#BookReview: Lost to Eternity by Greg Cox

#BookReview: Lost to Eternity by Greg CoxLost to Eternity by Greg Cox
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, Star Trek
Series: Star Trek: The Original Series
Pages: 400
Published by Pocket Books/Star Trek on July 23, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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A thrilling new Star Trek “movie era” novel from New York Times bestselling author Greg Cox!
Three Eras. Three Mysteries. One Ancient Enemy?
2024: Almost forty years ago, marine biologist Gillian Taylor stormed away from her dream job at Sausalito’s Cetacean Institute—and was never seen or heard from again. Now a new true crime podcast has reopened that cold case, but investigator Melinda Silver has no idea that her search for the truth about Gillian’s disappearance will ultimately stretch across time and space—and attract the attention of a ruthless obsessive with his own secret agenda.
2268: The USS Enterprise ’s five-year mission is interrupted when Captain James T. Kirk and his crew set out to recover an abducted Federation scientist whose classified secrets are being sought by the Klingons as well. The trail leads to a barbaric world off limits to both Starfleet and the Klingon Empire—and an ageless mastermind on a quest for eternity.
2292: The Osori, an ancient alien species, has finally agreed to establish relations with its much younger the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans. A joint mission involving ships from all three powers, including the Enterprise -A , turns explosive when one of the Osori envoys is apparently killed. Each side blames the others, but the truth lies buried deep, nearly three hundred years in the past…

My Review:

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales), was one of the great movies of the Original Series movie era, alongside The Wrath of Khan. Voyage Home had something for everyone, in that it told a great story, had lots of sweet moments of nostalgia for fans, addresses important and still relevant issues of its day with its tale of species extinction, had oodles of funny scenes and memorable, quotable lines – and ends with a heartwarming scene of the ‘band getting back together’ in a crowning moment of awesome.

It also presents a heaping helping of wish fulfillment for legions of fans then and now as the 20th century cetacean biologist, Dr. Gillian Taylor, time travels with the crew of the Enterprise and the whales George and Gracie from her time to their 23rd century.

It was the stuff that both dreams and fanfic were made of.

But it left a mystery in Taylor’s time that, nearly forty years later, is still unsolved. That mystery serves as the inspiration for a true-crime podcast – because of course it would. And thereby, as the saying goes, hangs this tale that spans from intrepid podcasters in 2024 to a medical researcher’s abduction in 2268 and onward to a planned peace conference with an advanced species in 2292.

What do those three widely separated incidents have in common? None other than Captain James T. Kirk, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise – with or without their equally famous ship – and an enemy that no one saw coming.

Escape Rating B: Like most media novelizations, Lost to Eternity is absolutely a story for the fans – and not just because of its homage to the fanservice of Dr. Gillian Taylor’s fate in Star Trek IV.

There are three separate stories in this one, set in 2024, 2268 and 2292. At first, with the focus on the podcasters in 2024, the story is thoroughly grounded in our here and now. It’s easy to get caught up in Melinda Silver’s need to find out what happened to Taylor, and the way that it devolves into conspiracy theories and men in black even as it picks up the remaining threads of Voyage Home as seen through the eyes of the people those events left behind in puzzlement was absolutely riveting.

If you’ve ever wanted the X-Files to cross with Star Trek, that part of this story is pretty much that story.

But the story unwinds across all three eras in turn, so the 2024 chapter is followed by a 2268 chapter and then a 2292 chapter. It all makes sense in the end – but as it goes along it takes a long time and a lot of pages to get a glimmer of just what makes these three stories connect up.

At the same time, the stories in each of the timelines and the way that they are interwoven with previous (from a certain point of view) events in the Star Trek timeline as a whole allows for a whole lot of loose ends from an amazing number of stories to get referenced and eventually closed – which goes back to this being a story for the fans because the more of those loose ends that one recognizes the more familiar – and fun – the story feels.

I had a good time with this story – as I always do when I pick one of these up. I love slipping back into this familiar and beloved universe, and that carried me over the points late in each timeline’s story where I just wanted to see all the dots get connected – and to see if the connections that my brain was making were the ones the author intended to make.

