In today’s episode, if Voyager’s next rest stop doesn’t have a decent snack selection, they won’t make it to another one. But when the natives take an acute interest in their transporter tech, Janeway has to decide if a full pantry is worth the trade. Why is Voyager always so chill about classism? What’s the deal with the one human on the planet? And whose leola root stew did Joie Sakhlova pee in? All this and more in The Garden, or, I Can’t Believe It’s Not British!

The Garden
Author: Melissa Scott
Pages: 278
Published: February 1997
Timeline: In season 2, somehow, between “Resistance” (2×12) and “Prototype” (2×13)
Prerequisites: None

There are certain adjectives I strive to avoid whenever I evaluate a Star Trek novel or anything else. Overrated and underrated I’ve always found easy to stay away from—weaselly trash words that invariably amount to nothing more than “I wish more people hated/liked the same things as me.” I feel I haven’t always been as successful when it comes to descriptors like interesting and fascinating, which are harder to say no to because it’s so natural to want others to find intrigue in the same things you do. Nevertheless, they still say more about the person using them than about any innate quality the thing being described by them possesses. On the other side of the “interesting” coin is boring, which, like its counterpart, is more a reflection of what you bring to a text than of anything it actually actively does, which is nothing, because it’s a bound stack of paper with words on it.

My ultimate point in saying all of this is that I will happily take some egg on my face if it means I can give in to my caveman brain for one review and say what my heart of hearts really wants to say, which is that out of over two hundred Star Trek novels to date, The Garden by Melissa Scott was, by a significant margin, the most boring one I have read yet. Not the worst, mind, but definitely the most boring—a story that did for me on exactly zero levels.

At the start of this one, Voyager’s nutrition situation is so dire that people are getting scurvy, even though scans and readings indicate they shouldn’t be. Yet here they are, and come to find out it’s cooking the food they picked up on their last planetary grocery trip that’s causing it. Heat breaks the vitamin C down into compounds most of the crew’s bodies can’t use, but also none of it is palatable unless cooked, so they’ve got a big problem. Of course, Neelix knows some folks called the Kirse who can hook them up with better eats, but he’s hesitant to recommend going to them because they frequently get raided by the Andirrim, who make trying to penetrate the Kirse’s defense system a rite of passage into adulthood. The problem is, Voyager won’t make it to another pit stop if the Kirse lead doesn’t pan out. Also, Janeway never listens to Neelix anyway, so why break a perfectly good streak.

The lights are on, and the food looks as tasty as advertised, but nobody’s home except some small critters that get skittish around tricorders. After what feels like an eternity, the landing party reaches the citadel and eventually finds a banquet that seems to have been laid out specifically for them. Janeway smells a trap, however, and belays her drooling crew. Her instincts pay off: avoiding touching all the food they saw along the way was in fact a secret test of character. For her judicious forbearance, Janeway and the rest of the landing party earn the privileges of pigging out and being called “people” by the Kirse (as opposed to “animals”).

Good relations are established, and they even meet another human, Thilo Revek, who ended up in the Delta Quadrant the same way Voyager did—coherent tetryon beam, Caretaker array, banjo, the whole shebang. Chakotay has some intel on him as an ex-Maquis who was really good at automating systems and liked being around computers more than people, and sure, he’s a little cagey, but none of that ever comes into play. The greater dilemma stems from the eye the Kirse have for Voyager’s transporters. Although they have some of their own, they’re pretty crude, not even able to reconstitute living matter. They’re keen to upgrade, but are metal-poor and would have to rely on some of Voyager’s stock to make it happen. Janeway, naturally, is hesitant to fork over that much raw material, and that’s to say nothing of Tuvok’s concern, which is that the Kirse will weaponize the new and improved transporter against the raiding Andirrim. Voyager needs this food run to go well or it’s the end of the line. Can Janeway work out a deal that doesn’t compromise Starfleet principles too badly and load up her shopping cart before the Andirrim pay a visit?

This. Book. Drags. My gawd, does it drag. It takes almost a hundred pages to even meet the Kirse and Revek, and another hundred to get the deal in motion, between which there is so — much — nothing. A B-plot of any kind would have leavened this book immensely. It probably would have been really goofy and dumb, knowing Voyager, but at least it would have done something to break up the monotony. Instead, there are interminable passages detailing the approach to the Kirse citadel and watching the away team resist eating. Scintillating. There is a lot of walking around with combinations of crew members and insufficiently distinguishable Kirse, seeing things that seem off and require explanation, though in truth there’s no bow pretty enough to wrap up the questions it raises to any level of satisfaction.

