Customer Reviews

Chains of Command (Star Trek The Next Generation, No 21)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This early Star Trek The Next Generation numbered novel can certainly be counted among the best. This is also the only novel by these two authors, W.A. McCay and E.L. Flood, which is too bad considering that with this early STNG novel, they set up an intriguing, well paced plot and carried it through to fruition quite nicely, which was somewhat rare with the earlier STNG numbered novels.

As cover art goes, for the early Star Trek The Next Generation novels, this is a decent but not too remarkable one, although it is among the rare ones with Dr. Beverly Crusher on it.

The premise:

The Enterprise is exploring a remote and devastated group of Class M (Munshara) planets when they receive a distress call from a group of what they find to be human slaves on a remote and quite forbidding glacial planet. When the slaves revolt, Captain Picard is unable to help them but they succeed despite the lack of Federation assistance. With the revolt over and the overseers successfully put down, Captain Picard and the slaves soon learn that the true controllers are coming to reclaim their property.

What follows is an extremely interesting and well told story, to include an Avian type race. I'd definitely recommend this particular early STNG novel to any and all fans of Star Trek fiction as it will make an excellent addition to your Star Trek library. {ssintrepid}

Star Trek - The Next Generation: Chains of Command written by Bill McCay and Eloise Flood is an interesting story as the U.S.S. Enterprise and her crew explore a remote sector of space, they run acrossed a group of devastated class-M planets and wonder what had happened.

As the story progresses the Enterprise receives as distress call from a glacial world... and the call is from humans. Human occupation is not supposed to be this far out in remote space, but nevertheless, humans are calling for assistance. Now, the Enterprise crew becomes involved and finds out that there are human slaves on the forbidding world. But the ultimate slave masters are a big yellow avian race... known by the slaves as chickens but they are known as Tseetsk.

It seems that the Tseetsk have been in this sector of space for a very long time and have digressed throughout the years due to an ongoing war that has pretty much devastated this sector of space. All in all, this story will captivate you as you become engrossed into the story and the resolution to this story is quite novel.

This is a solid 4 star book and has some unique parts as the Enterprise and her crew fall into the middle of a conflict.

The Enterprise encounters a sequence of planets that have undergone mass destruction. Worf correctly surmises that the massive damage they see is the scars of war. When they come up on another planet that is similarly scarred and ice-bound, they make contact with a human that is astonished to see humans in command with a star ship. He only has time to challenge Picard and ask him who his overseers are before he is cut down. The Enterprise has come upon a planet where humans are slaves to the Tseetsk, a species of large, intelligent birdlike creatures and the humans have just revolted. The man that was killed was an overseer, a human boss over the slave gangs.
When he realizes who they are, Koban, the leader of the human slaves tries to enlist Picard's help in his battle with the Tseetsk. Although they have lost the ability to maintain it, the Tseetsk are in possession of a technology vastly superior to the Federation's. A tachyon based messenger missile was so powerful that it's mere passage proximate to the Enterprise knocked out several primary systems.
When Picard refuses to immediately take sides, Koban has Troi and him kidnapped and taken to a remote outpost. Their captors then battle with a species indigenous to the planet and learn that all of the planetary damage the Enterprise has encountered was due to a war between the Tseetsk thousands of years before. When two giant Tseetsk ships answer the messenger missile, Riker is forced to try to negotiate with them. Fortunately, in the nick of time, the Enterprise crew is able to locate Picard and Troi, beam them back to the ship with the leader of the indigenous Tseetsk and they manage to reach a peaceful accord.
I found very little tension in this episode, while Picard and Troi are in danger while they are being held captive, it is the slave humans that are nearly all killed. The ending was much too brief, there was not enough buildup to create the suitable tension and everyone was very eager to reach a solution. There was no significant posturing on the part of the slave humans, indigenous Tseetsk or the Tseetsk that arrived in the ships. Everyone put aside their thousands of years of hatred and differences in a matter of minutes, which is very unlikely.

Once again we have one of those As-Mediocore-As-You-Can-Get kind of books, with potential and a less than satisfactory execution.

Like so many other Trek books, this one- taking place in the post-Wesley phase of the fourth season- is also backed up with an ethical dilemma.

There is a very low risk in that kind of story, since intellectual people- myself included :)- rarely grow tired of ethical problems, like we do of so many other things.

It doesn't work that way in this novel, though, since the ethical questions concerning slavery are ignored entirely, instead pointing the story in the direction of the all-too-familiar action-adventure formula, and doesn't do even that very well. The continuing presence of Deja Vu is very disconcerting.

As for the plot-twists in this book: they are rare and predictable, but the story doesn't grow boring because of the professional writing style of the authors. But even that doesnt eradicate the feeling of this book being written as a distraction, as if the authors didn't have anything better to do.

The other big problem turned out (once again...) to be the characterization. Once again we get a bunch of characters who have the same names and positions as our familiar TNG characters, but- with the possible exeption of Doctor Crusher and maybe Riker, who have prominent roles in the book- don't have anything else in common with their television counterparts.

In short: This was a readable TNG book that wasn't good or bad, packed with unfamiliar characters, but an all too familiar plot. If you don't know what mediocore means, read it. This is it at it's purest.

This novel has a very good idea behind it, and there is an adequate amount of action, an adequate amount of verbal sparring, and an adequate amount of ethical ambiguity to keep things interesting. The characterizations are handled well, although I will admit that those for the non-Enterprise characters are handled slightly better than those for the regular characters. The writing is smooth and professional, with few if any of the sloppy proofreading errors so common in mass-market adventure novels in general, and Star Trek novels in particular.

My only quibble is that the ending seemed a bit abrupt and pat, but only a bit. Just barely enough to make the rating four stars instead of five.

I recommend the book be read, but don't expect a blockbuster like Vendetta or Imzadi. The book is a little slow at the beginning, but does pick up as the story progresses.
If you like a lot of political action, then this book has some good twists. Also, it introduces the reader to a new alien race with an interesting history.

I would recomend this book to anyone who likes star trek or science-fiction! It was well written and I can't wait for more books written by this author!