Very good book. It was nice seeing the crews of the Aventine and Enterprise interact and I enjoyed learning Erika Hernandez's fate and how she came to be where she was.

A couple problems though. Sometimes authors make an enemy to powerful. So powerful that it almost feels like over the top. The massive Borg fleet at the end was way overkill. I mean I often wondered why the Borg didn't just send a few cubes, after seeing on Voyager how many they had. But this is kinda ridiculous. You kinda know its going to take some deus ex machina to prevent the Federation / Klingons / Romulans from being utterly annihilated. I'm also curious if we'll learn in the 3rd book why the Borg have abandoned assimilation in favor of destruction.

The Hirogen were way too powerful. They tough on Voyager. Really tough, but here they felt almost unstoppable.

I did like the exploration through the subspace tunnels though. Pretty nifty seeing such far away places, even if only for a little while.

Overall, despite some criticisms, I very much enjoyed this book, tearing through it in 4 nights. I look forward to reading the final book of this trilogy. ( )

Götterdämmerung, Trek Style

The Destiny trilogy answers the question, "how much stuff/aliens/references can I pack into one piece of fan fiction?" The answers is "a lot."

You get all the captains*: Picard, Riker, (Ezri) Dax, passing references to Janeway and Archer. You get all the aliens*: humans, Klingons, Romulans, Andorians, even aliens whose race was never mentioned in a canon show or film but is part of canon like Efrosians (the President of the Federation in 2293 with droopy moustache and wild hair). You get all the bad guys*: Borg, Nausicaans. And you get bonus additional material, like a super-powered alien race you've never seen before, the Caeliar!

[*Surprisingly, though, you get no TOS crew and no Q.]

And are important things at stake? You bet! How about a war that might spell the end of galactic civilization as we know it (or know it through watching Star Trek on the TV)? How about minor romantic tiffs between characters we already know? How about a very detailed description of how to walk in a pair of self-fabricated snow shoes?

Seriously, though, I read these books because I am truly a fan of the Star Trek world and wanted to see what the written fiction was like while I took a completist romp through the entire body of existing TV episodes (both live action and cartoon) and movies (both regular time-line and Kelvin Timeline). The author is a professional writer who has written several Star Trek episode scripts and has done quite a few Star Trek books that garner a great deal of praise on the Internet. When I refer to these works as "fan fiction" I don't meant to suggest anything negative about the author, but rather to suggest a genre that assumes its readers know the basic background of the setting and characters and attempts to offer them something that they cannot get from the canonical works. Certainly, that describes these books.

Ultimately, though, I think I would have more enjoyed reading a fresh work by the author, as I had the feeling that he was a bit cramped by the overwhelming press of Trekness: someone has to drink a raktajino every hundred pages or so; Worf has to walk around with a Bat'leth on a regular basis. I found the sub-arc regarding humans who had found themselves chained to a "beautiful prison" with all their needs taken care of and no way out particular effective, and I imagine that the author is capable of even more when unleashed from the requirements of the canon.

So, I guess I learned a lesson about fan fiction. ( )

Solid read with some very interesting parts in the middle. Better than I could have ever expected from a Star Trek Universe Novel. ( )

More adventures in a large arc of Trek's war against the Borg. ( )

This trilogy should absolutely have been one longer book, or two books of moderate length - the story is padded out in a way that everyone involved should feel badly about. I know you wanted to sell a trilogy, editorial staff - and I know being asked to stretch an interwoven plot over 3 books would be tricky, D. Mack - - but all of you could surely have figured out a way to do this without the 250 extraneous pages.

That said - this book is really good. Better than the last instillation, and ending on the most dire of cliffhangers I've ever known in the STU. The interwoven stories are all good, I like following Titan, Enterprise, and Aventine equally (though the plot hinges most on the Titan crew - something I appreciate).

So much more than just a Borg story, it feels like it may mount to the ultimate Borg story. ( )