In today’s episode, when a colony world’s sun is about to go nova, Picard is stuck holding a plate at a buffet of Sophie’s choices. But if Data can walk as big a golf game as he talks, they might not have to make any of them. How many people have a personal connection to this planet? Is the solution somewhere out in the ocean? And hasn’t anyone ever told Picard that “Cs get degrees”? All this and more in A Fury Scorned, the book that skims a little off the top.

A Fury Scorned
Authors: Pamela Sargent & George Zebrowski
Pages: 275
Published: November 1996
Timeline: Early season 6, between “A Fistful of Datas” (6×08) and “The Quality of Life” (6×09)
Prerequisites: None

Epictetus III’s sun is about to go nova, and although the Enterprise has been dispatched as a beacon of hope amid the overwhelming dread, there isn’t enough room aboard to save everybody and/or everything. Debate rages among the planet’s ruling council as to what course of action to take. Some say to think of the children and save a shipload of them to carry on the colony world’s memory. Some advocate for preserving cultural artifacts in light of recent archaeological finds that evince an advanced civilization once living on the planet before abruptly packing up and leaving. Others want the twenty sublight ships evacuating the system, populated by relatives and cronies of council members who exerted an unfair advantage to rescue them, hauled back to Epictetus to answer for their cowardice. All ideas with merit, but none close to a comprehensive solution.

Data, however, has a plan. He thinks he can draw power from the dying sun to create a wormhole, which the planet can then pass through in its natural orbit and exit near another, more stable star. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it pays off for him. But they can’t tell the Epictetans about it; the Federation Council warns that if they reveal the plan and then fail, trust in Starfleet and the Federation will be completely eradicated. So Picard and the crew move to evacuate the cities, all while trying to keep mum about the real reason for doing so.

Several of the cannier Epictetans begin to suspect something is up, though they never get very close to putting their fingers on it before it gets set in motion. There are also a number of characters, lower deckers mostly, with strong personal connections to Epictetus III, and a non-negligible portion of the text is dedicated to how they’re processing everything. And late in the book, the Tireos Oceanographic Institute begins to complicate matters as they introduce their theory that the ancient civilization that once lived on the planet’s two continents retired not to space, but rather the sea, and that the nereids living down there possess intelligence. The Tireos people, politely called “eccentric” by some and less gently regarded by others, are the closest this book gets to having an actual villain, holding up the show by refusing to beam up their contingent of children randomly selected for cultural preservation unless the Enterprise agrees to take on two nereids as well.

“Admiral, there be intelligent worms here!” / “No, there are the hell not.”

I’ll start with what I liked about A Fury Scorned. First, its commitment to diversity is laudable. The OC officers and the various members of the Epictetan ruling council represent an impressive spectrum of non-whiteness, or at least as solid an effort as you could reasonably expect in the 90s. Also, Epictetus III is a fully realized world, with lots of cities and sites for just two continents on a mostly water-covered world. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the writing process an actual map had been drafted, so convincing is the geographical heft of Sargent and Zebrowski’s created world.

Unfortunately, that’s about it for the good. A Fury Scorned doesn’t have as many strong points as it does weak ones, the most major of which is that the story is built to sustain at most only a few chapters, yet it’s been stretched far beyond its tolerance into a full novel. This results in at least a couple different kinds of padding. For one, there aren’t really any clear villains in the book, just a lot of mostly small-potatoes moral quandaries for various characters to ponder. These do elicit a certain fascination from time to time, and the book, to its credit, doesn’t spoonfeed you how it thinks you should feel about them. Although Star Trek does purport to be a little more intellectual than your average mass-appeal sci-fi property, the particular batter of this book is a little too heavy on the ethical contemplation.

There’s also a substantial amount of text dedicated to doubt about the mission’s outcome, of which, on the meta level at least, there isn’t any. I suppose that’s true of most if not all IP tie-ins, but what’s important—though also harder to achieve than one might think—is that the reader never acutely feels that. Sure enough, the good guys do win, but they do so a fair bit before the novel is actually over, requiring even more taffy-pulling, and so what we get at that point is Picard beating himself up over merely doing an amazing job by saving most of a planet’s population via an unprecedented act of wormhole creation and manipulating rather than getting a perfect score by saving literally everyone. It wouldn’t be out of character for Picard to feel inadequate about a mission’s outcome by any stretch, but for a success of this scale, it feels like unnecessary self-pity.

