In today’s episode, “stories from camp” takes on a whole new meaning when several senior crew members find themselves laboring for some harsh captors. But finding a way out will put all their “looking like they’re working” skills to the test. Who spins the best fireside yarn? Can Starfleet Academy really make you participate in a sport? And what would Kes have had to do to make Neelix not be attracted to her? All this and more in Pathways, the book that connects the dots between Tom Paris and Pepe Silvia.

Pathways
Author: Jeri Taylor
Published: August 1998 (HC)
Pages: 501 (PB)
Timeline: About a year after Seven of Nine joins the crew. Closest episode chronologically is “One” (4×25).
Prerequisites: None, though a lot of the stories don’t add meaningfully to existing lore
Borrowable on Archive.org? No

The last of the seven stories that comprise Pathways belongs to Tuvok. At first, he stares blankly through encounters with people he will never see again and tries to defer certain adult responsibilities without success, but the centerpiece of that story is Tuvok’s solo journey into the unforgiving Vulcan desert toward Mount Seleya, hoping he will find something that ultimately turns out not to exist. Even though it’s the last story in the book, I bring it up at the outset because it maps distressingly well onto the experience of reading Pathways.

Jeri Taylor was one of the lead writers, producers, and (for a little bit) showrunners of Star Trek: Voyager. Her second Pocket Books novel, Mosaic, was such a comprehensive treatise on the life of Kathryn Janeway that it was considered canon by the writers for much of the show’s run. I liked it pretty well myself. Pathways, on the other hand, is a brutal slog: over five hundred small-print pages of stories that meander, insert painfully bland supporting characters into the Voyager crew’s early lives before abruptly abandoning them, yada-yada over years of their lives and personal growth, add little of satisfying heft to their lore, and generally make you wonder “Who was asking for this?” I am not exaggerating when I say I might never have finished Pathways if I hadn’t bought the Kindle version and been able to catch a few pages on my phone here and there. Part of it is the day job, sure, but there have certainly been books in that time that I’ve wanted to spend my spare time on.

Problems start piling up early. You know you’re in trouble with a book like this if the framing story turns out to be more compelling than any of the individual tales. One minute, the senior crew is on Voyager; in the next instant, fourteen of them wake up in a spaceship taking them to a walled-off meadow, where they and members of several other alien races are held captive by the three-legged, slime-covered Subu, and they get nothing to eat or drink but bread with rocks in it and peepee-poopoo water. To keep morale up, they tell stories about their lives while discreetly keeping their eyes open for opportunities to escape. This was the one element most worth the price of admission, and it never stopped rankling me to have to pull away from it to go read sixty pages of someone else’s life story.

You also don’t do yourself many favors by kicking things off with Chakotay. That akoocheemoya spirit animal stuff is just the worst, and set a pace for my desire to read that never picked up. Harry goes next, and his is probably the best of the human stories, with a wrinkle added to his courtship of Libby that was surprisingly poignant and heartbreaking. He has a roommate at the Academy named George Mathers, who it is eventually revealed is in love with him, but realizes it’s not meant to be when he sees how over the moon Harry is for Libby. Both his story and Chakotay’s also prominently feature a harsh mentor named Nimembeh, who has a refreshing hard edge that Voyager characters tend to lack, and who would probably fit pretty well into that new Starfleet Academy show they’re making.

The human stories all feature interchangeable Midwestern supporting characters who are about as exciting as a dental checkup, and though that doesn’t change when the alien characters start telling their stories, those stories fare better overall. Neelix’s is kind of funny in a weird unintentional way, as up until his entire family gets annihilated in an instant and he does a truckload of drugs to forget all the horrific atrocities he’s witnessed, it’s basically just a typical American teenager narrative overlaid onto an alien culture. There’s a Kes story in this book too, and I suspect both her tale and Pathways as a whole were largely written while she was on the show with the expectation that she still would be when the book was published, with all that changing and Seven having to be shoehorned in late in the process. It does paint her character in a better light overall, and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I could have done without Neelix’s reminiscing.

Tuvok was the character I was most looking forward to seeing a story devoted to, so it was a canny move on Taylor’s part to save it for last, and it was the one thing I was happy to finally reach. Sure enough, the austerity of Tuvok’s walkabout made it much different and more compelling to me than the others. Tuvok is fascinating to me, because I think it’s easy to forget that he was the first full-blooded Vulcan to be a major character on a Star Trek series, and as such, he lacks a lot of the looseness that Spock’s human side gave him, and is arguably uptight even by the standards of his own kind. His lessons about accepting the qualities of others that commonly read as illogic to Vulcans are much harder won, and thus feel more earned. Though it ended as disconcertingly abruptly as every other story in this book does, I find myself liking it more and more in retrospect.

