Books: Star Trek: The Original Series: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox (2024)

 

"2024: Almost forty years ago, marine biologist Gillian Taylor stormed away from her dream job at Sausalito’s Cetacean Institute—and was never seen or heard from again. Now a new true crime podcast has reopened that cold case, but investigator Melinda Silver has no idea that her search for the truth about Gillian’s disappearance will ultimately stretch across time and space—and attract the attention of a ruthless obsessive with his own secret agenda.

"2268: The U.S.S. Enterprise’s five-year mission is interrupted when Captain James T. Kirk and his crew set out to recover an abducted Federation scientist whose classified secrets are being sought by the Klingons as well. The trail leads to a barbaric world off limits to both Starfleet and the Klingon Empire—and an ageless mastermind on a quest for eternity.

"2292: The Osori, an ancient alien species, has finally agreed to establish relations with its much younger neighbors: the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. A joint mission involving ships from all three powers, including the Enterprise-A, turns explosive when one of the Osori envoys is apparently killed. Each side blames the others, but the truth lies buried deep, nearly three hundred years in the past."

While I liked the tale, it does have problems –mostly the 2268 time period. The 2024 setting is the best, if only because Star Trek fans knows what happened to Gillian Taylor. So using the format of the a true crimes pod-cast was an inspired choice to see how Melinda and Dennis piece all the parts together. With this being a loose sequel to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, this section gave fans and readers a chance to revisit (almost) some characters from that era that are still around in 2024.

It took me a while to figure out who the mysterious man in the 21^st Century was who was trying to hinder Melinda and Dennis’ investigation, but eventually I guessed (rightly) there was a connection with Project Chrysalis, which was part of the backstory of Cox’s Eugenics War books. So the villain is human and tied to the Augments.

Meanwhile, in 2268 we get the trope filled story of a "scientist captured: must rescue without breaking prime directive” blah, blah, blah. While probably the most classic aspect of Star Trek, and was somewhat entertaining, the only thing really going for it was knowledge it was set in and around season three of TOS. And putting Kirk and crew in danger was anti-climatic at best.

We skip to 2292, set after Star Trek V: The Final Frontier but before Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and is the other good part of the novel. Here we get more traditional Star Trek plot territories, along with understanding whom was behind all of it. It’s the second best of the tree time periods, as Cox ties a lot of continuity together –which has what these Extended Universe Star Trek books are really about.

I mean the 2268 time period was just filled with continuity references –sometimes to the point of annoying. Like the 1990’s Doctor Who novels, the writers tended to go overboard trying to connect so much unintended continuity, that the books lost something. Hard-core fans enjoyed, I guess, but here –like Cox’s Eugenics War series- tries too hard to make it line up perfectly. But it sometimes hurts the flow of the narrative. In the end, I felt the 2268 TV era part was unnecessary. 

We do get a resolution to what happened to Gillian Taylor, who pops up (in, I guess, a cameo) in the final chapter. We learn what she is working on, which will eventually become part of the animated Star Trek series Lower Decks, but I would admit as well, it was disappointing she showed up so late in the book.

It’s a fine book, but it’s a reminder why I eventually gave up reading a lot of these Star Trek novels. Long gone in one of these franchise books is a creditable villain. 

Books: Star Trek: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack (2021)

 

"At the end of Moments Asunder, author James Swallow’s middle chapter of the Coda trilogy, our reneged Starfleet folks have taken shelter in the Mirror Universe to escape Admiral William Riker, who is being influenced by some kind of temporal personality disorder, and the Devidians’ attack across all of time. Here we meet new versions of our familiar characters, including Luc Picard, the captain of the CSS Enterprise and Director Savvik of Memory Omega, a scientific facility that houses all kinds of advanced technology. It is also here that the team of Data, Spock, and Wesley, using the Bajoran Orb of Time, learn a horrible truth about their existence and what they’ll have to sacrifice if they’re going to stop the end of the universe."

 

While Oblivion‘s Gate hits the ground running, once I got some fifty pages into it and learned that entire two decade run of Star Trek novels since Nemesis (well, really since First Contact) has actually been set in an alternate branch of the Prime Timeline seen in TNG, DS9, and VGR –called First Splinter- and this revelation left me cold. I mean, I’ve not read a lot of those Star Trek books that have been published in the last 20 years, but then I began to think about those long time readers who have. So then comes the Coda trilogy, and watch out, because this series is now saying that every single event these readers have read in those books, every character moment they have loved, every emotional loss and success that the crews of various series has encountered, has now been explicitly erased –they never happened. So all those relationships the readers have invested in, the ongoing Picard and Crusher relationship, or Janeway and Chakotay one, all the journeys these characters have been on in the last two decades are lost, leaving no mark in the extended Lit universe of Star Trek.

