It made perfect sense; a new captain should be assigned an easy, shake-down cruise. Time to get to know the ship and its crew without putting much stress on them.
So, brand new Captain Kirk takes on a traveling Vaudville show and is instructed to visit all the distant star bases to lift morale by taking the act “on the road.”
The idea of the book was a good one but I did not enjoy the circus performers and the fact that Kirk was instantly attracted to one of them.
There are some added characters; a Vulcan juggler who is emotional, a new alien race is discovered drifting through Federation space and Klingons come to mix it all together.
There are some added characters; a Vulcan juggler who is emotional, a new alien race is discovered drifting through Federation space and Klingons come to mix it all together.
Sounds like it should work, right? Except it doesn’t. It was exceedingly slow, far too introspective and just boring to read. I’m not the kind of reader that needs a fistfight in every chapter but this book takes its time to get going.
Having been published in 1986 it’s conceivable the author was under strict control not to do anything alarming to the franchise. So maybe I’m not being fair.
But it all comes down to whether I enjoyed the story or not.
I didn’t.
To bad too. I was really hoping for something a bit more fun.
Okay, that was quite a bit of bashing the book. It wasn’t all bad: there were some parts of the book that I did like.
Since this is an origins story it was a lot of fun to read how Sulu came aboard, the bad feelings the senior crew held comparing Kirk to the departed Captain Pike, how Scotty treated the new captain and how Chekov was always on board the ship.
That last point filled in the gaping plot hole from The Wrath of Kahn. How Kahn recognizes Chekov even though he wasn’t on the TV show until the season after his appearance.
So it did work on some levels. It just didn’t capture my imagination.
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