In today’s episode, Kirk takes Sulu to a pub where time passes more slowly and stories are the coin of the realm. They tell a dovetailing pair of tales about dragon tails, set twenty years apart. How much weight is the framing device pulling here? Who’s missing from the list of Kirk’s romantic conquests? And will Sulu ever have the latently homoerotic bond with Chekov that Kirk had with Spock? All this and more in War Dragons, the book where it’s the men’s fault as usual.

War Dragons
Author: L.A. Graf
Pages: 274
Published: June 1998
Timeline: The present day in this case is just after the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Kirk’s part of the story takes place in very early season 1 of TOS, right after “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (the deaths of Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner are still pretty fresh). Sulu’s part of the story takes place immediately following the Excelsior’s shakedown cruise, about three years before TUC.
Prerequisites: Mild familiarity with the aforementioned episode
Borrowable on Archive.org? Yes

🎶Sometimes you wanna go, where everybody knows your rank…🎶

Up to now, miniseries have been more an exception than the norm, but The Captain’s Table marks the opening of a floodgate. Much of the next few years of Star Trek Pocket Books chronology consists of these endeavors—some telling a single story in multiple installments, others organizing multiple tales around a core concept. The Captain’s Table is one of the latter: an intergalactic pub situated outside of normal time and space, open only to captains of naval tradition, where new arrivals buy everyone a round with a ripping yarn. It’s a cute idea that also opens a window of opportunity to do something Star Trek novels don’t get to do very often, which is tell stories from the first-person perspectives of familiar characters we know and love (as opposed to those of, say, thinly veiled author self-inserts).

Speaking of which, it’s usually Diane Carey who kicks off these kinds of projects, but this time we have L.A. Graf batting leadoff. L.A. Graf, you may recall, is a pseudonym used by two writers, Julia Ecklar and Karen Rose, which you might imagine has the potential to create something of an issue in terms of tone, where whatever captain they wrote about would have two different narrative voices if they wrote a story from his perspective. How do you go about solving such a problem? L.A. Graf’s solution is to double Captains Kirk and Sulu up in one book and tell not so much two stories, but rather one that’s separated into two halves that take place two decades apart. It made me briefly wonder if we’d find ourselves in another Day of Honor situation, where the first book immediately set about ignoring the central conceit, but it quickly becomes apparent that that’s not the case, and ultimately I think it’s pretty neat that John Ordover made it work without tossing a wrench in their collaborative engine. I just kind of wish it had been in service of something a little more exciting.

Amusingly, both captains’ stories take place near the very beginning of their respective tours of duty. Kirk, still reeling from the deaths of his friends Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner, rescues some reptilian folk from a derelict ship made mostly of Orion parts, only for them to immediately and violently pounce on him when he beams them over. Security manages to subdue the creatures, known as the Nykkus, who are the severely subjugated subjects of another set of lizard people called the Anjiri. At first, the universal translator spits out such incomprehensible gibberish that Kirk thinks it’s broken, but Uhura comes in, hangs out with the Anjiri for a little bit, and realizes it isn’t accounting for their movements, which supply the context for their words. After that, communication is still significantly stilted, but manageable.

The Anjiri want to bring the derelict ship back to their homeworld, but Kirk tells them it’s in such bad shape that it’ll disintegrate if they try to tow it, so they agree to go home empty-handed. They insist on running navigation and helm themselves, which Kirk inexplicably allows, presumably because it’s better than getting pounced on by lizard men again. Their “homeworld”, as it turns out, isn’t much to sneeze at: a collection of busted-up ships cobbled together on a planetoid in the middle of an asteroid belt. The women in charge in Anjiri/Nykkus culture are a little more amenable to conversation, so Kirk and Uhura introduce the wild concept of maybe establishing trade relations instead of mauling people and stealing their stuff, and he agrees to keep the whole encounter off the books—which makes things kind of difficult for Captain Sulu when the Nykkus resurface twenty years later.

But what’s that, you say? Weren’t the Nykkus the subservient ones? How are they the ones on the offensive now? That’s for Sulu to figure out when they attack Deep Space Three while the Excelsior is in port on its first mission after its shakedown cruise and steal a new stealth fighter, the Falcon FL-70. These are far from the cowering, silent Nykkus of the past; they take five-sixths of the dilithium resupply team1The only one who escapes their clutches is a humble Vulcan cadet named Tuvok. (and his first officer, Chekov) hostage and demonstrate a sharp tactical acumen that allows them to lure Sulu straight into a trap that forces him to evacuate the Excelsior. To get to the bottom of their newfound capabilities, he’ll need a helping hand from his old captain and some information from the Anjiri females before the actions of the Nykkus trigger a war with the Klingons.

