In today’s episode, when a Kazon ambush forces Voyager to retreat into a nebula to recover, Janeway takes a moment to make her own retreat into her past. But while she waxes nostalgic, half her crew remains stranded on a planet that’s about to start buggin’ out. Does Janeway eat raw seasonings? What’s the dead sport of the future this week? And who needs therapy when you’ve got the ice bucket challenge? All this and more in Mosaic, or, Kathryn & Hobbes.

Mosaic
Author: Jeri Taylor
Pages: 312 (PB)
Published: October 1996 (HC)
Timeline: Voyages of Imagination has it between “Tattoo” (2×09) and “Cold Fire” (2×10), though both “Alliances” (2×14) and “Meld” (2×16) are referenced, so I’m going to say it’s more like mid- to late S2-ish
Prerequisites: Light awareness of Kazon/Trabe dynamics for a handful of scenes, but you could pick it up without knowing about all that and be fine

The top of Mosaic‘s cover breathlessly proclaims: “Revealed at last, the untold story of Kathryn Janeway!” Not that there’s a whole lot of told story of Kathryn Janeway at this point in the series, but it gets to the heart of the matter well enough. That’s what we’re here looking at today: the first unnumbered Voyager novel, the first big event in what was at this time the newest Star Trek series on the air, not to mention the crown jewel of the UPN lineup.

I’m not going to spend as much time as I normally would recapping plot for this one. Suffice it to say that as with, for example, Best Destiny, the framing story is not the main draw here. That’s especially the case since the villains are the Kazon, who I’m already ready to declare the worst villains in all of Star Trek up to this point as I make my way through Voyager in earnest for the first time. Basically, while Our Heroes are investigating a new planet for food and energy sources and also following the trail of a mysterious archaeological find on the side, a minor sect of the Kazon, the Kazon-Vistik, catches Voyager with its pants down and come out of high warp guns a-blazin’. The ambush forces Janeway to leave the twenty or so members of the away mission—including Tuvok, Kim, Kes, and Neelix—down on the planet while she takes Voyager into a nearby nebula to stall for recovery time. The ground team takes shelter in the tomb they discover, and Harry and Kes make strange discoveries about a lost civilization as they explore its winding passages, eventually ending up trapped in a room where they learn they’re going to be riding out the impending bug-pocalypse their presence in the tomb has triggered. Meanwhile, with nothing to do but sit and twiddle her thumbs while her crew effects repairs, Janeway reflects on the events and people that made her the captain she is today.

Those memories are the main attraction. Mosaic takes us through the pivotal events of Janeway’s life, from an early childhood marked by the indelible stamp of her adoring father’s approbation to the end of her first captaincy in the Beta Quadrant. She regularly questions the utility of her traditionalist upbringing. Why suck at tennis when I could be captain of the Parrises Squares team? Why do my parents make me go to this little backwoods liberal-arts coven when I could be at the sterile, faceless Institute taking official Academy prep classes? Why eat home-cooked food when replicators exist? And so on. She swims illegally in the quarries of Mars on multiple occasions. Under the tutelage of Admiral Owen Paris, she goes on her first deep-space tour of duty, which turns out to be a little more exciting than what she thought she was signing up for. And perhaps most importantly to the overall arc of who she becomes, she suffers a tragic dual loss that marks the real turning point of her career and life.

John Ordover directly asked Jeri Taylor to write this book, which was a smart move, because no one at the time would have been better qualified or equipped to write it than she was. After all, Janeway practically is Taylor, and the latter has admitted as much in interviews and convention appearances. When Taylor created Janeway, she wrote her as an idealized version of herself, and it’s fairly easy to suss out some biographical details the two share, such as hailing from Indiana. I don’t want to get mired in unseemly speculation, but suffice it to say that if you asked me to wager on nearly everything in the flashback portions of this book being something that happened to Jeri Taylor in some form or fashion and only needing to be lightly adapted to fit in a Star Trek story, I’m not sure I would, but I’m also not sure I wouldn’t.

