This week, a cleric’s discovery casts doubt on the veracity of the legend of Kahless. But when the figurehead emperor smells a conspiracy to overthrow Gowron, the sons of Mogh channel the boys of Hardy in their search for proof. Will the Klingon Empire spiral into a crisis of faith? Are Riker and Troi too worried about Alexander’s browser history? And what do aliens count to help fall asleep? All this and more in Kahless, the book whose mother taught it to never kiss a fool.

Kahless
Author: Michael Jan Friedman
Pages: 307
Published: July 1996 (HC)
Timeline: Between “All Good Things…” and Generations
Prerequisites: “Rightful Heir” (S6E23)

Stepping away momentarily from the multigenerational saga of the Furies, we turn this week to a different creature of myth: Kahless the Unforgettable, arguably the single most important Klingon in that people’s history—the man who, so they say, forged the first bat’leth from a volcano-heated and lake-cooled lock of his own hair, used it to defeat the despot Molor, united all of Qo’noS under his rule, taught them the precepts of honor that laid the entire foundation for modern Klingon identity, and dropped the mic as he triumphantly swaggered into Sto-vo-kor. That’s the story all Klingons are taught from birth, treated and presented as immutable fact. But that could change when a disgruntled Boreth initiate named Olahg discovers a scroll alleged to be written by Kahless himself, which, if legitimate, would mean he is not as all that and a bowl of gagh as Klingons have imagined him being since time immemorial.

Moving clandestinely among the crowds, Emperor Kahless is displeased to learn that Olahg’s heresies are gaining traction among the general public. But while licking his wounds in a dining hall, he recognizes an important member of the Klingon Defense Force, Lomakh, and from reading his lips learns of a conspiracy to use this discrediting of his legend to undermine and overthrow Gowron, who supported the installation of the cloned Kahless as a figurehead to bolster Klingon morale. Gowron doesn’t seem especially worried about the scheme when Kahless brings it to his attention, so he turns to some comrades he knows will take it more seriously: Worf, Captain Picard (in his capacity as the Arbiter of Succession), and Worf’s brother Kurn.

Chapters in which this planet-hopping investigation and other present-day affairs take place are marked as being in the “Modern Age”, and alternate with chapters set in the “Heroic Age”, which detail the exploits of Kahless and are eventually understood by the reader to be the contents of the blasphemous scroll. Friedman says he was inspired in these latter chapters by the Norse-influenced fantasy novels he wrote before getting the Star Trek gig, but I feel like the structure of the book owes a substantial debt to a previous Trek work: Spock’s World. And hey, if you’re gonna crib, you should crib from the best. There are definitely worse books to be reminded of. So having gotten the Vulcan and Romulan versions of that back-and-forth mode of storytelling, Kahless comes along now to give us a Klingon take on it.

Mercifully, the book is not so didactic as to turn Kahless into a complete fraud. He at least has the moral fortitude to both recognize that Molor’s tyranny is wrong and give up his own safety and security for that belief. But beyond that, he doesn’t have much of a five-year plan. He has no intention of mounting a sustained resistance, but he also doesn’t care to disabuse anyone of the notion that there isn’t one. That seemingly benign lie doesn’t sit too well with Morath, his most fervent follower. When Kahless and his band of outlaws return to the village where Kahless had betrothed himself to a mate and find everyone (including her) dead, Morath claims it was Kahless that doomed them with his indifference and unrelentingly holds him to account, following him into the mountains and tormenting him like a specter until he resolves to do right by the people he got killed and organize a proper campaign against Molor.

Apologies to anyone who isn’t intimately familiar with The Simpsons, but I couldn’t help reading Morath as the Karl to Kahless’s Homer. It becomes apparent rather quickly that Morath is the one who had all the ideas about conviction and honor and accountability and Kahless went along with it out of whatever bare minimum of scruples he had, only realizing in the end just how onto something Morath was. I guess that might make Olahg the Smithers who tries to get Kahless canceled, though the analogy admittedly begins to break down a bit at that point.

But where that analogy actually gets way stronger is that Morath is very clearly in love with Kahless. This is definitely a more arguable take, but since jumping feet-first back into Trek fandom about five years ago, I’ve found it gradually easier to see where people are coming from when they read this or that relationship through a queer lens. It’s not really how I read by default, but it’s pretty hard to deny here. As far as I’m concerned, if Morath does not literally love Kahless, then I’m the Grand Nagus. The only other interpretation I considered entertaining was agape love, which is also not a totally unreasonable one. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a Michael Jan Friedman Trek novel had a heavy Christian vibe to it.

