Christopher L. Bennett

I had a mixed reaction to the first two Temporal Investigations books, which had some good ideas and were sometimes fun, but often got bogged down in continuity references that crowded out story. The third installment sees a format change, to novella, which makes it more focused and story-driven, plus we're all out of episodes to explain away, so Bennett has to come up with a plot that builds on Star Trek time travel, but isn't beholden to any previous story.

The result is delightful. Dulmur show more and Lucsly are inducting a new artifact into the DTI's vault when Agent Jen Noi (a contemporary of Enterprise's Daniels) pops up to claim it for the 31st century instead. Soon, Dulmur and Lucsly are being whisked away to an alternate 31st century, and then even further afield. It's just fun, and surprisingly given its length, it feels big. There's lots of great stuff here: Jena Noi using time technology in hand-to-hand combat, megastructures of the kind we rarely see in Star Trek, the awesome scale (and kind-of logic) of the Collectors' plan, the Borg T. rex(!), the way Garcia and Ranjea rewrite their own histories but don't even notice, Lucsly's reaction to being in the future being to keep his eyes closed so he can't contaminate the timeline, the TIA's method for beating the Collectors (a lot like Mudd's technique in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," actually). Sometimes Bennett's writing can get bogged down and clunky, but that's not true here; this book zips along, playful and entertaining.

It's not all roses; I was little annoyed the 24th-century agents trying to track down Dulmur and Lucsly have no real effect on the story, and the bit where Dulmur and Lucsly solve their personal issues by noting how the Collectors' problems parallel their own and give a speech about it is a bit on the nose. But fundamentally I really enjoyed this, and I look forward to reading future DTI e-novellas. Given how often I feel like Destiny-era novels take to long to get to the point, maybe all Star Trek books should be novellas?

Continuity Notes:

• I did wonder if I was being silly, pausing Cold Equations to read this, but in the end I'm glad I did, because 1) I wasn't enjoying Cold Equations very much whereas I did very much enjoy this, and 2) there are a few small but meaningful references to the Breen plot from Silent Weapons.
• There's a bit about how there was a brief, abandoned fashion for holo-communicators. At the time it was written, it was referring to the Deep Space Nine episodes "For the Uniform" and "Doctor Bashir, I Presume," but these days you can pretend it's a reference to their use in the 2250s in Discovery (although, the tech is said to be clunky, which isn't true of the Discovery version).
• I liked that Rom as Grand Nagus is making the Ferengi more conscious of the perils of time travel; given his experiences in "Little Green Men," it makes sense!

Other Notes:

• I continue to like how the 31st-century time agents are to the DTI as the FBI is to local police.
• A couple characters' rants feel too much like Bennett's own rants, and it threw me out of the story: the one about advanced technology the Federation ignores, and the one about how people confuse different alien species with the Preservers.
• It's a Christopher Bennett book, so people are constantly commenting on how attractive the women are.
• Some foreshadowing here-- what is the Body Electric?

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After its initial four-book run, there were a number of what I guess you might call "supplemental" books in the Typhon Pact series, beginning with this, the series's only eBook novella. Given my reaction to the original set of books, and this book's short size, I wasn't expecting much out of it, but to my surprise, it's the best Typhon Pact story thus far, the first to really deliver on the concept's storytelling potential, even if in a limited way.

Like most of the Typhon Pact series, it show more falls squarely into one ongoing series despite lacking one on its title page; in this case, it's a Next Generation novella, focusing on the Enterprise-E dealing with some of the political fallout of the formation of the Typhon Pact. In classic Next Generation style, we have A- and B-plots focusing on different characters. Picard, Worf, and Crusher on the Enterprise work to bring the Talarians (from TNG's "Suddenly Human," an episode I've actually never seen) into the expanded Khitomer Accords (the NATO to Typhon's Warsaw Pact), while Jasminder Choudhury and T'Ryssa Chen travel to Janalwa, the capital planet of the Kinshaya, where there's democratic political unrest against the theocratic government of the Pact's most reclusive member.

Each story on its own is interesting, and explores the repercussions of the Typhon Pact in a nuanced way. On Talar, negotiations are disrupted when women begin to demand more rights than the patriarchal government will allow them, which puts Captain Picard in an awkward position: the Federation promotes democratic ideals, but it also needs the Talarian government onside as a signatory to the Khitomer Accords, and so can't be seen to be supporting the rebels, even philosophically. It's a classic TNG-style moral dilemma, that only increases in complexity when Doctor Crusher is kidnapped by the female rebels.

