CW: one mention of rape (but it’s buried in a footnote, so you don’t have to look at it)

In today’s episode, a well-timed pop-up ad makes Janeway think it might be time for shore leave. But their hosts’ culture and behavior raise a lot of questions with some shocking answers. What do Chakotay and Kes’s visions mean? What happens if you insult Janeway’s dog? And why are musicians still using wooden reeds in the 24th century? All this and more in The Black Shore, the book that features some hair-raising cuisine.

The Black Shore
Author: Greg Cox
Pages: 278
Published: May 1997
Timeline: Early season 3, right after “The Chute” (3×03)
Prerequisites: None, though callbacks are starting to ramp up

Just as morale starts dropping and stress starts rising amid an empty, boring stretch of space, Voyager picks up a transmission from nearby Ryolanov, inviting them to stop by and partake of their hospitality. Chakotay recommends shore leave, and Janeway enthusiastically agrees. Tuvok’s a little put off by the fact that they didn’t show their faces at any point during their commercial, but his concerns are ignored. That’s progress, though: they’ve moved from disregarding Neelix’s advice up to disregarding Tuvok’s! (I didn’t say it was progress in the right direction.)

The Ryol make a pretty solid first impression, except for the elder Varathael’s aide Naxor, who gets ultra-jealous when Varathael’s daughter Laazia macks on Tom and goes off on Neelix for his endless prattling (though, to be fair, the latter would actually score him a lot of points with most people). But after that, red flags start piling up faster than tribbles. Several crew members at a reception take note of the neffalers, small primates who struggle to perform domestic tasks, but the Ryol are very proud of themselves for “civilizing” them and scoff at the notion that they could be sentient. Also, Kes and Chakotay each have a horrifying vision: Kes only gets pitch-blackness and a lot of screaming, but Chakotay gets mauled by a dark, mysterious wolf-grizzly thing. Thankfully, you don’t die in real life if you die in the akoocheemoya matrix, but it’s scary all the same.

Kes intuits that she’ll have to return to the beach if she wants to get to the bottom of her vision, but the parts she needs access to are restricted. B’Elanna finds at least one possible reason for that: she’s reading gobs of antimatter under the sand that they’re somehow storing stably. It isn’t what Kes is picking up on, but with each having a mystery to solve in the same spot, they team up to help each other find answers. Meanwhile, the Ryol are gradually exerting their psychic influence harder and harder on the vacationing Voyager crew, causing them to make nearly-fatal bush-league mistakes back on the ship and shirk not just their duty assignments, but their entire mission to get home. The house of cards really starts to topple when Janeway crashes a private disciplinary meeting and sees more than Varathael wants his guests to see. And once the true deeds and hearts of the Ryol come to light, it may be too late for Voyager to escape.

We first encountered Greg Cox when he collaborated with Kij Johnson on the TNG novel Dragon’s Honor, but The Black Shore was his first time going solo at the tiller. He’s still going strong to this day,1As of this writing, his latest Trek work is the TOS one-shot A Contest of Principles. and is even active (and very polite!) on some of the Facebook Trek novel groups I frequent. Even though it’s now a quarter of a century old, The Black Shore reads nearly identically in tone and vibe to the handful of more modern Trek books I happen to have already checked out. An even-handed peppering of well-placed callbacks to previous episodes (from all series, not just Voyager) assures us we’re in the hands of someone who’s done his homework and knows his stuff, so I was able to de-clench a little more than I usually do. Felt nice. Some of the big developments were pretty clearly telegraphed, I thought, but Cox’s sure hand makes it easy to watch them play out without complaint.

The Ryol are some nasty antagonists. Their swerve from friendly to ruthless is pretty brutal, as Trek goes. Cox recently joked on one of those aforementioned Facebook groups that he was sad that J.M. Dillard wrote a Star Trek vampire novel before he could, but there’s more to The Black Shore than that. In fact, it’s a testament to how frightening the Ryol are that vampirism is actually one of their least scary aspects. It reminds me a little bit of the season one episode “Prime Factors”, except if they wanted to offer free hospitality instead of trade goodies, and also if they went zero to a hundred a lot harder. The deeper the Voyager crew gets, the closer they get to answers, the more the Ryol turn up the heat. Cox ramps the intensity well.

