Dayton Ward

This book essentially has two totally separate plotlines. One is very familiar; this is our fourth Dayton Ward–penned exploring-the-Odyssean-Pass-after-The Fall novel, and so you'll know the vibe by now. The Enterprise comes across an interesting situation, there's some conflict, T'Ryssa Chen is in it a lot, Taurik is there. Ward is good at coming up with premises that feel like lost TNG episodes; in this one, the Enterprise and a group of scavengers come upon a derelict spaceship that show more seems like it ought to have a lot of people aboard... but where are they? There are some clever concepts here and interesting spins on Star Trek technology. As I have with almost all of these books, I found myself thinking about how I would adapt it to serve as a Star Trek Adventures scenario, which is always a good sign.

I don't think there's anything bad about these four books per se, but they have felt a bit... stasis-y. Like, all the characters are present and correct, but there's not the vibe you got back at the height of the Deep Space Nine relaunch or in the early days of New Frontier and Titan, that you were watching these characters evolve and grow. It almost reads like a tie-in to a tv show that doesn't exist, like all the characters have to be maintained as they are. Worf does Worf things, La Forge does La Forge things, T'Ryssa Chen does T'Ryssa Chen things, Joanna Faur continues to exist, Beverly isn't in it except as Picard's wife. I don't think I would say I disliked any of the post-Fall TNG novels on their own merits, but unfortunately I do feel like the best one was the first, Armageddon's Arrow; it had a sense that we were moving forward and going somewhere that ended up missing from Headlong Flight, Hearts and Minds, and this book.

The other half of the book is the fallout from Section 31: Control, which is really the fallout from A Time to Heal, a book that came out fifteen years prior! Section 31's existence is now public, but along with this, so is Picard's role in the coup that deposed President Min Zife. This half has its own two halves. In one, we see what's going on back on Earth: how are the politicians and the people dealing with all the revelations about S31, particularly that everything that everything the Federation has ever accomplished in its utopia-building was really the result of unsanctioned black ops? Mostly this is told from the perspective of Philippa Louvois (of "Measure of a Man" fame), now Federation Attorney General, as she begins carrying out investigations and prosecutions. It's fine; I did have the feeling that maybe the revelations of Control were a bit too big to realistically be accommodated into a tie-in book series at all, much less as a B-plot. The Federation has had yet another existential shock but I just don't think you can adequately deal with that and maintain the status quo needed for this to also be a series of books about people having fun space adventures. At this point, is it even realistic that the Federation continues to function? Akaar gives like five different speeches about how human choices do matter but they all feel a bit hollow.

I'm not sure about a couple choices here, like one where a trained Starfleet officer turns into a cold-blooded killer trying to get Admiral Ross because her husband died due to a Section 31 op. Also what's up with all the characters' insistence that Ross was a key player in S31? To the extent that an organization like S31 has formal members, I never had the sense that he was one; I certainly didn't feel like he was guiding policy. He was more just a guy the real players knew they could count on to throw things their way when needed.

The other half of this half is the personal fallout for Picard himself. This I found profoundly disappointing. What is the reaction of every key character finding out that Picard had a role in the illegal takedown of a democratically elected leader. Basically everyone shrugs and says, "oh well sometimes you just have to do a coup i guess." I could buy this of some characters (I can certainly imagine it of Worf, a man who previously killed a democratically elected leader)... but everyone? No one is upset to learn that the principled Jean-Luc Picard totally abandoned his principles? Not Beverly, not La Forge, not T'Ryssa, not Will Riker? I found this disappointing because 1) so much for Federation ideals, and 2) it seems a bizarre dramatic choice. This thing happens that could totally upend your characters' relationships, and you basically just ignore it?

The book ends with Picard deciding to be accountable for his decision and return to Earth, which I appreciate, but it feels pretty random; I wish it had been a natural outgrowth of the way something from this storyline intersected with the A-plot.

Notes on continuity and other issues on my blog. show less

Parallel universes are, of course, an old standby of Star Trek in specific and popular science fiction in general. What can we learn by seeing the road untaken, other universes where people made different choices or things went different ways? This book sees the Enterprise-E returning to its mission of exploration, which eventually brings it into contact with the Enterprise-D from 2367... but an Enterprise-D from a reality where Picard died during the events of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part show more II" and Riker became captain; other differences include the continued existence of Tasha Yar, Pulaski still serving as CMO, and Wesley working as a civilian specialist on the Enterprise.

The book invites comparisons with any number of parallel universe stories, from TNG's "Parallels" onwards, but the one that jumped out at me was Peter David's Q-Squared, because Dayton Ward performs a similar trick to David. In Q-Squared, some clever work with pronouns makes it unclear during one of the book's earlier scenes that we're in an alternate timeline; we at first thing we're reading about Picard and Beverly Crusher when it turns out to be Picard and a still-living Jack Crusher. In an early E-D scene, Ward has the crew at a card game, and some vague references to "the captain" make you think Picard is the captain when in fact it's Riker.

