In today’s episode, “there be whales here” is an omen rather than a victory cry. But when the Enterprise heads to uncharted systems in search of an answer to controlling the pet population, they end up drawing their food chain diagram in jumbo crayon. What do Klingons consider the most honorable Earth delicacy? Does the Star Trek future include good school boards? And what strange new worlds lie upstairs at the Captain’s Table? All this and more in Where Sea Meets Sky, the book that ill-advisedly loops the loop.

Where Sea Meets Sky
Author: Jerry Oltion
Pages: 267
Published: October 1998
Timeline: 2254, early in Pike’s first five-year mission (of two); the same year as, to name just a couple of points of reference, “The Cage” (0x01) and the early chapters of The Rift (TOS #57)
Prerequisites: Hompaq recurs from Dujonian’s Hoard (Captain’s Table #2). And you’ll need to have seen “The Cage” if you’re not familiar with the crew complement from the original 1964 pilot, particularly Yeoman Colt. Otherwise, none

Christopher Pike’s Enterprise is dispatched to Aronnia to help repair the biotech of some whalelike spacebound creatures referred to as titans, which the Aronnians use as living starships. Said titans have not returned from their annual migration to the Devernian star system, so the Enterprise takes a representative named Perri and pops over to see what’s up, only to discover the Devernians blasting the titans with old-fashioned nukes. Although they get sucked into and crippled by the fracas, they manage a few evasive maneuvers and pluck one of the nuke pilots, named Lanned, from his ship to get another perspective. Neither side comes out looking very rosy—Aronnia in particular, who told some white lies about their involvement with the titans to get away from Devernia and into the Federation—so Pike, dissatisfied with both sides, decides to go down to Devernia and for himself.

The titans wreak great amounts of havoc and heartache on the Devernians by dropping their eggs from orbit, which cause a ton of damage when they land, and then again when they hatch and release speedy little garbage-disposal babies that lay more waste to the cities and devour Devernians. Spock is able to deduce pretty quickly that the titans aren’t native to either Arronia or Devernia, which is why their breeding might be so wild and unchecked. The hypothesis leads them to new star systems and planets, where they find even scarier genetic offshoots of the titans, a food chain so simple it makes Duplo look like K’Nex, and, hopefully, an answer to the destruction that threatens to make life unsustainable on Devernia.

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Of one of Jerry Oltion’s other Trek novels, Twilight’s End, I noted when I reviewed it nearly four years ago that it struck me as “powerfully dumb, a thing of such exquisite stupidity that it is actually kind of perversely beautiful”. By comparison, Where Sea Meets Sky, with its egg-laying whales and oversimplified titan food chain, makes the idea of a planet that doesn’t rotate on its axis looks like one of Asimov’s greatest hits. It almost makes “Spock’s Brain” look worthy of serious contemplation. There’s throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, and then there’s carrying things to the wall and forcing them to stick.

As you might expect, this haphazard and largely extemporaneous-feeling approach to letting the story play out causes the book to peter out pretty quickly. This feeds into the worst aspect of the book, which is that there is no climax; things just sort of happen until they don’t anymore. There are gradual movements toward scientific progress, and then at some point Pike basically tells the two people at his table, “Yeah, things worked out, and as far as I know, they’re still working out.” It’s just like, cool story bro. Makes him look like a really bad storyteller.

You might also guess that the titans are sentient on some level and that the Enterprise crew ends up communicating with them directly in the fullness of time, as Star Trek crews often do, but that never materializes. Not all such stories need to have a “Devil in the Dark” moment of dawning realization about the alien’s intelligence. There’s room for beasts of pure instinct in Star Trek. But it feels like the Enterprise somehow gets suckered into doing animal control, which feels like a poor use of the talents of a Constitution-class starship. I’m glad Where Sea Meets Sky isn’t as bogged down in conflict between the two representatives as Twilight’s End, but I think I’d have preferred some standard interpersonal interaction to the beast-wrangling that takes up the book’s latter half.

