In today’s episode, the Enterprise crew decides breaking the Prime Directive is way more fun than finding a stupid plant that will save millions of lives. But in the midst of their “benevolent” interference, they fail to notice that shepherd’s pie is on tonight’s menu. Are you obligated to keep a surprise pet you weren’t consulted about? Should the reader always know more than the characters? And what if your phone calendar could force you to do stuff? All this and more in To Storm Heaven, in which the power of Ashkaar compels you.

To Storm Heaven
Author: Esther Friesner
Pages: 276
Published: December 1997
Timeline: Near the end of season 6, between “Frame of Mind” (6×21) and “Suspicions” (6×22)
Prerequisites: None

This book was written in a lofty way that was really hard to follow sometimes, so I hope I get this plot recap at least mostly right. So: there are these people from a world called Orakisa, which is one of many far-flung colonies established by the people of Skerris IV (a.k.a. S’ka’rys), who destroyed themselves in war, though not before sending out numerous colony ships. They kept each group in the dark about all the others, believing it would help them cultivate independence and diversity, the latter of which they believed was important so that in case of some medical disaster, what took out one world wouldn’t knock the others down, and they’d have a wider spread of resources to help each other out. (Though, how could they help their sister worlds if they didn’t know they existed?)1This is pointed out by a character in the text.

Some Orakisans who remembered S’ka’rys went back there and heavily altered their genetic structure to survive the radiation and have a look around. The procedure paid off; they hit archaeological paydirt, learning of the existence of all their sister worlds. But now there’s a triple whammy: 1) they can’t leave the planet without dying, 2) they won’t survive a second round of the genetic alteration procedure, and 3) living on S’ka’rys has given them a metabolic disorder where they can’t digest the native food that survived. So now Lelys, an ambassador from Orakisa, is being escorted to each sister world by the Enterprise in search of n’vashal, the one plant that can cure the metabolic plague. Their last chance is a colony called Ashkaar, and it’s looking pretty grim, because they were one of the ones that broke off because they disagreed with how the others lived their lives.

Based on the above paragraph, you may have guessed that the remainder of the book is about searching this last world high and low for n’vashal while navigating some pretty significant cultural differences. If you thought that, guess what? You’ve got egg on your face now, because it’s about something entirely different. They get to what they think is Ashkaar, but the person who picks up the phone says, “Dave’s not here, man, this is Ne’elat, Ashkaar is dead.” There still is an Ashkaar, however, and there are people on it; the Enterprise caught the life signs on the way in. The leader, Udar Kishrit, makes up a lie about keeping their criminals and military training sites there, but in reality it’s just simple people trying to live simple lives of simple simplicity.

What they learn after Picard approves shore leave on Ne’elat for the express purpose of espionage is that the Ne’elatians are stealing budding geniuses from Ashkaar (making it look like a kind of spiriting away to paradise) and culturally appropriating their religion. Having mastered the elements of Ne’elat and surrounded themselves with creature comforts, they found their spiritual lives lacking, but were tired of doing work by that point, so they just cheated off someone else’s paper. This is incredibly offensive to Lelys, who completely forgets she’s supposed to be looking for a flower to save her people and decides the Ashkaarians need to know this is happening and need a savior to get them out from under the thumb of Ne’elat. Enlisting the Enterprise crew to help her in this crusade should be harder than it is, because one, it’s not their problem, and two, Ashkaar and Ne’elat are not Federation worlds. But they seem perfectly content to go along with it, so that becomes the main wedge for most of the rest of the book.

I remember being forewarned about this book many years in advance. I don’t like to have my perceptions colored going in, but I was unable to stop my brain from automatically putting a pin in this one when I was told about it, so I’ve just kind of been waiting for its moment and hoping it wouldn’t be as bad as reports suggested. Sadly, it turns out To Storm Heaven is in fact pretty crusty. It starts with some minor semantic yet important tells, like characters addressing each other by rank and overly stiff speech patterns from the likes of Data and Deanna. When a book takes place at the end of season six but sounds like it would fit in better in season one, you’re in for a rocky ride. But a little stilted dialogue turns out to be the very least of this book’s problems.

