This is quite different from the previous book in the series—more of a disaster movie kind of plot than Wagon Train in space. The plot certainly moved right along, but I'm beginning to tire of the plot-driven nature of it. Sure, most of Star Trek is plot-driven, but the best novels also have a fair bit of character development, and these don't.

Star Trek: New Earth Series #Two of Six

First Thoughts:

I’ve enjoyed and am enjoying Deal Wesley Smith’s time travel novels, Thunder Mountain series but I didn’t know until recently that in the year 2000 he had co-written a few Star Trek novels. I admit I have not read all of this series but the books do seem to stand on their own and to catch up the reader nicely to what had happened in previous books, usually!

Story:

Essentially the colonists on the newly discovered planet, Belle Terre, find a planet with Earth-like conditions that everyone seems to love. But the snake in Paradise is their own moon, which has a core full of a quantum material that is highly prized by the Federation and others to have more power than dilithium crystals. It has a bad habit of being unstable and is about to explode, raining radiation on the planet and make it uninhabitable.

Our original Star Trek crew must figure out a way of either stopping or mitigating the explosion before it’s too late. Some good action sequences here, and the reading is easy and fast. You could easily finish this story in a matter of hours.

Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey put together a plot that is fast-paced but they leave up in the air whatever happened the starship The Rattlesnake, which had an interesting mission of checking out other planets in other star systems and they discovered an energy-sucking anomaly floating through civilizations and destroying them. Fascinating premise. Then the authors dropped it! Yikes!

Final Thoughts:

Interesting novel series, though written 19 years ago I just found out about it. Some of the six-novel series are strong, others not so much. Recommended, especially for fans of the Original Series.


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Second in a six-part Star Trek series, "Wagon Train To the Stars", in which Kirk tries to save the newly colonized planet from the imminent explosion of its moon. Good basic Star Trek adventure. ( )