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.

Books: Star Trek: Legacies: Purgatory's Key By Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore (2016)

“Eighteen years ago, the Starship Enterprise thwarted an alien invasion from another universe, and Captain Robert April took possession of the interdimensional transfer device that made it possible. Since then, each captain of the Enterprise, from Christopher Pike to James T. Kirk, has guarded this secret with his life. Now, Romulan agents have succeeded in stealing the device and using it to banish Ambassador Sarek and Councillor Gorkon to an unknown realm in the midst of their groundbreaking Federation-Klingon peace negotiations. With time running out as interstellar war looms in one universe—and alien forces marshal in another—will Captain Kirk and his crew preserve the tenuous peace and reclaim the key between the dimensions?”

While Purgatory’s Key, the third book in this Legacies series, has some great science fiction elements to them -indomitable and slug like foe the Jatohr- the book is somewhat of mess and highlights why (at least to me) modern Star Trek is caught in a rut. 

Part of the problem lies in the story itself, which would’ve made a great one-off book (even if the ending was already known) but was ballooned out to three novels. Again there is some complex ideas here, but like every other modern Trek TV series, is bogged down in techno-babble and unflappable notion that luck does indeed protect fools, small children and ships named Enterprise.

What is detracting here is that both Klingons and Romulans are more or less the same thing. And while book two focused on Romulans and their ship and the drama that unfolded there –leading to a mutiny of sorts, the same exact thing happens here, but instead it’s the Klingons. Despite honor, despite that both the Romulans and Klingons value honor and hate the Starfleet and the Federation, both (conveniently and coincidently) have soldiers who go against the grain. This speaks –maybe- of modern Klingons, but in a series of novels set during season two of the original series run, these Klingons are reflecting modernistic Star Trek notions. It’s the retcon aspect that has pissed off hardcore Trek fans concerning not only TNG and later series, but JJ Abrams reboot. 

My conclusion has come that Star Trek books have a place today still, fifty years later. But until a writer –perhaps even David Gerrold himself- can write a book that actually takes some risk, then I’ll need to stop reading them for a while. I need to focus on stuff that stirs my brain and not rote books that puts beloved characters in danger only for the reader to know that all will be wrapped up in a neat bow by the end.

Finally, I made note in my last post concerning this series, that featuring Joanna McCoy –Bones daughter- was (again) too convenient. As it happens, back in 1987, Pocket Books released Crisis on Centaurus by Brad Ferguson that was set sometime during the fourth year of Enterprise's five year mission (though, as the Star Trek Wiki points out, “the stardate in the book implies these events took place after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. But that’s nitpicking). The point is, a previous novel, nearly 20 years old and set some two years after this series, had established that Joanna McCoy living on Centaurus. My bad.