In today’s episode, Voyager’s new friends cut through red tape like butter, and have good taste in air fresheners to boot. But when Seven comes down with a nasty case of Corvid-19, she’ll need her new feathered friends to help her defuse a nuclear truth bomb. Will the Doctor’s sleepy-time experiments get anyone killed this time? When will Starfleet get off its legalistic high horse? And who got here first: the books or the show? All this and more in Seven of Nine, the book that manages to not get anyone killed by sleeping on the job.

Seven of Nine
Author: Christie Golden
Pages: 233
Published: September 1998
Timeline: About a year after “The Raven” (4×06)
Prerequisites: “The Raven” is mentioned regularly as a reference point for how Seven’s hallucinations differ in this story.

While Deep Space Nine was putting its nose to the grindstone and working hard to sustain what was in those days a little-explored form of serialized TV storytelling that would hold up and be heralded decades after the series’s end, Voyager was more or less enjoying a pleasure cruise, losing count of their photon torpedoes and shuttles, gleefully hitting the reset button on even the highest-stakes dramas, and making occasional big splashes rather than maintaining consistent high quality. And Voyager made perhaps no bigger splash during its seven-season run than the introduction of ex–Borg drone and noted defier of unitard physics Seven of Nine.

That sounds more denigrating than it’s meant to, but it’s genuinely just how each show respectively conducted its business. I like them both for different reasons, and one of the things I like most about Voyager is Seven of Nine. Rick Berman may have just wanted someone he could openly gawk at like a Tex Avery character when he brought Jeri Ryan into the fold, but Seven of Nine quickly proved more than compelling enough a character to handily overcome the tedious eye-candy motivation behind her origins. For all the sensationalism that surrounded her presence on Voyager, Seven of Nine almost instantly demonstrated far greater storytelling potential than the character she replaced, and wasn’t crushed by the millstone of a problematic relationship with another already polarizing character to boot. The gradual reassertion of her humanity and Janeway’s patience with and faith in her buoyed the journey home even in times of shakier narrative quality. So it’s easy to see why Paramount would want to take advantage of the lightning they had in a bottle by putting her front and center on the cover of her own novel.

Of course, giving the entire marquee exclusively to Seven makes it paradoxically easily to suspect that the book may not actually be as much about her as advertised, which is sort of true, though it’s also not disingenuous to say generally that it is. She is of course the linchpin to the whole thing, and the whole narrative is driven by her memories and the steadily increasing number of ravens she hallucinates, which works as a sort of reverse countdown to the book’s major revelation.

Voyager rolls up on the massive Lhiaarian Empire, which will take a year to go around and almost as long to go through due to all the red tape. While waiting in the forever line to seek an audience with the emperor, Beytek the Seventh, they meet Tamaak Vriis, who uses telepathic coercion to bump them way up the queue and makes fast friends with them. The Skedans have no problem schmoozing their way onto Voyager, which puts them in a good position to roll out a revenge plot they’ve been sitting on for a while. To keep the Voyager crew from picking up what they’re laying down, they distract them with happy memories that evoke pleasant odors—except for Seven. The Skedans were largely eradicated by the Borg, so they give her nasty smells and make her relive past assimilations.

Seven starts seeing ravens in her hallucinations, which she quickly understands serve a different purpose than the raven that led her to return to the wreckage of her parents’ ship on a moon in B’omar space, though the number of them increases as she tries working it out. An early clue when she finds herself triggered by the old nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, though it’s less of a clue than something where you have to wait to see how it makes sense. It was hard for me to guess at how it would all turn out, but the mystery did keep the pages turning, and was ultimately quite satisfying.

The character of Seven of Nine would be exhaustively explored by the time Voyager ended, but at the time she was writing the novel, Christie Golden had an enviably blank slate to work with, and she uses it quite well. At one point, Seven’s brain has too many tabs open and basically crashes, reverting her to Annika Hansen’s personality for a while. She recovers in time, but finds herself coming to grips with the sad realization that people liked her as Annika but merely fear and/or respect her as Seven. It’s an affecting scene, made no less so by the fact that she is being manipulated to feel that way by one particularly revenge-driven Skedan (who even goes as far as try to get her to kill herself at one point!).

