Looking For a Good Book

STAR TREK WEEK

While I have, to date, watched every episode of every Star Trek series and read many of the original series novels, and one or two from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and even Enterprise, I’d not read anything from the Voyager series. Probably for good reason. But I had this book on my Kindle (I don’t remember where I got it but it was probably on sale at some point). With my usual (bad) luck, this happens to be the third book in a trilogy.

There’s an imbalance of dark matter in different universes which is causing the universes to merge. The effects, if they do, would threaten both universes and everything that lives in each. It will be up to the crew of Voyager to rescue both universes.

Seeking help, Chakotay and Paris visit a planet in the ‘other’ merging universe, but the locals don’t take too kindly to the invaders and their prophecy of devastation. And in their ‘own’ universe, Captain Janeway and crew are madly searching for hidden dark matter that could bring about the end to everything. But even in the race for time, Harry Kim manages to fall in love (or at least develop a schoolboy crush) on a visitor who is trying to help them solve the dark matter problem.

Is it possible that the answers lie closer to home?

This was … eh.

I was not a huge fan of the series but I was hoping for something that would give me some new and better character development, but it wasn’t there.

This is very plot-driven (not surprising for a story in a larger franchise, I suppose) and it very clearly requires the reader to have read the previous books in the series.

On the surface, this should have what we look for in a good adventure story – the stakes should be high and the danger of not making it feel real. Well the stakes couldn’t be much higher than the end of everything. But it didn’t feel real in any sense.

The story that I got with Chakotay and Paris was interesting to me, in part because it felt immediate – I didn’t need to know much before getting in to their story.

But, with the exception of the Chakotay/Paris story, most of this ‘race for time’ has very ‘ho-hum’ to me. I couldn’t get into the story and I never really believed they would fail. Maybe that comes with the fact that we know this isn’t their end – we’re reading it because we’re Star Trek fans and we know what happens to Voyager and most of the crew.  Having us hold our breath wondering what might happen just isn’t going to work, so then it should be all about the ‘how are they going to do it’ but that was missing for me as well (again, perhaps that was teased to us in one of the previous books?).

This was released as a stand-alone book, so I think it’s fair to review it as such and as such, it doesn’t work.

Looking for a good book? Star Trek: Voyager: Shadow of Heaven by Christie Golden is the third book in a trilogy which finds the crew of Voyager wrapping up their quest to stop two universes from merging and raining destruction down on everything in both known universes.

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Star Trek: Voyager: Shadow of Heaven 

author: Christie Golden

series: Star Trek: Voyager: Dark Matters #3, Star Trek: Voyager #21

publisher: Pocket Books

ISBN: 9780671035846

paperback, 261 pages