(A Quick Note: This review contains a few more spoilers than usual. Some  have actually been requesting that for a while, so for those people, today is your lucky day. But if you want to keep some of the mystery alive, I’d recommend skipping the “MVP & LVP” section on this one. —Jess)

In today’s episode, when the Enterprise is tapped to scare off Beta Quadrant baddies, the locals advise shooting first and asking questions never. But when Picard realizes that may well be the only way to neutralize an even bigger threat, he’ll need all of Data’s USB ports to get the job done. Can you change the difficulty setting of space? How do hiccups feel to a Trill? And how much setup is too much for one pun? All this and more in Intellivore, the book that demonstrates the value of (ab)using your noggin.

Intellivore
Author: Diane Duane
Pages: 239
Published: April 1997
Timeline: Stardate 48022.5, which is right at the beginning of what would have been an eighth season of TNG and, to offer a point of comparison, is right at the start of DS9’s third season, occurring even before “The Search” (3×01+02, stardate 48212.4)
Prerequisites: Intellivore is, as we will discuss, an expanded take on a historical vignette in The Romulan Way (TOS #35), but it isn’t necessary to have read that to get into this

Way back in 1987, Pocket Books published Diane Duane’s third Star Trek novel, The Romulan Way. It was (and still is) an excellent book, and part of the reason for that is its clever structure, which alternates between different eras. The present-day1That is, of course, relative to TOS. portion follows a Federation spy who’s only a hair’s breadth away from going native before Dr. McCoy shows up on her employer’s doorstep as a hostage. The other half chronicles the history of the Romulans—or, as they call themselves in the Duanian Trekverse, the Rihannsu—including their schism from the teachings of Surak and their arduous migration across space to what would eventually be their twin homeworlds, Romulus and Remus (or, again, if you prefer some spicier non-canon flavor, ch’Rihan and ch’Havran).

One of the vignettes from that historical half tells of a race called the Iruhe, who got such a taste for consuming the life force from people’s minds that they began moving their planet around and projecting images of it as a lovely place to make landfall, then lie in wait until dinner came along. I doubt anyone (maybe not even Duane herself) suspected it at the time, but a decade later, those three humble pages would go on to form the basis of Intellivore, the latest threat to the Enterprise-D.2The word “intellivore” even appears in The Romulan Way, but the Iruhe are not mentioned by name in Intellivore. Also, if you have a copy of The Romulan Way handly, this stuff is on pages 105 to 107. And while it’s mighty impressive to see a seed planted so long ago bear fruit this far down the line, this one’s got some bruises you don’t often see in Duane’s bushels.

The Enterprise and the Oraidhe are assigned to the Great Rift, between the Sagittarius and Orion Arms of the galaxy, to provide support to the Marignano, a science vessel investigating that region. A lot of civilizations have abruptly ended in this area of space, and the two Galaxy-classers are on hand as a show of military might to dissuade pirates from plundering the resultant ruins. Encounters of varying flavor pepper the book’s first half, but they don’t add up to much initially, instead serving to establish the vibe of this particular part of space. Things don’t really get rolling until they find a derelict pirate vessel with one life sign, but no biomass. The body should be dead in its condition, but it’s instead barely alive. Brain damage, but no trauma. Nervous system intact, but not working. Are we in Spookytown yet?

The same thing happens to the Boreal, a human/Andorian colony ship that rather brusquely demands to be left alone in its initial brush with the Enterprise. Both they and the planet they’re bound for vanish, but only Boreal reappears, its crew alive but unresponsive. Data discovers that someone—or something—is moving the same planet around, perhaps to bait colonizers for its feeding purposes. When the scientific literature turns up bupkus, Picard turns to the folklore, and no points for guessing what he finds there. An extremely lucky break (more on that later) points to a way to avoid the intellivore’s mental intrusion, leaving Data as the only crew member suited to deal with it head-on. He’s got organic parts in his makeup too, so he’s definitely taking a risk, but he may be their only chance to stop this bizarre nightmare being…

Clocking in at about forty pages shorter than the average Trek novel of this era, there’s so little meat on Intellivore‘s bones that it’s actually a wonder it’s even that long. This is a very leisurely novel, one that doesn’t go very many places and takes the scenic route to all of them. An almost decadent amount of time is spent getting acquainted with the two captains we haven’t met before, Gohod Clif (a Trill; no relation to the energy bar) and Ileen Maisel (a sassy human woman; no relation to the Marvelous Mrs.). Discussions among the Enterprise crew and narrative tangents play out languidly, but rarely go anywhere truly meaningful. This sort of thing can be fun if you’re in the mood for it, and Duane’s piquant writer-voice makes it easy to indulge, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that she’s fully on autopilot here.

What it feels more like than anything is that Duane is using Intellivore to sow future story ideas the way she planted Intellivore in The Romulan Way. To be completely honest, this is actually a really cool idea: where better to store your ephemeral thoughts than somewhere where they’ll be indelibly printed tens of thousands of times over? But there’s a crucial difference. In The Romulan Way, Duane was filling in a then-sparse history, adding rich color to an underserved part of the lore. In Intellivore, she’s merely marking time. That said, this is Diane Duane we’re talking about, so it’s at least entertaining filler. One such delightful sideshow, for example, expounds on the use of “ethical mathematics” to plot courses that increase the statistical likelihood of “good” or “bad” encounters. Very fun, for sure. But to return to a metaphor from earlier, you come in expecting to eat the fruit, not the tree.

It should be noted that nothing here indicates any kind of decline in Duane’s talents. But when everything up to this point has been uniformly outstanding, even a light slip feels almost scandalous. This isn’t going to do anything to hurt her standing on my Mt. Rushmore of Star Trek novelists, but everyone, even Diane Duane, is human. If you’re just looking to bask in her specific flavor, I can recommend this, but just be aware that it isn’t so much a traditional narrative so much as a collection of morsels, punctuated by the occasional forward story movement, that only starts revving up around the final fifty pages or so.

