In today’s episode, a starship trying to head off a Klingon invasion suddenly finds its salad tossed and its eggs scrambled. But when its time-displaced captain plays the sympathy card to get the new Enterprise gig, the crew isn’t confident in his old-school thinking. Would the TOS era have had ship’s counselors? Does anyone in Starfleet understand how seniority works? And what’s up with the octo decapus? All this and more in Ship of the Line, the book with the most tempting mail-in offer yet!

Ship of the Line
Author: Diane Carey
Pages: 320 (PB)
Published: October 1997 (HC)
Timeline: 2278, about five years after The Motion Picture (past); 90 years later, during roughly season 4 of Deep Space Nine (present), which causes some continuity issues, but honestly, those are the least of this book’s problems
Prerequisites: “Cause and Effect” (5×18); “Chain of Command” (6×10+11); ends with a mostly verbatim retelling of an early scene in Star Trek: First Contact

I don’t say this lightly: in many ways, I would consider Ship of the Line the worst Star Trek novel I’ve read to date. It is truly dire. It is bad in ways that a writer just doing it for a paycheck or not quite grokking the nuances of the property they’ve been assigned to could never intentionally manage. Any one of its myriad offenses would be enough on its own to land a story firmly in the lower echelons of any reasonable ranking spectrum, but to have them all at arm’s reach in one convenient one-stop shop is quite the sensation. Something like this could only be the product of all a person’s worst excesses swirling together in a perfect storm of misinterpretation, self-indulgence, and delusions of grandeur. Diane Carey is the only person who could have written this book—which, that being the case, means it probably should never have been written at all.

The bitch of it is, it starts out really fun. For about 70-some-odd pages, we follow Captain Morgan Bateson and his crew aboard the Soyuz-class cruiser Bozeman, in this particular moment representing the last line of defense between the Klingons and Starbase 12. While a big noisy ruse put on by the rest of the Klingon armada keeps the big guns in Starfleet tied up at the Neutral Zone border, Bateson takes on his old rival Kozara in an attempt to keep him from conquering and destroying the starbase. The Bozeman takes a few good salvos, and in the course of trying to find a place to hide while they plan their next move, they accidentally enter the temporal causality anomaly in which the Enterprise-D also became ensnared in the classic season 5 episode “Cause and Effect”, emerging 90 years later in an unfamiliar century. Quite a shock to the system, to be sure—but not to worry, Picard tells him: now that he’s suddenly alive again, that means he’s instantly become the longest-serving captain in Starfleet and thus should be able to enjoy all the privileges of said lengthy service and backdated seniority appertaining thereto!

I want so very badly to drop everything and talk about this right now. But we need to get through this plot recap first.

So ANYWAY, three years pass, and Bateson and his men have found work overseeing construction of the brand-new Enterprise-E at the very starbase his actions nearly a century ago saved, thus averting all-out war. Bateson racked up enough goodwill in that time to punch all the holes on about ten sympathy cards, and now he’s cashing them all in for the ultimate reward: the captaincy of the Enterprise-E.

Naturally, this raises some very salient questions, such as: Is this symbol of a bygone era really fit to captain a modern starship? Is he aware of how times and political dynamics have changed? Is three years really enough time to have properly processed the trauma of being temporally catapulted forward nearly a hundred years? Some of these can be debated to varying extents, but Bateson draws a hard line on the last one: counseling is for weaklings, and all a man needs to forget his problems is to put his nose to the grindstone and work them away. That’s worked out all well and fine for some of Bateson’s men, but others, like his XO Gabriel Bush, are still an absolute wreck; he was on track to get married before he went through the time hole, and now, having learned that she went on a search for him that ended with her getting captured as a political prisoner and brutally dismembered, he keeps returning to the bottle no matter how many times Federation science cures him of alcoholism. (It’s somewhat difficult to drown your woes in synthehol.) Despite these glaring issues, Bateson takes the captain’s seat above Riker’s many well-considered and vehement protests, and Picard gets a mission to Cardassia Prime to negotiate for the release of some prisoners of war Starfleet suspects are being held hostage there.

