In today’s episode, animal husbandry looks to be Janeway’s last hope for staying enrolled in the Academy. But the toughest specimens to wrangle might well be two male pigs. What’s considered “disabled” for a Betazoid? Is getting research grants harder or easier in a moneyless society? And how subtle is this book’s aim for the female demographic? All this and more in The Chance Factor, or, Tango & Kath.

The Chance Factor
Authors: Diana G. Gallagher, Martin R. Burke
Pages: 115
Published: September 1997
Timeline: 18 years before “Caretaker” (1×01/02)
Prerequisites: None

Cadet Janeway is significantly nicer in this book than she was in her last YA outing, but nice doesn’t pull your academic standing out of the toilet, which is where hers is as this story begins. The only thing that saves her bacon is someone taking notice of her dressage skills and quick thinking when a horse freaks out around a three-headed sauropod. That someone is Captain Holbrook, who’s just been given the green light on a feasibility study to test the utility of what Starfleet calls “nontechnological resources”—read: animals. Holbrook signs off on her choice of a less panicky quarter horse named Tango, and it’s off to Diehr IV, where she and her new colleagues—animal and humanoid—will attempt to complete a simulation within a prescribed three-day time limit.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the humanoids prove more difficult to tame than the animals. Obviously that doesn’t apply to T’Lor, as calm and collected a Vulcan as any, but her male colleagues present considerably more challenges. Jon Brezi, a Betazoid, is sweet and sensitive, but also “disabled” in a way unique to what we’ve seen among the species, in that he can only telepathically communicate with animals, and has some kind of mental block preventing it from happening with humanoids. This earns him the scorn and derision of Thorn and Endar—a Klingon and a Talarian, respectively—who constantly call his manhood into question and hate taking any kind of orders whatsoever from women.

Between their adventure just being a simulation with the only real challenge being a time limit and no indigenous humanoid life interfering (they do face a wild animal or two), The Chance Factor ends up being a pretty low-stakes affair, and as such, it’s hard to maintain consistent interest. The main conflict stems from the pushback Janeway gets from Thorn and Endar, and as soon as you see how baldly sexist they are, you instantly know it’s heading toward a contrived make-nice where they learn the error of their ways and learn to work better with others, especially women. Obviously, I am not the demographic for these books, but the older I get, the less patience I have for these pat stories where people perpetuating systemic problems see the error of the ways in a mere 100 pages. It’s just not convincing on any level. Thorn coming a little farther along than Endar makes some sense given how it helps tie into Klingons learning to trust the Federation, but also it’s been 60 years since Khitomer when this book takes place, so you’d think they’d have some better headway by then. Maybe not though. Klingons are sort of ridiculous folk.

When paired with her previous YA outing, the DS9 Jake-and-Nog romp Arcade, a pattern begins to manifest. Gallagher definitely took the route of pandering openly to kids with things they’re into (video games, horses), but it also seems like somehow she would try to build on it. Like, get them in with the horses, then they’re locked in for when you start teaching them that sexism is bad. I think she did it better in Arcade, since hooking a secret test of character onto the back of “video games are pretty rad, amirite kids?” was a little more interesting than tucking an unconvincing redemption arc for two jerks into a horse adventure.

You might notice an extra name on the cover of this one: Martin Burke, Gallagher’s husband. He wanted to try his hand at writing, and they thought collaborating on a YA story might make a nice, low-pressure, entry-level way to do it. However, shortly after this one was published, Burke developed ataxia, which pretty much cut that dream off at the knees. I have to admit, that was a swerve I was not expecting the Voyages of Imagination entry for this book to take. At least he got to see it happen once, though. I don’t know much about Gallagher or Burke, but I have to imagine they loved each other very much; they died within eight months of each other—Burke in April of 2021 at 78, Gallagher in December of the same year at 75. And we’ve still got one Gallagher YA effort coming up soon—let’s hope the third time is the charm and she sticks the landing.

MVP & LVP

• After a rough first outing, Janeway finally gets to be the MVP in a book she stars in. In a leadership vacuum, she steps in and takes charge and does it very well. Not much more cut-and-dry an MVP than that.
• LVP for this one is Endar. Thorn actually had a semi-convincing change of heart, but I felt like Endar just sort of quietly grumbled and went along with it because of how outnumbered he was.

Stray Bits

• The Chance Factor is one of those ultra-generic titles that could apply to literally any Star Trek novel or episode. It comes from something one of Kathryn’s instructors tells her, about how you always have to be on the lookout for unexpected risks.
• According to Voyages, the sauropod was originally only supposed to have one head, but when the cover art came back with three, the editorial team liked it better and asked Gallagher and Burke to adjust their text to match the image. Fortunately, it didn’t take much finagling to make it work.
• This will involve spoilers, but I don’t think anybody cares about having a 25-year-old YA Voyager book ruined for them, so: I think the way they handle Jon Brezi’s mental block is a massive cop-out. There’s actually a lot of interesting material to unpack with a Betazoid who has a “disability” (at least according to Betazoid norms) that we’ve never seen before, and how he makes the best of it in spite of everything and grapples with it on a day-to-day basis. But then, during a moment of heightened intensity, I suppose the adrenaline rush uncorks the mental block or something like that, and suddenly he can hear people in his mind. So, problem fixed, he can hear people’s thoughts, he can be a good regular Betazoid now. Glad that’s over!
• This book was released just before I turned 13. I’m not saying this was the specific intent—and I’m about to get into the ugly gender categorization that characterized so much of toys and children’s entertainment in those days, so forgive me—but when I was that age, stuff with horses in it was mostly aimed at girls. The only time you were a boy and you read something with horses was if it was Hank the Cowdog. Or maybe if Gary Paulsen wrote it. So I have to wonder if including stuff about dressage and running around on quarter horses was seen as “natural” for being paired with Janeway and thought of as maybe kind of a way to draw girls in.
• Pretty snazzy MRE tech they’ve got in Starfleet: “Starfleet’s flash-pack field rations heated automatically when opened and the containers completely biodegraded two hours after being activated.” (p. 71)
• Wanna hear the funniest thing ever written in a Star Trek book? Here it is: “And [Janeway] would never again make the mistake of judging people based on cultural or political misconceptions, either.” (p. 101)
  

Final Assessment

Bad. I was going to say it was about as average as a Star Trek book gets, but the poor handling of Jon Brezi’s disability kind of nudged it one over for me. I also have a hard time believing you could make the scales fall from the eyes of two guys who have spent their entire lives to this point believing awful retrograde things about women (and men who don’t fit an extremely rigid definition of toxic masculinity), but maybe that’s me being a little too cynical. Oh well, at least Janeway isn’t human garbage in this one.

NEXT TIME: Scrambled eggs all over Morgan Bateson’s face in Ship of the Line