In the end, I enjoyed all three of the individual stories, liked the way they merged, had fun with the way they tied up different loose ends, and loved spending time with these characters. I also thought the author did a great job of making sure that the stories got told from different perspectives – that it wasn’t all Kirk and Spock saving the day no matter how much I do love those stories.

But I found the villain just a bit flat. He read a lot like Arne Darvin, the villain of the episodes The Trouble with Tribbles (TOS) and Trials and Tribble-ations (DS9)combined with the motive but not the scenery chewing of the villains in Star Trek: Insurrection. The villain of Lost to Eternity unfortunately got all of his character from Darvin – who was fairly colorless. A little bit of scenery chewing might have improved him a bit – for select definitions of the word ‘improvement’. Perhaps it would be better to say that a little bit of scenery chewing might have made him a bit more colorful – and interesting.

Still, a good reading time was absolutely had by this reader and I loved the way that it did exactly what Voyage Home did – it connected our present with Star Trek’s future and dreamed a dream of getting from here – to there.

#AudioBookReview: The Most Human by Adam Nimoy

#AudioBookReview: The Most Human by Adam NimoyThe Most Human: Reconciling with My Father, Leonard Nimoy by Adam Nimoy
Narrator: Adam Nimoy
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: autobiography, biography, memoir, Star Trek
Pages: 272
Length: 9 hours and 18 minutes
Published by Chicago Review Press on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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Living with Dad was like living with a stranger—as a kid I often had trouble connecting and relating to him. But I was always proud of him.
Even before Star Trek I'd see him popping up in bit roles on some of my favorite TV shows like Get Smart, Sea Hunt, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. And then one night he brought home Polaroids of himself in makeup and wardrobe for a pilot he was working on. It was December 1964 and nobody had heard of Star Trek. Still, the eight-year-old me had watched enough Outer Limits and My Favorite Martian to understand exactly what I was looking at.
Spock's popularity happened quickly, and soon the fan magazines were writing about dad's personal life, characterizing us as a "close family." But the awkwardness that defined our early relationship blossomed into conflict, sometimes smoldering, sometimes open and intense. There were occasional flashes of warmth between the arguments and hurt feelings—even something akin to love—especially when we were celebrating my father's many successes. The rest of the time, things between us were often strained.
My resentment towards my father kept building through the years. I wasn't blameless, I know that now, but my bitterness blinded me to any thought of my own contribution to the problem.
I wanted things to be different for my children. I wanted to be the father I never had, so I coached Maddy's soccer, drove Jonah to music lessons, helped them with their homework—all the things dads are supposed to do. All the things I wanted to do. So what if my Dad and I had been estranged for years? I was living one day at a time.
And then I got his letter.
That marked a turning point in our lives, a moment that cleared the way for a new relationship between us.

My Review:

It’s an iconic line, isn’t it? “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” In my head, I still hear it with all of the Shatnerian pauses, and it still brings a tear to my eye, even though Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan came out more than 40 years ago – and we all know that wasn’t the end for either Spock or the man who made that ‘pointy-eared Vulcan’ a cultural icon.

But Spock was a fictional character, played by a very human man, filled with all of the virtues and flaws that are part and parcel of that human condition. This is a bit of the story of that humanity, as seen through the eyes of someone who was up close and personal with the virtues, and caught – or at least held onto – the brunt of entirely too many of the flaws.

And in this introduction, I’m doing exactly what the author has done – used the memory of his famous father to get at the story of his son. A role reversal of something that Leonard Nimoy once alluded to, that someone – actually someone looking for money in particular – would use his son to get at him.

So this isn’t a Star Trek story. And it explicitly isn’t a biography of Leonard Nimoy. Rather, it tells the story of the family that lived in, as the author referred to it, ‘the house that Star Trek bought’ in LA’s Westwood Village in 1968, how they got there, where they came from, and especially what happened after to the boy pictured on the book’s cover, Leonard Nimoy’s son Adam.

This is Adam’s journey, not Leonard’s. But, as with all families, the lives of the parents – who they were, where they came from, their reactions to the ways that their own parents raised them, and how they internalized that upbringing – reflect on their children, for better and for worse.

This is THAT story.