Kozara, meanwhile, has been toiling in disgrace ever since bungling the assault on Starbase 12. The only shred of honor he had left was being able to count the disappearance of the Bozeman as a win. And now that Bateson is in fact still alive, he doesn’t even have that to hang his bat’leth on. His son comes aboard his ship to reveal his father’s final failure to him and tear him a new one, and he does a pretty thorough job of it. But Kozara’s not down for the count yet. With his intimate knowledge of Bateson and some surprisingly solid intel on the Enterprise-E, he charges ahead with one last grand plan: to overtake the E, fly it into Cardassian space phasers a-blazin’, embarrass both the Cardassians and the Federation, and show everybody just what a disgraced old fool is capable of.

So let’s start with this book’s understandings of time, age, and seniority, because the entire premise is built atop these, and yet it would be incredibly charitable to call them deeply flawed. When he emerges from the anomaly, Bateson immediately jumps to the head of the pack in those areas—but no rational person would say he suddenly has 90 extra years of service on his record. If I’ve been serving in Starfleet for 12 years, but I enter a time hole and I’m suddenly pulled forward 150 years in the blink of an eye, there’s no way I would be allowed to claim 162 years of service on my record. Less apropos but still semi-related: if I’m 30 years old, and I enter a time hole and instantly move forward 200 years, I’m not 230 years old; I’m still 30. Mentally and physically I’m 30, but while there would be a gap of 230 literal years between my date of birth and the present, I could not say with a straight face that I am 230.1I ran these assertions by my wife to make sure I wasn’t taking crazy pills. She agreed with the first one, but disagreed with the second. Unfortunately, this book posits that it is fair and correct to do exactly that, when the reality is that even three years of re-acclimatization would barely be enough for any but the fastest learners to be allowed near anything more important than a garbage scow.

Now, in some fairness, there is a pertinent debate to be had around this that the book does bring up. Responding to his staff’s complaints about Bateson’s lack of qualifications, Picard raises a point about talent transcending its era:

“If we brought Benjamin Franklin forward in time, I guarantee he would be a formidable presence in government. Innate talents are worth something. Men of the past are not necessarily simple men. Galileo would flourish in these times. He would rise above the crowd even now.” (p. 119)

An interesting point, if not an especially strong one. It’s worth noting (I think) that Galileo at least would probably have been doing something with slightly lower stakes than taking the helm of a major exploration vessel. Given the major qualms Picard has about relinquishing his position, too, it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself more than his crew, which weakens his standing a little bit. Also, a previous book I was reminded of that handled this argument much more elegantly and intelligently was Debtor’s Planet. Ralph Offenhouse was similarly temporally displaced after being revived from cryostasis, but it turned out his talents as a go-go 80s Reaganaut made him an excellent ambassador to the Ferengi. I wish we lived in the opposite timeline where W.R. Thompson wrote 30 Star Trek novels and Diane Carey wrote two.

The book’s other issues are not as irreversibly woven into the fabric of the premise. They’re just common Diane Carey shibboleths, like her nasty attitude about therapy, her view of the holodeck as only useful for didactic history lectures, and her pathological overall hatred of TNG. I’m not sure why she continued writing novels for this series, because she’s utterly incapable of appreciating any of these characters on their own merits. Troi reports to Bateson for ship’s counselor duty, and he gruffly tells her that no one on his ship will be needing a counselor and to report to sickbay, where neither she nor Dr. Crusher perform even one single medically related action. Even beginning-of-season-2 Pulaski would find Carey’s outlook on Data retrograde; for her, any humanity he’s acquired over the course of seven seasons and two films is completely overshadowed by the liability of being able to be stopped by a trip to Lowe’s. And she doesn’t respect Picard’s captaining style, so she literally has to turn him into Kirk to be able to write for him, in this case by having him spend over 10 percent of the entire book watching old holodeck logs of TOS episodes where he can interact with Kirk (but no one else) on the way to his Cardassia Prime negotiations, which ultimately leads him to decide that the diplomacy isn’t the answer this time.

