“A BRAZEN HEIST Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the Enterprise crew race to find out who has stolen Data’s android brother B-4—and for what sinister purpose.

A BROKEN PROMISE One desperate father risks all for the son he abandoned forty years ago—but is he ready to pay the price for redemption?

A DARING MISSION Against overwhelming odds, and with time running out, Commander Worf has only one chance to avert a disaster. But how high a price will he pay for victory?”

One of the most unfortunate tendencies in the Star Trek franchise, prior to the “reboot” in the current films, has been the lack of a solid ending.  Deep Space Nine and Voyager both managed to end relatively well, but only the former managed to take that ending and evolve into a post-finale series of novels with actual heft.  The rest of the post-finale fiction has, to one extent or another, been devoted to fixing what the final on-screen word dismantled.

In that regard, there is no more damning culprit than Star Trek: Nemesis, the first attempt at having non-Trek insiders write and direct a film in the franchise.  More books and story arcs in the post-Nemesis era have been devoted to repairing the status quo than I could count, and the fact that this is still an ongoing process, all these years later, is a testimony to how terrible the film really was.

David Mack is no stranger to stepping into the fray and repairing the damage of ill-considered story direction.  The Destiny trilogy took various pieces of the Borg and Enterprise continuity and brought them to a thrilling conclusion, completely changing the status quo of “original timeline” Trek in the process.  I’ve often said that it brought Trek fiction out of the doldrums and set the novel continuity on the right course; as rough a start as the Typhon Pact concept might have had, it’s been handled extremely well of late.

With recent Typhon Pact novels setting up a solid Cold War-inspired narrative, this trilogy comes at the galactic political tensions from a distinctly different direction.  It also takes on one of the absolute worst elements of Star Trek: Nemesis: the infamous “B-4”, the precursor to Data, who was left with Data’s memories (among other things) at the end of the film.  As obvious as it was to just about everyone where that could lead, the novels have largely ignored the matter.

One notable exception is Immortal Coil by Jeffrey Lang, which serves as a bit of a prelude to this story.  Many of the details from that novel are used, along with the android-centric details from various episodes of The Next Generation, as the foundation for the rather intriguing events of this first volume in the Cold Equations trilogy.

The title, back cover blurb, and a bit of common sense combine to tell the reader exactly where the story is headed, and like so many of the post-series story arcs, this corrects what many fans felt was a mistaken on-screen demise.  That said, Mack takes the idea in a very different direction.  Anyone expecting a simple return to the beloved status quo should know better, and as always, nothing can be regained without a price.  (In this case, it meant a loss of one of my favorite novel-continuity supporting characters.)

This being the first novel of a trilogy, there is clearly a great deal of setup and introduction involved.  Mack doubles down on that with a lengthy middle section that is, in essence, one character’s recitation of the past few decades of his life.  Since I love the “secret history” concept, I didn’t mind the content much at all.  What was slightly off-putting was the first person, present tense (forgive me if there is a more correct grammatical term).  Readers of The Hunger Games will understand what I mean, and may recall that I had some initial difficulty getting past my usual aversion to stories told in that fashion.

In the end, it is a minor point; my interest in Mack’s attempt to “correct” the existence of B-4 and the events of Star Trek: Nemesis by placing it in a solid, entertaining context was more than enough to overcome my dislike of the writing style choices.  And ultimately, the story is not about B-4, Data, or even Dr. Soong; it’s about how the existence of Soong androids as a whole has an impact on the state of play between the Khitomer Accord powers and the Typhon Pact.  It’s all a means to a far more interesting end, and a solid start to the Cold Equations trilogy.

Released: October 2012
Price: $0.99 (Kindle version)
Acquisition method: Amazon.com