In today’s episode, when Tom and Harry follow a siren out to sea, they end up not having a very merry time. But when their lady friend starts looking a little gray around the gills, Harry begins to suspect that the cure may be worse than the disease. Is it easier to find someone without a combadge than previously indicated? Should the Doctor put a higher priority on inventory checks? And does anyone on Voyager actually know the Prime Directive? All this and more in Bless the Beasts, the book brought to you by Harry Kim’s Pure Vibes, a four-disc compilation of Delta Quadrant jams that isn’t available in any store and can be all yours for four strips of latinum! Subspace operators are standing by!

Bless the Beasts
Author: Karen Haber
Pages: 274
Published: December 1996
Timeline: Between “Parturition” (2×07) and “Persistence of Vision” (2×08)
Prerequisites: None

Voyager’s latest round of resources and repair needs takes them to Sardalia, home to a hospitable people of avian aspect. They want to treat Janeway to all manner of festivities, but she doesn’t have time for it and doesn’t mind saying so, so Lord Koilas dismisses her. But as soon as he does, he falls ill and has to be revived by his daughter Marima. No one else seems to think much of this or act like anything even happened, but once he gets better, he’s much more willing to accommodate Voyager’s repairs. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K—but not so strange that Chakotay doesn’t get Janeway to authorize shore leave.

Tom and Harry spend theirs visiting a fortune teller who says that some but not all of the crew will make it home and to beware the water. Spooky! They also meet Marima in a bar, where she tries to chat them up, but they don’t find Sardalia sufficiently sTrAnGe AnD uNiQuE for her taste, so she almost ditches them. At the last second, however, she decides to invite them to go “harvesting”, which is somehow even more violent than it sounds, being basically a free-for-all slaughter of a sea mammal called the darra. During the sport hunt, the hydrofoil Tom and Harry are riding in is destroyed by ships from another territory, and they wash up on an island along with Marima, who’s been hit by a recurrence of a hereditary disease called the gray plague, which can be forced into remission by an enzyme in darra blood (which is why they go harvesting).

The three are “rescued” by the Micaszians, a rival faction to the Vandorrans (i.e., Lord Koilas and Marima’s side) who claim to take far better care of the darra and extract the enzyme more humanely. Harry begins to take an acute interest in the darra and becomes convinced of their sentience, though Tom and Marima are reluctant to agree. Meanwhile, the Sardalians initially try to cooperate with Voyager’s repair effort, but become gradually more enamored with Federation engineering and medical prowess. They want that gray plague cured at cost, and their patience is wearing thin…

Bless the Beasts comes to us courtesy of a one-offer, Karen Haber, some of whose otherwise notable-seeming works include a nonfiction book called The Science of the X-Men and a four-novel cycle called Fire in Winter, the first installment of which took its cues from “The Mutant Season”, a story written in the 70s by her husband Robert Silverberg,1 before coming into its own and carving out its own identity. Haber wrote Bless the Beasts shortly after her father died, and in a sweet touch, the book is partially dedicated to him. It’s her only Star Trek novel, and I think it captures the spirit of early Voyager quite well. Unfortunately, the way it accomplishes that is by completely misunderstanding how the Prime Directive works.

One of Starfleet’s uglier invocations of the Prime Directive is when they withhold medical treatment from a species, which never looks good even when there are sound reasons for it. The Sardalians are pre-warp, but they’re aware of starships; it’s mentioned early that spacefaring visitors love stopping by their world for R&R. The only way curing the gray plague would “interfere” with the Sardalians’ development is to increase their ability to commit time and energy to scientific research without that burden weighing on them. But it’s far from inevitable that even good health would speed things along for them, given what slow learners they are, as we see in their engineers’ collaborations with Torres. So all the withholding of the cure is doing is providing an excuse to drum up the conflicts that characterized early Voyager until they reach a painfully obvious solution. Tensions did of course run high on the show in the beginning, but this is an inorganic and sloppy way to go about creating them.

Thankfully, there are also some things this book does well, keeping it from going too far over the cliff. Tom and Harry’s friendship feels as solid as in later seasons, which is no small feat for a bible-based commission to pull off. Haber also uses some of the characters’ quirks to strong effect—for instance, Harry can sort of intuit what the darra are “saying” because his musical talents translate well to interpreting their tones. And Chakotay at one point rather cleverly tries to locate Tom by narrowing the search parameters to a particular scar Tom has, a segment that briefly makes you wonder why the Federation has to use combadges to sniff their people out before swiftly reminding you, “Oh yeah, that’s why.” The characters are certainly not the problem here.

Nor is the suspicion involving Lord Koilas’s second minister Borizus and things going missing, like a tricorder from sickbay and Tom’s entire Starfleet file. This book probably would have had enough of a leg to stand on in terms of conflict without dragging the Prime Directive into it, which makes its inexplicable inclusion and interpretation that much more of a sore thumb. It probably wouldn’t have been great even without it, but man, it is really not helping anything by being there.

MVP & LVP

  • My MVP for this one is Harry. There isn’t so much a “save the whales” vibe to this story as there is a conflict between “kill all the whales” versus “only kill some of them”. But Harry brings a lot of humanity to it, and his insistence on proving the sentience of the darra even while mostly getting pooh-poohed by Tom and Marima is admirable.
  • Picking a LVP was tough, but I think the edge goes to Jovic, the first engineer they send up to Voyager to help B’Elanna. Talk about not sending your best people! He deserves every bit of laying into him that B’Elanna gives him. Anyway, it was either him or Neelix, who seems to believe that immediate shore leave cancelations do not apply to him and Kes.

Stray Bits

  • Cover Art Corner: Tom’s face on the final version of the cover is actually a digital touch-up. It seems odd to me that they felt the need to do that, because the original (at right) isn’t that bad. I guess it’s easy to see how Paramount might have felt it would hurt brand recognition, though. But this isn’t the last time we’ll see a Voyager character face replacement happen. Wait until we get to The Garden, a book where the cover really needed the glow-up, and only got about half of one.
  • “Perhaps, beginning with this piece, [Harry] would make a collection of music from other worlds. ¶ Yes, a collection of unknown music from the Delta Quadrant! Kim’s heart beat faster at the thought. What a stir that would cause back on Earth.” — Indeed. After all of those trillions of Spotify listens from all over the galaxy, he’ll make [frantically keys in numbers on adding machine] [flicks beads on abacus] [consults Magic 8 Ball] [contemplates tribble] [reticulates splines] [rips dot-matrix printout from room-sized tube computer] two slips of latinum! (p. 37)
  • Sorry this took an entire month to get out! The grad school load is insane this semester.

Final Assessment

Average. It wouldn’t have been exceptional even without the Prime Directive garbage, but the stuff that’s adequate pulls it back on the rails enough for it to even out into something that’s not totally terrible but is ultimately just sort of forgettable. Definitely not one you need to worry too much about.

NEXT TIME: Here’s Mudd in Your Eye