This week, ignoring the tachyon field emanating from a starship graveyard proves much easier said than done. But when a malevolent concierge assures Voyager that there’s no way to check out, it might be up to the weirdest loner on the ship to save them all. Is three-dimensional chess still in vogue in the 24th century? Is the computer monitoring the crew’s calls for quality assurance? And why is Star Trek so bad at handling characters who behave even slightly un-Starfleetly? All this and more in Cybersong, the book that takes the cookies to sickbay.

Cybersong
Author: S.N. Lewitt
Pages: 277
Published: June 1996
Timeline: Between “Parturition” (S2E7) and “Persistence of Vision” (S2E8)
Prerequisites: None

Like the wizard in Gauntlet, Voyager needs food badly and is weeks away from the nearest halfway decent Class M source. So when the nearby object giving off increased tachyon density doesn’t read as anything more than total garbage, Janeway elects to ignore it. No coffee in that nebula? No deal. But the tachyons won’t let them go so easily. The density is increasing even as they move away from the field, course headings are starting to get wonky, and some of the more psionically adept members of the crew are beginning to feel an unusually pronounced sensation of loneliness.

Meanwhile, another ship manages to cut through the tachyon interference and get a distress call through to Voyager. The beings aboard are stunningly beautiful, likened to angels even, but Janeway smells a rat, and sure enough, they don’t actually read any life forms aboard. She, Paris, and Kim venture out in a shuttle to see what’s going on and find a holodeck-type area in the hollowed-out husk of primary interest where the “angels” exhort them to stay and keep away from “that which waits” or “the thing that waits”. As Janeway says thanks but no thanks and exits stage left with extreme phaser prejudice, Chakotay gets a feeling like she should take a shuttle and check on the away team before check-in time, and Kes tags along for similar reasons. When they find them wounded, Kes begins to suspect the incident was set up, and the big question turns into who has an interest in holding them here and why. 

In all honesty, this plot is a fairly big mess. Kes attempts some reenactment therapy with the Doctor over her dreams about the Kazon-Ogla and the loneliness she feels in them, but that thread ends up completely stalling out. You think it’s going to end up mostly involving her and Chakotay, and the latter does do most of the heavy mental lifting in the climax. But many of the finer details have been obliterated from my memory by one character, a character who doesn’t even show up until almost a hundred pages in: an ensign in stellar cartography named Daphne Mandel.

I originally had Mandel down in my notes as a stray bit; I thought the four pages devoted to her introduction were nothing more than a particularly delectable morsel of storytelling for its own sake and that we’d move on after that. But she figures pretty heavily into the back two-thirds of the book. She’s the lone officer in stellar cartography, which puts her in the very much minority position of absolutely loving being stranded out in the Delta Quadrant, a clever counter to the norm I’m both surprised Voyager never really examined (or hasn’t as of where I’m at in my rewatch, at least) and not. She’s also an extremely talented programmer, enough so that she dreads being transferred to engineering, where she knows the brass would find her more useful. She’s very comfortable in her own skin, enviably sure of who she is, where she’s at, and what she believes. It’s that last one especially that makes her kind of a thorn in certain officers’ sides.

Star Trek occasionally bumps up against this sort of thing, where we meet a character who baffles and irritates the starched shirts in Starfleet because they don’t have the first clue of how to deal with someone who doesn’t fit an extremely specific behavioral profile. While reading Cybersong, I was reminded more than once of episodes like “Hollow Pursuits”, the TNG episode where we first meet Barclay, and the DS9 episode “Melora”, about the station’s attempts to accommodate a new disabled officer and her valid annoyance with the unintended yet nevertheless real condescension endemic to those attempts. Mandel is treated by turns like a puzzle to solve and an obstacle to sidestep, but virtually never like a human being.

Ensign Mandel is clearly not interested in making friends and has some insufferable know-it-all tendencies. It’s off-putting and unapproachable, but nothing a light touch couldn’t go a long way toward softening. “Prickly” would be a good word for her demeanor. Unfortunately, she’s also insubordinate to a pretty inarguably unacceptable degree, which is perfect for the senior officers, because that’s all the ammunition they need to spill the tea about her behind her back, dress her down as much as it takes to placate their egos, and treat her pretty shabbily in general, like speculating whether she’s a Cardassian spy working for the Obsidian Order and locking her in her quarters without her knowledge on the strength of that speculation while she takes her work there.