David deploys the revelation to dramatic effect, dropping it in (if I recall correctly, it's been at least two decades since I read Q-Squared) at the end of a scene, upending the mental image you had built up over the preceding several pages.The problem here is that the next time we go to the alternative Enterprise-D, we're just told that Riker is captain; there's no drama to the reveal. So why defer it?

An inexplicable lack of drama is consistent through all the alternative timeline stuff. It takes absolutely forever before the two crews are even aware of each other; I felt like the first one hundred pages were just people scanning nebulas. And while in Armageddon's Arrow, Ward built in a lot of nice little moments and small arcs for the E-E crew, here I felt I was just reading about them doing their jobs in the most humdrum fashion. T'Ryssa Chen has a boyfriend... and that's it, nothing is at stake for her. Once the two crews meet, they do so without much drama or interest. Does the discovery of this other Enterprise do anything other than make the crew from the future nostalgic about the old LCARS format and bridge layout? Not really. It doesn't raise any questions for Picard about his life, or La Forge, or Worf, or anyone.

The closest we get is that the alternative Riker gets a bit of closure... but to be honest, why do I care if that guy gets some closure? Again, compare Q-Squared, where if nothing else, Jack Crusher undergoes an existential crisis from learning about his fate in the "Prime" timeline. At the end, Picard makes a potentially interesting decision in giving the alternative Enterprise-D metaphasic torpedoes, but this decision entirely happens off-screen, and its consequences seem to be limited to the fact that if he is found out, he will receive a sternly worded letter from a bureaucrat.

Outside of the alternative timeline stuff, there is unfortunately little going on in the novel. The main antagonists are Romulans from a century ago; unsurprisingly, they are little threat, even aside from the fact they mostly seem to sit around talking replaying beats from "Balance of Terror." I was not able to get worked up about the fate of the aliens in any way, shape, or form, and it's all resolved with surprising ease.

In both cases, information is often imparted to the reader in the least dramatic fashion possible. Rather than learn about the alternative Enterprise-D's history along with the Enterprise-E crew, it's simply given to us in exposition. Rather than have the Romulans dramatically decloak to make things worse, they simply pop up in a chapter from their viewpoint where they just sit around watching people. There's no dramatic reveals, no suspense mind from almost anything here. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what the book was going for. The basic premise seems to be "two alternative crews meet each other... and everyone is terribly nice about it." Perhaps it's a realistic take in a Star Trekky sense, but it hardly makes for interesting reading.

Continuity Notes:

• Picard thinks of the Briar Patch as a place that gave the Enterprise trouble years earlier... not months earlier!


• The ship class names for the Romulan ships in this book all come from the FASA RPG sourcebooks.


• Picard recalls that the Enterprise-E was originally called the USS Honorius while under construction, being redesignated after the crash of the Enterprise-D on Veridian III. While the origins of this name are obscure, its first mention in prose fiction came in the S.C.E. novella The Future Begins by... oh, how interesting. (Not, contrary to the claims of Wikipedia, in Diane Carey's Ship of the Line.)

Other Notes:

• In a bit about how Chen seems to do everything on the ship but her job as contact specialist, we're told that what she spends her time doing includes "composing... detailed analysis of whatever new species the Enterprise might encounter, and recommendations for next steps... with respect to a newly discovered civilization" (p. 27). But if composing such materials isn't part of the duties of a contact specialist, what even are the duties of a contact specialist?


• There is for some reason a totally irrelevant two-page recap of the events of "The Pegasus."


• There is also a whole page-long thing that establishes that Christopher L. Bennett is an in-universe professor at Starfleet Academy. He likes to talk a lot about time travel theories, spinning a lot out of very small comments by other people and unable to stop talking. Hard to imagine, to be honest.


• Doug Drexler's cover image is as undramatic and humdrum as the book it illustrates. And doesn't that Enterprise-D look a bit wonky to you?

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Do Not Recommend. It's sad and frustrating how badly this book missed for me, because Tarsus IV is such a juicy, engaging, emotionally fraught situation. The details here don't convince me, it reads more like a Tom Clancy hunt-'em-down novel than anything else, and to add insult to injury it doesn't even do a good job characterizing Prime Lorca, who I'd really like to know more about. Sigh. Would have been a DNF if not for my project to read every book, and that I wanted to know what show more happened from a canon-ish perspective.

One of the great strengths of the original episode “The Conscience of the King” was that while Kirk judges Kodos’ actions, it leaves the question of whether Kodos was truly a bone-deep monster open. Could he have been simply a person caught up in a terrifying time, given too much power, trying to apply Vulcan-style logic and making errors so huge they cannot be forgiven? His actions when he discovers his daughter’s murders certainly suggest that.

But this book leaves none of that wiggle room. We are never given a moment to consider that perhaps, when out of their mind with fear and anger and grief, humans do things that are wrong, even evil, and live to regret them. Kodos is transformed into a calculating, sociopathic dictator with a cultlike following who has no regret or remorse, even when Starfleet’s relief ships arrive early. Every character who encounters the situation instantly decides that Kodos is an irredeemable villain who must be “brought to justice,” that justice ideally being a short drop and a sudden stop. And the sentence-by-sentence writing, unfortunately, isn’t good enough to convince me that the characters really feel this way, only that the characters need to feel this way in order to justify paragraph upon paragraph of loving description of Starfleet service rifles.

