#15

[One of my long-term reading projects is the 134 titles in Simon & Schuster’s “Star Trek Relaunch” series that ran from 2001 to 2021, in which the publishing company was given permission from Paramount to create a persistent “canon” universe for the books, in which events have permanent repercussions, and characters die for good without ever coming back. I’m reading them in the order they were originally released; here’s a Google Doc of the entire run, including links to all the reviews I’ve so far written.]

2026 reads, #15. As mentioned last time, this book is actually a concluding half to a larger story started in last month’s Homecoming, which I didn’t realize because the books have two entirely different names, instead of Homecoming parts 1 and 2 like you would expect in such a situation. As such, then, you should read that first review for most of the thoughts I have concerning this two-book series, with this second half being not much more than, “Yep, it ended the way I expected it to.” These books do what they need to do -- that is, they get the USS Voyager crew ingratiated into the Relaunch universe of the Simon & Schuster books, which they were already fifteen titles into when they first enfolded Voyager into it (due to the TV show ending right around this time, thus giving Simon & Schuster the power to officially take over the story’s “canon”), and introduce a bunch of new complications to everyone’s lives now that the main conflict isn’t simply how to get home from the Delta Quadrant. Author Christie Golden does a serviceable job at that -- I’ve read better Trek novels, I’ve read worser Trek novels -- so given that I was never a particularly big fan of Voyager in the first place, even when it was on the air, in this case serviceable is fine, for a group of novels that I consider mere universe-building ones for the main Deep Space Nine titles I’m mostly here for.

Speaking of which, the next book in this series is going to be a particularly interesting one, because it’s the Relaunch introduction of a series called “New Frontier,” which was the very first Trek series to exist only in book form, never as a TV show. It had already been going for fourteen volumes by the time S&S executive Marco Palmieri decided to enfold it into the bigger persistent Relaunch storyline, so it already had its fans, its backstory, and many adventures before now. (Basically, it’s the tales of the USS Excalibur, which is supposed to be another ship in Starfleet but not as big or important as the Enterprise.) It’ll be interesting to see how it ends up becoming a part of the Relaunch universe, and whether I’ll be crucially missing something by beginning the series here on volume 15 after doing a catch-up at Wikipedia.