The Janalwa plotline is also interesting. Freedom of movement has increased between Typhon Pact signatories, and Spock's Vulcan/Romulan reunification movement has been legalized on Romulus, meaning a contingent of Romulan reunificationists are travelling to Janalwa in solidarity with suppressed Kinshaya dissidents; the Kinshaya cannot act against these citizens of an ally they way they might against their own citizens, providing something of a shield for the Kinshaya. Choudhury and Chen in disguise join the Romulans, and the story explores some of the complexities of nonviolent resistance with fairly explicit references to both Gandhi and the Arab Spring, in a way that also ties into Choudhury and Chen's emotional development.

I enjoyed this plotline for how it extrapolated some of the political ramifications that might come from the establishment of the Typhon Pact. In creating an "anti-Federation," the Federation's enemies inadvertently enabled some of the Federation's ideals to flourish. In most of the Typhon Pact novels (Rough Beasts of Empire excepted), the Typhon Pact has mostly been evil antagonists without much complexity, so it's nice to see that reversed here.

If there's a complaint that I have, it's that I'm not convinced a novella should have both an A- and B-plot. Either plotline could have been expanded more: I can imagine another version of the Talar plotline where Picard did more, instead of fretting about what to do. And while I appreciate finally getting some insight into the Kinshaya here, we just scratched the surface on them; the set-up of the plot means that it felt like most of the friendly characters we met on Janalwa were Chen and Choudhury's fellow "Romulans." Seeing more of Kinshaya society would be nice-- as would be probing the limits of political resistance more. Bennett specifically cites Egypt as his primary inspiration, but the Arab Spring in Libya, for example, was wantonly violent at times. (Admittedly, the death of Gaddafi happened the same month the book came out, so Bennett couldn't exactly take it into account!) I could also imagine a version of this story where making the choice to be nonviolent is personally harder for Choudhury, as well.

But a novella doesn't give you the space for this, of course; I think The Struggle Within would have been even stronger as a short novel, or as a novella focused on a single plotline. But despite that, it's the best Typhon Pact story to date.

Continuity Notes:

• Choudhury shaves her hair and adopts mourning tattoos when she disguises herself as a Romulan, in the style of Nero and company from Star Trek (2009), picking up on a retcon first established in, I believe, the Countdown miniseries.

Other Notes:

• The scenes of the Kinshaya leaders using Breen troops to fire on their own citizens were very effective.
• Maybe I'm something of a prude, but Picard/Crusher sex jokes just don't sit right with me.

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These days, the way New Frontier was populated with popular Next Generation guest stars in order to establish its legitimacy as a literary spin-off of the screen franchise seems positively naïve: here we have a novel based around two characters whose total screentime can be collected in a four-minute video. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical going in, but Department of Temporal Investigations turned out to be a fun premise. The joy of it is in the way that Bennett approaches the DTI show more as a long-running cop show, about well-meaning but tired civil servants just trying to do their best in a universe that doesn't appreciate them.

It's the small details that make the book work: I liked the joke about how DTI agents are tired of time jokes (the one in the opening chapter was delightful); I liked how uptime temporal agents are higher authorities, basically like when the FBI turns up in a police procedural; I liked the idea that after major disasters, the DTI has more work both because of people trying to change history and because of tourists/researchers coming back to see it; I liked the little digest history of the DTI, where when Starfleet gets time travel, they're all "neat! let's explore time too! what could go wrong!" and the DTI is formed because the government is like, "You keep almost wiping out recorded history. STOP IT." I liked the portrayal of Dulmur and Lucsly. Bennett stated his intention was to turn their very colorlessness into an asset, and the book succeeded in this. I liked both of their fervent devotion to the job, and the sly humor of Lucsly, especially his final line in the penultimate chapter.

The book's strongest parts are its beginning and its ending. The opening chapter, featuring an agent who's snapped after a rough mission in the wake of Star Trek: Destiny is good fun; I loved both his rant ("Kill her, don't kill her, none of this makes a difference to the multiverse.") and Lucsly's putdown of it ("stop abusing temporal physics as an excuse to dodge responsibility for your own choices!"). The whole first chapter leads like the pilot episode of DTI tv show, because it goes straight from this (obviously the opening teaser) into a quick mystery about passenger transport that traveled through time, which has tv-style cutting between suspect interrogations. The whole thing culminates in the induction of a new member of the DTI, a potential viewpoint character. It was fun and entertaining.

