markk

After finishing Joe Haldeman's World Without End, I thought I might be reaching a burnout point on my Star Trek novel reading. I tried a couple of the others in the older "Star Trek Experience" series, but they didn't really grab me (it didn't help that one of them, David Gerrold's The Galactic Whirlpool, was about yet another world-ship), and neither did a couple of the other early Pocket Books that I tried. But then I decided to jump ahead to one of the later novels, and it proved the right decision. Peter David's novel started out strong with the Enterprise crew from the original pilot — Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, Dr. Philip Boyce, and the rest — encountering a tear in space. This gives the author surprisingly fresh ground in which to develop a Star Trek tale, and David really does well with it. By contrast the second half of the novel, which is set on the Enterprise-A three decades later, seems much more tired, perhaps in part because the idea of the same aging crew (I mean, come on, a captain as first officer?) still occupying the same posts after all that time has long strained my credulity. It helps, though, that David writes with a knowing wink and the premise is interesting enough to keep me turning the pages.