Mosaic is more fascinating to me than good, which really says something, since it’s very good. I may be mistaken, but I feel like it offered something that was not in terribly high demand in fandom at the time. No one sums it up more succinctly than Patton Oswalt in his classic bit about George Lucas on Werewolves and Lollipops: “I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from, I just love the stuff I love.” I was only twelve when Mosaic came out in hardcover, but nevertheless I feel like that was sort of the mood of the time. Was anyone really asking themselves what shaped Janeway, what drove her, what made her tick? Maybe some were. But I kinda suspect they mostly weren’t.

When you get these kinds of stories in Star Trek, they tend to be more about specific turning points or linchpin moments than about the summative arc of one’s life. Obviously, much of that owes to the episodic nature of it, but even so, no one was writing books like this about Picard or Sisko. Because the identity of Kathryn Janeway is so closely tied to that of Jeri Taylor, and vice versa, I’m tempted to call Mosaic a vanity project, but I think that sells it short and also is a little mean. I also think saying that does a disservice to how prescient one could argue it is. This sort of origin story is a lot more prevalent in fandom nowadays than it was then, though I admit it’s a little fuzzy to me whether we actually want these stories or we’re just told we do and we happily accept that every IP now has to be monetized within half an inch of its life. I think its charms might be better appreciated in today’s context than they would have been at the time.

I also think it’d be hard to get a book like Mosaic published today, and that endears it to me. There’s a shagginess to the information it volunteers that wouldn’t fly today. Every element would have to be scrutinized to make sure it lined up with all the other presentations of the property, and it would have to be ensured that none of it made any sort of wave that was not fastidiously preapproved. It legitimately floored me to learn that Mosaic was, unlike other Star Trek novels, actually considered canon for a while by the writers and producers of Voyager, at least until events that occurred on the show after Jeri Taylor’s departure began to supersede and contradict it. I guess being written by an executive producer who literally created the character in her image helps, but that’s still absolutely wild to me.

As to the question of what made Janeway the fearless leader she is as of the series’ present, the answer seems to largely boil down to “men” (and also her sister Phoebe, who extremely sucks, but we’ll get to that). From her father Edward to Admiral Owen Paris at the Academy to her first fiancee Justin Tighe, Janeway never quite feels like she’s improving for herself or her own benefit, and she’s never as singularly driven as when she’s vying for a man’s approval. Her most satisfying dynamic is with the one person she’s not trying to impress: Hobbes Johnson, an awkward neighbor boy she finds annoying and repulsive as a child, but who she gradually comes to appreciate as a comforting constant and affable conversationalist. Overall, if you’re approaching this one hoping to see the evolution of a girlboss, you’re liable to be a little disappointed on that front.

Despite that and a few other strikes against it, however, I quite enjoyed it. It’s an easy, comfortable, low-stakes hangout kind of story, which is unusual for an unnumbered novel, though not unwelcome. There are parts of the framing story I could have done away with entirely—hint: they rhyme with “blaze on”—but the mysteriousness of the tomb where the stranded crew members shelter in place is properly eerie, and I found Harry and Kes well paired in their exploration of it. But the captain is the woman of the hour here, and there are several aspects of her story I expect I’ll be chewing on for a long time to come.

MVP & LVP

• For me, the MVP of Mosaic is Hobbes Johnson. As a child, Kathryn is extraordinarily mean to Hobbes, which is a shrewd choice by Taylor. One, it’s a nice reminder of how cruel children are to each other, and two, it’s a strong early sign that Taylor won’t simply blindly lionize Janeway. But anyway, Hobbes is acutely aware of what others think of him and handles it very maturely. I think there’s a subtle difference between being stung by a cruel remark and allowing it to sting you, and I think Taylor does an excellent job of showing how Hobbes briefly allows himself to be stung by one in a way that reassuringly implies it’s not going to derail him from being who he wants to be in the long run. Watching Kathryn, so impatient to get to the future, learn to appreciate his slow-ride charms was my favorite part of the book.
• This book’s LVP is Phoebe, Kathryn’s sister. A more obvious case might be made for Cheb Parker, by far the worst of her boyfriends (not to mention a first-ballot inductee to the Awful Name Hall of Fame), who gaslights her into believing she’s cold and unfeeling. But I want to talk more about Phoebe, because she’s yet another sad example of Star Trek‘s knuckle-dragging outlook on trauma recovery. Phoebe grows up to be a “free spirit”, which sometimes is a code phrase for “insufferable asshole”—and this is definitely one of those times. Kathryn suffers a tragic dual loss late in the story that sends her deep into a classic textbook depression—won’t eat, won’t leave her bed, sleeps all the time, etc. Phoebe, however, will have none of it. This witch literally dumps a bucket of ice water all over Kathryn while she’s in bed and tells her it’s past time she got over it, that her grief has officially curdled into wallowing, and that it’s not like other people weren’t affected by it, but they all picked themselves back up and dusted themselves off and now you need to, too! Kathryn of course slowly returns to normalcy and largely credits Phoebe with helping her bring her eye back onto the ball, but to me, this doesn’t sound anything but a great way to get your jaw permanently dislocated. No one gets to tell you how long you get to feel a certain way about a traumatic event. Phoebe can take a long walk off a short pier.

