In today’s episode, when Data’s quadmates celebrate his Omicron Theta-versary, the idea that lying can be used for good blue-screens his ethics programming. But he’ll have to learn the nuance quickly if he hopes to foil some scientists’ psychic invasion plans. Who does an android read for fun? Which terrible unconventional name spellings will survive into the future? And how did the YA line fare overall? All this and more in Deceptions, the book brought to you by the Acme Corporation!

Deceptions
Authors: Bobbi JG Weiss & David Cody Weiss
Pages: 117
Published: April 1998
Timeline: 23 years prior to “Encounter at Farpoint”
Prerequisites: None
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

Deceptions begins with a relatively benign one—that is to say, Data’s cadet pals throwing him a surprise birthday party. He points out that they had to trick him to make it happen, and even after they explain it, he still has trouble reconciling the idea that a lie can be used to a positive end. Is he going to have to get with the program by the end of the book? Is gagh best served live?

Soon afterward, Data’s xenoethnography class is scheduled to embark on a three-day trip to various planets, with the destination selected for his group being Arunu, a dead world where an archaelogical dig is taking place. The Arunuans were an orally silent race, instead choosing to communicate by infusing solid objects with psychic emotional energy. Data figures since he can’t feel emotion, he won’t be affected by touching them. Lucky for him, his hypothesis is correct, so the leader of the dig, Professor Spinaker, allows him to work with three Dyrondite scientists, tall white mantis-like creatures who, like Data, have no emotions, except in a much less charming way.

The Dyrondites don’t want to work with Data, so he feels the need to prove himself useful to them, which he does by tuning up one of their tools to detect the emotion-packed artifacts within a much larger radius. In doing so, he locates some in the hills away from the dig site—and leads his fellow cadets right smack into the middle of a Dyrondite smuggling operation. That’s just the beginning, however. With the artifacts they’re smuggling, the Dyrondites are planning a full-scale feels blast so powerful it will cripple the worlds of the Federation, allowing them to step in and seize power. It’ll be up to Data, the only person as unaffected by the artifacts as the Dyrondites, to use his newfound knowledge about selective deception to convince them that he’s switched loyalties so that he can inflict the necessary sabotage in their ship to save the Federation.

Honestly, the idea that deception can sometimes be used for unambiguously positive purposes is a neat thing to try to get across to a young audience. Obviously it causes the least amount of headache to teach them that lying is wrong no matter what, but everything has its time and place, and I think being honest and forthright with kids about those gray areas is a noble notion. Outside of the few occasions where that idea comes to the forefront, however, Deceptions is unfortunately about as squarely middle-of-the-road as Star Trek youth novels get, so I don’t care to talk about it at length. Instead, what with it being the last Star Trek book catering specifically to kids until a pair of Prodigy stories in 2023, I’d rather take a moment to reflect on the Star Trek YA line overall.

Even by the already turbulent standards of Star Trek novels, the ones targeted at the youth demographic were wildly hit-or-miss. The Starfleet Academy books performed their very best when they turned inward on the characters, though that was distressingly rare compared to how often they settled for humdrum 24th-century equivalents of out-of-touch adults’ ideas of what kids stress about in school. Meanwhile, the Deep Space Nine books starring Jake and Nog most commonly operated under the misguided assumption that kids need someone closer to their age to latch onto so that they don’t feel like such fish out of water in grown-up media. When I got into TNG as a very young child, it wasn’t because Wesley Crusher being there made me feel better. It was because characters like Picard, Geordi, and Data solved problems intellectually and creatively and I felt like they deserved my 8-year-old respect.

What most of them end up being in the final balance is books for no one: not really speaking sufficiently to timeless issues that kids face, but also not having nearly enough good meat for adults to chew on, either. Several of them betray a somewhat low opinion of children, thinking they must always be placated by action and won’t be able to sit with a book that isn’t always providing a stimulus every two seconds. The best ones prove that that isn’t the case. Regardless, it’s with the notching of Deceptions on our belts that we send the kid books riding off into the sunset. Q’apla!

MVP & LVP

• The MVP is obviously Data here. He can withstand Arunu’s toxic atmosphere without having to wear an oxygen mask, he’s the only one who can be near the artifacts without being affected, and his preternatural strength and stamina get the requisite workout. His teammates on the field trip are perfectly capable, but he is definitely pulling the most weight here.
• LVP is one of the other cadets, Lukas Whitlock. Although perfectly amiable, he doesn’t add much to the mission besides a few wisecracks, and on top of that is the biggest burden after getting hurt. Not very much to this character at all, sadly.

Stray Bits

• One of the cadets at the surprise party is named Waylyn Marks. Somebody please take the chalk away from the Academy parents. (p. 7)

• One of the gifts Data receives is a gag combadge that squirts water. Do you think that’s a gift that can be replicated five minutes before you have to leave for the party, or do you have to go to like a novelty shop to get one? Personally, I’m more tickled by the science tricorder that spring-loaded snakes pop out of—and, of course, who could forget the phaser that spits out a flag that says ZAP? (p. 8)
• Instead of sleeping like the other cadets, Data spends that time on “a critical analysis of the complete works of the twentieth-century author Stephen King.” Can’t wait to see what Data makes of his coke phase. (p. 45)
• The Dyrondites scan Data while he’s partially materialized during transport. That’s pretty smart, honestly. Good way to get the readings you want off someone while they’re completely incapacitated. (p. 100)

Final Assessment

Average. Although its lesson for the kids is impressively nuanced, the surrounding characters and scenarios aren’t compelling enough to live up to it. For almost a quarter of a century, Deceptions stood as the final entry in a line of books that occasionally transcended their demographic, but too often merely settled for basic “what if clichéd kiddie conflict, but in space??”. It’ll be a very long time before we reach the Prodigy books on here, but one can only hope that authors acquired a better understanding of how to write more effectively for the middle grades sometime in the intervening years.

There were a few gems in the line, which are listed alongside the adult offerings here, and I recommend checking those out as enthusiastically as I would any “regular” book. If I’m being totally honest, however, the main reason I’m sad to see the YA books go is because I’ll no longer have them as easy catch-up weeks. Roughly three hundred pages every single time I read a book now? 2024 let’s gooooooo

NEXT TIME: Benny Russell dreams of a universe Far Beyond the Stars