PUBLICATION: Star Trek: S.C.E. #38, Pocket Books, April 2004
CREATORS: Kevin Killiany
STARDATE: Unknown, after the previous book
PLOT: The da Vinci is on a joint mission with the Klingons to repair a failing alien colony ship before it enters Klingon space. The feudal society within doesn't know it's on a ship and its pilots have failed to wake up. Infant mortality is way up due to pollution and radioactivity, all because no one knows how to repair anything. It's up to the S.C.E. to go down into the massive ship and find out what's happened and fix it.
CONTINUITY: At the end of the book, the da Vinci is heading for Deep Space K-7, naturally near the Klingon border (The Trouble with Tribbles).
DIVERGENCES: None.
SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK - The ship
REVIEW: When someone writes fantasy into SF, they're already keeping me at a distance, and every time a chapter turned to the point of view of the feudal aliens - with all the cod-fantasy place, animal and character names - my eyes tended to glaze over. It didn't help that these were out of step with the S.C.E. narrative, apparently happening LATE in the story regardless of placement, and Killiany sometimes giving us time stamps in the local vernacular did NOT help with the time jumps. He just seems more interested in his guest characters than he is most of the regular crew. There are moments: Patti eventually gets lots to do, the da Vinci's chief engineer gets some play (it's weird how she's such a non-entity usually), and there's a good scene where the crew figures out why the birth rate has gone down. But they all lose a lot of ground to the otter-like locals and the Klingon engineer who, I would say, is the real hero of the novel. I respect the attempt at doing something different, but even the Starfleet perspectives are odd and partial - from blinded characters or ones slipping in and out of consciousness - and you get the feeling this was meant to be a longer book and that the writer took out entire chapters. Even the resolution is "told" rather than shown. Very messy.
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