The Escape

Wow, so this was a really good book. You can tell it was written before Voyager first aired as the Doctor is called "Doc Zimmerman" and the characters are all off by a bit. There's a lot of clunkiness. Neelix feels like an escort NPC in your average RPG. Always having to stop and take naps. I think that adds to the charm though. The story is fantastic, its about a species that developed time travel instead of space travel. Their entire civilization divided up the planet's history into segments called Periods, that are 500,000 years long. Everyone moved into Periods of their choosing and are allowed to visit other Periods, but not time travel within their own to prevent paradoxes.

It seems like with a bit of refinement this would make a show more really good TV episode. show less

This novelization presents a relatively unique alien civilization - one that lives in different time periods, not in different physical locations. The story is a bit overcomplicated, but I liked it nonetheless — I wish it spent a little more time with individual characters, though.

(I've not got my notes on hand, so this will less detailed than usual.)

This one was decent. It's the first original story in the Voyager novels, and a fine start, though not too ambitious. Voyager heads to a planet with lots of odd little vehicles on it to try to salvage parts for repairs, and get more than they bargained for when one of them activates and several crew members vanish.

The story holds together well, and everything moves along toward then end at a decent pace. No really big surprises, but fun enough.

When they finally get around to using time travel, and the crew have their escape plot foiled, and finally they're able to return to the ship, it's really quite fun.

It's a short little novel, at least compared to some of them I've read. It was a straight forward plot. Voyager needed raw materials so that they could repair the Warp Drive properly and continue traveling towards the Alpha Quadrant.

They find a planet that seems to be a treasure trove of empty spaces ships of some kind and so their adventure begins.

At some points in the story the narrative gets confusing, but it seems to be on purpose since it's also confusing for the Voyager characters (not to mention time travel is almost always confusing in both movies and books). For the most part if the confusing parts were important they were 'translated' for the Voyager crew and therefore for us too.

It's a solid three stars, the characterization show more in the book is pretty close to the characterization on the series, which is not always a given with these Star Trek novels. And the story is very engaging. show less

The Voyager stops at a planet that looks like it's full of abandoned shuttles. Voyager needs parts, so an away team is sent to see what can be scavenged. The planet turns out to not be abandoned and the away team is captured. I found the book to be enjoyable and an easy read.

In the USS Voyager's first original novel, Janeway and crew discover a culture centered around time travel rather than space travel. Neelix, B'Elanna, and Harry face off against ... a bureaucracy! Tuvok, Paris, and Seska try to discover the riddle of ... the well-meaning special ops agent! The former storyline, while interesting, lacks tension because all action scenes and escape attempts are missing due to time travel interference. The latter storyline lacks tension due to the "enemy" agent being a sympathetic POV character.

I really liked the time travel stuff in there. Reminded me a little of the good old BTTF movies. :-)