The Lost Era: Well of Souls

I picked up Ilsa Bick's Well of Souls because I was greatly impressed by her award-winning Star Trek short story "A Ribbon for Rosie" in the anthology Strange New Worlds II. That story moved me to tears and proved she could really, really write. Unfortunately, for me this novel fell short, although it's still evident to me Bick is a talented writer and I'd certainly be willing to read her again.

As the "Historian's Note" at the front of the book states, the "story is set in the year 2336, forty-three years after the presumed death of Captain James T. Kirk aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-B in Star Trek Generations, and twenty-eight years before the launch of the Enterprise-D in "Encounter at Far Point." In between those two focal points this show more novel deals with the Enterprise-C we saw in the Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise." We barely got a glimpse of Captain Rachel Garrett in that episode, and the only character on board we got a good look at was Richard Castillo--and only for that episode. That means that for all intents and purposes these are original characters. The book then has to stand and fall as a science fiction novel--the characters aren't pre-sold, this isn't the kind of book you usually seek out in such media pro-books--the chance to spend time with characters who are old friends. About the only familiar character--and he has a small part in this--is Doctor Leonard McCoy from the original series.

The author biography in the back tells us Bick is a psychiatrist who "has written extensively on psychoanalysis" and it shows--I think to the book's detriment actually. This is her first published novel, and it has to be hard not to lean on what you know. But ultimately Star Trek in any of it's incarnations isn't about a psychiatric practice. It's about heroes and leadership and friendship and adventure and bumping into alien societies and situations that shed light on the human condition and I feel that's not focused on enough. From the start Garrett struck me as too emo, and the book is way too concerned with Garrett's guilt over the death of her former first officer, with the current first officer's guilt over the death of a former officer, and the guilt of the acting first officer over the death of her brother. At times I wanted to shout at the characters to get over themselves and do their jobs. And Garrett herself never for me comes into focus as the leader of her crew, as a charismatic figure like her Enterprise counterparts Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. At times I also thought the style a bit overwritten.

A first novel can be tough. A first novel based on someone else's universe might not have brought out the best in Bick. For all that criticism, again, this is evidently a talented author worth reading who apparently has moved on to write other novels. I just wouldn't start here. show less

I bought Ilsa Bick’s Star Trek: The Lost Era: Well of Souls because the Enterprise-C is my favorite of the Starships Enterprise and I wanted an additional story featuring Captain Rachel Garrett and her crew. Unfortunately, the story is just far, far too rambling and there are so many new characters that it’s difficult to keep track, particularly as Bick writes about them and their backstory as if they had appeared in numerous episodes of their own television series. Instead, one constantly feels as if this novel were somewhere in the middle of a series, except that the previous Lost Era novels do not connect to this with Keith R.A. DeCandido’s The Art of the Impossible only including a passing reference to the Enterprise-C. For show more the most part, each book tells its own self-contained story set sometime between the launch of the Enterprise-B and the launch of the Enterprise-D. Bick’s story relies a great deal on characters’ internal lives and the guilt they feel over various past incidents, but it’s difficult to get invested when there’s just so much background and world-building in each chapter. It would have been better to slowly reveal characters’ motivations instead of packing so much into the beginning. This is by far the longest of the Lost Era novels and would have benefited from further edits to clarify and strengthen the story. show less