In today’s episode, the Mall of the Delta Quadrant turns out to be a not-so-elaborate front to catch a Kes. But when the 4000-year-old head honcho strands his dinner guests on his planet, their ingeunity and networking skills may prove too much for him to bear. Is true love in the cards? Are Bolians secretly Reapers? And which Star Trek character would win the misery porn Olympics? All this and more in Marooned, the book that doesn’t take off until it crashes.

Marooned
Author: Christie Golden
Pages: 276
Published: December 1997
Timeline: Season 3, after “Future’s End” (3×08/09) at least, because the Doctor has the mobile emitter
Prerequisites: Characters from “Learning Curve” (1×16) recur. There are also lots of neat callbacks, but they just add flavor.
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes1

What is it with dudes and Kes? Aren Yashar, the leader of a band of space pirates, is the latest villain to have designs on the demure Ocampan—and if you think Neelix was robbing the cradle, wait till you get a load of Aren, who’s over 4200 years old. Equipped with intel from his right-hand man Kula Dhad, he lures Voyager to an alleged spaceport called Oasis, but there’s very little morning glory to be found within these wonderwalls; it’s kind of run-down, and a lot of the storefronts are closed. Aren Yashar pretends to be the benevolent station manager, but that ruse gets dropped pretty fast, as it takes all of one chapter for him to abduct Kes. They’re tough to track once they leave, but Voyager keeps the scent and follows them to their base of operations, a planet called Mishkara.

Janeway thinks Kes is only the beginning of Aren’s demands, but he insists he’s only interested in her, and seems to genuinely believe the star charts he gave her makes it an even trade. He invites a list of crew members he’s become fascinated by in his research on Voyager—Tuvok, B’Elanna, Neelix, Bolians in general, and a wild card of Janeway’s choosing—to check out his digs. Janeway shows her thorough lack of interest in Aren’s pleasantries by bringing Tom Paris as her fielder’s choice, then remains closed off during dinner, so Aren sends them back to Voyager, but no one actually thinks he’s going to let them go that easily—and they’re right. During their return to the ship, he turns on his Acme Brand Targeted Ion Storm and crashes their shuttle, marooning them on the planet.

It’s not long before their crash site is raided by bears—but thankfully, they’re friendly, intelligent bears, known as the Sshoush-Shin. Janeway impresses the leader, Hrrrl,2 by making combadge repair top priority, thus demonstrating to him that she values the establishment of peaceful relations, and as they prepare for the journey to Aren Yashar’s base to attempt to rescue Kes, he tells them about Mishkara’s history as a prison planet where the guards and convicts initially enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship after the convicts carved out a livable existence on the inhospitable world, along with how that went sideways after they started bringing in other species. He also warns of the many dangers they’ll face along the way, like bats that can influence people telepathically, sand that eats people, and some less savory folks called the Xians. Meanwhile, up in orbit, Chakotay wants to mount a rescue, but every time he gets too close, some sentinel ships that are very good at playing possum spring to life and bombard them with blasts, so he and Harry work to figure out how to turn them to their advantage.

Aren Yashar is a fun villain. He’s soft-spoken, yet ruthless. (I imagined him with James Spader’s voice.) He seems to honestly dislike resorting to violence, but also has zero issues doing so. He really does want nothing more than to enjoy things he finds amazing with people he finds amazing—with Kes on a more permanent basis, of course, but also the crew of Voyager. Part of why he’s so intrigued by Kes is her extremely limited lifespan; he’s only got a few years at most to show her things he’s experienced in a lifetime spanning several millennia. His mercurial personality kept me going in the early parts of Marooned, when I found it quite difficult to want to pick up.

It’s pleasantly ironic that the book doesn’t really take off until the shuttlecraft crashes. I got a lot more invested once we met the Sshoush-Shin and started getting a better idea of what a guy like Aren Yashar sees in someone like Kes. The Sshoush-Shin’s origins were pretty detailed for a one-off race, and I appreciate that Golden didn’t pull punches on the complexity of their relationship with Mishkara. I also liked how she incorporated the Learning Curve squad into the orbitside part of the story; it was always a bit of a bummer to me that they mostly disappeared after their initial appearance, outside a handful of one-off appearances. It’s nice to watch them get to make good on some of the drive Tuvok helped them cultivate and to see them work with Chakotay as more cohesive cogs in the machine.

