This week, Kirk’s battle with the Gorn captain remains the stuff of legend a century later, but the official Blu-Rays all cut off right at the good part. But when Picard tastes of the forbidden donut, he’ll get his own chance to put his stamp on history. How many personal growth arcs can Barclay sustain? Can beggars still not be choosers in the 24th century? And which TOS episode is this book really a sequel to? All this and more in Requiem, the perfect book to read after a phaser-induced siesta.
This week, when a plague sweeps through Bajoran resettlement camps, Sisko is hesitant to send in his first-stringers. But when a prophecy from Kai Opaka about a healer girl unifying the world makes its way to him, he tasks Dax with finding a straw of hay in a stack of needles. What does Ferengi poetry sound like? How do Bajorans interpret Cinderella? And how many views are Odo’s makeup tutorials getting? All this and more in Warchild, the book where Bashir gets all the donuts he can eat.
This week, the Enterprise can’t turn around: it’s in Lovecraft country. But when a ship emerges from a nebula that things more commonly go into, its crew claims the Starfleet of its time is in the pocket of Big Microchip—and one of Kirk’s crew is the CEO. So who’s the sellout? What are the real dangers to watch out for in space? And is “redshirt” actually a term used by Starfleet officers? All this and more in Crossroad, the book where Nemo is the last thing you want to find.
This week, Geordi may be on a field trip to an active volcano, but his peers sure don’t have the warmth they used to. That’ll change soon enough, however, when they suddenly need him to do the entire group project. What’s with the Starfleet Academy books and flooding? Is there anything more soul-withering than a Vulcan scowl? And what good cadet doesn’t know all the legal two-letter Scrabble words? All this and more in Atlantis Station, the book that’s a race to the bottom, and I don’t mean the ocean.
This week, getting the Klingons and a race they waged war against for seventy years to get along turns out to be exactly as frustrating as it sounds. But the negotiations go from bad to worse when Riker and Deanna go missing, Geordi goes for-real blind, and the Fox News Kool-Aid impairs Data’s command judgment. Which officer does the most puff-piece interviews? Does the Federation provide adequate phaser training for civilians? And can you really work a combadge with a spoon? All this and more in Foreign Foes, or, Blame It on the Grain.