Three stories in an alternate timeline.

What if the Vulcans had become our enemies instead of our allies?
What if there were a species stronger than the Borg?
What if Khan had taken over the Earth during the Eugenic Wars?

Each of these questions gave one of the stories in this book a completely different spin on the Star Trek worlds that we have come to know.

What if something, some path in your life had been different, what then? ( )

This is the first in a series of books chronicling possible alternative Star Trek universes. It contains three short-short novels: A Less Perfect Union by William Leisner, Places of Exile by Christopher L. Bennett, and Seeds of Dissent by James Swallow. Of the three, my favorite was definitely Leisner's, telling the story of an Earth that never joined the United Federation of Planets. Despite depicting an alternate universe, Leisner captures the characters quite well-- they all feel like the people we know and love, but not quite. It's a true Star Trek story, ably demonstrating that we are better together than we are apart in the best tradition of the series, but from a different perspective than we've had before.

James Swallow's story was decent-- the idea of a universe with "Khan victorius!" as the back cover shouts at us is a good one, as is the story he concocts in it, a sort of reverse "Space Seed". The best touch was the Khan hologram. I do find it very contrived that any of the characters we know-- especially the human ones-- could even remotely exist in this universe, however.

Christopher L. Bennett's alternative Voyager story, on the other hand, fell pretty flat with me, spending too much of its time telling and not showing characterization, trying to do far too much in its short pagespan, and getting bogged down in some pretty uninteresting stuff with Species 8472.

Overall, the first two Myriad Universes volumes have been an unreserved success, opening up Star Trek in a new way, which is always a good thing. I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite between A Less Perfect Union and A Gutted World, but I enjoyed almost all of the stories quite a bit. I look forward to the future planned installments in the series, though I'd like to see those utilize some new formats: full novels, short stories, &c.