This one also gets a little weird with the metaphysical outside-of-time aspect of the Captain’s Table and Pike’s timeline. Pike is a character defined almost entirely by his ultimate fate, especially pre–Strange New Worlds, and though I haven’t seen much of that show yet, I’ve seen enough to know it informs a lot of his character. Some characters tease Pike with knowledge of his future, something that it seems like Cap lets go on a little too long for comfort.1It is also revealed that Colt transfers to the Bozeman at some point, which doesn’t bode well for her either. This ties into some feelings I have about the limitations of SNW’s fundamental premise that would get too far out into the weeds to be relevant to this review, but suffice it to say I didn’t care for these diversions all that much.

All of the above makes this a really hard one to want to pick up, even now that I’m also buying the books on Kindle as I get to them so I can sneak 1 or 2 percent of them on my phone here and there. (It really does add up!) I go back and forth on my feelings about the campy parts of Star Trek—sometimes they’re charming, sometimes they’re annoying, but they’re also a case-by-case sort of thing; it’s all very complicated and weird—and this book piled them on and I was not feeling them at all. The interstitial chapters in the bar never did much for me, but it doesn’t speak well of Where Sea Meets Sky that this was the only time I found myself actively looking forward to them.

MVP & LVP

• I’m giving Spock the MVP, because it’s his research that puts them onto the idea of finding and ultimately working toward the story’s victory condition, but also, to be honest, for having to deliver a lot of this technobabble with a straight face. Colt deserves a runner-up slot for pitching in some solid thoughts as well.
• I didn’t really like Number One as portrayed in this book. She’s quite haughty toward and dismissive of Yeoman Colt for no real reason, and doesn’t really contribute as much as you would expect from an XO.

Stray Bits

• The end of Where Sea Meets Sky returns to the beginning of War Dragons, making the Captain’s Table series a closed loop—a move that fairly upset Oltion (who wasn’t consulted about it) and which even to me, a person who rails endlessly against zombifying franchises and firmly believes things should be allowed to end in peace, feels pretty shortsighted. You can never return to that well again if you put a bow on it like that! Not without doing some major retconning gymnastics, that is. I know there’s an anthology of Captain’s Table short stories still a ways off in the future, but this is an unusually hard stop.
• Once they leave Devernia and start trying to find the titans’ origin point, the Enterprise feels weirdly alone in the universe in a way that you rarely see in Star Trek. Even in Voyager, civilization never feels more than an episode away even in the Delta Quadrant. There’s probably a way to make such a thing truly interesting, but this story isn’t set up for something like that.
• Pike calls Number One “Lt. Cmdr. Lefler” once and never again. It’s starting to kind of weird me out how much Trek authors are beginning to insist on loading a ton of lore onto this specific one-off character. Is it just because she was played by someone who ended up being super-famous? (12)
• Pike is concerned about Hompaq’s forehead ridges, since Klingons don’t look like that in his time. By the end of the book, however, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for him… (21)
• Dr. Boyce, p. 50: “Captain, I’ve got a very agitated patient here who demands to see you. You want me to put him out until you’ve got time or what?” Good Lord, Boyce! There has to be something in the Starfleet medical officer handbook about that. Something about sedating inconveniences until you’re ready for them wigs me out. I feel like Will Smith worrying about the neuralyzer in Men in Black. (50)
• Hompaq approves of haggis as an honorable delicacy. I guess it is very gagh-like, when you get down to it. (173)
• Fear of Flying and The Shining are taught in schools in Pike’s time. I didn’t know what the former was until I saw it mentioned here, but it turns out it’s a pretty seminal feminist text. Considering a quick Wikipedia perusal credits it with popularizing a term for sex without commitment or emotional attachment called the “zipless fuck”, I don’t see it passing . The Star Trek future truly is for all areas of life, including your local board of education. (221)

Final Assessment

Bad. Immediately after its best installment, the Captain’s Table rolls out its worst. It’s unfortunate for Pike to get handed such a goofy dud of a story when there are so few from this era that put him front and center. Whales laying eggs and organically evolving fusion drives fits comfortably alongside Spock’s brain being stolen and Abraham Lincoln in space in a way I can’t exactly bring myself to call complimentary. The story doesn’t really know where it’s going and fizzles out hard by the time it reaches its early conclusion. This is the only true bomb of the Captain’s Table series, so it’s unfortunate that it closes out on such a sour note.

NEXT TIME: Back to the movies for Star Trek: Insurrection