In today’s episode, a plant-killing plague is spreading faster than a rumor, but only Kirk has the real tea. Meanwhile, when Picard puts on his Dixon Hill hat, he becomes the man who knew too much, and Spock makes a discovery so startling, it makes him cash out his logic chips. Can you just be whoever’s kid you want? Is the Kobayashi Maru really that big a deal? And what the heck is happening on Mercury? All this and more in Avenger, the book that disengages the racism protocols.

Avenger
Authors: Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, William Shatner1In case it wasn’t clear, this is a pointed statement on my part, sorted in descending order of depth and strength of contribution.
Pages: 370 (PB)
Published: May 1997 (HC)
Timeline: Two years after The Return
Prerequisites: Star Trek Generations; The Ashes of Eden and The Return (characters recur and key events are recalled); “The Conscience of the King” (TOS 1×13); “Amok Time” (TOS 2×01); “Sarek” (TNG 3×23)

When Kirk threw the giant OFF switch on the Borg homeworld at the end of The Return, surely that was curtains, he thought. Surely this would be the time the Mounties of fate caught him dodging the death draft. Right? Guess again, Jimbo. Instead, he falls through a transwarp garbage chute, gets found by some ex-Borgs who detox his deadly nanites and let him couch-surf with them for a while. Also, whatever place this is has a galactic core for a sun sitting pretty much right on top of it, and it’s, like, totally beautiful and life-changing, man. Then, after a couple years of hanging out and appreciating the stark simplicity of ex-Borg life, he finds an intact scout ship and thinks it’s probably about time he resumed his True Dream, i.e., domestic bliss and mind-bending sex with Teilani.2Most of this isn’t explained until the middle of the book, because Kirk is trying to maintain a guise of anonymity, because people will quite understandably void their bowels if they realize he’s still alive, and he argues that it isn’t really that important, which is actually sort of true in a meta sense; the point isn’t so much how he got here as that he is now. Modern fandom appetites are only whetted by the tying of every last loose end in the galaxy, however, so it is eventually addressed, and right about the time you start thinking they probably need to get it out of the way, to boot. And then of course it’s this totally underwhelming wet fart.

Naturally, Kirk can’t be back in town for five minutes without there being a galactic emergency that can only be solved by his moxie and know-how. Sure enough, there’s some kind of plague ripping around the galaxy that’s killing all the plant life on every planet. No big deal for him, though: he walks right into a field hospital on Chal, feeds Teilani a tea made from dried ground-up Klingon leaves, and carries his betrothed out the door immediately. The hospital team finds a plaque from the Enterprise-A under her bed, and the team leader, Christine MacDonald, realizes OMG IT’S KIRK WE’RE SAVED. But it’s going to take a little more than tea time to stop this pandemic.

Meanwhile, Picard unsuccessfully tries to talk a young Vulcan and his pregnant wife out of breaching quarantine and blowing themselves up. But something about it doesn’t pass his sniff test, so he makes a U-turn to re-investigate the site of the incident. His suspicions are confirmed when it turns out there’s no organic residue at the site of their supposed deaths, and he believes furthermore that it’s connected to the virogen3I’ve been trying to dance around this word, which is the book’s preferred nomenclature for the disease, because I think it sounds dumb. It isn’t a real word, though it’s obviously a portmanteau of virus and pathogen. But then why not just use one or the other of those? They’re perfectly cromulent words! Virogen is stupid. It reeks of the bad kind of cheesy. I hate it. somehow. He takes his concerns to the station manager, but all he gets for his trouble is a protoplaser to the face and exposure to the disease, forcing him to do responsible social distancing for most of the rest of the book. Riker stages a pretty rad operation to extricate him from their clutches and succeeds spectacularly, though not before the not-dead Vulcan forces a mind meld only to realize Picard has previously melded with “the leader”—that is to say, Sarek. But what can Sarek lead? He’s dead!