Reality Rating B: If you come to this book expecting a ‘Making of Star Trek’ story, you’re going to be disappointed. If you’re expecting a ‘warts and all’ biography, you’re not actually going to get that either. Not that both the father and the son didn’t have plenty of those.

This is, admittedly, a story about a man who was a hero and/or a touchstone for more than one generation of fans that shows that he had feet of clay up to the knees – but then so do most humans, which is kind of the point.

Circling back around again – because it is irresistible to talk about the father when this is a book by and about the son – it’s about a dad’s impact, both good and bad, on the life of one man who just so happens to be the son of someone famous.

Once one throws out the preconceived notions about what one expected in this autobiography, it’s something entirely different. At first, I had a bit of a difficult time connecting to the story and the author, but then it started to feel a whole lot more familiar than I expected.

His story resonated with me because our fathers were both products of the same Eastern European, Jewish immigrant, Depression-era generation. Both were workaholics who financially supported their families but weren’t physically around, were often in their own heads when they were, and as a result had strained relationships with their children. Adam Nimoy is my age, so we were viewing the world of the 1970s and 1980s from similar ages and from familiar backgrounds and expectations.

There are times when I wonder if ‘daddy issues’ are what makes the world go around, but I digress, just a bit.

I’m saying that once I found a way into his perspective a little, it made the whole thing work better for me. I listened to the audio, and even his speech cadences felt familiar – not because he sounds like his famous father – he doesn’t – but because those cadences arise from a similar time and place and culture. It was kind of like listening to a cousin.

His story is very much, at points, a walk through dark places, of taking heavy blows from sometimes self-inflicted wounds, and then walking a hard and frequently lonely path through recovery. It becomes a story about what happens after a person stops medicating their emotional pain away and starts feeling their feelings.

Which was something that resonated a hell of a lot more than I expected – as did the parts about how easy it is to hold onto old hurts and older grudges and how difficult it is to let them go.

Rating an autobiography feels different from rating a work of fiction, because even though I’m rating the story as it’s told, that can’t help but feel a bit like rating the life of the person telling it – no matter how much I try not to.  And rating someone else’s life is just wrong. It was what it was and it is what it is and what needs to matter here is how good a job the author AS AN AUTHOR does of telling the story they decided to tell – even though it’s theirs.

Which is where that B rating comes in. It did take me awhile to get into this book, and there were times when it felt like he was kind of whiney in a way that came out in the audio as well. The story is way more about the author’s recovery from addiction than it is about anything else in a way that’s good and important and feels real in its length and its details but also felt a bit long and repetitive as he had to repeat some of the steps – as one so frequently does. It also reads as a kind of ‘slice of life’ story that mostly hits the highlights – and lowlights – but doesn’t dwell on the everyday too much, but a little went a long way when it came to dealing with the family dysfunction – of which there was plenty.

Coming into this expecting one thing and getting another may throw off more than a few readers – although if they stick with it they’ll find a whole lot more than they originally expected. Anyone looking for a story that personalizes the ‘Twelve Steps of Recovery’ will likely find this fascinating, inspiring and helpful as he pulls it down to earth and makes it very real even as he’s invoking a ‘Higher Power’. And in the end, the audio works better than the text because the audio helps to make the story feel authentic. It’s him, and he’s telling his story – warts and all.

Review: Forgotten History by Christopher L. Bennett

Review: Forgotten History by Christopher L. BennettForgotten History (Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations, #2) by Christopher L. Bennett
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, Star Trek, time travel
Series: Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations #2
Pages: 350
Published by Pocket Books on May 1, 2012
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
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The agents of the Department of Temporal Investigations are assigned to look into an anomaly that has appeared deep in Federation territory. It's difficult to get clear readings, but a mysterious inactive vessel lies at the heart of the anomaly, one outfitted with some sort of temporal drive disrupting space-time and subspace. To the agents' shock, the ship bears a striking resemblance to a Constitution-class starship, and its warp signature matches that of the original Federation starship Enterprise NCC-1701--the ship of James T. Kirk, that infamous bogeyman of temporal investigators, whose record of violations is held up by DTI agents as a cautionary tale for Starfleet recklessness toward history. But the vessel's hull markings identify it as Timeship Two, belonging to none other than the DTI itself. At first, Agents Lucsly and Dulmur assume the ship is from some other timeline . . . but its quantum signature confirms that it came from their own past, despite the fact that the DTI never possessed such a timeship. While the anomaly is closely monitored, Lucsly and Dulmur must search for answers in the history of Kirk's Enterprise and its many encounters with time travel--a series of events with direct ties to the origins of the DTI itself. . . .

