Good lord, I haven't updated in forever. There have been like two or three Trek books that have gone unmentioned,

Good thing I don't have anything else to do for the next two weeks.

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Star Trek - Cast No Shadow by James Swallow

Well, that was an unexpected treat.

I'm not entirely sure why it was unexpected. I mean, I liked Swallow's Titan book when I wasn't expecting to, so there's really no reason why I should have thought I wouldn't like this one. I guess it's because the last round of TOS books that have come out have been kind of underwhelming.

Anyway, about five years after TUC, Valeris is sitting in a Federation penal colony, and the Federation is, with great resistance from the Klingons, attempting to help them recover after the explosion on Praxis. A terrorist strike against a relief staging area(I think supposed to echo the attack on the USS Cole) by a banned subspace weapon kills a lot of Klingons and Federation citizens, and threatens to cripple what little progress has actually been made in the new peace.

Everyone suspects a breakaway group of Klingon hardliners. The only person who thinks any differently is Elias Vaughn, at this point in his career, a young Starfleet Intelligence desk jockey. When no one listens to him, he defies orders and begs the SI field agent assigned with investigating the attack to consider that this might have its roots in Admiral Cartwright's conspiracy. Accepting that Vaughn is on to something, the two SI agents hitch a ride on Excelsior out to Klingon space, stopping off to pick up Valeris on their way. A second attack later, and the two agents and Valeris are all alone in Klingon space, working with an awesome Klingon intelligence officer who accepts the alliance of convenience, but never lets anyone doubt her desire to kill Valeris for her crimes.

Anyway, this kicks off two parallel character arcs, a redemptive one for Valeris, and sort of the classic heroic epic for Vaughn. They're both very good, although I might give a slight edge to the Valeris story. Swallow, I think, really gets what makes her tick, and weaves his ideas for her backstory in with what we see onscreen very, very well. Like Unspoken Truth, there's a little bit of misdirection with Valeris' motives, but unlike the earlier book, I think it's fair to doubt her intentions, and more to the point, when we get to the denouement, the story has been strong enough to earn it, unlike MWB's book.

There's also one hell of a climax.

Anyway, good read.

We've been watching ENT S4 on Netflix, and I have to say, while it's no BSG, it's a lot better than I remember it being.

I've always liked the three-part Vulcan episode, but I was surprised be how enjoyable the Augment three-parter was as well.

Of course, then there's "Bound" which need never be spoken of again.

Star Trek: Vanguard - Declassified

"Almost Tomorrow," by Dayton Ward

Of the four stories, this one connected with me the east, which is not to say that it's a bad story. It's more about filling in some of the gaps of what life was like in the early days of the station, before even the SCE eBook, where we see, among other things, the first meetings between Reyes and Desai, and T'Prynn and Anna Sandesjo. The latter kind of surprised me. I don't exactly know what I was expecting, but T'Prynn was rather a bit more...forward...in the relationship than I might have expecting. In their first private meeting, as they get towards making the Klingon and/or Vulcan with two backs, Dead-Fiancee's katra forces a mind-meld between the two women, which confirms T'Prynn's suspicions about Anna, but also lets Anna know T'Prynn's secret. That sort of levels the playing feild, and it makes their relationship, and its ultimate fate, even more poigniant.

The best part of the story, though, follows the crew of the Sagittarius on a survey mission in an incredibly remote system in the Reach, where they're bound to bump into the Klingons...and they don't exactly like Captain Nassir and company. They've always been one of my favorite parts of these books, and it's nice to see them working as a unit again, since we haven't seen them since Reap the Whirlwind.

On the whole, this is still a solid little story, but it didn't quite have the emotional beats as the others did/do.

"Hard News" by Kevin Dillmore

As you might expect, this is a Tim Pennington story. Pennington is one of those characters that I didn't warm up to immediately, but I did eventually come to appreciate him as being the reader-surrogate, and ultimately, as the moral center of this story.

The unusual thing about this story is that it's told in first-person. That didn't really bother me, but the only other time I can remember anyone using that particular device within the TrekLit canon, it in some of the stories in the Captain's Table anthology.

