In today’s episode, we’ll have a double order of Starfleet Academy, hold the artwork. Six cadets start out hyperventilating over a broken group project, but they soon go on to bigger, better, and much more dangerous things. How high is the bar for a Trill’s first host? How many swirlies did Harry Kim get as a cadet? And how many progressive points do Star Trek‘s first openly gay characters earn it? All this and more in The Best and the Brightest, the book that plays fast and loose with the Vulcan names.

The Best and the Brightest
Author: Susan Wright
Pages: 277
Published: February 1998
Timeline: The events cover a span from roughly the middle of season 5 to immediately after Generations
Prerequisites: A general awareness of the aforementioned span of TNG, plus anything happening concurrently in Deep Space Nine and/or Voyager
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

In August of 1993, Pocket Books released Worf’s First Adventure, the first of twenty novellas for young readers published between then and April 1998, which told stories of Star Trek legends (mostly from The Next Generation) in their Academy days, thus giving kids adolescent analogues of their favorite characters who had problems they could relate to. Like any Star Trek (literary, televised, or otherwise), the quality of these YA offerings vacillates wildly between outstanding and abysmal from one to the next, although with a few major exceptions, none of them offer much good meat for grups to chew on.

So if you want to read something set at Starfleet Academy without feeling like you’re punching way below your literary weight, the curiously unnumbered The Best and the Brightest should fit the bill. It follows six cadets through their four years on Starfleet’s venerable training grounds, initially putting them all together for their freshman term, then separating into various combinations and configurations in subsequent years. Let’s meet ’em:

• Jayme Miranda, a spunky, if somewhat average human;
• Moll Enor, a first-time Trill host experiencing anxiety about the memories she’s making and the bar she’s setting for future hosts;
• Bobbie Ray Jefferson, a member of a large, furry species known as the Rex, but born and raised in Texas;
• Starsa Taran, a short cadet with a childlike appearance who needs a lot of specialized equipment to acclimate to Earth;
• Nev Reoh, a former Bajoran vedek;
• and Hammon Titus, who has enough chips on his shoulder to fill a bag of Doritos (and not leave any air).

For those who remember the Richard Arnold crackdown years, this roster may well come as a balm to the soul. After authors’ thinly veiled self-insert protagonists and steamy situations got too out of hand for Roddenberry’s taste in the mid-80s, the TNG research consultant took on some extra volunteer duty vetting novels, comic books, and other secondary media for the increasingly busy Roddenberry. He took that duty very seriously—often too seriously, in the minds of many. Under the Arnold regime, overt sexuality was strictly forbidden, and writers couldn’t give meaty roles to previously unheard-of Starfleet officers, especially ones that could just traipse onto the bridge fresh out of the Academy and outperform everyone in the main cast at all of their jobs without breaking a sweat. Coupled with good intentions, there’s nothing wrong with some standards to keep the brand on the rails, but as practiced, they stifled creativity and held the novels in nearly every series back for years.

The smash success of New Frontier almost certainly made the decision to greenlight a book like this one much easier, but setting one at the Academy is another clever way for an author to smuggle in talented original characters without worrying about them running circles around veterans, and Susan Wright surrounds them with enough familiar characters and callbacks to keep casual fans from drowning. These may seem like baby steps in the bigger picture, but they’re important ones. There was a bracing feeling to those 80s books that I now realize I didn’t appreciate until I was well past them. There was a thrill in watching authors come up with clever ways to expand the Star Trek universe as it existed at the time, and in knowing we weren’t necessarily beholden to following the same popular mainstays around all the time. The Best and the Brightest brings back a small jolt of that electricity. Sure, it’s fun to see Jadzia Dax or Captain Picard make a cameo, and I can see why the editorial folks would have wanted them there as a safety net, but I would have been perfectly comfortable hanging exclusively with the new cadets.