One of my favorite dynamics in Voyager is the tension between Seven’s “this is what you taught me to do” and Janeway’s “not like that, though”, and Seven of Nine offers a particularly bracing take on it. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, the climax is largely predicated on the difference between legal and moral justice, as well as which one is preferable. Much is made of characters who are driven primarily by civility and protocol, such as Janeway, disagreeing with both the way the Skedans choose to carry out their revenge (though ultimately unable to deny how effective and free of collateral damage it is) and Seven’s interpretation of allowing them to carry it out as an act of compassion. I think audiences in 2024 are a lot more likely to feel where both the Skedans and Seven are coming from; in fact, in light of recent events, Janeway’s equivocation feels like the sort of neoliberal wishy-washiness that at this point may never win Democrats another election as long as they live. But it’s definitely worth reading for yourself to decide.

For a show that ran seven seasons, many of the personalities of Voyager never felt truly settled until the final couple of seasons. Christie Golden immediately keyed in on several of their best aspects in her excellent Trek debut, The Murdered Sun, and that talent serves her in good stead here as she shades in another (at the time) barely limned character. Seven’s come a long way since then; she’s a big part of Picard, and I’m sure the Voyager relaunch had some interesting directions in store for her that I have yet to discover for myself. So it’s fascinating to go back to more innocent times when Seven of Nine had a giant skintight spandex hurdle to clear to be taken seriously as a character, and was succeeding even from the beginning.

MVP & LVP

• It would be very disappointing and super weird if Seven of Nine was not the MVP of a book entitled Seven of Nine, but of course she does save the day and of course she is the MVP. But I think The Doctor more than earns a runner-up spot. There’s something very satisfying about realizing “Oh, the Skedans won’t be able to do Jedi mind tricks on him!” about ten pages before they try it and it goes exactly how you think it will. But it goes a little bit beyond that; knowing that his mind can’t be read, they also use him as a security guard for a little bit. Even though the Skedans manage to deactivate him and get to the surface of the Lhiaarian homeworld, it’s a clever idea that deserves a nod.
• LVP goes to Priana, a teenage Skedan who has a minor subplot where she gets attracted to Tom and uses her powers to make him forget all about B’Elanna and pay attention to her instead. She realizes it’s wrong fairly quickly, but there’s still some mild discomfort to work through before that.

Stray Bits

• “Infinite Regress”, a season-five episode that first aired just two months after this book was released, also dealt with Seven assuming the personalities of people who had been assimilated. The major difference is that in the episode, making her suffer by imbuing her with the memories of people she had assimilated is the entire crux of the conflict, whereas in Seven of Nine, it’s just a small action (which one guy takes too far) meant to throw her off the scent of a larger plot. Golden talks in Voyages of Imagination about people accusing her of being unoriginal, though as she correctly points out, she did beat the show to the punch (and did it better, I’d add).
• One of the songs listed when Seven and Harry are going through songs associated with birds to try to trigger a eureka moment is “Freebird.” Very fun to imagine Seven in a pair of huge over-the-ear headphones listening to ten minutes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, hoping it will solve her problems. (60)
• “When they entered the mess hall, Neelix’s homely face flooded with pleasure.” — Damn, that’s the second book in a row where Neelix takes one on the chin completely out of left field. Please, Christie, don’t hurt ’em! (149)
• The Doctor briefly experiments with sleepiness to feel more human to the crew. Thankfully, this time, it’s purely aesthetic, so no one dies as a result. (158)

Final Assessment

Good. The impulse for Paramount and Pocket Books to center a whole novel around a buzz-worthy new character is an understandable one, and even though it explores territory that the show would soon get to as well, its take is unique. If you can’t get enough of Seven of Nine, Seven of Nine is a solid and breezy read. It’s got exactly the kind of meaty moral conundrums you can expect to be chewing on with an ex-Borg mindset, and it’s page-turning fun waiting to see how the oblique clues Golden lays down come together. Recommended.

NEXT TIME: An exploration of TNG’s most bizarre love Triangle: Imzadi II