In today’s episode, when a game of touch football goes out of bounds, Leonard McCoy loses his winter break and gains some community service hours. But on his first tour of volunteer duty, the disasters may not be as natural as they seem. How old is McCoy supposed to be here? What’s the technical term for fear of transporters? And which sport is deader in the future: baseball or football? All this and more in Aftershock, the book that only seems to be telling one side of the story.

Aftershock
Author: John Vornholt
Pages: 116
Published: September 1996
Timeline: 17 years before McCoy joins the Enterprise
Prerequisites: None

Leonard McCoy is a transfer student at the Academy. Because he’s a little older than your average cadet, he’s having trouble acclimating, though not so much that he doesn’t get invited to (or, perhaps more accurately, peer-pressured into) late-night touch football on the quad. Reluctantly, he joins, and soon finds his team up against a fairly feisty flock of freshmen. Leonard fixates on one cadet in particular who’s giving him the business, and their newly forged rivalry culminates in a tackle through a security fence, landing them both in hot water with Admiral Ybarra. McCoy is pressed into duty for the Disaster Relief Service Club, one of the Academy’s more understaffed volunteer joints, while the other cadet, a spitfire named James T. Kirk, draws mess duty.

At DRSC signups, Leonard meets Spock and an attractive human girl, Lisa Donald, who tries to let him down gently, being as she’s already spoken for. His hard luck continues when he learns that training goes through the first week of winter break, scuttling his plans to head back to Georgia and see his dad. Although the training is intense, things look up a teensy bit when Lisa rewards his persistence by agreeing to a date—but right at that moment, the Club is told they’re shipping out in just half an hour to Playamar, where earthquakes are liquefying the coasts and river banks and causing all kinds of chaos.

According to Spock’s preliminary research, Playamar shouldn’t be having earthquakes at all; the geology should have remained perfectly stable for a long time yet. A mystery indeed—or, at least, it’s a mystery until Spock reads off the next Playamar fun fact, which is that it was originally claimed by a people known as the Danai, who initally opposed Federation colonization, but were later admitted to the Federation and given another world to live on. And it’s right here that Aftershock takes the tumble from which it never recovers.

From the instant they’re mentioned, the reader never doubts that the Danai are behind the earthquakes. There is of course much saving of lives and generic tense action, as befits any young cadet’s baptism by fire, but it all merely delays the inevitable. And once the Danai do show up, they’re presented as complete ogres who shoot first and ask questions never. I’m not just putting a cute spin on an old phrase there—I mean to say there literally isn’t a single line of Danai dialogue in this book at all whatsoever. There is so much valuable perspective and contextual information missing that it is honestly kind of appalling.

Aftershock‘s wholly uncritical eye toward the colonization of an already populated world is deeply disappointing, and the way it so casually yada-yada-yadas over whatever concerns might have arisen between the miners’ arrival on Playamar and the Danai’s supposedly hunky-dory relocation is downright ghastly. At the end, the Danai behind the earthquakes are dismissed in a throwaway line as a splinter faction, implying that their actions are not condoned and they will be summarily dealt with. And yes, obviously, their actions are extreme and the fact that lives were lost took it beyond the pale. But do they have a legitimate claim, or a point of view worth examining? We’ll never know. This is all the more upsetting considering the YA books have not been afraid to get cozy with heavy subject matter, and that Vornholt has previously turned in some great work for the Academy line.

Less disheartening but still discomfiting is the unreadable sense of McCoy’s age. I confess to falling into a Kelvin timeline thought pattern when trying to visualize him in this story, but he is in fact supposed to be significantly older than most cadets, right? To the extent I could get a bead on it at all, he only felt about two or three years older than the other cadets at most. I’m not exactly expecting lore about his divorce or about Joanna, but I think there could have at least been a fairly interesting lesson for kids in here about personal and professional success being a marathon, not a sprint. But that is the smallest of potatoes next to all the glossing over imperialism, which is really what casts a pall over this whole thing.

MVP & LVP

• This week’s MVP is Spock. McCoy gives him some strange guff about hanging out on the computer instead of mingling on the way to Playamar, but being prepared is important! And of course all his research comes in handy, because Spock.
• This is one of those rare weeks where I struggle so much to name an LVP that I’m just going to say that there isn’t one. No dead weight in this one; everyone from captains to cadets to redshirts contributes something meaningful. So that’s at least one nice thing about it.

Stray Bits

• There’s a lot of talk in Star Trek about baseball being a thing of the past, but it still gets mentioned way more than other sports (and almost always with doe-eyed reverence, to boot) and more than a few people make a valiant attempt to keep it alive. This might be only the first or second time I’ve seen football mentioned in a book, however. Football is the truly dead sport of the future. Unless, of course, the future you’re talking about is the absolutely brilliant 17776, which you should really experience (“read” doesn’t quite cover it) if you never have.
• There are a lot of jetpacks and usage thereof in this book. When I was a kid, my brother and I always begged our dad to build us one, and he always swore he would get around to it. I get why you wouldn’t want to just squish kids’ dreams like a bug, but in retrospect that seems a lot weirder than just patiently explaining why they aren’t feasible, which I think I could have appreciated. Anyway, jetpacks are always one of those things where I inexplicably get a little wigged out when they show up in Star Trek, like non-android robots.
• “[McCoy] just shook his head, glad that most Vulcans in Starfleet served aboard the Intrepid. At least he would never have to serve with Spock. What a pain that would be.” — I will always be a sucker for lines like this. They will never be not funny to me. (p. 45)
• Vornholt gives a fun faux-Latin name to McCoy’s long-held fear of transporters: portabrevaphobia. It’s unclear whether the breva refers to shortness of distance or time, however. Possibly both. (p. 50)

Final Assessment

Terrible. Aftershock creates egregious waste by skipping right over even the broadest details of some imperialist colonization business that, on the face of it, really is not a good look for the Federation, and also by turning some villains who might have had some legitimate opposition and been able to be reasoned with into troglodytic disruptor-toting beasts. Less glaringly, it fails to provide a meaningful sense of how old Leonard McCoy is supposed to be in the context of his Academy days. Not much to recommend this one at all.

NEXT TIME: Eugenics rears its ugly head once more in Infiltrator