As I noted, Marooned was a hard book to want to pick up for a while, but once I got into it, the premise paid off acceptably. Some interesting original side characters and confidence in hitting character beats just barely save this one from the lesser echelons of memorableness. I don’t think this one’s quite as much of a banger as Golden’s debut, The Murdered Sun, but you can hardly call it a sophomore slump. She’s trucking along just fine, making herself a name to look forward to with a quiet, un-ostentatious assurance.

Ten Forward Toast

Sadly, Bokk, the crew member Janeway brings down to satisfy Aren Yashar’s desire to meet a Bolian, doesn’t live to see the end of the marooning. Turns out “the sand that eats” isn’t just a poetic name for quicksand. It does exactly that, and quite graphically to boot. I’ve gone on record many times as having a somewhat inexplicable soft spot for Bolians, and I didn’t have much faith that he’d make it to the end, but it’s still a little extra-sad for me that he didn’t.

MVP & LVP

  • I’m giving MVP in this one to Chakotay for exactly one (1) moment, when he’s trying to play up how much damage Yashar’s fleet has done. He orders Chell to punch him in the jaw, and Chell hits like an absolute truck, drawing quite a bit of blood and knocking out a tooth. Now that’s committing to a bit.
  • The LVP of this one is easily Neelix. The Kes-pining falls on the wrong side of annoying, especially given this is right around the point where Kes has made it clear they’re just friends, and going rogue in the middle of the night to mount a lone-wolf operation to rescue her is the kind of thing you would think would incur some kind of slap on the wrist. Frankly, he’s incredibly lucky that the Sshoush-Shin misjudged the telepathic bats that are indigenous to the planet and didn’t end up getting brainwashed into walking straight off a cliff. If you’re a Neelix hater, this book will give you plenty of ammunition.

Stray Bits

  • Cover Art Corner: This book is way less about Tom and B’Elanna than this cover led me to believe it would be.
  • Since this is season-three Kes we’re talking about, I really didn’t think she was going to sit around and wait to be rescued. I thought the way things would go was that she’d eventually be forced to take matters into her own hands and tell Aren “no means no” via psychic assault. But it never came to that—whether for better or worse, hard to say.
  • The Doctor’s concerns about Kes succumbing to Stockholm syndrome amount to so little that he might as well have sat this out entirely.
  • Genuine LMAO at the captain’s log where Janeway is confused as to why the space pirates would take Kes because she has nothing to offer: “Much as we aboard Voyager have learned to value Kes’s contributions, we remain utterly at a loss as to why someone would set up so complex a trap for one member of the crew, and indeed, a member with the least amount of useful knowledge of our technology.” Ouch, Kathryn! You’d better hope you don’t have any shoulder surfers on your ship! (pp. 35–36)
  • Janeway, consoling Neelix, pp. 54–55: “Of any ship in the galaxy … the crew of this one most understands what it’s like to lose a loved one.” First of all, it’s not a contest, and even if it was, Voyager probably immediately loses on account of the fact that those they’ve left behind are still alive. The first people to jump to mind for me are Ben and Jake Sisko, losing a wife and mother, respectively. Kirk was never really in David Marcus’s life until the end, but he felt the loss acutely. Those are just a couple of examples off the top of my head. I’m sure industrious fans can come up with many more.
  • Aren Yashar gives voice to a thought we’ve all had about Bolians in our darkest hour: “And the ridge. Is it solid or pliable?” (p. 78)
  • Henley (the lone woman of the Learning Curve squad) mentions she was raised Catholic. You’re definitely not still practicing if you were in the Maquis, right? (p. 147)

Final Assessment

Good. For a while in the beginning, this is one you’ve really got to force yourself to pick up, but an antagonist with some unique personality dimensions, a fun ally species, and Golden’s mastery of character beats eventually see this one to an agreeable conclusion. Not much more to say about it than that. With this and The Murdered Sun under her belt, Christie Golden officially becomes a name to look forward to seeing on future Trek covers (especially Voyager ones).

If my count is correct, no year had more Star Trek novels published than 1997, with 34. Some come very close, but I think 1997 holds the #1 spot uncontested. And that busy, busy year is now under our belts—meaning next time, we move on to 1998, a year with some pretty exciting multi-part series, TV and movie novelizations, crossover events, and of course, strange new worlds to look forward to…

NEXT TIME: Gary Seven returns in Assignment: Eternity