Anyway, it's a week or two after Reyes' arrest. Tim has had two big stories hit: His story about the events he witnessed in the Jinotaur system, and the one Reyes asked him to write about the nuking of the colony on Gamma Tauri IV. This has not left him especially popular with the Starfleet contingent on the station. He gets a new partner in crime (and maybe it was just me, but since Tim Pennington always appears as David Tennant in my mind, his new friend looked an awful lot like Freema Agyeman), an intrepid girl reporter named Amity Price, who has gotten in way, way over her head with a story on the Orions. There's also a pair of really nice scenes between Tim and Dr. Fischer in the station hospital, when the former starts visiting T'Prynn.

It's a good story, but it has a really downbeat ending. And, I'm afraid that's going to be a theme, here.

"The Ruins of Noble Men" by Marco Palmieri

Damn.

This was the one that I wasn't expecting that hit me like a punch in the gut. There are two parrallel story tracks running: Fischer and Desai are sent to investigate the death of Vanguard Station's colonial liason officer (a gentleman who had been mentioned in passing before, but I don't think ever actually appeared) on a distant colony-world where he'd been attempting to convince the locals to leave before Starfleet pulled out of the area. At the same time, this brings up in Fischer's mind a memory of a mission when he was serving under then-Captain Reyes aboard the USS Dauntless which involves an encounter with Gorkon, at this point still just a military officer. It also involves Reyes' then-XO, Hallie Gannon, who would be captain of the doomed USS Bombay, who is a specialist in Klingons, and is every bit as aweomse as she appeared to be in her all-too-brief appearance in the first VGD novel. Also, someone, a rather important someone, is leaving the station.

I don't remember Marco having written anything for TrekLit before, and I don't know quite what I was expecting, but this was far and away my favorite of the four stories (though, and I want to stress this, all four of them are good).

"The Stars Look Down" by David Mack

Oh, David, why do you do this to me?

That isn't a complaint. It's just that I've made no bones that Cervantes Quinn is by a good stretch my least favorite of the characters in these stories, but damn it, David had to make me go and start to like him. And he also dedicated the story to the memory of his cat, and there's really nothing more I need to say to explain that. As a Vulcan friend of mine used to say, I grieve with thee.

Starfleet Intelligence sends two of its intrepid agents, one Mr Quinn and Bridey Mac, to a world in Gorn space. An Orion vessel caught some of the Jinotaur pattern, even though that hadn't been heard since the system vanished. Neither the Orions nor their Gorn captors know what's been found, but the Federation and Klingons do, and it's a race to see who can retrieve the information first. This part is solid action-adventure stuff, and Bridey Mac in particular gets a great action scene. Complicating matters, Ganz has finally located Quinn, and more importantly Quinn in possession of Zett Nilric's ship, and sends a Nausican hitman after him.

The pair manage to get the data and escape, but then they're sent to locate the source of the signal, and, well, it's not going to end well. But it does tie into an almost-forgotten TNG episode really, really awesomely, and I think moves the greater plot of VGD into the home stretch.

Well done, sir.

And to all four of you gentlemen, and I hope you know how sincerely I mean this: Thank you for this wonderful Vanguard tapestry that I've enjoyed for the past six years. I can safetly say it is one of TrekLit's true high-water marks, and I feel priviledged that you chose to share it with us.

 I'm sure I've posted about this before, but it's a peculiar trick of my neuroses that the most I want something, the more I can picture myself getting that thing, and the less likely I am to actually get that thing.

Star Trek: Voyager - Children of the Storm by Kirsten Beyer.

Before I delve into the book (which I really enjoyed) I have to say something about the names of the ships in the Full Circle Fleet. They're just too precious. The three science vessels are the Curie, Hawking, and Planck, the medical ship is the Galen, and the agricultural ship is the Demeter. Okay, I guess that makes sense, but it's still kind of depressingly human-centric.

Anyway, so, we're back in the Delta Quadrant.

This is one of those stories that is so quintessentially a Star Trek story, it just made me happy.

Anyway, the story follows two tracks: In the first one, which happens parallel to Unworthy, three ships, the Quirinal, Planck, and Demeter are assigned by the the now departed "Admiral Batiste" to investigate the Children of the Storm, an exotic race of extremely powerful telepathic xenophobes that the Aventine encountered prior to the Battle of the Azure Nebula. As you might expect, things don't go very well: one of the ships is destroyed, one of the ships is captured, and the third escapes but ends up crashing onto a planet.