Turns out he didn’t die the way we all thought, though—you know, from Bendii Syndrome? Nope, he was murdered, slowly, in a way designed to look like Bendii. His former aide confesses as much in a holo-message delivered to Spock by an anonymous Klingon messenger. Spock gets so mad, he throws the holo-thingy at the wall. He gives in to emotion in this book more than ever before, and it’s pretty intense. Granted, there’s a good reason why he does it, but it’s still wild to watch, especially as an ironic contrast to Kirk, who detaches from his emotions at the same time Spock begins to embrace them more—though Kirk might go a little too far in that direction, as we’ll see.

The link between the three arcs is Sarek—the other two already mentioned, but also Kirk is bothered by memories of encountering him as a kid during the evacuation of Tarsus IV, which feel wrong to him because he’s pretty sure the first time he ever met Sarek was the Babel Conference. Picard gets most of the way to connecting all the dots between the Vulcans and the virogen, but Spock provides the key piece: when he was a kid, Sarek and Amanda may or may not have done a bit of light terrorism? Look, it was the 2240s, it was the hot trend, everyone was doing it, it was a different time, so cut ’em a little slack, m’kay?

But no, really, they palled around for a minute with a group called the Symmetrists, who believed that the galaxy is basically a living being with its own ecology, and that running around in starships, terraforming planets, and introducing your microbes and plants and animals to their ecosystems is tantamount to a criminal act. So if the Federation accepts that all beings have a right to exist peaceably, and the galaxy is itself a being, then you’re infringing on its rights by colonizing it. They tried to argue that only completely lifeless planets should be colonized and terraformed, but the Federation was all like, “Uhh, we already have a lot invested in this, and also, you have no proof of your claims, so until you bring us some, we’re gonna keep on truckin’.” Sarek and Amanda severed their ties with the movement though not soon enough to not regret the association, and without the implicit support of a political heavy-hitter, it eventually went dormant. But now they’re back and more radicalized than ever, but even they might not fully realize what kind of worm can they’re opening…

Three books in, I think we’re all generally aware of The Understanding that likely happened with these Shatner books—which is to say, he provided a loose idea of the plots and themes he wanted to explore; the Reeves-Stevenses hammered out the finer details; Shatner did some of the basic writing; and Judy & Gar fleshed it out, brought it more in line with the larger Trekverse, and made sure the continuity tracked. Margaret Clark claims in Voyages of Imagination that Shatner did about 95 percent of the writing in these collaborations, which frankly strikes me as ego stroking at best and one of two things at worst: either an outright lie, or a fear of cheesing off someone who will make your life miserable if you make one wrong move, like Billy Mumy in The Twilight Zone or something.

That said, I do think Shatner had more of a hand in this one than he did the previous two. His sentences are very easy to pick out: they’re terse, choppy, fragmented—in other words, pretty much the same as how he speaks. You can read them in his iconic cadence and know instantly. I observed more such sentences here than I did in The Ashes of Eden or The Return. It might be that he had gotten more comfortable working with the Reeves- Stevenses by that point, or maybe he thought he had enough of a handle on various elements of theme and story structure (between these and all the TekWars) to contribute a bit more to the arrangement.

Whatever the case may have been, I think that’s a good thing on paper. If it’s only going to be his name on the front of the book, it should feel like he did an amount of work that would go at least a small way toward beginning to merit that. But there’s only so much Judy & Gar can do to smooth out some of Shatner’s rougher tendencies, which leaves him in kind of a funky spot. If he doesn’t pitch in hardly at all, then people scoff at his vanity and say snide things like, “Okay, who really wrote this book?” But he’s also not a good enough writer in the sense that if you swing the pendulum the other way and give him more control, it will cause even worse qualities to emerge—which is pretty much exactly what happens here.