MVP & LVP

• This week’s MVP is an unnamed officer from the Oraidhe that I’m going to call Concussion Guy. Unfortunately, it’s necessary to wade into spoilers to talk about this, so this is your last chance to bail if you think you might ever want to check this one out for yourself.
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  …are the people who don’t want spoilers gone? Okay, here’s your official welcome to spoiler country. Sadly, the Oraidhe succumbs to the intellivore’s mind tricks as well; it shows them a fake image of the Enterprise in trouble, and Captain Clif jumps to warp without warning and light-speeds right into the trap. Same as with the pirate ship and the Boreal, they all end up a bunch of vegetables—except for one guy, who had fallen while doing something, jarred his brain, and was lying around unconscious while the whole bad scene went down. When he comes to, Dr. Crusher realizes that the intellivore doesn’t notice if you if you’re unconscious, and from there comes up with the idea to sedate everyone while Data plugs into all the ship’s systems simultaneously and executes Operation Blow Up the Eldritch Horror Planet.

  So of course, the thing as always with MVP material is, do Enterprise and Marignano succeed if that doesn’t happen? Does approaching the intellivore while asleep occur to anyone in time? Good can come from the strangest places, even from blunt-force cranial trauma. The only thing that sucks is that we never see that guy coping with the fact that he woke up to learn that he was the only person on the Oraidhe who survived. Where’s the scene where Beverly breaks that to him? God knows we got every other superfluous event imaginable. Why not that one?

• This week’s LVP is Geordi. Geordi is supposed to be the chief engineer of the ship of the line, yet sometimes he gets shunted into this role where he just sort of tags along on setting up whatever big plan Data (or sometimes Barclay) has come up with. In this case, he doesn’t even show up until halfway through the book. I wonder if Duane literally forgot he existed for a while and was like, “Oh, crap!”

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: Yet again, we have a cover where it looks like the captain’s seen a significant glow-up compared to the rest of the artwork, and this is the first such non-Voyager one. Paramount’s extreme caring about The Brand around this time is becoming more apparent than ever. However, unlike the Voyager covers, I can’t find any information online about this one being touched up. Still, I think it had to have been, because Picard’s look just doesn’t aesthetically jive with the rest of the picture.
• One of Captain Maisel’s officers is named Frances Pickup, a name that could have come straight out of a Thomas Pynchon novel.
• Something Intellivore does address that I feel like Star Trek rarely tackles so directly is the possibility that you might need to simply nuke it from orbit. It happens twice in this book. The first time, some traders of a species called the Lalairu tell him that’s the way to contend with the pirates in the area, to which Picard basically replies, “That isn’t really how Starfleet rolls, but I will take it under advisement, thank you, have a good day.” About seventy pages later, Dr. Crusher echoes the Lalairu captain’s sentiment in her suggestion on how to contend with whatever is sucking the minds out of the victims (not knowing at the time it’s the intellivore). A little shocking to hear from such a normally calm and collected character, but we’ll go with it. But what really scorched my eyebrows was the wildly problematic anecdote she then goes on to regale Picard with. She tells him about how she thought she was such a Billy Badass in medical school, toughing her way through things that made other students sick, until one day she visited a facility full of people as mentally blank as what the intellivore makes people, and was so traumatized by what she perceived as the uselessness of their lives and the lack of essential spark they had that she spent weeks afterward randomly sobbing over it. She literally calls it “the most horrible thing in the world”, says things like “And it just hit me, all of a sudden, the waste of it all, the sheer waste”, says of the care provided to them that “it would never matter. None of it would matter”, and ends by telling Picard that he needs to “Find what did this … and make it pay.” Now, obviously they can’t defend themselves, but I have to imagine that if I had a mentally disabled child and someone used terminology like “the most horrible thing in the world” and a “sheer waste” to describe their lack of intellectual faculty and inability to fulfill some hypothetical genius potential to me, I’d turn them out and never talk to them again. There have been a fair number of mildly to moderately distressing instances of unenlightenment up to this point, but this might well be the most fetid of them all. And from one of the very best authors in all of Trekdom, no less!
• Captains Picard and Clif enjoy a nautical adventure together on the holodeck. Wait, which Diane wrote this book again? (pp. 84–91)
• Captain Clif explains why hiccups suck for the Trill: “…the symbiont pouch is right under the diaphragm. How would you like it if the bag you were stuffed into suddenly started being squeezed from all sides and shaken repeatedly?” (p. 89)
• “‘Come on, Ileen,’ Clif said, standing up.” Did … did Duane name Captain Maisel “Ileen” just so she could make a Dexys Midnight Runners reference one time, smack dab in the middle of a book? Because if so, that is some galaxy-brain punning. (p. 114)

Final Assessment

Average. This is the seventh Star Trek novel I’ve reviewed by Diane Duane, and it’s the first one to get anything lower than Excellent. That is a pretty outstanding streak that I’m devastated to see broken today, but if I intend to keep my critical arrows in true, it has to be done. It’s pretty lacking in real substance, doesn’t really kick into overdrive until the last fifty pages, and the meandering vignettes aren’t as fun when they’re just filling in lines on a page rather than unexplored lore. If all you want from a Diane Duane book is the flavor, Intellivore is probably still more or less worth your while. But as far as narrative pacing, there’s chill, there’s ice-cold, and then there’s Intellivore, and some who aren’t as accustomed to and/or accepting of Duane’s idiosyncrasies might not be so patient with that sort of thing. Definitely her least good outing to date.

NEXT TIME: Deanna tries to Breakaway from her overbearing mother