Unfortunately, the whole book is not like that. It soon settles into a monotonous format of alternating present-day cases of the DTI in 2381 to 2382 with flashbacks that slowly ascend from 2364 to 2378. None of these cases are as good as the first one, which could stand on its own as a little story-- most of the flashback cases follow the format of "DTI turns up the aftereffects of a Next Generation episode; exposition is delivered to massage the details into the novel's Unified Theory of Star Trek Time Travel." It's definitely small world, and none of them are as zippily written as the introduction, sometimes getting quite belabored in their explaining of temporal theory, Star Trek continuity, or both. It's formulaic and there's not enough at stake in most of them to be interesting. Some are still entertaining, though (I liked the bit where Janeway escapes temporal justice and Lucsly quits the force), and soon a narrative begins to emerge, of the twenty-fourth century's participation in the Temporal Cold War from Enterprise.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about the novel's engagement with this. It works okay on the novel's own terms; the book lays clues about the identity of Enterprise's so called "Future Guy" in each of the flashbacks, and eventually that information pays off. But if you handed a fervent Enterprise fan this book so that they could finally get the answers Enterprise itself never yielded, I don't think they'd be satisfied, as there's absolutely no hints from Enterprise that really pay off here. The true identity and motive of "Future Guy" pay off Watching the Clock itself, not Enterprise. Plus, of course, no Enterprise characters are present to have anything to do with the comeuppance of their long-time nemesis. Maybe they should have plucked Archer out of time to punch him on the jaw or something? But it's as if a long-running mystery in the Father Brown stories was unexpectedly resolved in a Sherlock Holmes story. It jars narratively.

The ending is the other good part; the DTI, some Next Generation characters, the 29th-century Starfleet guys from "Relativity," the 31st-century temporal agents from Enterprise, and many more characters end up in snarled, tangled, temporal mess that was just completely ridiculous in a good way, taking all the goofy possibilities of Star Trek time travel and piling them atop each other to joyous excess. I didn't follow any of it (and I usually have a good head for these things), but I loved reading it. It's like Steven Moffat turned up to eleven.

Also the viewpoint newbie character gets shunted off into her own side story, which completely failed to engage me. The Axis of Time seems like a potentially interesting Big Dumb Object, but the story told with it was completely dull; I couldn't bring myself to care about cross-time artifact smuggling, or super sexy mind control space ladies.

So, a set-up that's more fun in theory than practice, but hopefully that bodes well for future installments of DTI-- I know the third installment onward are novellas, which seems like it would lend itself toward what I liked about the first chapter.

Continuity Notes:

• You could write a list of bullet points for this novel as long as the novel itself; of course, Bennett already has.
• That said, I caught a reference to the notorious Killing Time that he didn't annotate. On p. 205, Lucsly's Romulan counterpart kind of admits that the Romulans may have tried to eliminate the Federation from history "in some... other reality, now rendered irrelevant." (Though Bennett himself said it was less a specific reference to Killing Time and more a general reference to tie-ins about Romulans messing with history.)
• The anecdote about the ringship Enterprise, though, was a particularly belabored continuity fix in a novel full of them. And I'm not even sure the anecdote makes much sense.

Other Notes:

• Like S.C.E. / Corps of Engineers before it, Department of Temporal Investigations has a clunky and un-sexy subtitle. I maintain S.C.E. should have just been called Star Trek: Miracle Workers, but it's less obvious to me what Department of Temporal Investigations could have been called instead. Time Cops? Time Patrol? Time Masters?
• I did feel at times that no female character could turn up without having their attractiveness ranked; this culminates in a scene where Dina Elfiki walks past Dulmur and Lucsly while wearing a holo-disguise, and they exchange dialogue that amounts to, "Not even a hologram can disguise dat ass." (Elfiki is apparently modeled on Sarah Shahi.) On the other hand, I think the attractiveness of exactly one male character is commented on, and he's a Deltan sex god. Who says you need visuals to have male gaze?
• I was amused to note that even in the twenty-fourth century, ALOE is a common crossword puzzle filler word. (It's got three vowels!)
• I think this is the first Star Trek novel to include an allusion to pubic hair.

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I'm divided on if this is a two or three star book for me, on the one hand I enjoyed it more than A Contest of Principles, on the other hand this book didn't really feel like Star Trek at times. I got Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Power Ranger vibes at times which really killed the mood of the story. For me Star Trek is somewhat scientific with some fantastical elements, but Bennett really turned up the more fantastical aspects of Star Trek that made it feel like something different.

I really show more do hope none of this is ever apart of actual Star Trek canon, and by actual canon I mean being in one of the many current airing tv shows, because I really hated some of the choices made by Bennett. I mean when I said this didn't feel like Star Trek at times I mean it. If Bennett had decided to write this novel with his own characters in his own scifi universe, I probably would have liked it more, but because it was Star Trek I am more judgemental.

This certainly was something. Good on Bennett though for writing this story and addressing serious topics and discussing ideas around identity. I think he can write a good story because I did enjoy the first half of the book, but he needs to not try to mess with the canon in so many ways all at once. show less