If the Starfleet Academy mini-adventures for kids have a decidedly high school feel to them, then The Best and the Brightest can be fairly said to lean more collegiate. The cadets get up to the kinds of shenanigans cadets get up to. They get in trouble, get chewed out by Admiral Brand, get permanent reprimands on their records. They struggle to manage the staggering amount of responsibility the Academy dumps on them. Some of them fall in love with each other. One of them changes their major late in their schooling. They also meet the most important criterion for any Starfleet officer with a grand destiny ahead of them, which is that they seem to be magnets for once-in-a-lifetime occurrences.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call The Best and the Brightest a novel, however. It’s more like a series of loosely connected episodes that just so happens to clock in at a typical Star Trek novel’s length. The story is bookended by scenes set just after Generations; the cadets know one of their own has died in the Veridian III crash, but then you have to go back through the beginning and follow them all the way through their matriculation to finally find out who it is. Otherwise, while you do follow the same cadets from chapter to chapter, things you initially suspect might matter later, like Jayme’s friend Elma resigning her commission in the first chapter or Bobbie Ray encountering some much wilder and more dangerous members of his own race during a field survival test in his second year, amount to nothing in the long run.

The cadets learn hard-won lessons from their experiences, of course, but it can be tough to trace how that growth manifests across long stretches of time when you’re bopping along briskly through vignettes that are each completely different from the one prior. Eventually you realize you won’t get one cohesive story, but are rather just kind of casually peeking in on a turbulent few years of a handful of cadets’ lives, and I think a significant factor in how well The Best and the Brightest will work for a given reader will depend largely on how much they can get on board with that. Once you get to used to this, you can appreciate them a lot more. My tentative favorite as of this writing is the one where Titus signs up for a communications study that ends up being totally nonverbal, but I could see it changing on a reread.

Personally, I’m here for it. It’s a refreshing change of pace, and it’s a lot meatier than what we’ve come to expect from books that have “Starfleet Academy” on the cover. Some of the stories, especially toward the end, are quite lean and/or rushed, but even those have enough logic inserted in just the right spots to hang together. Between B&B and New Frontier, I think the OC water is finally safe to swim in again, which makes me think a lot of the best in Star Trek novels is yet to come.

MVP & LVP

• MVP has a kind of rubbery definition depending on what purpose I want it to serve at a given moment. Most of the time, I give it to the character whose contributions to saving the day were the most indispensable. This time, it’s for the character who ended up becoming my favorite through their journey of personal growth, which in this case is Nev Reoh, the former vedek. He’s got such a sweet soul, which pairs well with the good head on his shoulders. It’s unfortunate that he ends up romantically paired with Starsa, not to mention problematic; it happens almost immediately after she gets through her tumultuous transition to puberty, though in some fairness, he gets kind of railroaded into it by her and her family and never seems totally comfortable in it.
• My LVP is Keethzarn, a half-human, half-Vulcan commander trying to become known as “the happiest Vulcan in the galaxy.” What he is, on a subatomic character level, is a hot mess express: terrible name for a Vulcan, extremely discomfiting vocal tics (he calls Nev Reoh “kid”, which is too bizarre to hear from a Vulcan), He’s got a long way to go to hold a candle to Stephen.

