In today’s episode, after tromping on Boothby’s flowers, Cadet Janeway vows to take her next mission one step at a time. But when her team catches the local crud and is subjected to enforced social distancing, the only cure is the grass that’s redder on the other side. How’s Geordi’s roadie gig going? What’s a good name for a shuttle spotlight segment? And is correcting aliens on their idioms a useful focus of one’s energy? All this and more in Quarantine, the book with two playback speeds.

Quarantine
Author: Patricia Barnes-Svarney
Pages: 114
Published: October 1997
Timeline: 18 years prior to “Caretaker”
Prerequisites: Nothing required, though references abound, mostly to Mosaic
Not to be confused with: Quarantine (TNG #54, Double Helix #4 of 6)

Another Voyager YA book means another set of friends for Cadet Janeway, and, for the first time, an actual mission with real stakes. This time, she and her pals Timothy Wang, Mari Lakoo, the reptilian Blinar, and the haltingly speaking L’as’wa Ranna get to travel with a real crew to the horrendously named Chatoob. They’re delivering medical supplies to help combat a plague on the world while the captain sees about the planet possibly joining the Federation. Kathryn is almost late to the mission launch because she runs into Boothby (literally) and accidentally tramples some of his flora, thus earning herself a lecture about taking things one step at a time, a mental reminder that occasionally recurs in the story but doesn’t have enough heft to be a major theme that can carry the whole thing.

Chatoob has domes that its people live in to prevent breathing polluted air, but when Kathryn scans it from orbit, the results show that the air outside the domes is perfectly breathable—in fact, if anything, it’s even fresher than the inside. It’s a curious discrepancy she just can’t let go of, and it finally gets her in trouble on the surface when she scampers off to get to the bottom of some more strange readings. Her fellow cadets run after her to see what she’s tracking, and they all get locked in the room together and told they’ve wandered into a contaminated area. As a result, they now all have a disease called the Cillian plague, which means they have to trade their uniforms, combadges, and other equipment for baggy robes and hang out in quarantine, presumably until they die.

While detained, the cadets learn about the finer details of Chatoob society from an old woman called the Zan1It’s unclear whether that’s a name or a title, as well as why it necessitates being preceded by a definite article. and her right-hand assistant Lane, who are both in the initial stages of Cillian plague. They learn that the people are divided into the Chats and the Obers, and that the Obers prefer a simple life, while the Chats live as fast as they talk and have undisguised contempt for the Obers. They also seem to be confused that the plague only affects Obers and not Chats, which is odd, because they know Chat chicanery well enough to be sure that the cadets were lured into the contaminated room by a Chat decoy, but no one makes the leap (until it’s explicitly revealed) that the Chats would engineer the plague on purpose. Anyway, a cure can only be created by synthesizing a red grass that grows out by the coast, the retrieval of which without getting caught by the Chats will require some ingenuity on the cadets’ part. So too will figuring out how to get in touch with the Tsiolkovsky so they can inform their superiors of their predicament.

What Quarantine made me think about most was main characters, and who gets to be one, and why. Most people don’t pick up tie-in books for their favorite franchises just to watch characters they know play second banana or get sidelined, but I would guess kids especially don’t do that. Janeway is the main character of Voyager, so it’s kind of taken for granted here that she has all the clever ideas and takes all the decisive action. But if you aren’t paying attention, you can easily forget that Janeway isn’t the leader of this mission. It’s actually Blinar. Blinar says wrongheaded things, offers easily rebutted ideas, and comes off as bossy. He mentions at one point that he’s the first of his race in Starfleet and wants to prove to his father that the Federation is all right; Janeway ruminates on it for about half a paragraph, but there are other more pressing matters, so she moves on and it’s never revisited. I know it would have been difficult to have Janeway remain in a subordinate scientist role and still keep the focus sufficiently on her, but some development for anyone who wasn’t her would have been nice.