But Riker takes it in the shorts worse than anyone. For the unforgivable crime of doing exactly what a first officer is supposed to do (i.e., recommend against courses of action that would be reckless or inadvisable and offer alternatives), he gets relentlessly humiliated, railroaded, made to feel small, and cucked in front of his crewmates by Bateson, who bombards him with sub–Ben Shapiro debate tactics until he wilts under pressure and weakly admits Bateson has a point. It’s some of the cringiest cringe I’ve ever read, and it does less than nothing to ingratiate the reader to Bateson, who desperately needs it, because he is very much the one with no leg to stand on in this situation. I don’t think higher-ups show enough respect throughout the series in general for Riker’s conscious decision to remain in the first officer position; it takes a lot of confidence in and knowledge of one’s self to be so sure you’re better suited to a second-banana role, but it seems like he’s made to feel especially small for it here.

Of course, Riker and Bateson eventually arrive at the obvious conclusion that their styles work best together, but the damage has been so thoroughly done by that point that it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s actually legitimately shocking that Kozara stands down as peacefully as he does, because the entire middle of the book feels geared toward proving the axiomatic superiority of Bateson and Kirk and their old-school cowboy maverick ways. Yet in a way, she even wins there, because it allows her to advance another insufferable generational argument, which is that the only thing worse for Klingons than lifelong dishonor is having to listen to their damn kids whine about how said dishonor has impacted their lives. Kozara spends the whole book an old, incoherent fool, but the second he owns that foolishness, he suddenly beomes wise and admirable. Sure.

The bullying and hectoring is a massive shame, because Morgan Bateson turns out to be a great fit for Carey’s bombastic nautical stylings. Her dialogue flows well from his mouth, and I like the love of etymology she gave him paired with the astute observation that it’s a fun way to learn history. But with his arrogance and his shabby treatment of characters over their perfectly reasonable suggestions, the character is all but skunked. In Carey’s artless hands, he’s a mouthpiece and a blunt instrument. It would have been great to see a character that takes a lot of his personality cues from Kelsey Grammer’s distinctive cadence and carriage operating in a milieu more appropriate to his skills. It’s painful to see him used in this fashion instead.

There are yet other things, smaller still, yet no less irksome. She quotes herself in multiple epigraphs between chapters—some eulogy for (what else?) a boat. Little discardings of fact in favor of license abound, like the mention of a second five-year mission for the original Enterprise, which at this point in Star Trek Pocket Books publishing history has been debunked as not viable to the timeline for nearly a decade. Descriptions of TNG characters betray a stunning lack of knowledge of the show, like when Picard is shocked by Spock’s subtle emotionality: “Spock seemed deeply affected—and Picard had been long ago conditioned not to expect that from a Vulcan” (p. 169). What? No, he hasn’t! He mind-melded with his dad! He went on a whole undercover thing with him! It was a two-parter! He’s had plenty of opportunities to have his expectations of Vulcans upended! But it’s all part of Diane Carey’s quest to make the TNG cast look like coddled, easily befuddled amateurs.