Stray Bits

• The Best and the Brightest is the first Star Trek work in any arm of the franchise to feature an openly gay character in Cadet Jayme Miranda. Alas, although the mainstream understanding of Star Trek is that it is the first piece of media one thinks of when one considers media that is “progressive” or “forward-thinking”, the fact is that those more intimately familiar with it know it is not quite as ahead of the curve on progressive causes as many fancy it; Ellen DeGeneres had already publicly come out on her eponymous sitcom ten months prior, and they had any number of chances to incorporate queer characters into TNG, DS9, and Voyager and instead made a bunch of excuses for why they didn’t. The franchise might have had a respectable claim to some LGBTQ cred had they not hedged their bets on episodes like “The Outcast” and “Rejoined” and bunged them up so badly, but sadly, such was not the case. Anyway, Jayme Miranda is nevertheless a major milestone, and good for Susan Wright for getting such a character approved and writing her orientation in such a way where other characters treat it perfectly naturally and don’t conspicuously comment on it, but still, it seems somewhat cowardly on Paramount’s part to hide such an important first in books read by a single-digit percentage of the fanbase. The suspicion of gutlessness is corroborated by the fact that Paramount “insisted that the word ‘gay’ should not be included” in the book (indeed, it doesn’t appear once). According to Wright in Voyages of Imagination: “They said that in the Trek universe sexual orientation was not even noticed”—which reads to a modern eye as a gay riff on “I don’t see race,” a sentiment now widely understood to be problematic for several reasons. Even more distressingly, the books beat the shows to the punch by almost two entire decades; the latter didn’t get their first gay characters until 2017, with Stamets and Culber in Discovery—way past the point where anyone behind the scenes could conceivably have deserved a cookie for doing the bare minimum.
• Serendipity sometimes smiles on my reviews, and as it happens, this one is going up between Paramount’s announcement of a forthcoming Starfleet Academy TV series and the beginning of production in 2024. Reading The Best and the Brightest at this specific moment in time, it’s not hard to imagine it making a great template for a season of television, particularly the more shortened style that the streaming model necessitates. Ten chapters, ten episodes. You could practically lift it straight off the page. There’s a little more acknowledgment of book lore in canon these days, so who knows? Maybe we’ll see Jayme Miranda or Moll Enor make the jump to the screen. Certainly the social climate is now far better equipped to support their relationship. It’s very unlikely we’d see characters translated totally intact, of course. But a boy can dream.
• One of the cadets’ quadmates is a Vulcan named T’Rees, who is male. We’ve seen many female Vulcans take an S-name that is traditionally reserved for men (most notably Dr. Selar), but unless I missed it somewhere, this is the first time we’ve ever seen a male Vulcan with a female naming convention. I wondered if there would ever be any significance ascribed to this within the book, but no dice.
• As far as I can tell, Susan Wright handles the swirl of concurrent events and chronologies absolutely perfectly. One of my favorite manifestations of this is the occasional mention of Voyager characters who are attending the Academy at the time. Some members of the quad suggest taking their busted semester project to B’Elanna Torres for help, and at one point Titus grouses about Harry Kim, evidently something of a professors’ pet in his final year.
• Titus and Bobbie Ray play a violent hologame at one point. It’s fun to see an author of the era embrace that kind of culture rather than look down on it. (p. 36)
• Dax brings Moll Enor to a holodeck simulation of the baths of Cydonia to help her relax. I wonder if that’s where the knights bathe? (p. 135)
• One chapter finds Nev Reoh posted on a less-than-scrupulous station and developing a bleeding heart for an Orion girl named Meesa, a name that will have aged like milk within 15 months of this book’s publication. Though it certainly isn’t the book’s fault, I nearly spit out my drink when Nev fervidly pleads with his commanding officer that “Meesa doesn’t have time.” (pp. 186, 194)
• Pedantry is never the move, but one thing it’s surprising to see let slide is rendering her name as “Ro Laran”. It happens more than once, and Ro deserves to have a little more respect put on her name than that, I think. (p. 191)
• “Moll had found that the Izad had a common, subtle tick [sic] of allowing their voices to go up at the end of a sentence, making everything they said sound like a question. Moll attributed it to their socially subservient position.” — Or maybe they originally migrated to their planet from Canada? (p. 216)
• Not only is there an openly gay character, there’s also a nonbinary one! Lieutenant B’ll is identified using “their”. Now that’s probably actually worth something. (p. 233)

Final Assessment

Good. The first novel about Starfleet Academy to clear 120 pages and not contain any pictures is solid, though it’s not quite what you may expect, in that its chapters are more like chronologically-ordered short stories that happen to feature the same set of recurring characters. If you can get on board with that, then you have a pleasant read ahead of you. Susan Wright upgrades cadets’ concerns from middle school to something more collegiate, and the result is compulsively readable. If you’ve ever felt mildly embarrassed about wanting to check out the YA Starfleet Academy offerings, you should have nothing to worry about with this one.

NEXT TIME: Worf’s brother Kurn returns with a Vengeance