Also, it feels really wrong how casually Data suggests creating a wormhole and the relative ease with which it is accomplished—some hurdles, but no significant ones. This might have been a less conspicuous point if the book had been written some five or six years prior, though not by much. But it was the end of 1996 as this book came out, and by then we’d already had years of Deep Space Nine laying claim to the only stable wormhole in the galaxy, not to mention the multiple times Voyager had already faced bitter disappointment from them after getting their hopes up. Not that we knew a lot about wormholes then (or do still), but we knew enough to know making one with a predictable exit point isn’t in the realm of the plausible. Granted, it isn’t a completely clean operation, and it is the job of science fiction to dream about the impossible becoming mundane, but something about this idea doesn’t sit right, ultimately severely undermining the book’s gravitas.

Over the course of this site’s life, SF Encyclopedia has become my favorite place to bone up on authors I’m unfamiliar with, mostly because it often offers astute criticism on top of exhaustive biographical information. As it happens, each of these authors’ entries contain a line of general criticism about them that I think can also be fairly said of this specific novel. Of Pamela Sargent, it observes: “… a slightly excessive foregrounding of cogitation sometimes causes her narrative sense to falter, and her continued interest in the permutations of human nature can seem abstract.” (It should be noted that this statement is sandwiched between complimentary descriptions of her style.) Speaking on a similarity between the otherwise unrelated Macrolife, George Zebrowski’s most highly regarded single work, and his 1991 novel Stranger Suns, it declares them both as “suffering at times from a tendency to depend on insufficiently plausible lines of plot to carry their ambitious burdens.” So, somewhat amusingly, you can kind of tell who wrote which parts from these passages.

All of this makes me feel a little bad that Sargent and Zebrowski are such otherwise prolific and decorated authors. It turns out A Fury Scorned is a lighter example of a phenomenon we’ve seen many times already, which is to say, the talents of scribes of harder sci-fi not translating so smoothly to Star Trek. I say “lighter” in this case because they seem to take decent care to not talk down to the reader, and because unlike most Serious sci-fi writers who play in the Trek sandbox, they’ll be back for a few more stories. Hopefully in some of those we’ll see some improvement.

MVP & LVP

• The clear MVP of the story is Data. Geordi gets an assist, sure, but this is Data’s show. You come up with the idea of sending a planet through a wormhole, and then you do it? You locked down that MVP, no question about it. Though it is a little weird how he strings everyone along at first like, “Let me show you. You won’t believe me if I just tell you.” The Enterprise has seen enough wild stuff by now that I think you could put it out there and at least three quarters of the senior staff wouldn’t immediately laugh you off.
• My LVP pick is Kwame Landon, head of the Tireos Oceanographic Institute, and it’s not even because he holds a bunch of kids hostage and effectively shoots his entire team’s alleged commitment to pacifism in the foot. It’s because of how incredibly wrong he is about the nereids being intelligent. Samas Rychi, one of the council members, dismisses this possibility so theatrically that from a reader standpoint you feel like it must be painfully obvious that there is in fact something to it. But no. The passage through the wormhole isn’t all roses. It twitches and slightly shifts as the planet passes through it, shearing off the tippy-top, where Tireos is. The planetary fragment tumbles and breaks up, the nereids crash out of their tanks, and Landon and the nereids both die instantly. I mean, they just flat-out eat it. Not that it’s funny, but, like, the suddenness of it elicited this harsh bark of laughter from me. Like, if you want to cross the nereid possibility off the list, that is definitely one way to do it.

Stray Bits

• Only one stray bit this time. On page 33, Guinan has one of those novelty drinking birds on her bar top. Data is transfixed by it for a little bit and then turns his attention back to the conversation. And we never hear about it again! For some reason, this really bothered me. I thought we’d see it occasionally and it would be this sort of symbolic barometer for how things were going. But it’s just, “Hey. Check out this little toy. Okay, moving on.” Maybe it bugged me on a kind of Chekhov’s-gun level. I dunno.

Final Assessment

Bad. There’s not nearly enough story to sustain a novel’s length in this one, and even Star Trek has a more grounded sense of how wormholes work than these writers do, which undermines it significantly. It does have a few points worthy of praise, but overall, it’s yet another instance of someone (or this case, a couple of someones) from the gritty world of hard sci-fi trying to do Trek and striking out.

NEXT TIME: Sisko has a new adventure with old friends in Saratoga