In some ways, the saddest part of it all might be the Voyages of Imagination entry on the book, which casts the complete incoherence of her ideas into sharp relief, takes up two entire pages (no small feat if you know how large that book is), and makes it clear she believes her nautical hobbies somehow put her on equal footing with actual pioneers. At this point, I am wondering how I ever enjoyed any of her books. All of these idiosyncrasies and writing weaknesses just didn’t seem as glaring then, or as much of a deal-breaker. Did the novelty of Dreadnought!‘s first-person perspective really help obscure some of its more pressing issues for that long? Even though it can’t have been, the snowballing of these issues seems so abrupt. Alas, we’re still stuck with her for a while, but from where I’m standing right now, 2001 (i.e., the year she last published a Trek novel) can’t get here fast enough.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP pick for this book is George Hill, the decapus who serves as sort of an unofficial mascot for the Bozeman. George Hill is a fun reminder of the more anarchic spirit of the TOS days, one that evokes the feeling of a certain other Diane with its acknowledgment and inclusion of non-humanoid life. He doesn’t get in the way, he’s not any kind of threat to day-to-day operations. He’s just … there. And that’s good enough. Good flavor. The only part of this book that gave me a genuine smile.
• LVP here is Gabriel Bush, Morgan Bateson’s first officer who spirals into alcoholism and depression after learning what happened to the woman to whom he was betrothed during the time skip. Bush stands as a symbol of some of Bateson’s worst qualities. No one could use actual professional counseling more than this sadsack who can barely stand up straight at the best of times, and yet his captain and crewmates find it more appropriate to hide him from the critical eye of inspectors, make countless excuses for him, and insist that the best treatment for him is to be in uniform and working, despite the fact that he’s disgracing that uniform by serving in it in his current state. This guy is not fit for duty aboard a starship and probably never will be again, and yet you know that when the cheese hits the chili, Bateson’s taking him over a guy like Riker. Only in Careyland.

Stray Bits

• Despite the fact that two female officers are visible on the Bozeman’s bridge in “Cause and Effect”, Carey’s Bozeman crew is all male. Of course, nothing gets more in the way of a trademark Diane Carey high-space-seas adventure than women, so what chance could canon possibly stand?
• It’s fun to say “ship of the line” in the same rhythm as Beavis saying “Breakin’ the law!” (CW: animated blood and dismemberment)
• Data, with his emotion chip active and clearly having been hanging around Scotty too much, refers to the Enterprise-E as a “bonny lass”, which Riker silently mouths to Picard in a way that reminded me of one of the secretly biggest laughs in BASEketball, when Ernest Borgnine is ranting about short attention spans and mentions Dan Fogelberg. The way Trey Parker silently repeats “Dan Fogelberg” sends me every time. Man, I’ve really got lowbrow 90s entertainment on the brain today. (p. 108)
• Kirk refers to his navigator as Mr. Stiles. I thought he might be related to a certain someone, but alas, no dice. (p. 179)
• The back of the paperback edition contains a mail-in offer I’d have jumped all over if I had been as much into the books then as I am now: a Captain Calhoun action figure. It’s really amazing, the lengths to which they’ve gone to make the fans of the novels feel included and catered to over the years. I’ve heard anecdotally that something like 2 percent of the fan base reads the novels. It might have been a little more back when they were cranking out 30+ books a year, but I bet it’s still close. So to create a Playmates action figure based on a character who only appears in the literary segment of the franchise is pretty rad. It looks like if I want one, they’re all over eBay.

Final Assessment

Terrible. All of the questionable tendencies we’ve seen from Diane Carey’s interpretations of TOS and TNG that make reading her novels a frustrating experience have been leading up to this one perfect storm. This amounts to little more than seizing the opportunity afforded by an elevated pedestal to take a steaming dump on a series she feels represents everything that’s wrong with the coddled baby generation these days. Who needs to face their problems and put words to them? Just rub a little dirt on it and put your back into it, junior! What she ends up taking a dump on instead, however, is a character who had a lot of potential for interesting expansion in the literary arm of the franchise, turned instead into little more than a blunt instrument for beating the superiority of the old ways into hard-headed young people. An interesting front and back end don’t come anywhere close to pulling this one out of the muck. We still have, by my count, 14 novels to read by her, but at this point, the only ones I can imagine looking forward to reading are the ones set firmly prior to TNG, where her beliefs are stuck.

NEXT TIME: B’Elanna Torres examines Her Klingon Soul