Let’s start with Geordi, since he’s featured on the cover. This is yet another story where he’s forced to fall head over heels in love with someone he just met, which in this case is Ma’adrys, who is introduced in a prologue where she appears to enter a portal to paradise called the Gate of Evramur and is later found by Geordi in the gardens of Ne’elat’s main palace. I cringed for Geordi, disheartened that he had to endure the humiliating hopeless goo-goo eyes for yet another one-off character. Ma’adrys is in little better position. Friesner can’t seem to decide if she’s a naive maiden or a whipsmart firebrand. She’s smart enough to know she’s not actually in whatever her people’s version of heaven is, but she also calls Geordi “starlord” like a yokel. Pick one!

Friesner also often supplies characters with information without keeping the reader in the loop. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily something an author is obligated to do, but the particular way she handles it, a character will often bring up a piece of information that makes something that was previously confusing suddenly make sense, and you’re left thinking, “Gee, it would have been nice to know that.” Or, like, things will happen really fast and some big moves will get yada-yada’d. Sometimes this happens to entire plot threads; one that unfortunately goes nearly completely uncovered is Picard and Hara’el’s journey on foot to Bovridash, a part of Ne’elat where monks still practice that old-time religion, to find n’vashal. Because of that yada-yada’ing, there were several points where I had to rescan the last few pages because things were suddenly moving along much more briskly than they had been for a while, which was especially enervating given it was already hard enough to get through pages a single time in the first place. Early on, I even felt like I had to check a few times to make sure my copy wasn’t missing pages. Not a great headspace to be in when you’re already trying to make sense of some pretty dense lore.

But worst of all is not only that this story should not have even happened, but that it itself knows it should not have happened. The extent to which the Enterprise crew gets involved in this situation ends up really doing a number on these poor folks. Spiritual and existential crises proliferate wildly. Toward the end, Bilik, an oberyin (village healer), plaintively mourns: “Our lives were simple, they had direction, we could have lived happily if only we had been left alone.” It’s hard to read this as anything other than an explicit admission that this action should never have been pursued in the first place.

The treatment of Ma’adrys by quite literally everyone in her life, and by extension by the author, is truly vile. Ma’adrys eventually becomes aware that Geordi is (I’m not going to mince words here) grooming her,2I hesitate to use that word, since it’s become a shibboleth wielded by those masters of projection known as conservatives, but as long as they’re going to deflect attention off their own acts of grooming by campaigning to rob the word of all meaning, I feel one has a duty to learn to identify and call out actual proper instances of it when they show up. and she refuses to go along with his schemes any further. Whether it’s by Geordi, who tries to mansplain what’s best for her while constantly grabbing and kissing her; Bilik, who tried to hold her back from her maximum potential before her “ascent” to “Evramur” because he wanted to be with her; or the leaders of Ne’elat, who abduct people from another world because they’re too lazy to draft their own spiritual journey (which is especially pointless when they have practitioners of the old ways already living on their own planet); everyone uses her in some way. But she can’t fight the ultimate unstoppable force: the status quo, which ultimately strong-arms her toward a pat happy ending that hinges on both a really dumb eleventh-hour revelation and one character’s thoroughly unconvincing change of heart.

It’s asking too much to expect media of this era to defy the big red reset button, but this novel is so ill-suited to cramming itself into that mold that it’s too tempting not to imagine one having the stones to follow through on the consequences of a mission gone totally sideways. After reading Picard’s report on this mission, Starfleet should be tossing out disciplinary measures like Oprah: “You get a court martial! You get a court martial! Everyone gets a court martial!” Of course, it would never make it through the editorial process. Or if you wanted it to, you would have to make it a hardcover event. But I only dream of it because it’s the only logical conclusion of this book’s events.