I’m most angry with this because Tarsus IV is such a rich setting, and it seems like a perfect setup to showcase a truly well-developed Prime Lorca. What if Lorca’s response to tragedy - assuming the plot more or less rolls out as it does in the novel - is consistently shown to be an inner battle between his anger and the compassion that he believes he ought to show to all beings? Wouldn’t that be a more interesting comparison to Mirror Lorca? What if Georgiou, on the relief vessel, was more enraged than Lorca at the situation, having conceived of herself as a savior and appearing on Tarsus IV only to find out she was too late? What if Kodos and his followers had complex ideas about ethics????? We will never know.

In conclusion, don’t read this book unless you really have to. If you want to read a Star Trek novel about the Disco characters, read Desperate Hours. If you want to read a Star Trek novel with ethics in it, read Prime Directive. If you want to read a Star Trek novel about young Jim Kirk, read Best Destiny (it’s flawed and a little old-fashioned, but solidly enjoyable). The only reason to read Drastic Measures is to find out (SPOILERS behind the jump)... show less

There are certain subgenres of Star Trek episodes: the studied-by-omnipotent-aliens story, the planet-of-the-hats story, the estranged father story. One I'd never really given much thought to before picking up From History's Shadow is the "secret history" subgenre of Star Trek: Vulcans giving us vel-kroh (Enterprise's "Carbon Creek"), aliens guiding us through the 20th-century Cold War (the original's "Assignment: Earth"), 29th-century technology giving us the microprocessor (Voyager's show more "Future's End"), and so on. From History's Shadow, like its literary predecessor The Eugenics Wars by Greg Cox, expands on those episodes to present a whole story of 20th-century secret history. For James Wainwright, this novel begins just after the events of Deep Space Nine's "Little Green Men" in 1947 and ends with the events of the original's "Tomorrow is Yesterday" in 1969 (plus a 1996 coda based around "Future's End"), threading its events into episodes like "Carbon Creek" and "Assignment: Earth" in between. It's not all references, though, as Dayton Ward works in a new alien race, the Certoss Ajahlan, who are combatants in the Temporal Cold War working to rewrite Earth's history in order to prevent their own destruction.

On the one hand, it's clever and fan-pleasing how From History's Shadow weaves all these references together, emulating what The Eugenics Wars did with the later parts of the 20th century. I appreciated the return of Mestral ("Carbon Creek" is one of the better Enterprise episodes) and I've always loved Roberta Lincoln andvI find the Aegis tantalizing. And the intricacies of the Temporal Cold War always have a certain appeal as well. Ward comes up with a compelling, seemingly unified history. Also interestingly, this book almost creates a secret history's secret history, revealing that behind-the-scenes there was more going on in "Assignment: Earth" than we were told on screen.

But I found that the story often lacked energy. Big chunks of time periodically pass, and I don't think they always do so in elegant ways; there are a number of scenes where Wainwright sits around thinking about things that have happened, things which sound more interesting than the things that are happening. The rise and fall of his department seems key to this story, but it's glossed over more than it's explored. I particularly wanted more of Wainwright himself. This is a man who's dedicated himself to a cause for over twenty years that's wrecked his personal life, but up until the very end, I had little sense of his own inner drive. His emotions and motivation always seem muted. A determination to discover the truth could have provided the unity that this kind of transhistorical epic needs. But the novel lacked cohesion, coming across more as a series of disparate incidents. I did really like Wainwright's last two scenes; his confrontation with Captain Christopher and his recognizing Voyager on the television give us a window into a man obsessed and pushed around too long, but up until then there'd been little hint of what made him go.

I'm also uncertain about the 23rd-century interstices on the Enterprise. I get why they're there, but at the beginning of the book they lack incident (it's a lot of Kirk and Spock talking to people) and dissipate momentum of the main story. They also give away some of its revelations: it's okay for a reader to be ahead of a character, but information from the frame story puts the reader too far ahead of the characters on some occasions. If we knew as little as Wainwright did, this might have made his investigations a bit more compelling. I did like how the Enterprise segments wrapped up, but it took too long to get there.

Continuity Notes:

• Some post-foreshadowing here: Kirk and Spock mention a mysterious Commodore Antonio Delgado in connection with the Temporal Cold War. I assume we will hear more about this man in time travel stories going forward.
• Probably some savvy fellow could put or has put together a Gary Seven/Roberta Lincoln timeline. This novel predates Roberta's trip to the 23rd century in Assignment: Eternity, but here she seems a little more au fait with the Aegis agent lifestyle than I remember from Eternity.

Other Notes:

• Much of the action in this novel takes place at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which is just over an hour from where I grew up. I have fond memories of the airplane displays there, which I saw many times as a child. I never noticed any Ferengi shuttles or Vulcan probes, however. There's not really any local color beyond names, though. (Does Jim Wainright like Skyline chili? Or is he more of a Gold Star man? Does he root for the Reds? Or does he stick to the more local Dayton Dragons?)

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