In the "present" Voyager mounts a search mission for the ships, and the crew does additional research into the Children (As Dr. Cambridge correctly points out, if these are the Children, where are the parents?). The reason that I am comfortable calling this a true Star Trek story is that, even facing an exotic, seemingly unstoppable enemy, the crew, particularly Captain Eden and one other, never give up the opportunity to find ways to help them instead.

As ever, the thing that really helps the story out is Beyer has such a keen understanding of the characters. I think my favorite scene came early on, when Seven of Nine was baby-sitting Miral, and the two of them end up playing Hide-and-Seek on the Holodeck. It's a sweet scene, and strikes me as exactly the kind of thing that Seven would have done if she'd been around when Naomi was a toddler.The original characters are even better: the two standouts were Captain Farkas of the Quirinal (sort of a female version of the older Kirk--down to the relationship with the grumpy CMO), and Captain O'Donnell of the Demeter (a research botanist who at first seems really ill-equipped for command, who turns out to be rather awesome).

Between this and Watching the Clock, we're finally on an upswing. I like it.

I'm sick of being cold, and wet, and hypnotized left, right and center. I'm sick of being shot at, savaged by bug-eyed monsters, never knowing if I'm coming, or going...or being. I want a bath, I want my hair washed, and I want to feel human again.

And BOY am I sick of that sonic screwdriver!

I was not expecting this.

That in and of itself would have been amazing, but the professor went to far as to say (when I asked if he'd be willing to write me a recommendation) that I was one of his favorite students and that it had been a pleasure having me in class.

Truth to tell, I'm still kind of sniffly about it.

ETA: And I made the Dean's List.

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - Watching the Clock by Christopher L Bennett.

In so many ways, Christopher Bennett is the most frustrating of all of TrekLit's current slate of regular writers. I really don't understand how someone can have so much insight into something that has no right to make any sense, and so little knowledge of how actual human beings (and presumably, most humanoid aliens) interact with one another.

By all rights, the story that's here shouldn't work nearly as well as it does. It manages to take elements from just about every major time travel plot Trek has ever coughed up, from Gary Seven's employer the Aegis, to the twenty-ninth century Starfleet of Captain Braxton, to the thirty-first century Federation of Crewman Daniels, and even Temporal Shower Guy, and actually strikes a really, really good balance between ConPorn and an interesting new story.

The main thrust of the story follows about a year in the current post-Destiny STU, which sees a new front opening in the Temporal Cold War. This actually works pretty well, because the focus is on the rather curious partnership between Agents Dulmur and Lucsly. There are also occasional flashbacks to the beginning of their working relationship, which presents Dulmur rather sympathetically, and then presents Lucsly as as big a stick in the mud as he seemed to be in Trials and Tribble-ations. The time travel stuff makes a lot more sense than it has any right to, considering it's a lot of handwaving pseudo-physics.

There's a B-plot which follows a rookie DTI agent named Teresa Garcia and her partner, who are investigating a mysterious discovery Titan made in the Gum Nebula, a piece of Whatever technology that has a gateway through which one can travel through several hundred thousand years of space and time. The idea is borrowed from Isaac Asimov (with attributions both within the text and in the author's afterword), and is governed by a coalition of species from various points in the Whatever's timeline (which seems to me to be borrowed, this time without attribution, from Mass Effect). This whole plot kind of sums up all of my frustrations with Bennett's prose in general:

-Despite being very coherent, it doesn't actually serve any purpose in the other plot, save for a minor Maguffin element that could have, I think, been gotten at another way.

-Despite the coherence, there is page after didactic page about the Whatever, which again, doesn't actually matter to the plot that people are invested in.

-Garcia is a very appealing character, except for two specific scenes which approach sexuality as a twelve-year-old boy with no specific knowledge of sex might approach them. The first one, where Garcia strips off and throws herself at her sexy Deltan partner offended me so badly that I came very close to setting the book down and not picking it back up. Between this and Over a Torrent Sea, I could be convinced that Bennett just has a very adolescent view of sex, except that Garcia's partner, who is just treated as a de facto bisexual, is for the most part handled so well, I can't quite just say that.

I think on the whole, I liked this quite a bit better than the last few helpings of TrekLit, even though I didn't quite feel it 100%. I sort of hope this is going to be an upswing for the books, because we could sure use one.

I think this quite possibly was better than the fifteen minute memorial that the BBC did to air after "The Impossible Astronaut."

I actually wrote to BBC America and asked them to please dedicate the episode to Lis Sladen. I'm very glad they did.