This week, we’re taking Probe from the top, once more, with feeling. The same peace conferences, the same song decoding, the same stories about alien whales, but now we march to the beat of a different drummer—a beat that adds a boatload of useless secondary characters and gives everyone dumber names. Is Sulu the worst spy of all time? Is there anything a single pill can’t cure in the future? And why won’t everyone just leave Scotty alone about his weight? All this and more in Music of the Spheres, the book where nothing matters but the music.
This week, it’s clear the Romulans have been to the movies lately. Suddenly they’re planning their own peace initiative, with blackjack, and hookers. While they and the Federation put together dinner and a show, the probe from The Voyage Home drives through space with a trunk full of unanswered questions. And when it makes a U-turn to get the truth, Kirk and Spock realize it’s going to take a lot more than showing it a couple of whales to satisfy its curiosity this time. Which Romulans are serious about peace and which ones aren’t? What does the probe have to look forward to when it goes home? Is this yet another flippin’ “Enterprise Incident” sequel? All this and more in Probe, the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! of Star Trek novels.
This week, the Enterprise picks up yet another blowhard ambassador to mediate a religious dispute involving a sacred animal, but Spock opts out to tinker with a cool laser on a terraforming colony. But the Klingons, up to their usual cloak-and-dagger shenanigans, descend on the colony to steal the beam in hopes of weaponizing it. Will Kirk and the ambassador figure out how to relocate the animals? Can Spock successfully collaborate with a bunch of tweens? And how much does it suck when annoying people are right? All this and more in Faces of Fire, the book that will make you openly yearn for the death of a child.
This week, the Enterprise finds an old ship from the planet Vemla that hasn’t had the last few Windows Updates. But during the grand tour, a stray injury leads to the revelation that they’re all androids on the lam. Matters go from sticky to sludgy when the androids’ builders show up charging them with terrorist actions and demanding them back for dismantling. Now Picard has seemingly only two choices: violate the Prime Directive or violate the Prime Directive. Will he find secret option C? Has Data finally found his people? And what’s in Picard’s special synthehol mix? All this and more in Spartacus, the book that sets the record for destroyed port nacelles.*