 

While the notion of First Splinter tangent was created during the events of Star Trek: First Contact film is an intriguing idea, as I read, I began to realize the cause to effect of this revelation and then it makes me feel there should’ve been a better way to close out this portion of the Trek-Lit line. Sure, the writers of this trilogy remind us what Star Trek has always stood for: self-sacrifice, the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, that giving up their lives in the service of stopping the Devidians is a noble cause, but it comes with the idea that nobody will know what they did.

 

This theme has also been done many times before on the Star Trek live-action series, especially on Voyager, in the two-part Year of Hell, Timeless, and series finale, Endgame. It’s a shame that this was the only way three talented writers could end this two decade period.

 

Sure, Disney labeling their Star Wars EU novels as “Legacy” tales not connected to the franchise relaunch back in 2015 angered long-time readers, but they have (for good or bad, depending on your view) cherry picked some of the best characters and situations from them, especially for both the animated series and Disney+ live-action series. So repeating this error with the Star Trek books was not going to work.

 

For good or bad, for me, the Coda trilogy does not end on a hopeful or optimistic note. In addition, while as I've said, I’ve not devoted a lot of time to these various novels over the last twenty years, I can see where some that have will not be pleased with what has been done here. Then again, there may be an equal number who loved all of it.

 

But for me, the series (and this book) has too much going on, too much jumping around, too many characters to keep track of, so it became an effort to keep things in some cohesive structure. Had I read the seventeen novels and other short stories that comprise this conclusive series, I may have felt more connected. Try as they might, I do feel anyone reading this series will need to have read those previous books to really get a better perspective from them.

 

But again, this was all designed to retcon Star Trek Picard into the literary Star Trek universe. My end thought is maybe they just should’ve just slapped “Legend” on the old books and been done with it.

Books: Star Trek: Legacies: Captain to Captain By Greg Cox (2016)

Much like Doctor Who, the longevity of Star Trek has allowed much iteration with many stories, not only on TV, film, and fan made shows on the internet, but in novels as well. While Doctor Who waited until it was close to thirty years old before allowing original novels to be released, Star Trek has been giving us new (and non-conical) tales almost since the show ended its run back in 1969. And since 1979, there has been one continuous run of original novels.  

But Star Trek has a uniqueness to it that has allowed novelists to continue to release new adventures. What a lot of writers have done is take minor elements (and major ones) within the continuity of the franchise and go off in tangents both good and bad. They’ve been able to expand minor characters (both guest casts and other crew members who did get names) and give them a full back-story –whether you care or not.

Greg Cox’s Legacies: Captain to Captain is designed to tie-into the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek: The Original Series, and is the opening story in a new trilogy that stretches from the earliest years of the Starship Enterprise under Captain Robert April to Captain Kirk’s historic five-year-mission, as well as one universe to another. Hidden aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise is a secret that has been passed from captain to captain, from Robert April to Christopher Pike to James T. Kirk. Now the return of the enigmatic woman once known as Number One has brought that secret to light, and Kirk and his crew must risk everything to finish a mission that began with April so many years ago. Nearly two decades earlier, April and his crew first visited the planet Usilde, where they found both tragedy and a thorny moral dilemma. Today, the legacy of that fateful occasion will compel Kirk to embark on a risky voyage back to that forbidden world—which is now deep in territory claimed by the Klingon Empire!

As always, the novels are not “official” Star Trek. But Cox, who has written a number of other titles in the franchise including the duology Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, does a fair job of exploring the unmade TV years of Captain April and Captain Pike (beyond the TV series first pilot) along with giving us a look into the Number One character that vanished in the re-writes the series went through when NBC gave Star Trek a second chance. In Cox’s tale, we learn that Number One is Illyrian who goes by the name Una. The moniker of “Number One” comes from the fact that she was a high achiever in everything she did, not only on her home planet, but in her rise through Starfleet. 

Of course, we get references of Kirk era stories, in particular Mirror, Mirror (even though the Captain and crew are more supporting characters here) and that mysterious Tantalus Device that the alternate Kirk used, which connects the plot along. Cox does spend an insufferable amount of time giving us minute detail about the landing party and them walking the six kilometers (and if Usildar is a rainforest, why do the original inhabitants of the planet need misters? They’re only beneficial in areas like a desert where there is low humidity) which, sadly, enabled me to skip a number of pages (and a reason I read it so fast -though having the day off from work helped). Then there is Una’s plan to rescue her fellow crew members, which is nearly the same plan as Older Captain Janeway from Star Trek: Voyagers series finale. 

It’s an okay book, but it is a reminder to me why I eventually gave up trying to read these them. Part of it, of course, there are so many novels, not only in TOS line, but The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise (but since I dislike the last two, I’ve never taken the time to read those spin-off novels). 

I have so much other stuff I want to read that I cannot lock myself into one series, one genre anymore. 

