In today’s episode, when Janeway watches Voyager go up in flames, she lets the pod she was on when it happened carry her where it will. But when she ends up on a privateering vessel swabbing the deck, she has to face the fact that it might be the pirate’s life for her whether she likes it or not. At what age does every young adult start to seem like a baby? What does the order you list your children in say about you? And what’s the biggest ace Diane Carey has up her sleeve? All this and more in Fire Ship, the book that can admit when it’s time to fold ’em.
Fire Ship
Author: Diane Carey
Pages: 274
Published: July 1998
Timeline: The nearest Voyager episode in the timeline is “Retrospect” (4×17).
Prerequisites: None
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes
Now Janeway brings her story to the titular pub. I like how she tries to bring Paris in with her, but he ends up getting waylaid and rerouted and basically just rejected by the establishment like an incompatible organ. A nice demonstration and reminder that this is a captains-only affair.
In Janeway’s yarn, her crew is chilling with the Iscoy, a race so hospitable and friendly that they extend an invitation to them to call their planet home and stop trying to complete their journey. The offer is tempting, but while her guard is down, unknown assailants ambush the planet while Voyager is in spacedock. At the time, she’s on a pod out in space, and all she can do is look on helplessly as Voyager appears to explode from warp reactor failure. Stuck in her underwear on an escape pod with a dead Iscoy pilot and traumatized beyond belief, she clings to life just enough to ration supplies for survival, but otherwise lets the escape pod drift out to wherever. This initial chapter is very hard to follow in places, but it’s clear it’s intentional, and that in itself does an effective job of emphasizing just how fast and chaotic the attack is.
At last, Janeway gets picked up by a ship called the Zingara, run by a people known as the Omians. They don’t have very advanced propulsion—they use solar energy stored in fusion cells to create a “light kick” that carries them from star to star—and it’s an all-male crew with some rigid ideas about bringing women and children into space. They don’t want to make a woman work, but she insists on pulling her weight, so they put her to work cleaning grout out from between the tiles that make them go. In addition to having a primitive grasp of light-speed travel, the Zingara also operate in an inefficient and unmotivated manner. They lack basic tactical strategy, their relationship dynamic with other Omian ships is inscrutable and contradictory, and they don’t even repeat commands back to each other. It’s all a little maddening to Janeway, who’s used to Starfleet protocol and Starfleet speed.
For a while, the main conflict is this culture shock, from which Carey is able to wring a lot of intriguing tension out of the clash between past experience and current reality. Whose experience matters more? When does the Zingara crew need to start listening to Janeway, and when does she need to start listening to them? Janeway isn’t making much headway trying to get them to budge on their feelings about women in space, so she basically has one month to convince the men she’s useful and brace them for the Menace, which is what she’s been calling the people who destroyed Voyager and the Iscoy. Janeway knows a lot more about space than the men do, which is enough to know that the Menace will inevitably head their way, and probably sooner rather than later.
Then, when a rival named Sasaquon launches a neural attack that immobilizes the Omian crew, Janeway’s human physiology isn’t affected as badly, and she’s able to launch a one-woman counterassault. Though eventually caught, she’s thrown in a bunk with another similarly displaced woman named Totobet, whom she recognizes as a member of the so-called Menace. Totobet does recall the destruction of Voyager in spacedock, but can only offer as a reason that “it’s what [they] do to survive.” Janeway learns that the Menace have a severe overpopulation problem that’s caused by the fact that they die if they forgo just about any aspect of child-rearing, from mating to conception to birthing to nursing. So Janeway not only has to find a way to prepare the Omians for an incoming onslaught, but she has to wrap her head around her attackers’ unusual morality, often finding herself enraged by the fact that Totobet is so nonchalant about all of it.
Make no mistake: many of the trademark Diane Carey idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes are very much present as usual. But here, they’re rendered in a way that serves the story rather than Carey’s ego. Yes, she did, unsurprisingly, find a way to turn this into essentially a sailing tale, but the setting she creates overlays cleanly enough on top of the nautical trappings to make any irritation with rushing so eagerly back to her comfort zone negligible. She doesn’t try even a little to work with characters from beyond the TOS era. And she’s clearly not here to mess around. Janeway finds the bar, meets some patrons, and sits down to tell a story, and although there are a few cursory narrative nods early on to acknowledging things the people around her are implied to have said or interjected, this falls away very quickly and becomes purely Janeway telling a first-person story with no interruptions. In some ways it feels like another manifestation of Carey’s unwillingness to play along with a miniseries’s premise, but on the other hand, it’s hard to deny it runs a lot cleaner and smoother than the other books.1 And I found myself not really having as much of a problem with this or most of her other quirks as I usually do, because it’s a really gripping story.
