The Romulan Way (Star Trek: The Original Series, No. 35) [Paperback]

Diane Duane (Author), Peter Morwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1987

They are a race of warriors, a noble people to whom honor is all. They are cousin to the Vulcan, ally to the Klingon, and Starfleet's most feared and cunning adversary. They are the Romulans -- and for eight years, Federation Agent Terise LoBrutto has hidden in their midst.

Now the presence of a captured Starfleet officer forces her to make a fateful choice -- between exposure and escape. Between maintaining her cover -- and saving the life of Dr. Leonard McCoy.

Here, in a startlingly different adventure, is the truth behind one of the most fascinating alien races ever created in STAR TREK -- the Romulans.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pocket Books; First Edition edition (August 1, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671634984
• ISBN-13: 978-0671634988
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,717,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Diane Duane was born in New York City -- a descendant of New York's first mayor -- and worked there as a psychiatric nurse before leaving the profession for the only one she loved better, the business of writing. Since the publication of her first novel in 1981, she's written fifty more, not to mention numerous short stories, comics, computer games and screenplays for TV and film, and has picked up the occasional award here and there. (She has also worked with Star Trek in more media than anyone else alive.)

Right now she's probably best known for her "Young Wizards" series of young adult fantasy novels, featuring the New York-based wizards Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan -- in business for twenty-five years now, their most recent adventure being described in the ninth YW novel, "A Wizard of Mars" (just released in paperback).

DD shares a two hundred-year-old cottage in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland with her husband, the Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, a laid-back white cat named Goodman, and various overworked computers... an odd but congenial environment for the staging of epic battles between good and evil and the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination. (And a lot of ethnic cooking: her own favorite foods come from the cuisines of central Europe and the Mediterranean.) In her spare time she gardens (weeding, mostly), studies German and Italian, listens to shortwave and satellite radio, and dabbles in astronomy, computer graphics, iaido, amateur cartography, and desktop publishing ... while also trying to figure out how to make more spare time.

Her favorite color is blue, her favorite food is a weird kind of Swiss scrambled-potato dish called maluns, she was born in a Year of the Dragon, and her sign is "Runway 24 Left, Hold For Clearance."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, excellent plot, August 1, 2001

By 

Rabbi Yonassan Gershom (Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Romulan Way (Star Trek, No 35/Rihannsu Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)

Like many of the early TOS novels, this one really has some substance to it. Diane Duane has done an excellent job of developing the back history of the Romulan culture, explaining how and why they split off from the Vulcans at the time of Surak, etc. Her detailed description of the long generation-ship journey to the planet which would become known as Romulus is especially well done. During this journey, the Rihannsu (which is what the Romulans call themselves) consciously changed their language and social structure to reject the logical way of Surak and become an old-new version of the warrior society that once existed on Vulcan. (I found myself wondering if Duane had patterned this history on certain aspects of modern Israeli culture, which has consciously rejected the pacifist philosophy of European Jewry to go back to the biblical warrior mode -- but that's a whole other story.)

The plot itself takes place in the 23rd century, long after the Romulan-Vulcan split. The Federation has lost contact with an undercover operative on Romulus, and now fears for her life. Dr. McCoy is taken prisoner by the Romulans and ends up incarcerated at the same place where the Federation agent has infiltrated Romulan society and is passing for a household servant. Now she must be very careful about acknowledging McCoy, lest she blow her cover and get them both killed. Nahraht the Horta (a silicon-based lifeform who eats rock, and who also appears in several other Duane novels) plays an important, if at times humorous, role in the rescue of Dr. McCoy. To tell you more would be a spoiler, so let me just say that this book is one of the best reads in the TOS series. It also sets the scene for a number of characters and events in future books by Diane Duane.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What the Show Should Have Been Like!, February 18, 1999

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[e-mail] (Newtown, CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Romulan Way (Star Trek: The Original Series, No. 35) (Mass Market Paperback)

A great pity this is out of print, as it's one of the best examples of real world-building in a Star Trek novel. It holds up as a work of pure speculative fiction, as very few other works set in this universe do. Instead of reading a juvenile history of some Terrestrial civilisation and crudely imitating it, as appears to be the practice of many Star Trek writers, Duane creates a complete and believable culture. If the people who write scripts for the shows and films had any sense, they would regard novels like this as canon and dump most of the absurd tripe that the creators of the Old Show (largely from outside real, that is to say literary, science fiction) developed.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not bad; interesting background on the Romulans, August 16, 2008

By 

Roger J. Buffington (Huntington Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Romulan Way: Rihannsu #2 (Kindle Edition)

The Romulans are the "other" bad guys in the Star Trek universe, along with the Klingons, from whom they differ considerably.

"The Romulan Way" features a fairly interesting storyline coupled with some very interesting flashbacks of early Romulan history, which explains (this author's interpretation) how the Romulans left Vulcan, and why they became implacable enemies of Earth and the Federation.

This is an above-average Star Trek novel. Its main flaw is a somewhat murky style of writing, and a somewhat slow-moving plot. It did hold my interest, however, and most Star Trek fans will enjoy this story.