Customer Reviews

The Disinherited (Star Trek, Book 59)

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

 

 

Some Star Trek novels just don't feel authentic. Often, the ship and the characters are static figures working in a vacuume. (not the outer space kind...) This book gets it right. It feels like it is a true part of the Star Trek universe. Many tiny little details from the three seasons of the original series are woven together into a fabric of Trek "reality." There is one in joke concerning a dual role that I really got a kick out of. This is a quick, fun read and I reccoment it to original series fans of every stripe.

I have read well over 100 Star Trek books and this one was the best I've read in a very long time. A number of different elements that all tie together nicely in the end make for a good story. One thing that I really enjoyed the most was that this book did one of the better jobs of capturing some of the nature of the relationships amongst the crew that holds true to the original show. The only thing that I didnt enjoy fully was the view this book tried to give into the psyche of a young Ensign Chekov. This was a very good and enjoyable read.

Star Trek: The Disinherited by Peter David with Michael Jan Friedman and Robert Greenberger is a TREK tale told well. The collaboration of the three authors gives the story a full body of adventure as the characters are fleshed out. You get the feeling while reading this book that someone has spend some time writing this story.

As Kirk and crew, minus Uhura, speed off to save another Federation world suffering from an unknown space attack, only to find the worlds completely devastated. Ready adventure is apparent when the attacking fleet severly damages the Enterprise and make their escape.

But, Spock finds something of great interest that could make a difference in the fate of the Federation, let alone the Enterprise. Uhura is on a mission of her own... making this a two story adventure... working the plots of these stories together, the readers get a better picture of the adventure.

This is solid classic TREK told well and written to keep your interest with an ending only found in the TREK universe.

I am a big fan of Michael Jan Friedman and his long-time collaborator Robert Greenberger. Their collaboration with long-time Star Trek veteran Peter David is a great success. The plot goes like this: A number of colonies in a remote star system are seemingly randomly attacked by a vicious fleet of unknown origin. Kirk and crew arrive to investigate, while Uhura does a sabbatical serving on a different ship but working on the same mystery. During her stay away from the Enterprise, she realizes that the commodore of this new ship is very much interested in keeping her on a permanent basis, and struggles with the decision of leaving the Enterprise (It is funny to imagine what would have happened to the Star Trek cannon if she indeed had left...). The story also details the problems a very young Ensign Chekov encounters in adapting to Starship Enterprise to which he has recently been assigned. The characterizations are wonderfully detailed and extremely consistent with Star Trek cannon, and the day to day living of higher as well as lower rank officers are presented so vividly and in so much exciting detail that you feel like you are on the Starship Enterprise watching them going about their daily chores. The novel is definitely a big page-turner. But, when all is said and done, the best thing about this book is the relentless, breath-taking, never-ending action. Kirk is in top form, masterfully commanding his ship in one conflict/dogfight after another. This novel makes you realize why Kirk was awarded the rank of captain at the youngest age in Federation history! The mystery concerning the vicious alien fleet is very satisfactorily explained at the end, and even a moral message or two are squeezed in. I have read a lot of Star Trek novels in my life time, but this ranks up there in the top five! I will dig into the next collaboration of this author team (Doomsday World, along with Carmen Carter, starring the Next Generation) and can only hope it is as good as this one...

I've read well over 100 Star Trek novels; this one is not a standout that I would recommend to someone if they wanted ten recommendations (or even twenty), but it is solid and enjoyable. Not surprisingly, given who the authors are, it is well-written, and (perhaps surprisingly,) the collaboration is pretty seamless; I thought that I would recognize each individual's writing style, and be able to tell who contributed what, but that was not the case other than a few places where I definitely recognized Peter David's sense of humor.

This is a decidedly unusually Original Series book in that it involves one of the crew working on another Federation starship. That section, Uhura's, is the rather slow section of the book. It is a combination of investigation and personal drama. The whole section is not very well written. The Kirk and Chekov stories on the Enterprise are much more interesting. The Chekov story is a drama, and is fairly well written and has a good characterisation of Chekov. The Kirk story, the main one for the Enterprise, is a combination of investigation and combat. The combat scenes are quite well done. For the rest of it, the depiction of the characters is reasonably good. The dialogue for this section is generally quite good, and there are several really good scenes. I seem to have made this book out as less satisfying than I actually find it. It is good entertainment, with the majority of the book more than making up for the slow pace of Uhura's section. It's just a little too obvious that different authors wrote different sections of the text.

What a great book! This was the first star trek novel I had read in years, and I was enthralled with it! I took it on the train to New York, and was expecting to be disapointed (all because of Peter David,who usually fills his star trek books with bad language and explicit material, esp. "Q-Squared" ) but Rob Greenberger and Michael Jan Friedman seem to be a good influence (I suspect that most of the good stuff was their ideas). Incidentally, parts of this book, in fact the main theme, bear a striking resemblance to the mvie "Star Trek IX:Insurrection".The two seperate storylines converge near the end, and during them, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen next. Also a good book for Uhura fans, because she plays a major role, after all, the chapters having to do with her make up half the book......This book will keep you guessing till the final chapters,it will...did I mention that this was a great book?

I enjoyed how the author wove two differing stories, one on the Enterprise and the other on the Lexington, together to form a cohesive novel. The characters are well thought out, the story plot is true Trek, and the space battles are what anyone could come to expect from a typical big-budget Trek movie. Well done. A good read for any Trek fan.

This is one of those Star Trek novels which is written by an ensemble of writers. An ensemble writing team is a key factor in a novel's downfall UNLESS the authors are each writing a different storyline.

This becomes apparent through the errors on pages 35 and 68.

Otherwise, the Disinherited is a typical Star Trek novel.

The story told in this book is rather dull and boring. I had hoped for much better. It also failed one of my major criteria for a novel; it was never edited. At various points throughout the book Sulu is refered to as the navigator or helmsman. On particular scene has Uhura, seeing Chekov look at her, ponder about the navigator. The very next paragraph she is now ponder about the navigator (Sulu). Very annoying. In order to make this book more enjoyable I found myself visualizing very colorful "sign language" by various character. Sign language plays an important part in the story.

Overall, I was very disappointed in this book.