My Review:

Today is Star Trek Day. Why? Because, once upon a time in a galaxy not far away at all, on this day in 1966, the very first episode of Star Trek, now referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series, because it WAS, premiered on television thanks in no small part to the efforts of Gene Roddenberry AND Lucille Ball.

Today is also, and coincidentally, the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek: The Animated Series.

Those combined anniversaries make this the perfect day to review the second book in the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations series, Forgotten History. Because, as you might have guessed from the cover, this pseudo-history takes a deep, deep dive into the many, many times that Captain James T. Kirk either created or was caught up in a temporal disturbance.

From the perspective of DTI Agent Gariff Lucsly, the ENTIRE purpose of the DTI was to prevent anyone else, particularly any other starship captain, from messing about with time as much or as often as Kirk did.

Because Kirk had so damn many up close and personal encounters with time travel that it could be said they had a ‘friends with benefits’ relationship. Or, considering the events involving the Guardian of Forever, perhaps that relationship might be better referred to as ‘frenemies with benefits’.

There certainly WERE benefits – as even the DTI generally considers saving the planet to have been a benefit. They just wish that they didn’t owe it to their departmental nemesis so many damn times.

The story in Forgotten History begins with what seems to be incontrovertible evidence that Kirk played fast and loose with the stability of the Federation’s timeline on at least one more occasion, and a much bigger occasion at that, than the SEVENTEEN times that the DTI was previously aware of.

But Kirk, for all of his temporal escapades, and in spite of the way that DTI investigates the ways and means in which time looks back on itself, is more than a century in their rear view mirror. So to speak. And as DTI Agents Lucsly and Dulmur discovered in the first book in the DTI series, Watching the Clock, the events that make it into the history books – or the official records – may have only the barest resemblance to what really happened.

So the story that we, and the DTI Agents, begin with is a tale about a captain who ran roughshod through history and established procedure and was allowed to get away with it. (Which he very often did and was.)

But perhaps not in this case. Only time will tell.

Escape Rating B: The story of Forgotten History, and the history that was deliberately forgotten, is wrapped around the creation of not one but two legends, and the purpose the creations of those legends was intended to serve.

Which means that this is a story that goes back in time to show just the events which shaped both of those legends.

One, of course, is the legendary career of Captain (later Admiral, later Captain again) James Tiberius Kirk and the successful completion of the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission under his command. A five-year mission where even in its first year the ship had three encounters with time travel – at least by the DTI’s count.

They’d already set the record – and they hadn’t even gotten started.

Which is where the other legend came in. Because the Enterprise and her crew were playing with things that no one understood, Starfleet needed to get a handle on time travel before it got a handle on them. Leading, eventually and in a more roundabout and bureaucratic way than anyone imagined, to the formation of the Department of Temporal Investigations under the direction of its Founder and first Director, Dr. Meijan Grey.

How those two legends, and their legacies, impacted each other AND Starfleet is what lies at the heart of this book.

In order to reach the point in the ‘present’ that gives that impact its full weight, the book puts itself and the reader through a LOT of the history of Kirk, Grey and the DTI. In the process of putting that history into the hands and minds of the readers, there’s a heaping helping of infodumping to cover every temporal infraction Kirk and the Enterprise ever committed, every DTI response, and every bit of political and bureaucratic shenanigans going on behind the scenes and under the table to serve agendas that Kirk turns out not to be nearly as on board with as legend would have it.

Unfortunately, that necessary infodump really drags the pace of the story for the first half. It was a terrific bit of nostalgia, and I enjoyed a fair bit of it, but it takes the action and adventure out of a series that has always been blissfully full to the brim with both – even when the plot of the episode was humorous, thought-provoking, or both.

Which means that, while I did like Forgotten History quite a bit, a good bit of that is due to the high nostalgia factor in going back to the era of The Original Series, both in the stories and characters themselves and that I watched the final season as it was broadcast in 1968-69 with my dad.