I do think a few juicy opportunities were missed. For instance, with the concept of a displaced and subjugated indigenous people on the table, you’d think having Chakotay empathize and get invested in their plight would be an easy slam dunk. Maybe that’s something 90s whiteness wasn’t ready to start unpacking yet, though. A mind showdown of some kind, perhaps between the Ryol and Tuvok or Kes, would have been cool as well. In fact, it’s a little odd that Tuvok gets through the whole story more or less psionically unscathed. I think I’d have preferred him to get one of the visions instead of putting up with that fake-ass akoocheemoya crap. Also, it doesn’t quite stick the landing, with a deus ex machina in the climax that for me evoked some less-than-complimentary memories of The Stand.

Nevertheless, it’s a solid story overall, especially for a series as shaky and wildly fluctuating in quality as Voyager. And there are signs that we’re starting to pull away from its pre-series commission era, though this book still in some ways retains a lot of the flavor of one. But more than anything, what I feel is a sense of optimism. The solo debut of one of Trek lit’s longest-running contributors feels like something to get excited about, like it’s heralding the impending arrival of good times ahead. It’s putting me in a real good frame of mind. I feel like I’m ready to tackle anything. What’s next? Bring it on!

…a Shatner novel?!? Ahh, fu—

MVP & LVP

• This week’s MVP is Tom Paris, because I think he deserves it for getting put through the wringer as hard as he does. Laazia really does a psychic number on him,2It’s not explicit, but depending on how you interpret what’s left unsaid, you can argue that Laazia date-rapes Tom at least once. and though no one would fault him for failing to withstand her affections, he still feels like he needs to make up for it, and gets some rousing table-turning in the final act. Call me a sap if you want, but for the most part I like the “Tom Paris tries to be a decent person” redemptive arc, and this is a fine example of it.
• Our LVP this time is Neelix. Part of that is that way he’s written, which is kind of bizarre, and one of the few characterizations Cox doesn’t nail super-well. Cox styles him as this sort of boastful teller of tall tales, which is indeed a small ingredient of the Neelix stew, but the places he talks about sound more out of Great Depression-type “Big Rock Candy Mountain” fantasy than sci-fi. The other part of it is that, of course, he never shuts up, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Stray Bits

• Neelix tells Naxor about Talaxian hair pasta. No, that isn’t a colorful description like “angel hair”; it’s made from actual removed follicles. Sounds a treat. I’d like to hear the Chef Reactions guy rip on that. (p. 23)
• Harry plays “Nightbird” for one of the neffalers on his clarinet. Somehow, I doubt it’s as loin-stirring as when Riker plays it. Also, he breaks a reed, which, like, how is that happening in the 24th century? Haven’t they discovered some polymer or something that makes a reed twenty times more durable without sacrificing any of the musicality? Seems like the sort of thing you’d see on Star Trek about two decades before you see it in real life. (pp. 42–44)
• “[Janeway] chose not to mention that time, years ago at the Academy, when she was the last person standing after a free-for-all that pretty much leveled an oyster bar in Seattle. That hadn’t been a first-contact situation, after all. Besides, that Tellarite had insulted her dog.” — Me after reading that:
  
  (p. 80)
• Probably the last episode I would have expected a callback to was “Threshold”, but it happened, and the laughter was indeed hearty. (p. 129)
• Tom feels like he ran something called the Deltan Marathon. Wonder what that entails. My guess is it’s like a regular marathon, except there are Deltans lining both sides of the route, so you have to run the whole thing with a massive pants tent and try not to, uh, make too many pit stops, if you get my drift. (p. 130)

Final Assessment

Good. Although it misses some potentially interesting narrative opportunities, The Black Shore is a solid yarn. The Ryol make for brutal antagonists, the warmth of their initial friendliness matched only by the shocking intensity of their heel turn. I had a feeling I was going to be safe in Greg Cox’s hands, and he delivered. One of Trek lit’s most dependable and talented authors is here for the long haul, and I think we’re about to see an uptick in average quality.

NEXT TIME: Kirk dodges death once again to fight a plague in Avenger