trek: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow by James Swallow

Star Trek Coda is a three-novel epic conclusion to the Trek-lit timeline of books that picked up the Starfleet story after 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis and has developed it in depth for the past 19 years. With new 24th-century canon being created by Star Trek: Picard and other new Paramount+ Trek series, the Trek-lit series is being retired with an epic three-part finale: Coda. With an emphasis on Deep Space Nine characters, James Swallow’s The Ashes of Tomorrow picks up after Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward.

Having no longer kept up with Trek-lit continuity for some time, I did find some of the changes interesting. We have the return of Benjamin Sisko from the Celestial Temple who is now the captain of the Galaxy-Class USS Robinson. Garak is no longer plain-and-simple but is the Castellan of the Cardassian Union. Julian Bashir at one time worked for Section 31, but his instrumental role in the downfall of that organization and its clandestine leader, the AI named Control, has left him catatonic. Kira Nerys is a Vedek called “The Hand of the Prophets” by the Bajoran people. Deep Space Nine has been destroyed and but has been rebuilt as an entirely Starfleet space station, commanded by Ro Laren. Nog is XO on a starship, Miles continues to get promoted, but remains a noncom. There are other changes as well, most seemly logical and proper. Spock is still alive as well, and Data has resurrected his daughter Lal and play like Time Lords watching the galaxy flow by. 

Like all middle chapters in a trilogy, Swallow must set-up the final pieces for the concluding volume. But as the action continues, the scope of the novel is bit less than its processor. Too much time is spent dealing with Riker and whatever has overtaken him (clearly we’re dealing with some alternate version of him, or once potentially under the influence of…those bug aliens from Conspiracy? I mean, why not?) Still, it seems Starfleet’s inaction is also out of place –but this book and previous one points out how much Trek-lit has really changed the Starfleet. They’ve become stuck in their ways, afraid to do the right thing, to send things through committee. Much like the first book, The Ashes of Tomorrow does start sacrificing legacy characters as the tale progresses. This is fine, in some respect. But we are dealing with time and alternate universes. So in the back of my mind I can’t help but feel the Magical Candy-Like Reset Button –coined by Star Trek writer Bryan Fuller- will rear its ugly head by volume three.

Books: Star Trek: Coda: Moments Asunder By Dayton Ward (2021)

 

“Time is coming apart. Countless alternate and parallel realities are under attack, weakening and collapsing from relentless onslaught. If left unchecked, the universe faces an unstoppable descent toward entropy. Scarred and broken after decades spent tracking this escalating temporal disaster, while battling the nameless enemy responsible for it, an old friend seeks assistance from Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The apocalypse may originate from their future, but might the cause lie in their past? Identifying their adversary is but the first step toward defeating them, but early triumphs come with dreadful costs. What will the price be to achieve final victory, and how will that success be measured in futures as yet undefined?”

For a good number of years, perhaps as much as fifteen years, I collected Star Trek novels, starting with 1979’s The Entropy Effect. Most would be the novels from TOS and good chunk of TNG and DS9. By the time VOY appeared, I begun to stop collecting (and to be honest, I did not read most of the books I collected). Starting around 2001, when the last film featuring The Next Generation cast was out, and the future of the franchise looked dim (Enterprise would run on a few years more, but since it was set before TOS, the books really did not impact much of Trek’s ever so complicated continuity. Anyways, with Star Trek: Nemesis done and no new films or TV series to be set after that film, Pocket books began an ambitious plan to expand the franchise. Given the freedom and latitude not being tied to “official canon”, the various Star Trek novels from the all the TV series (and various spin-offs featuring other Starfleet crews) could take the franchise into uncharted territories. This would stay in place until 2018, when plans were being developed to launch Star Trek: Picard, the first post-Nemesis series to air on CBS All Access streaming channel (what is now known as Paramount+). While Star Trek: Discovery was already on, much like Enterprise, it was a series set before TOS (though plans were afoot to move this series into the far future), so its impact on Picard would not be affected by the new TV series launch.

But with Picard’s launch, which would rewrite everything that came before, basically meant putting twenty years of Star Trek novels from all the spin-offs out to pasture. But instead of doing what Disney did when they acquired the Star Wars franchise, which was basically toss thirty years of novels out and start from scratch with a new timeline, Pocket Books decided to properly end those two decades of novels with what eventually became Coda. This trilogy of novels by Dayton Ward, James Swallow, and David Mack sets out to end this timeline by giving long-time readers a satisfying ending to two decades of careful continuity, adventures featuring the cast of TNG, DS9, and VOY. Also contributing would be the cast from Star Trek: Titan, New Frontier, Corps of Engineering, Klingon Empire, and Department of Temporal Investigations. All three writers selected to finish out this era needed to create a galaxy ending crisis that would bring everyone together and bring it to a close. The question is can it work? Can these novels appeal to dedicated long-time readers plus those (like me) who only have read a handful of the hundreds of novels that have come out in the last twenty years?

For the most part, I liked the book. Ward gives us a four page “Previously” before the book begins, which highlights various events that have transpired over two decades in those novels (I think it’s around 17 books, but I maybe wrong). This will (and did) help me, but I also realize there was not enough space to mention everything, so I’m sure I missed some small nods. I was surprised how much the book recapped a lot of events from the various TV shows as it went along –my feelings is that while not everyone read those novels, most know about TNG, DS9, and VOY from the TV episodes. I’m not sure if this laundry list of reminders was for the non-fans or Easter eggs for those hardcore readers, but I did find myself skipping over them.

Time travel once again becomes the well Star Trek keeps going back to, with Wesley Crusher now a Traveler (and Time Lord?) who sets this three-part finale in action. His ascendance and his power have grown greatly and he now senses the doom of the universe, but to find out who’s behind it, he’ll need to nearly sacrifice himself to do it (and does, but another version, a younger version eventually shows up on the Enterprise). The book plays out like you expect, with a lot of side characters and security people dying in replace of our heroes (who always miraculously escape at the last second), a ton of techno-babble and STEM crew members who can instantly understand all of it and give it back with machine like precision (no one has a halting speech patterns anymore. I know this has to be in books, but it is annoying).

Moments Asunder is highly accessible, but truth be told, readers would probably enjoy it more if they read all those background novels. So it’s not a particularly dense tale, and it wraps up (if I can use that word for the beginning of trilogy) it’s part of the story like every episode of Star Trek has done for decades – a huge rush of action, adventure, emotional triumphs and loss- and get a neat little coda, I guess, before a quiet To Be Continued…on the final page.