Stray Bits

• Obviously it will be many, many years before I get around to it, but I’m curious how this compares to The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway by Una McCormack. I suspect both have their defenders; this especially is the kind of book where I can see people saying this is “their” Janeway.
• If you begin to wonder as you read when Mark is going to come up, just be patient. It’s handled eventually, in a way you could argue both is and is not a twist, and it made enough sense, but also … I dunno. Felt kinda like “womp womp”? I’m not going to spoil it, but I will say: you see it, you kind of just go, “Oh, okay,” and you move on.
• “It could not have been more sudden or unexpected. One minute Janeway was in her ready room, relaxing with vegetable bouillon while reading personnel reports.” — I understand intellectually that the word bouillon is being used here in the sense of a broth, but I can’t help but picture Janeway nibbling idly on a bouillon cube. (p. 25)
• “Only Hobbes would use a word like ‘traditionalist,’ Kathryn thought. He was such a vulk that he didn’t realize his grownup vocabulary sounded ridiculous.” — Making up slang is one of those really tricky things that is generally incredibly ill-advised when it comes to Star Trek. The first analogue I thought of was the students calling Klingons “turtle heads” in A Flag Full of Stars, which actually decently passed a sniff test for realism and immersion. I think “vulk” and “vulky” are probably even better examples, though. It’s not explicitly spelled out what they mean, but because your brain plugs your prior knowledge about Vulcans into the context, it makes sense immediately. Super well done. Also, you have zero chill, book—there was no need to attack childhood me so brutally like that. (p. 40)
• Data, in a fun cameo, p. 53: “I have no emotions which might be wounded, so you may feel free to ask me any question you like. I shall be happy to respond.”
  
• Cheb Parker explaining the unusual sight of bowling alleys in the Magruder Mansion, p. 113: “It’s a game that was popular until about a hundred years ago. You rolled a heavy ball down this wooden alley and tried to knock over an arrangement of ten pins.” — So yes, this week’s dead sport of the future is: bowling! I don’t think it would actually die out all that much in the future though. Even though it can be played professionally, it’s got one of the lowest barriers to entry for amateurs, so it’ll be a form of good old-fashioned fun that never goes out of style. Miles and Julian are always seen playing darts, but they would also 100 percent be down to bowl ten frames in a holosuite.
• “Hobbes, she knew, was returning to Indiana University, one of the most prestigious non-Starfleet institutions in the country and one of the hardest to get into.” — This made me laugh really hard, because the thought of some rando state university slowly working its way up to world renown through the centuries is hilarious. But then I learned in the course of my research that Jeri Taylor went there, and then it seemed more sad than funny. [extremely nasal pitch] “My school is cool, too! They’ll see! They’ll all see!” (p. 147)

Final Assessment

Good. Mosaic is a kind of book that, for whatever reason, we haven’t seen a lot of so far, and even the ones that are sort of like it aren’t exactly like it. Though I did find what I thought were some significant issues with certain aspects of it, it’s smooth, easy, and very enjoyable, and receives a substantial boost from its uniqueness among Trek novels. Though I don’t think it’s the sort of thing people were clamoring for back then, time and the evolution of pop culture have been kind to deep-dive origin stories like this, and now that people are much more in a mindset where they want to know absolutely everything about their fandom universes, in some ways it’s actually probably more fun now than it was then. While I’m not quite prepared to call it an absolute stone-cold classic, it did leave me with a lot of things I’m going to be ruminating on for a good long while. 

NEXT TIME: Janeway and Tuvok have an acid Flashback