Kirk and Sulu alternate their stories, and though Kirk’s tale ends a little bit short of the halfway point, he’s still a big part of Sulu’s story, and has parts of the Excelsior-era half that only he can tell. This makes me feel a little bad for Sulu, to be honest, because I can’t help but feel like this has the (probably unintentional) effect of undermining Sulu’s competence somewhat. Keeping the Anjiri/Nykkus homeworld visit off the record is a bizarre decision to begin with, but it seems like its only real narrative purpose is to force Sulu to have to rely on Kirk later—first for intel, then for moral support. Telling Kirk’s story fully before Sulu’s or having Sulu be part of the original mission’s landing party are just a couple of solutions I can think of offhand, but I think the book would have been stronger if either the two halves were less intertwined or if Sulu had been more crucial to the first one.

Sulu’s not the only one who suffers a crisis of confidence. You might notice that Chekov is Sulu’s first officer in this book, which is not the case in the movies. It’s possible to imagine a brief period where this was so because the dawn of Sulu’s captaincy is never covered in the movies, and a lot of L.A. Graf’s whole deal has been about keeping these characters together over the years, so the prospect of seeing them in the top two seats on a ship might be exciting. But when Kirk rescues Chekov, he’s angry and wishes he had died, because he sees the way things are playing out in this first mission on the Excelsior as a repeat of his (also self-perceived) failures on the Reliant. This makes him very brooding and taciturn for a good chunk of the book, which is not generally a vibe the character wears well.

That said, I could be convinced that this was part of an effort to give the male cast a vulnerability that rarely gets shown in media in general, much less in Star Trek. This would definitely make sense, as it would contrast against both the strength of the feminine characters (Anjiri/Nykkus society is run by the women; Uhura is in fine form as ever) and the toxicity and danger of the male antagonists, who get their newfound intelligence from an accidental deviation from the usual breeding procedure.2Though knowing how it usually goes doesn’t cast the Anjiri females in a very flattering light. If so, it’s admirable, but unfortunately not very compelling.

Really though, I’m just trying to gin up something to appreciate here, because ultimately, there just isn’t much there there, as they say. The meat on the bones is a bit gamy, as you might be able to guess from the padding of a Dujonian’s Hoard preview and abridged biographies of Kirk and Sulu that are both included as part of the main page count. But I think the core concept is really fun and has a lot of juice in it. This isn’t anywhere near as terrible a start to a miniseries as something like Ancient Blood, but it doesn’t set a very high bar to clear either.

MVP & LVP

• Uhura takes MVP in a walk. She waltzes right into the middle of a throng of lizards that could tear her head off and just starts chatting with them and tweaking her universal translator like it’s nothing. Uhura is often at her best when she’s digging deep into and beaming with joy at the linguistic aspects of her job, and her effortless confidence here is a much-needed salve to the misbegotten self-doubt populating the rest of the story.
• LVP is Chekov. I’m not saying characters can’t show some different sides sometimes, but I way prefer brash, impulsive, proudly-Russian Chekov to self-flagellating angry Chekov.

Stray Bits

• The Excelsior’s chief medical officer is named Judith Klass.
• Sulu gets really emotional about Chekov’s abduction. It’s not unexpected, coming from authors who vastly prefer writing for these two characters and Uhura above all others, but I was shocked at how fast it went into Spirk/t’hy’la territory. I could transcribe practically the entire page here, but some standout quotes include “It wasn’t the fact that this was the Excelsior’s first real crisis that bothered me. It was the fact that Chekov wasn’t here to support me through it” and “was it any wonder that I’d come to think of Pavel Chekov as my other self, the man I might have been if I’d been born in cold, grim Russia and not vibrant San Francisco?” Is the world ready for Sulov? or Cheklu? I’m here for it. (80, 81)
• L.A. Graf are pretty good about coming up with interesting shuttlecraft names, and here they’ve given us the Jocelyn Bell, named after an Irish astrophysicist who discovered the first radio pulsars as a postgrad student in 1967. (139)
• One of the sections in the Kirk bio at the end is called “His Romances”, and it’s pretty comprehensive, though it notably leaves out Lori Ciana, whose canon status is debatable, but Gene Roddenberry wrote her into the Motion Picture novelization, so I say she’s in. (269–70)

Final Assessment

Average. War Dragons is certainly one of the Star Trek novels of all time. The baton pass back and forth between two stories is relatively clever, and allows L.A. Graf to work comfortably in their preferred partnership milieu without giving one captain two voices, but unfortunately, they don’t come together in a way that keeps the pages turning easily. There’s a lot of potential in the Captain’s Table concept, but it’s clear this first installment isn’t the realization of it.

NEXT TIME: Picard and Worf search for the elusive Dujonian’s Hoard