This would be bad enough on its own, but it’s compounded by another of Voyager‘s bad habits, which is the distressing ease with which they seem to get cozy with supremacist cultures. The Kirse make a strong distinction between “people” and “animals”, which doesn’t seem to be based on any assessment of actual intelligence so much as on not touching things that aren’t yours. Chakotay raises a minor stink about how they treat their animal gardeners, but that never gains any further traction. The Andirrim are indeed aggressive when we finally meet them, but the book never even imagines that they could have any point of view on anything whatsoever. Voyager simply slips into fighting alongside the Kirse without ever asking any of the hard questions about what the dynamic really is here.

If it seems like I’m both-sides-ing this a little, it’s just that the evidence simply isn’t there. What sucks is that there is in fact a decent-sized kernel of intrigue to the notion that not only might Voyager actually be siding with an oppressor, but that they’re actively, consciously making that choice. A concept like “yes, we restocked our pantry, but at WHAT COST to our SOULS” is right in Star Trek‘s wheelhouse. There is of course the usual hemming and hawing about the long-term Prime Directive ramifications of sharing their superior transporter tech, but taking a side in a hunt they don’t have a dog in seems like a much worse problem in that vein to me. So I’m sorry if a tossed-off single sentence about the Andirrim being buddy-buddy with the Kazon-Ogla doesn’t cut my mustard, but given how problematic the latter were from the very first point of conception, that’s all but inadmissible.

Tie-in novels written before a series begins come with a host of issues that can’t rightly be blamed on their authors. But if there are any of those present here, they’re nearly impossible to spot among the ones that can. I have been more confused, more infuriated, and more disgusted by Trek novels before now, but I’ve never been less interested or motivated to pick one up than I was with The Garden. I remembered barely anything about Melissa Scott’s other Trek novel, DS9’s Proud Helios, but looking back at my review of it, I’m amused to find that I also found that book a snoozer. I don’t remember the intensity of that feeling, but I have a hard time imagining it achieved the heights of boredom that this one did.

MVP & LVP

• My pick for The Garden‘s MVP is Tom Paris. He’s the character we follow around the most, as well as the one Scott seems to have the best handle on. He also develops a rapport with a Kirse named Grayrose that culminates in a mildly unearned emotional tug, but is still kind of nice overall.
• Our LVP here is Kes. Not much here for her to do. I think she doesn’t even speak but maybe one time in the whole book, twice at most.

Stray Bits

• As with Bless the Beasts a few reviews back, someone at Paramount must have decided that the cover of The Garden would hurt The Brand in its original form. Tom evidently wasn’t deemed bad enough for a retouch, though he does look like a little more to me like Lt. Hawk from First Contact than like Robert Duncan McNeill (who, in some fairness, might not have been cast yet when this was painted). And while Janeway does look a little haggard in the original, I feel like they could have blended the replacement a little better with the rest of the painting. I wish I could find the name of the artist who did these covers, but that information seems to be as thoroughly scrubbed from the internet as any piece of information can be. Seems like a real “you’ll never work in this town again” kind of deal.
• Everyone in this book says “Right” a lot—and I mean a lot. Like, to the point of distraction. I really wish I’d kept count. They said it so many times I began to wonder if Melissa Scott was British, but she was in fact born in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is about as not-British as it gets.
• Tuvok, p. 13: “Not all species make use of ascorbic acid. Vulcans, for example, do not metabolize it at all.” I feel like it’s been a long time since we’ve gotten a weird little bit of non-canon science trivia about a species, so that was a cute little throwaway line.
• I had a pretty good laugh imagining Tom Paris taking an explosive diarrhea dump, because mentally I am eight years old. (p. 27)
• “Kim hesitated, but the smell was too good to resist, especially after the weeks of Neelix’s cooking on Voyager. They would have to make sure that Neelix didn’t try to do to much with the Kirse food, it was just the sort of thing he would spoil with too much seasoning…” — I’ll grant that I don’t know what any of the various flavorings native to the Delta Quadrant taste like, so maybe a small amount of this or that goes a long way, but it’s pretty hard to truly overseason just about anything. On balance, this sounds about white to me. (p. 147)
• “The voices came back almost instantly, calling their names, and Paris counted them off one by one. When the last one had answered—Joie Sakhlova, no surprise there—he touched the communicator again.” — What on earth? Who is Joie Sakhlova, and why is “no surprise” that they reported in last? I want to know why this person automatically elicits snide thoughts. Does everyone talk behind Sakhlova’s back in the mess hall? What did they do to get this reputation? Is this the next crewmember up for a Tuvok-style shape-up regimen? Scratch that. I don’t want to know; I need to know. (pp. 208–09)

Final Assessment

Terrible. “Boring” is a kind of meaningless thing to call a book, generally saying more about the person who says it than about the text itself, but some things test even the most stalwart critical goodwill. Not to mention that it’s yet another piece of kindling for the raging bonfire of my personal argument that Voyager is such a big backwards step for Star Trek‘s reputation for progressiveness that it makes “Code of Honor” look like Sesame Street. Awful all around. I can’t recommend this one on any level.

NEXT TIME: Jake and Nog find a new toy in Cardassian Imps