But as a story, Forgotten History wasn’t nearly as much fun as Watching the Clock, which just plain moved a whole lot faster and enjoyed a tighter focus on its central mystery in spite of its greater length. Still, I liked them both more than enough that I just picked up the rest of the DTI series, and will probably dive into the next book, The Collectors, whenever I’m next in the mood for a bit of Trek.

Review: Watching the Clock by Christopher L. Bennett

Review: Watching the Clock by Christopher L. BennettWatching the Clock (Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations #1) by Christopher L. Bennett
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, Star Trek, time travel
Series: Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations #1
Pages: 496
Published by Pocket Books on May 1, 2011
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBetter World Books
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There’s likely no more of a thankless job in the Federation than temporal investigation. While starship explorers get to live the human adventure of traveling to other times and realities, it’s up to the dedicated agents of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations to deal with the consequences to the timestream that the rest of the Galaxy has to live with day by day. But when history as we know it could be wiped out at any moment by time warriors from the future, misused relics of ancient races, or accident-prone starships, only the most disciplined, obsessive, and unimaginative government employees have what it takes to face the existential uncertainty of it all on a daily basis . . . and still stay sane enough to complete their assignments.
That’s where Agents Lucsly and Dulmur come in—stalwart and unflappable, these men are the Federation’s unsung anchors in a chaotic universe. Together with their colleagues in the DTI—and with the help and sometimes hindrance of Starfleet’s finest—they do what they can to keep the timestream, or at least the paperwork, as neat and orderly as they are. But when a series of escalating temporal incursions threatens to open a new front of the history-spanning Temporal Cold War in the twenty-fourth century, Agents Lucsly and Dulmur will need all their investigative skill and unbending determination to stop those who wish to rewrite the past for their own advantage, and to keep the present and the future from devolving into the kind of chaos they really, really hate.

My Review:

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.” At least according to Doctor Who.

Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I spotted their TARDIS, or at least a TARDIS, somewhere (or somewhen) in the mass of confiscated time travel detritus stored in the Department of Temporal Investigations’ Vault on Eris. But I could be wrong. Or it might not be there now. Or then.

The thing about time travel, is that it messes up any sense of past, present and future, in the grammatical sense as well as every other way, more than enough to give anyone trying to talk about it – or write about it – a terrible and unending headache.

Just ask the folks at the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations, whose entire existence, across space and time, owes itself to Starfleet’s pressing need to clean up after Jim Kirk’s all too frequent messing about with time.

I really want to make a Law and Order reference to “these are their stories” because it does kind of work, even if DTI Agent Gariff Lucsly’s affect and mannerisms owe a lot more to Joe Friday in Dragnet.

The story in Watching the Clock combines two elements and both go back and forth in time more than a bit. Time which always seems to wibble just when it’s expected to wobble – and very much vice-versa. Seemingly ad infinitum and always ad nauseam.

The biggest variable often seems to wrap around who is getting the nauseam this time around.

As this is the first book in the Department of Temporal Investigations series, and that’s an agency that appears – often in rueful commentary – in several episodes across the Star Trek timeline without being the center of any incident – after all, DTI are more of a cleanup crew than an instigating force – a part of this book is to set up the agency, its primary officers, and its place within Starfleet.

Which results in more than a bit of that wibble and wobble, as the case that Agents Lucsly and Dulmur find themselves in the middle of is also in the middle of both the actual case (even if they’re not aware of it) and the Trek timeline, so the story needs to establish who they are, how they got to be where (and when) they are, and who they have to work with and against.

But the case they have before them – also behind them (time travel again) – is rooted in the Temporal Cold War, which seems to be heating up again. Assuming concepts like “again” have meaning in the context of time travel. Someone is operating from the shadows, manipulating the past in order to keep the Federation from defeating their aims in the future.

Which sounds a lot like what the Borg were attempting in First Contact. As it should. When it comes to time travel, this has all happened before, and it will all, most certainly, happen again. And again. And AGAIN.

Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because last week ended with some really frustrating reads. I was looking for something that I was guaranteed to be swept away by – no matter what. (I started the next St. Cyr book, What Darkness Brings, but it was too soon after the previous. I love the series, but like most series reads, I need a bit of space between each book so that the tropes don’t become over-familiar.)

It’s been a while since I read one of the Star Trek books, but I have a lot of them on my Kindle because they are one of the things Galen picks up when he’s looking for a comfort read. So there they were, and I hadn’t read this series. Although now I will when I’m looking for a reading pick-me-up.

There’s always plenty of Trek nostalgia to go around, and I’m certainly there for that, especially in the mood I was in. Howsomever, as a series set in the ‘verse but not part of one of the TV series, this one needed a bit more to carry this reader through all 500ish pages. Because that’s a lot, even for me. Especially when I’m flailing around for a read.

Watching the Clock combined the kind of buddy cop/partnership story that works so well in mystery – and this is a mystery – with that lovely bit of Trek nostalgia with a whole lot of thoughtful exploration of just what kind of a mess time travel would cause if it really worked.

Because the idea that going back in time would “fix” history, for certain definitions of both “fix” and history, sounds fine and dandy in fantasy but in SF just makes a complete mess out of causality and pretty much everything else.

(If you’re curious about other visions of just how badly it can go, take a look at One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The Tchaikovsky story, published a decade AFTER Watching the Clock, looks back on their version of a time war from the perspective of a battle-scarred, PTSD-ridden survivor and it’s not a pretty sight. But it is a fascinating story – also a lot shorter exploration of the same concepts as Watching the Clock.)

So, if you’re looking to get immersed in a familiar world while reading a completely original story set in that world, Watching the Clock is a fun read and Lucsly and Dulmur and all the members of the Department of Temporal Investigations are interesting people to explore it with. I had a ball, and if you’re a Trek fan you probably will tool.

If the concepts interest you but Trek isn’t your jam, check out One Day All This Will Be Yours.

Review: Star Trek: Picard: No Man’s Land by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

Review: Star Trek: Picard: No Man’s Land by Kirsten Beyer and Mike JohnsonNo Man's Land (Star Trek: Picard) by Kirsten Beyer, Mike Johnson
Narrator: Michelle Hurd, Jeri Ryan
Format: audiobook
Source: purchased from Audible
Formats available: audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera, Star Trek
Length: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Published by Simon Schuster Audio on February 22, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's WebsitePublisher's WebsiteAmazonBarnes & NobleKoboBookshop.orgBetter World Books
Goodreads

Discover what happens to Raffi and Seven of Nine following the stunning conclusion to season one of Star Trek: Picard with this audio exclusive, fully dramatized Star Trek adventure featuring the beloved stars of the hit TV series Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan.
Star Trek: No Man’s Land picks up right after the action-packed season one conclusion of Star Trek: Picard. While Raffi and Seven of Nine are enjoying some much-needed R&R in Raffi’s remote hideaway, their downtime is interrupted by an urgent cry for help: a distant, beleaguered planet has enlisted the Fenris Rangers to save an embattled evacuation effort. As Raffi and Seven team up to rescue a mysteriously ageless professor whose infinity-shaped talisman has placed him in the deadly sights of a vicious Romulan warlord, they take tentative steps to explore the attraction depicted in the final moments of Picard season one.
Star Trek: No Man’s Land is a rich, fully dramatized Star Trek: Picard adventure as Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan pick up their respective characters once more. Written for audio by Kirsten Beyer, a cocreator, writer, and producer on the hit Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, and Mike Johnson, a veteran contributor to the Star Trek comic books publishing program, this audio original offers consummate Star Trek storytelling brilliantly reimagined for the audio medium.
In addition to riveting performances from Hurd and Ryan exploring new layers of Raffi and Seven’s relationship, Star Trek: No Man’s Land features a full cast of actors playing all-new characters in the Star Trek: Picard universe, including Fred Tatasciore, Jack Cutmore-Scott, John Kassir, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Lisa Flanagan, Gibson Frazier, Lameece Issaq, Natalie Naudus, Xe Sands, and Emily Woo Zeller, and is presented in a soundscape crackling with exclusive Star Trek sound effects. Drawing listeners into a dramatic, immersive narrative experience that is at once both instantly familiar and spectacularly new, Star Trek: No Man’s Land goes boldly where no audio has gone before as fans new and old clamor to discover what happens next.