To Storm Heaven should have been a simple story about trying to locate a plant while perhaps contending with the obstinacy of the local bureaucracy and perhaps some unanticipated natural dangers arising from the Ne’elatians’ lack of knowledge about much of the planet. Instead, it completely forgets that the Enterprise is one small part of a much larger institution that its actions represent, and has its crew play god with people who don’t have the agency or ability to decline their ministrations. It’s painful watching characters we love behave reprehensibly, and they do so no matter the situation. Every choice a crew member makes is the worst possible choice they could possibly make. Friesner’s only other Trek novel wasn’t great either, but this one is a nuclear-grade stinker.

MVP & LVP

• There aren’t many people in this book who behave in a way that would net them anything so illustrious as one of my MVP awards, but there is at least one, and that’s Hara’el, the son of Legate Valdor, who has one of the few character arcs that you can get behind, as he strives to assert himself and not be cowed by his awful, awful dad. I only wish we’d gotten more time with him and Picard on the way to the monastery on Ne’elat, but this book was so bad at identifying its own most interesting aspects that that was never realistically going to happen, unfortunately.
• Of all the things I hated in this book, I don’t think I hated anything more than the hamster plot thread, and the main reason for that was Dr. Crusher. Worf is 100 percent in the right in demanding that she take it back; she put him in an incredibly crappy situation. He had no say whatsoever on a pet that would be living in his quarters, and yet she puts it all on him by being all “hOw ArE yOu GoNNa ExPLaIn WhAt HaPPeNeD tO iT???” He shouldn’t have to explain it! It’s made out to be like Alexander’s consent is needed when Worf never got that opportunity himself. Worf does point this out, but his main objection is of course far more facile, the usual Klingon claptrap: a hamster is not a “warrior’s pet”—not until the point where it bites his finger and won’t let go, anyway. And as my wonderful wife so astutely pointed out when I went on a tear about this: Beverly is a parent herself! There is no way she would have stood for having a hamster cage hanging around sickbay if someone else was like “Hey, I got Wesley a pet hamster! It’s your problem now byyeeeeeee!” Anyone who got my son a surprise pet, didn’t consult me about it, and then painted me as the bad guy when I said we weren’t keeping it, I would immediately cut them out of my life, no chance of parole. That is straight-up psychopath behavior.

Stray Bits

• The title of the book comes from a quotation by Horace (“Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals; we storm heaven itself in our folly”), but before I knew that, I was hoping that Storm Heaven was a place, and that the title meant they were going there. That sounds way more metal, tbh.
• Tribbles are presumed to be extinct in this book. (p. 36)
• Beverly mentions hearing a Vulcan professor present a paper about hamsters at a conference, citing them as “a prime example of how biological success often defies the rules of logic.” Though I absolutely hated the hamster thread, it is fun to picture a stern-faced Vulcan giving a dull-as-dishwater lecture about them. (p. 37)
• The Na’amOberyin (the most powerful healers on Ashkaar) have this sort of storage battery embedded in each of their heads, so that when a traditional once-in-a-lifetime can’t-be-refused no-questions-asked request gets made of them, they transfer some of their powers of compulsion to the battery, and the battery compels them to fulfill the request when the time comes, which keeps them humble and ever cognizant that they are there to serve the people. A neat idea, actually; one of this book’s very few. I would totally get my hands on one of those if I could use it to force myself to do the dishes. (p. 220)

Final Assessment

Terrible. If you think of books as objects that are to be treated with a sort of reverence, this one will sorely test that philosophy. No one upholds any ideal of personal or professional integrity; they just do what they want, endlessly patronizing the simple agrarian folk and pathetically groveling before them to see that the enlightened starlords know what’s best for them. It is almost physically painful to see beloved characters acting in a way so contrary to their normally inspiring characterizations. Stay far away from this one—it’ll spike your blood pressure when it isn’t putting you to sleep.

NEXT TIME: Zoiks! There’s a g-g-g-ghost on The Haunted Starship