By far the coolest part of Avenger is how it chips at some of the basic assumptions we hold about the Federation—namely, that exploration and expansion and colonization are inherently good things and the Federation does them good and well and The Right Way. But it’s shown that the plague is able to spread as quickly and easily as it does because the Federation shoehorns chlorophyll into practically every new ecosystem it comes across, whether it’s native or not. The Federation is sometimes compared unflatteringly to the Borg in Star Trek, and there’s a bitter irony in how they claim to favor acculturation over assimilation, which might be easy enough to believe when all they show you is their people, but gets shakier when you scrutinize how they treat ecosystems. There’s a lot of room for introspection and rumination on this revelation, and a moderate person capable of nuanced thought might conclude, “Well, even though the Symmetrists are awful, they do raise some points we might do well to give some hard thought to.”

If there is one thing we know about William Shatner, of course, it is that moderate and nuance are not generally words that appear in descriptions of him. So instead of some nice, even-tempered reflection, what you get is Kirk basically screaming in Picard’s face, “THE ECO-FASHES WERE RIGHT, JEAN-LUC!!” Which in turn relitigates an issue I had with The Return, how Kirk and Picard could exist peaceably; their talents and points in their favor do not directly conflict with each other; and yet Shatner is pathologically incapable of playing nice or sharing a sandbox, and so Kirk must be the world-weary wise man who has learned more through hard experience than anyone could possibly fathom, and Picard is just a namby-pamby book-loving square who just doesn’t get it, man.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

— wint (@dril) June 2, 2014

It gets worse, though. Throughout the book, there is an ongoing ironic reversal of humors, wherein Kirk sheds emotion and begins to see the appeal of looking at things rationally and logically, whereas Spock gives in to his human side with more reckless abandon than we’ve ever seen from him. And Kirk has a connection to Sarek that he’s trying to work out the details of. But what it ultimately leads to, without giving away too much of it, is a supposition that basically amounts to, “Yes, Spock is the son of Sarek. But what I would submit is that, in some ways, perhaps I, James T. Kirk, am just as much his son as well? If not arguably more?” Since The Ashes of Eden, it’s been abundantly clear that Shatner is someone who likes to work out his feelings on the page. Given that, this reads to me like a deep-seated jealousy of the near-universal adoration people have for Leonard Nimoy and not for him. Taking a father/son relationship that’s very important to the character of Spock and daring to put himself on nearly sibling-level footing with that strikes me as shockingly greedy and classless.

And yet, despite the heaters I’m whipping at Willie Shats, this is nonetheless a mostly riveting and enjoyable read, thanks to the tireless efforts of Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. As Shatner’s worst impulses continue to metastasize and overtake more and more of their collaborations, Judy & Gar rise to the occasion and turn in successfully better and better writing that’s somehow always able to keep the whole thing from going over the cliff—and now it’s reaching “Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2, screaming, eyes bugged out, cords in his neck looking like tree trunks” levels. As the excerpt from their then-forthcoming original novel tucked away in the back demonstrates, they at least weren’t totally stuck in this arrangement, but I wish they got to spend more of their Trek-lit time not batting such thankless cleanup.

MVP & LVP

• Avenger‘s MVP is Dr. McCoy, who doesn’t show up (in corporeal form, that is) until 17 pages from the end and in two hours whips up a virogen antidote that nobody else could manage to, which in book time is one sentence. Literally a 140-year-old deus ex machina. One could argue that our intrepid writing trio concocted a threat too potent for even an event novel to reasonably contain and thus really worked themselves into a corner. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, though! Writers getting logjammed? No way! Dr. McCoy is just that good, remember? Nothing beats the OG, right? Right?
• Avenger is yet another Star Trek novel where Geordi gets completely forgotten about and given a handful of lines so glancing, they might not even have been in the original draft. How does this keep happening? Even Rolk, the Bolian Worf replacement with no discernible personality, gets more to say and do. Quit doing my man LeVar like this!