My Review:

I picked this up in one of those “Audible Daily Deal” things for $1.99. And it was certainly worth way more than I paid for it. Because this was not quite two hours of Star Trek fun in a week where I seriously needed to go to my happy place – and Star Trek is still very much that place.

Like so many Star Trek: Next Gen episodes – and this certainly does seem a lot like an episode of Picard so that fits – No Man’s Land has an ‘A’ plot and a ‘B’ plot. The A storyline is an action adventure story, with Seven of Nine and the Fenris Rangers racing off to save a hidden Romulan cultural archive from the depredations of one of the mad warlords who rose up after the fall of the Empire.

The B plot, as it so often was in Next Gen, is a character-driven story wrapped around the possible romance that was hinted at between Raffi and Seven of Nine in the closing moments of the final episode of Picard’s first season. The possibility of that relationship is echoed in the A plot by the bitter sweetness of the lifelong love between Seven’s old friend, Professor Gillin and Hellena, the wife he was separated from during the Romulan evacuations so many years ago.

Like so many Trek episodes from ALL of the series, it all begins with an emergency distress call from a far-flung outpost. In this particular case, a far-flung outpost filled with nothing but scholars, historians, scientists and relics – some of which are also among the first three groups. It’s a repository of Romulan culture, desperately saved from the destruction of the Romulan homeworld by the Fenris Rangers, with the cooperation – sometimes – of the original owners and the assistance of the librarians and archivists who gathered the material. It has been protected mostly by its obscurity, but that cloak has been torn away and one of the more implacable Romulan warlords is on his way to either capture or destroy it.

Except, that’s not exactly what happens.

But the distress call interrupted a tender moment between Raffi and Seven, as duty calls one of them, in this case Seven, and drags a bored, unemployed Raffi along in her wake. And that’s where the real fun begins – as it so often does in Trek – with a mission, a barely workable plan, and a character going it on their own without any plan but possibly a death wish.

And underneath it all, an adventure that might blow up in everyone’s faces leading to an ending that no one quite expects.

In other words, a typical day on the bridge of a Federation starship – even if someone has to steal one first!

Escape Rating B: I went into this hoping for a bit of fun, and I certainly got that so I left this story pretty happy with the whole thing. But it listens very much like a cross between an episode of the Star Trek universe as a whole and one of the media tie-in novels that Star Trek birthed in vast quantities.

By that I mean that I was expecting fun but not anything that would seriously affect the main storyline of the show – in this case – Picard. So I was expecting the hints of a romance between Seven and Raffi to be bittersweet at best because even if it does happen eventually it can’t happen here.

And yes, the Romulan warlord is a bit of a screaming cliché – but then most Romulan warlords were screaming clichés. The actual emperors could be very interesting, but the warlord wannabes – not so much.

On the other hand, the exploration of the Fenris Rangers and how they work together and mostly don’t was fascinating. The banter between Starfleet-trained Raffi, over-the-top, walking malaprop Hyro and jack-of-all-trades Deet was frequently hilarious. That trio act provided most of the comic relief in a story that was otherwise pretty damn serious.

Of course I loved the whole idea of the hidden repository. That’s always cool.

But it was the story of Professor Gillin and his lost love that tugged at my heartstrings, and I really liked the way it held up a mirror to the relationship that Raffi and Seven are tentatively reaching towards – and backing off from at the same time.

Because Seven and Raffi just aren’t in the same place. They’re both damaged and grieving and more than a bit lost – but Raffi is at a place where she’s willing to try again and Seven just isn’t there and may never be. Watching them recognize that was sad but also heartfelt.

And it rang so very, very true that Raffi’s love for the Federation was the relationship that she felt the most regret over, that it was the most difficult love of her life for her to completely give it up. Because in a way that’s true for all of us who have been fans over the years and never quite let that love go.

So if Trek is your happy place, or if you just want to dip a bit into that world, or if you’re looking for a bit of distraction from whatever that won’t hurt too much or pull too hard or tax too dearly on your world-weariness of the moment, No Man’s Land is actually a great place to go for a couple of hours.