It’s nothing so tidily one-to-one as “Spock is Jesus and the unificationists are the disciples”, but there are spots where you can replace “Klingon” with “Christian” and plug in “Jesus” in place of “Kahless”, which has the curious effect of booting up a kind of thought exercise. For example, what if Jesus had really been more of a fundamentally decent but shiftless normie, and it was really, say, Peter who had all the big ideas and the heart and character of legend but preferred to let another person be the symbolic vessel for all of that? Sure, it’s no Last Temptation of Christ, but it is amusing to me how often Star Trek writers project onto alien races to work through their philosophical ponderings and shower thoughts.

As historical Trek novels that jump back and forth between the present and past go, Kahless isn’t quite up to the level of Spock’s World, though it’s tough to imagine what could be. Still, as long as you keep the story moving, it’s truly difficult to mess this kind of thing up too badly. As you might guess based on what I chose to focus on, I found the historical saga more entertaining than the present-day conspiracy. That arc was serviceable, though I was more fascinated by the C-plot for Alexander, who spends his page time chilling with Riker and explaining his take on the contents of the scroll, which he read on Worf’s terminal, and which are decidedly more agnostic than the average Klingon’s. But it’s good all over, and worth the look.

MVP & LVP

• The MVP of the week is Morath. Everyone needs a friend like Morath: he might seem arrogant and on a bit of a high horse, but it’s hard to say he’s wrong. And of course, the fierce, unwavering loyalty. Gotta love that too.
• My LVP in this one, believe it or not, is Picard. It’s very sweet of him to follow Worf into danger, but he’s a complete deer in the headlights during the fights, and he doesn’t seem to have much insight to contribute otherwise. Other than the influence he wields as Arbiter of Succession, he’s kinda dead weight here.

Stray Bits

• I applaud the novels’ valiant efforts to make it seem like Worf openly loves Alexander and has a lot of Big Feels about him, but I’m pretty sure we watched the same show, so I still have a hard time buying it. Do I believe Worf is extra upset about an academy full of children being bombed because it gives him Khitomer flashbacks? A hundred percent. Do I believe he’s extra extra upset because he sees Alexander’s face in the faces of those children? Not a bit.
• Alexander tries counting sheep to fall asleep, but it doesn’t work—partly because he’s never seen a sheep before. I don’t know that this gag completely works, but it’s always funny when Terracentrism gets the wind taken out of its sails. Also amusing is his observation that Earth fairy tales could well be Klingon for how violent they are. Humans like to think they’re Federation, but there’s way more Klingon (and Ferengi, Romulan, Cardassian, and even Orion) in us than I bet many of us would care to admit. (p. 101)
• Recently, I was asked by a patron to include more spoilers in my reviews. I am not actually wholly opposed to doing it, but I generally don’t except for the very worst books, on the off-chance that someone becomes inspired to check a book out for themselves based on my review. That said, there is a pretty wild twist that just sort of gets casually dropped at the end that I want to talk about a little bit, so I’m going to hide it behind a footnote. If you don’t want to know about it, don’t click on it or mouse over it, but if you’re interested, here it is.1Toward the end, Morath takes a d’k tahg meant for Kahless. This is revealed to be the blood-stained dagger from which the emperor was cloned, thus implying that the clone is actually Morath rather than Kahless. The emperor is pretty sanguine about it, confident that the revelation will not shake Klingons sufficiently to induce a widespread crisis of faith. In effect, he’s doubling down on the gambit first posited in “Rightful Heir”—i.e., that the truth will ultimately prove less important to people than the myth and whatever good it has since engendered. A fair point, and likely not an incorrect one; however, it’s noted that Kahless wrote the scroll at the end of his reign hoping that Klingons might read it when they were more ready to live lives driven by truth rather than legend. Therefore, I would say it has to be an at least moderately scathing indictment of Klingons that they are reliably intellectually incurious enough to have twice now been correctly predicted to allow major bombshells about historical inaccuracy to slide because the societal cost of doing so is lower than that of reprogramming everything they thought they knew. It would also seem to me that a society that doesn’t demand at least some small adherence to truth will eventually doom itself to total failure. Whew! Glad I don’t know any cultures like that! [nervous laughter]

Final Assessment

Good. Kahless is another fine deep dive into a juicy piece of Trek history in the tradition of Spock’s World. Though it promises action and adventure and delivers on both, it’s also got a few really fascinating takes on Klingon belief that I was still chewing on long after I finished it. If you’re interested in Klingon lore, you’ll definitely want to check this one out, as it is indeed a rightful heir to “Rightful Heir”.

NEXT TIME: Only Spock can avert the Crisis on Vulcan