Stray Bits

• There’s a Doctor M’Benga in this book, the great-granddaughter of the original. Though given how things have worked out recently (DON’T CLICK THAT IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN BY THAT), it might be a little harder to reconcile the idea of the family line continuing for so long now. Also, they call her Bones, which is so blatant that not even Shatner bothers belaboring the obvious.
• Until he dies, Tarok is an amusing character, sort of the Vulcan equivalent of a fun uncle, which is a funny concept to roll around in your head.
• The EMH appears on a few occasions, and everyone is pretty irked by him and treats him like crap. Of course, this is as it should be: we as viewers/readers don’t feel that way because we’ve gotten to know him on a more human level through Voyager, whereas circumstances haven’t forced everyone in the Alpha Quadrant to build a rapport with a hologram. So even though it feels weird to see everyone rolling their eyes at him and giving him guff, it’s accurate, and I appreciate that they got that particular detail right. I was less thrilled about the part where Kirk adjusts him to appear as Dr. McCoy—I guess because old-fashioned country racism somehow gets you faster solutions—right before the real McCoy shows up (and yes, they do make that joke).
• One of the books Spock carries among his personal effects is The Art of Peace by Surak. One of the more subtle, clever laughs this story has to offer. (p. 68)
• Data’s emotion chip kicks in: “I am a purdy good shot, pardner.” If you heard Bob Wheeler in your head when you read that line, make sure to schedule your annual physical soon if you haven’t already.4Yes, I’m yoinking Wil Wheaton’s bit here. What can I say? It’s months later and I’m still thinking about that book! Give me a break, okay? (p. 140)
• Emphasis in the following passage is my own: “Certainly, evidence clearly established that many worlds shared related life-forms [sic]. Some of this was due to the interplanetary exchange of bacteria and viruses fueled by violent meteoric impacts. In Earth’s own system, life on Earth, the underground bacteria of Mars, the oceans of Europa, and the ice viruses of Mercury all shared common origins.”
  (p. 174)
• There’s a great moment where Kirk wants to brag about his Kobayashi Maru performance to Christine MacDonald5a.k.a. the Other Woman in the story, although she’s not truly an Other Woman in a meaningful sense since Teilani is barely aware of her existence and they aren’t competing with each other except briefly in Kirk’s mind, because she reminds him of himself at that age (which is no doubt the hottest thing Shatner is capable of imagining), and she’s an okay character, but a lot of why she exists is so Kirk can stay strong and remind himself that Teilani is his true love, although because it’s Shatner at the wheel, he gets to have a little cake and eat it too by having her take the initiative on a bold smooch, though it’s nothing tawdry (and certainly infinitely less barf-worthy than the couple of times he lays down with Teilani). and gives her a huge lead-in to stroke his ego and be all like, “Oh, you mean that thing ONLY YOU beat??” But then she goes “Duh, pretty much everyone knows you’re supposed to reprogram it,” and it wilts him instantly—I mean, just rips the piss right out of him. Incredible moment, A++, would read over and over again. If Shatner didn’t write it, I’m amazed he allowed it to stay in, and if he did, I can’t believe he was able to check his ego at the door long enough to make such a blistering funny. (p. 247)

Final Assessment

Average. As usual, Shatner drags it toward bad territory, the Reeves-Stevenses pull it back from the brink with excellence in equal measure, and the whole thing ends up somewhere in the middle. So you get a book with a lot of deeply problematic elements that is honestly not very good, yet still somehow fun and compulsively readable for the majority of the duration. Pretty wild how they keep pulling that trick off. That said, this is the end of the first of three trilogies by Bill, Judy, and Gar, this one sometimes being referred to as the Odyssey Trilogy. Their next cooperative outing will kick off the “Mirror Trilogy”, which sounds like a real tonal 180. At least there’s potential for it to be something completely different. We shall see, I suppose.

NEXT TIME: Spock’s family tree has yet another branch in Mind Meld