Speaking of that abruptness, I don’t think there’s a single piece of this book that doesn’t have herky-jerky narrative pacing. Despite being practically a series of novellas, there’s not a single one of them that doesn’t find itself running up against some sort of bizarre self-imposed time limit. Even the framing story feels like it spends way too long piling on new obstacles, such as when Harry gets his foot crushed by accidentally rematerializing with it inside a rock with only a dozen pages out of 500 left in the entire book.

This book is overstuffed beyond all reason. Contrast a book like Pathways with something like the Captain’s Table series, the first four books of which, although I read them in the spring and summer of this year, feel like an eternity ago. Stories like the ones in Pathways are much more satisfying when they don’t have to compete for space or feel like they’re on some invisible timer. Mosaic was an easier read partially for that reason. Every single story in this book, including the framing story, would have been better served by occupying its own novel. I would much rather have read eight separate novels by a variety of authors each focusing on one of the stories found here than one doorstopper by someone who clearly did not have to answer to an editor.

The day job is a not-insignificant part of why it took so long to manifest this review, but I think it would have taken a long time for me to finish this book even if I wasn’t wrangling sophomores five days a week. I think there was just such a positive response to Mosaic1Or anticipation of one; Pathways was commissioned while Mosaic was still being written. that it was tempting to want to make lightning strike twice. Instead, their excitement got the better of them, and what they wound up with was the mother of all info-dumps, with nary a trace of artfulness or élan anywhere in evidence. I’m much more content to let Pathways make my bookshelf sag than my spirits.

MVP & LVP

I always wondered if it would happen, and I think today it finally has: for the first time in Deep Space Spines history, we have a character who is both the MVP and the LVP of their respective book, and in Pathways, that character is a young lady named Coris. She’s the MVP because she meets the Voyager crew while trying to steal Harry’s boots, and their unqualified acceptance of her and their tales of overcoming adversity eventually inspire her to sacrifice herself by stalling the Subu long enough to allow the crew to clandestinely transport out of the camp two at a time using the makeshift transporter they managed to cobble together. But up until then, she’s also a doe-eyed lump on a log who does absolutely nothing, and there’s no amount of retconning or narrative fudging that would make it possible for her to join the crew on their journey home. Congratulations (?) on your double win, Coris!

Stray Bits

• Jeri Taylor died not long before I finished reading this book, on October 24. She basically was Janeway, and Janeway was her. Without her creative input, it’s possible Voyager wouldn’t have had the strong female captain that it did. The value of her contributions to the series is hard to overstate. LLAP, Jeri.
• Quite a few gay characters in this book. In addition to George Mathers, two of the crew members trapped in the Subu camp, Brad Garrison and Noah Mannick, are an item as well. I was sure one of them was going to die, and I’m relieved they didn’t.
• In things no one could possibly have predicted would have aged weirdly but are still funny anyway, Tom Paris has a friend named Charlie Day. All I could think of for most of Tom’s story after reading that name was an It’s Always Sunny title card that says “The Gang Gets Kicked Out of Starfleet Academy”.
• It’s revealed that Kes chopped her hair short because she didn’t want to give an Ocampan elder the satisfaction of ogling her. But then she doesn’t see a problem with Neelix? I guess it all depends how someone treats you.
• There’s a kids’ version of Parrises squares called Pre-Squares, which young B’Elanna Torres was quite good at. That’s a cute name. (147)
• Admiral Owen Paris reminds Tom that he’s “required to participate in a sport” as part of his Academy training. I know space duty probably is probably best suited for those in peak physical condition, but can they really require that? Like, that’s not ableist somehow? Hard to imagine, say, Melora feeling great about that. (213)
• “Neelix was impressed by the composure of this man, who always seemed to rise above the indignities of his situation, his bearing erect, his demeanor calm. He personified a quality Neelix had long sought, and that was dignity.” — This made me laugh out loud. It’s way too easy to imagine Neelix standing with poor posture, looking at someone who carries themselves with the tiniest speck of self-worth, and saying out loud “I wish I had dignity” right before his pants fall down and reveal boxers with hearts all of them. (405)

Final Assessment

Bad. There are a few isolated elements I enjoyed that keep this from descending into truly Terrible territory, but if it’s going to take me over two months to work my way through a Star Trek book, I at least want it to be a fun ride, not like I’m walking uphill through molasses. Nothing about this book is paced correctly; all the stories just sort of go on for a while, until the exact moment they don’t anymore, and they don’t add any knowledge about these beloved characters that I would consider interesting or indispensable. If your appetite for anything Voyager is nothing short of insatiable, you can get several full meals out of Pathways, but lore for lore’s sake is rarely if ever the way.

NEXT TIME: Literally what I was just talking about! Seven of Nine gets her own novel!