Of all the aspects of Carey’s personality that regularly poke up through her writing, the only one that truly grates here is her typical insistence on human supremacy. Janeway is frankly pretty awful to Totobet, and although this is justified for at least a short time on some level because she watched Totobet’s people destroy everything and everyone she loved (and, on top of that, a really nice race that never did anything to anyone), she carries it well into and beyond actual rudeness. Also, Carey continues referring to Totobet’s race as the Menace even after she reveals they’re called the Lumalit and even after their situation and motivation reveal them to be far from menacing, except insofar as a certain extreme degree of pragmatism can be considered menacing. In fairness, it’s easy to see Janeway behaving this way in many writers’ hands, not just Carey’s; Janeway always did have hard luck finding people who could write her with an even hand.
One question Fire Ship grapples with is: at what point do you accept that the life you had before isn’t coming back? On Voyager, she didn’t have to accept that, because the Alpha Quadrant is still there; it’s just a matter of getting back to it somehow. But watching what she believes to be Voyager’s total destruction is a whole other ball of wax. When she finally convinces the Omians of her skills enough to become a deck boss, she takes a Pledge (sic), part of which is that it supersedes all previous oaths she’s taken. That’s the point where she comes to terms with the fact that she’s part of Omian society now. You know it can’t last, since returning to Voyager would be a requirement for Janeway to be dragging Tom around with her in the framing device’s present, but it’s neat that the story gets her to the point where she has to make that decision and you get to see her make her peace with that.
That said, it’s hardly a spoiler to say Voyager comes to the rescue in the climax, but it is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser how she explicitly chooses to stay with the Zingara and commits to that choice until the Omians vote to “reassign” her to Voyager. Janeway clearly interprets her Pledge according to the letter of the law, which is fine as long as she thinks Voyager is well and truly lost, but doesn’t track at all once she knows they’re alive. You would have to imagine choosing the Zingara over Voyager, even for a little bit, would have some really toxic emotional fallout, leave at least a few crew members with some major lingering resentment, and create major trust issues (“You decided you could choose a group over us once—who’s to say you wouldn’t do it again?”). Once you know the chance to get back to the Alpha Quadrant has been resuscitated, you’ve got to pick that track back up immediately, right? So I don’t think it quite stuck the landing.
In fact, now that I think about it, what really could have been interesting would have been for Janeway to come into the Captain’s Table and start telling her story as captain of the Zingara, which would enable Chakotay to access it as acting captain of Voyager, and then, say, he enters the establishment and finds her while she’s telling her story, and that’s the moment she realizes they’re all still alive, thus making the Captain’s Table the bridge that ultimately brings her back to Voyager. That could have been an incredibly innovative way to use the premise.
Turning more to the circumstances that brought the book itself about, Carey does have one major advantage over the other Captain’s Table authors, which is that she’s the only author up to this point to have already written a Star Trek novel from a first-person perspective. Given that, it feels fair to compare Fire Ship to Dreadnought! and Battlestations!. I liked the latter two well enough at the time I read and reviewed them (over six years ago now, good Lord!), but I suspect I wouldn’t warm up to them so much today. Piper is very much an author self-insert, and though I avoid the term “Mary Sue” at all costs on account of how tainted by misogyny it is, there’s no question that the character represents some of the purest wish-fulfillment you can find in a Pocket Books Trek novel, with a pretty charmed road to the top. By contrast, Fire Ship sends Janeway straight to the bottom of the pecking order, where she realizes it’s been a long time since she had to learn some humility. It’s a more interesting take for sure, though maybe not rooted in as mature a mindset as you might imagine.
Truth be told, I was really worried about this one, because Carey’s Voyages of Imagination comments made me wonder if the premise wasn’t going to be at least partially driven by her internalized woman-hate, manifesting in this case as a chance to see someone she views as a princess get taken down a few pegs. She describes Janeway as the “daughter of an admiral, who never had a hard moment in her life”2 and admits, “I confess to enjoying the chance to watch her actually do the work of the lower decks for a change. I always had the idea that James Kirk had scrubbed decks, but I never had that feeling from Janeway.” Well, of course you got that feeling off of Kirk. He’s a man. You like men, and you overwhelmingly prefer their company. Literally no one is surprised you feel this way. Anyway, regardless of how much self-pleasure Diane Carey may or may not have derived from making someone she perceives as spoiled suffer a little, I have to give credit where credit’s due, and I have to say that overall, I enjoyed Fire Ship more than I didn’t.
Even though there are still two Captain’s Table installments left, there’s a little bit of space (hurr hurr) between the four we just looked at and those two, so now seems like a good time to pause and take the temperature of the series.
