In today’s episode, a worldwide transporter system represents a massive paradigm shift for the people of Birsiba. Unfortunately, it shifts their paradigms right over into the next universe. Now multiple Janeways must work together to stop the space vacuum conga. Why does only every other universe have a Voyager? Why are the differences between universes so trivial? And what’s the worst way to describe someone interrupting your dinner? All this and more in Echoes, the book with good B.O. genes.

Echoes
Authors: Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Pages: 278
Published: January 1998
Timeline: Not long after “Future’s End” (3×08+09)
Prerequisites: “Deadlock” (2×21) is referenced so many times I almost rewatched it, and honestly probably should have
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

Every two-and-a-half hours, the population of the planet Birsiba (roughly three billion) is shifting one universe over, due to their shiny new worldwide transporter system interacting with a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey rift-type thing they don’t know is there. Maybe a weird and sort of trivial problem on the face of it; the differences between adjacent universes are, in this book anyway, fairly minute: a matter of clothes and eyes being different colors, with the occasional mildly radical hairstyle change. Or it would be weird and sort of trivial, if some of those populations of three billion weren’t shifting over into a universe with no Birsiba. By the time Voyager happens upon it, the shift into the cold vacuum of space has happened almost ninety times. Multiply that by 3 billion people, and you’re looking at one hell of a space graveyard.

It’s a whopper of a way to open a story for sure. But although Echoes grabs you rather forcefully by the collar, it doesn’t really know what to do once it has your attention. These days, our hunger for multiverse shenanigans can barely be sated, so it’s cool to go back and examine media that tried to contend with the concept before it became so widely popularized. Echoes  certainly exercises more restraint in how it tackles the idea of other universes than we’re accustomed to seeing in 2023, so much so that it’s tempting to think one of the problems with it is that our sensibilities are so attuned to a more heightened sensory experience that a self-contained 300-page story, even one set in the kind of mainstream IP that now makes up a worrisome chunk of our media diet, can’t hope to stack up. But for one thing, that’s not really fair to it, and also, it has more than enough issues stemming from its own merits to easily discount that idea.

At first, the fact that differences between parallel universes are so small makes the book feel unambitious. As it goes on, however, it manages to make a decent argument that that’s actually more unsettling than if the differences were large and obvious. I can buy that, I guess, but that would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to create extensive notes and charts to track those differences. Even though Echoes restricts itself to bouncing between only three universes out of a possible infinity, I still found it incredibly difficult to keep the wires untangled. It would be much easier to do so in a visual medium; I have no problem imagining it as an adequate, if forgettable season-three episode. But text alone just isn’t capable of serving the concept or the reader very well.

Nor is the typically terse prose of Smith and Rusch. There is a certain lush expansiveness that to me feels endemic to the idea of multiple universes and is hard to capture in the kinds of clipped single-sentence paragraphs they favor. And again, while only jumping between three universes is probably smart and economical from a logistical and narrative standpoint, it instead has the perhaps unintended effect of making the universe feel limited and claustrophobic. They are joined by another author on this outing, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, who won the Bram Stoker Award for her debut novel The Thread That Binds the Bones, and I think I could kind of tell where her contributions were located, because those paragraphs were a little longer and more pensive, but it doesn’t have much of a positive difference, sadly.

Worst of all, there’s a whole lot of nothing happening in this book. A distressing amount of the text is devoted to some character, usually Janeway, either agonizing over the clockwork deaths of 3 billion more people or dwelling on the minuscule differences between the away team that gets shifted over and their original counterparts. It’s also really hollow how the problem is also solved without meaningfully consulting the Birsibans in any way. Granted, they don’t have the technological know-how to understand the issue even if it was spelled out for them, but the Voyager crew only ever talks to one of them: R’Lee, one of the heads of the planet’s World Council, who, although hapless, is at least polite. Not every civilization Starfleet encounters has to be a brilliantly advanced one, of course, but it would have been nice if the Birsibans had had any degree of agency in their own salvation.

After that banger of an opening, I had high hopes, but Echoes is dull and confusing, and it isn’t fun to keep up with the tangle of even those few tendrils it lets roam free. If you want to read a Star Trek novel featuring a worldwide transporter, there’s The Abode of Life, which is horribly ancient and suffers from that older Pocket Books problem of writers of hard sci-fi not being able to adjust to handling Star Trek with different gloves, but is otherwise mildly intriguing. And if you want to read a story where crews from different universes work together, I enthusiastically recommend Boldly Go, Vol. 3, a trade paperback featuring issues of the IDW Kelvinverse comic in which Enterprises from different parallel universes work together to defeat an alternate version of Khan. Anything to keep you away from this one.

MVP & LVP

• My MVP for this one is Torres. Unlike other parallel universe duplicates, there’s a bit of friction between them that helps move the excitement needle a little bit. She also seems to be the only one working to actually figure anything out while everyone else sits around either bemused or grimly depressed by the situation.
• My LVP for this one is Neelix, who is unsettled by the presence of a duplicate Kes to the point where he can’t really talk to or be around either of them. On one hand, that’s certainly one way to solve what was always a problematic relationship. Though if he had a million dollars, we definitely know what he wouldn’t do:
  

Stray Bits

• Only every other universe has a Voyager. This accurately reflects the aftermath of the season two episode “Deadlock”, in which they experience a spatial rift while hiding from the Vidiians inside a plasma cloud, eventually leading to an unstable situation where one of the two Voyagers must sacrifice itself, though not before the other one picks up a spare Harry Kim to replace its recently jettisoned original. This is brought up a lot.
• “[Janeway] liked books. A real book could be read in snatches, seconds of escape and relaxation, instead of an afternoon’s worth. Sometimes seconds were all she had.” Boy, do I feel that. One of the most naive things I thought going into my first year of teaching was that I might on rare occasions be able to use my conference period for a small amount of relaxation and mental battery recharging. Ha ha! What a foolish fool I was. (p. 8)
• I think Smith and Rusch have given a shoutout to Jerry (and Kathy) Oltion before, if memory serves, but there’s another one early in this book with the mention of “Oltion coils”. (p. 18)
• Tom Paris observes the remnants of food spilled all over the floor as a result of someone being in the middle of a meal during a universe shift. The turn of phrase the narration settles on to describe this is “eatus interruptus”, which is supposed to be a clever play on coitus interruptus in theory, but which in practice sounds less like a way to describe a meal that got cut off than simply the disruption of, uh, a somewhat different sex act. (p. 43)
• Birsibans apparently have naturally pleasant body odor. A minor W in the genetic lottery, but a W nonetheless. (p. 91)
• R’Lee shares the title of head of Birsiba’s World Council with two other leaders, Lelah Bir and Fando Jee, who, as long as we’re talking about parallel universes, have names that sound like they floated in from a Star Wars universe. (ibid.)

Final Assessment

Bad. Parallel universes are an idea of a particular scope that are not served well by either the medium of text, a random standalone novel, or the kind of severely clipped prose that Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch usually traffic in, which it seems their special guest Nina Kiriki Hoffman tried to alleviate, albeit to negligible effect. And though I’ll always go to bat for talky Trek, this book doesn’t even have a lot of that, instead opting for endless POVs of internal agonizing over the situation. Smith & Rusch have written a good Voyager novel before; go read that one instead.

NEXT TIME: Starfleet Academy only accepts The Best and the Brightest