The other part of my issues with them is that these tales are always (well it seems) connected to past episode stories; at least when Bantam was releasing titles back in the early 1970s, they writers tried to do original science fiction stories. Now everyone seems to have its roots in previous television episodes.

I suppose there is some logic to that. Online fan shows, in particular New Voyages and Continues, are setting their stories within TOS TV run and usually feature some sort of continuation of tales started there. It’s comforting and familiar, I guess, to those old school fans. But current Star Trek, in whatever form it comes in now, seems more concerned with rehashing previous episodes than actually telling a great science fiction story with a moral dilemma.

Books: Star Trek: Elusive Salvation By Dayton Ward (2016)

The shared universe of Star Trek novels –and the sheer numbers published continuously since 1979 when Pocket Books overtook Bantam Books (who released a sporadic, but fair number of titles in the early to mid 1970s) - means the quality of them goes up and down from novel to novel. And it’s hard sometimes not to see these tales as nothing less than fan fiction, albeit “official”, for most seem to revolve around characters and situations established on the various TV series and movies over Star Trek’s 50 year life span. Even the fan web series, which began around 2000 and continue today, seem obsessed with doing sequels to TV episodes instead of trying to do original stories using the Star Trek characters. 

Part of that, I guess, is that fans like familiarity. By doing continuations of those stories, concepts and ideas, the readers are not subjected to anything that may be challenging. And I don’t mean to sounds like an ass when I say that, it’s just today’s media seems infatuated with idea that originality is somehow dangerous and that the audience only wants retreads of what came before. And that’s part of the reason why I sort of left the Star Trek original novel series behind, only occasionally dipping my toe back when something peaks my interest.

And while Elusive Salvation is a serviceable novel, light and fun, the reader clearly knows how this will all end from the start of the adventure. 

“The Arctic Circle, 1845: Escaping the tyranny under which their people have lived for generations, aliens from a distant planet crash land on Earth’s inhospitable frozen wastes. Surviving the harsh conditions will pose a challenge, but over time the aliens will migrate to more populated areas, with decades passing as they work to conceal their presence from their former oppressors, who continue to hunt them at any cost. San Francisco, 2283: When a mysterious craft is detected entering the solar system, Admiral James Kirk is dispatched by Starfleet to confront the vessel. He meets with an emissary from the Iramahl, a previously unknown alien race who have come in search of their brothers and sisters thought to have gone missing in this area of space centuries earlier. Having recently thrown off the last chains of subjugation by another species, the Ptaen, they now believe their lost people hold the key to saving their entire race from eventual extinction. New York, 1970: Roberta Lincoln, young protégé of the mysterious agent Gary Seven, is shocked when she receives the oddest request for help—from the future…”

As I’ve mentioned before, I do enjoy time travel stories, and beyond the great looking cover this book has (yes, I bought it because of the cover. Mostly.) it does involve that great trope of science fiction, time travel. It also has Roberta Lincoln from the TOS episode Assignment: Earth, a great character (and concept) that probably would’ve been neat to see as a TV series (that episode, as I’ve read, was really a backdoor pilot at NBC that never went anywhere). Of course it was Teri Garr’s wonderful performance that made the episode memorable. And while author Greg Cox has revisited Lincoln and her mysterious boss, the human Gary Seven, in a few novels that fleshed out the Eugenics and Khan conflict (the duology novels: The Rise and Fall of Khan Nooien Singh) no great origin story has been developed. Gary Seven remains a cipher and in this book by Dayton Ward, you’ll not get any clearer picture of who Seven is or why the organization known as Aegis does what it does (and how they're able to do what they do, because Ward spends no time even attempting an explanation).

Of course, one of the best aspects of these Star Trek novels is its ability to connect dots that were never intended to be made. The franchises does have a rich history, but a lot the Federation and Starfleet's origins were not nailed down continuity wise during TOS run, so it’s enabled these writers to make speculative jumps in their stories (such as: Gary Seven and this Aegis group are now connected to the Temporal Cold War arc that was part of Star Trek: Enterprise’s first few TV seasons). Which is great, I like that. But sometimes it’s the other stuff, the other characters and actions and the pacing of the book that divides these books from good to bad or just serviceable.

Ward, who also penned the 2013 Trek novel From History’s Shadow (which I did not read, and which the writer spoils entirely here), is clearly a fan of UFO’s and our governments history of “covering up” alien activity here on Earth. He seems to have spent a great deal of time researching real life conspiracy agencies like Project Blue Book and Majestic 12. He also takes pot shots at more modern Star Trek TV series that seemed to think James Kirk’s style of it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. This corporate utopian that slithered into Star Trek has been one my most critical aspects of the franchise in its later years; that what made the show, the crew of the Enterprise so much fun was its ability to break the rules and use “cowboy diplomacy” to resolve many problems.

Of course, Kirk is always right, but even when he is disciplined by his superior officers, his punishment is light. So the fantasy of Star Trek continues.