As I see it, there’s one main issue the Captain’s Table has that looms over everything else good and bad about it, and that’s that an author has to nail down more moving parts than usual for a Captain’s Table book to feel like it succeeded. Ultimately, what I want from media tie-in literature is simply a good story. It’s not gonna be Shakespeare, it’s not gonna be Le Guin; hell, half the time it ain’t even gonna be Patterson. I’m fine with that, I’ve made peace with it. But the problem is, with a regular book, if you execute well on the story aspect, you’ve fought at least half the battle, if not a good chunk more. But with Captain’s Table, you also have to juggle things like the interactions with the bar patrons, how much of the captain’s story is about the captain, ; and failure in one or more of these areas is more conspicuous than if you were just trying to write a solid Star Trek story.
It turns out these are hard books to do well, and even the ones that I liked didn’t quite keep all the plates spinning. I don’t intend to demean the concept by calling it “cute”, but there’s not really another word I can think of for it. It is really just sort of a cute idea—maybe not the best, but a fine one. It didn’t result in anything that totally knocked my socks off, but then again, there haven’t been any out-and-out duds so far either. I know we still have Calhoun and Pike to go, and maybe what with them being a little more off the beaten path, there’s potentially more interesting territory to be mined there. Calhoun’s in particular I have some decent expectations for, since it covers a part of his past he hasn’t been willing to talk about up to this point.
MVP & LVP
- My MVP for this one is Totobet. It’s kind of wild that you end up sympathizing with a character who has such a blasé outlook toward her culture’s solution to overpopulation, but she’s so meek and mild and Janeway treats her so abominably at times that you steer into wanting to understand her. Janeway eventually does come to comprehend her point of view and apologize for misjudging her, but a lot of damage has been done by that point, and it’s hard to fully forgive her for a lot of it.
- LVP for this one is Sasaquon. Carey’s thirst-trap descriptions of him aren’t enough to pull your attention away from the fact that he’s maybe the least tactically savvy of the Omians we meet, enough so that the word “doofus” is maybe not out of line. Kind of a pathetic excuse for even a secondary antagonist.
Stray Bits
- Cover Art Corner: Some may be wondering why I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but I wanted to wait until I had the first four books under my belt to show off the extended mural that their covers form. I love stuff like this, and although it’s not quite possible to get them exactly flush with each other, it’s still impressive. Also of note is that each cover has one of the books’ authors in the background. I’m fairly positive that’s Diane Carey hanging out in the background of War Dragons; L.A. Graf are just to the right of Sisko’s head on The Mist; and Smith & Rusch can be seen on Fire Ship. Only Michael Jan Friedman got to be on the cover of his own book, it would seem (unless that’s Peter David, but the cameo on the cover of Once Burned looks much more like him). The fifth and sixth also sort of align with this, but the lighting is somewhat different, and so I feel like they’re more their own thing.
- It appears as though Janeway was touched up from the original Keith Birdsong art, perhaps to help her look a little friendlier and more open—she does look like she’s taking a bit of a defensive posture there, though I’d hardly call it bad, and arguably not even in real need of being altered.
- Janeway lists off her “family” to Totobet: “Chakotay … Paris … Kim … Seven … Tuvok … Neelix … B’Elanna…” I don’t know how much stock you can put in the order she chose here, but it’s kind of surprising that B’Elanna doesn’t even rate ahead of Neelix! Man, Diane Carey really does hate Klingons. (p. 210)
- Carey is the only author so far to not write the biography of her book’s captain(s). That duty fell to Michael Jan Friedman, apparently.
- One thing Carey captures really well that I’m starting to acutely feel as I approach 40 is that when you’re a slight bit older than your colleagues—maybe not quite old enough to be their parent, but maybe, say, you graduated grade school before they started it—they often seem like little babies. You can’t help perceiving them that way. They’re just babies! They don’t know anything! It sounds more patronizing than it is.
Final Assessment
Average. Diane Carey puts most of her usual personality quirks, which has lately resulted in some real stinkers, to better use here, more in service of a story than an out-of-control ego. As a result, Janeway’s time at the Captain’s Table ends up being more enoyable than I predicted. There are still a lot of nagging questions raised by the way she handles things, and the ending seems like it creates some nasty fallout that we’ll conveniently never have to deal with, but on the other hand, she manages to touch on some interesting themes throughout and handles the framing device in a way that placates her brusque doesn’t-play-well-with-others personality while simultaneously benefiting the story. It’s hard to say definitively how any one author should handle the framing device, but Carey makes a decent case for minimally involving it beyond a perfunctory setup.
NEXT TIME: Finally exploring some of those Strange New Worlds we’ve heard so much about
Bryan
The New Frontiers Captain’s Table book isn’t just one of the best Star Trek books I’ve ever read, it’s flat out one of the best books I’ve ever read. I really hope you think so too, I’ve been waiting for it.