More than anything, it’s yet another chance to marvel at how astonishingly rapidly Voyager belly-flopped on its initial promise. One imagines they thought they could get light years of mileage out of the core conflict of Starfleet and Maquis personalities butting heads over irreconcilable philosophical differences, and yet it only took barely a couple dozen episodes (if even that many) for all the ex-Maquis to bend the knee so fully to the Starfleet way that they’re already accusing Starfleet officers of less-than-sterling conduct. It’s all very, very bad, but in fairness, it’s at least bad in a more interesting and thought-provoking way than the other bad parts of the book, like the reveal of the entity keeping them in the trap, the reason for certain characters’ enhanced dream sensations (spoiler footnote),1 and the resolution for the Mandel character, the last of which is also ultra-rushed to boot.

Cybersong is the only Trek novel written by Shariann Lewitt, credited here, as on roughly half of the rest of her bibliography, by the initials S.N., the second letter of which Memory Alpha claims stands for “Nothing”. Currently, she’s a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT, which is at least a commendable achievement in academia, if not necessarily an indicator of talent. None of her other work is franchise-based, and if I’m being completely honest, I cannot bring myself to care about any of it. I wish this one had been better, but nothing about it ever gels, and there’s a lot of wasted potential in it. Hey, at least that makes it on brand for Voyager.

MVP & LVP

  • My MVP this week is, yes, Daphne Mandel. She’s not the easiest person to be around, but she’s way more interesting than most Voyager characters, which admittedly is not a high bar to clear. 
  • He’s honestly probably not the worst character in the book, but Tuvok rubbed me the wrong way enough to earn the LVP this week. I’m not a fan of Tuvok when he’s forced to lean into the playing-detective aspect of being chief of security or when he tries to play HR, and he does a little of both this week, much to my chagrin. Chakotay’s probably more of a jerk overall (to Mandel, natch), and Janeway acts like she can barely contain her glee at “solving” the Mandel “problem” at the end, so probably either of them could get the award on a given day, but today, it’s Tuvok.

Stray Bits

  • Lewitt expresses an interest in the sentience of biocomputers in Voyages of Imagination, which gave me some hope that Cybersong would get a little freaky with the nature of the bio-neural gel packs, but alas, no dice.
  • I know this one was a pre-series commission, but I wonder what kind of Simone Biles–level editing gymnastics it took to spend so many pages discussing the prospect of Cardassian sabotage and somehow never mention Seska even once. Maybe it went to press before they could shoehorn a quick reference in there? I really know less than nothing about these books’ publishing timetables, but it’s pretty glaring nonetheless.
  • This is the first Voyager book where the Doctor gets more than a perfunctory page or two, and I gotta tell you, I did appreciate it.
  • Janeway, when told that tachyon readings are increasing no matter which way they move around or away from the field: “Have you checked the navigational systems and console connections?” — Did … did you just tell them to make sure everything was plugged in, Janeway? You’re a captain of a starship, not IT at Reynholm Industries! (p. 25)
  • “The captain was so calm she could have been playing 3-D chess in the Voyager lounge.” — Feel like I haven’t seen tridimensional chess get a shoutout in a minute. Are people still playing that in the hundred-plus years since its TOS-era heyday? Or is it all dabo and tongo and Stratagema now? (p. 77)
  • The computer is able to terminate the medical emergency communication override by not detecting any medical talk in a vocabulary analysis, which honestly is kind of a clever feature, but also, like, mind your own beeswax, computer. (p. 165)

Final Assessment

Terrible. What a mess this one is, though to its credit, it’s at least a fascinating train wreck. I think the last thing I expected from Cybersong was a hard swerve a hundred pages in to focus on a new original character, and it handled that about as well as it handles everything else about itself, which is to say, not great. That said, it does give the reader more food for thought than pretty much anything else in the book. Otherwise, pretty much no cohesion from start to finish; things either peter out or culminate in uninteresting developments.

If you’re interested in that gross thing Star Trek occasionally does where uptight Starfleet officers treat a differently wired officer like crap because apparently no one is disabled or neuro-atypical in the future, it’s a fascinating case study in that. If not, skip it.

NEXT TIME: The novelverse’s first multi-part multi-series crossover scores its First Strike