I will say this for Quarantine: it’s a fun one to read out loud. Things are moving fast as my student teaching ends and getting a job starts to look more like an inevitability than a possibility, and as such, I find myself approaching a lot of things with “teacher brain”. I thought about expressive reading a lot while reading this, and what good practice it would give kids to try on all the different speaking styles. The Chats and the Obers talk at different speeds that are informed by their relationships with technology and nature, respectively. L’as’wa’s stilted speech patterns are fun to trace, and about half of Blinar’s S’s come with some standard but still fun reptilian hissing. So while it didn’t have the most amazing story or crackling dialogue, Barnes-Svarney did pack in at least one way to keep it engaging.

This is the last of the Voyager YA books; the entire YA enterprise2Pun not originally intended, but it is now. was put to bed shortly afterward. It’s too bad we never got to see any other Voyager characters as cadets. A fresh-faced, nervous Harry would have been relatable. I think it would have been cool to visit some of the characters that canonically dropped out of the Academy and get some lore-filling guesses at what might have led to that, but that probably would have run counter to whatever kind of aspirational example they were ostensibly trying to set. Besides, Voyager just kind of had some bad luck being the caboose on the mega-merchandising train that Trek had going in the 90s. The Playmates action figures only represent the first season or two. (Remember Seska?)3I do actually own one Voyager action figure. A coworker at the job I had before student teaching, who is as big a Star Wars fan as I am a Star Trek fan, brought it to me and said, “I don’t know who this is, but I know you like Star Trek, so you can have this.” It was Tuvok. Anyway, as far as Star Trek books go, this was definitely one of them.

MVP & LVP

• Relating to what I was talking about earlier: I don’t really want to pick Janeway for my MVP, but I feel like my hand is sort of forced? I mean, she has all the ideas, and she’s the one who gets stuff done. I would love one meaningful contribution from literally anyone else that could give me an excuse to say something nice about it, but I guess some people are just marked for destiny.
• My LVP choice is Timothy Wang. He doesn’t offer much outside of pointless, unfunny snark.

Stray Bits

• I can’t seem to come up with a clever name for a segment that highlights the person a ship or shuttlecraft in a novel was named after, but I like pointing them out regularly enough that I think it needs a name. Anyway, Kathryn and her teammates are taken to Chatoob by the Tsiolkovsky, named after Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a pretty big cheese in early rocketry who also had some mildly fascinating philosophical ideas. Also, it turns out this name has been used previously for a science ship, although it was in the TNG episode “The Naked Now”, so not only does probably no one remember that, they probably also don’t want to.
• Quarantine opens with a Geordi cameo—and not only that, it actually calls back to Crossfire, mentioning his role in the Academy band. I don’t know for sure if it tracks that Geordi and Janeway were in the Academy at the same time, but given how hard this book works on incorporating lore (mostly in the form of referencing Mosaic, but there are a few other interesting ones), I bet it does.
• Boothby tells Janeway to stay off the pachysandra, a word that will never not remind me of ActivAmerica, a short story collection by Meagan Cass. The title story is great—it’s about “[a] recently separated woman [who] must run a mile a day in order to maintain her new corporate health insurance.” But enough of the stories in it feature that word that that’s about 90 percent of what I remember about the book. (p. 8)
• Quarantine identifies Mari Lakoo as a “Yupiaq”, which is probably more accurately rendered as Yup’ik. His culture doesn’t actually inform his character much, but I’m never going to complain too much about niche representation. (p. 16)
• Timothy Wang corrects Blinar with an eye roll when the latter says “wild duck chase” instead of “wild goose chase”. What’s with the guff? Blinar is an alien! The fact that he got that close to approximating a phrase from a culture he didn’t grow up in in the first place is amazing! And like, obviously you knew what he meant, so maybe leave the red pen in English class, Tim? (p. 41)

Final Assessment

Average. This is the best of the three Voyager books for young readers, but that isn’t saying very much at all. The bar it had to clear was “don’t suck”. It isn’t actively noxious, but there isn’t a lot going for it either. The different styles and speeds of various characters’ speech make for a fun read-aloud, but otherwise, it isn’t hard to see why things started petering out on the YA front not long after this.

NEXT TIME: Set the controls for the Heart of the Sun