PUBLICATION: Star Trek: S.C.E. #40, Pocket Books, May 2004
CREATORS: David Mack
STARDATE: Unknown, after the previous book and more than four months after Wildire (Books 23 and 24)
PLOT: A warp-capable probe has crash-landed on a war-torn planet only at a 21st-century technological level and because of the damage, it's failed to self-destruct. Gomez, Stephens, Abramowitz and, unusually, security officer Vance Hawkins are sent in to find and destroy it without breaking the Prime Directive. Except every nation on the planet wants it. Except their cultural expert shatters her leg as soon as she's beamed in and must be left behind to talk them through things remotely. Except they soon get captured by an invading army and sent to a prison camp. Abramowitz helps them escape by hacking and crashing an old satellite into their area, and is then discovered by xenophobic locals who will end up stoning her and throwing her off a cliff. Meanwhile, the rest of the away team is in hot pursuit of the probe in a truck and almost all die in a firefight completing their mission. Only at the very last second are they beamed away by the da Vinci. Once out of medical danger, Abramowitz and Hawkins form an intimate relationship.
CONTINUITY: There are so many injuries, they need to activate TWO EMH programs. The crew is still traumatized by the events of Wildfire.
DIVERGENCES: None.
SCREENSHOT OF THE WEEK - Cover color-corrected to make the planet snowier.
REVIEW: David Mack wrote Wildfire, in which we lost a member of the crew. I think it's a little self-serving of him to have everyone in the story still traumatized by those events when we spent a large number of books seeing them get over it, but I suppose some scars never go away. Certainly, it works to raise the tension and make the reader think of Mack as an executioner. Who will he kill this time? Hawkins going on the mission instead of Corsi raises an eyebrow - could he be a redshirt? Then Abramowitz gets severely injured - was Hawkins a red herring and we're killing off someone else entirely? By the end, I was ready to believe they might kill off Gomez! So good work, on that score. There's a LOT of action in the book, and it's decidedly UNtrek-like action. Lots of bullets flying, explosions, car chases, and while it's exciting, it does feel more than a little off. ESPECIALLY given how Gomez is portrayed. She's a real hardass in this story, and though it leads to cool moments, it's just not her usual character. Mack has given her a death wish that feels wrong at this point in the series (perhaps at ANY point). And for a writer who stresses the crew's trauma over Wildfire, he seems unconcerned about the trauma THIS story should be generating. The character most roughed up should have feelings about that more profound than "I want to shag someone" (which isn't even played as such). Out of context, well-written and pulse-pounding. In context, I don't recognize the series.
Comments