Thursday, May 20, 2010

Star Trek - The Children of Kings by David Stern

Spoiler Level: Medium

The nice thing about the new Trek movie is that since Captain Pike was featured so prominently, it inspired Pocket Books to publish a new Pike book.

I like Pike books. I'll confess I still haven't gotten around to reading the Pike book in the Captain's Table series, but I liked Vulcan's Glory, thoroughly enjoyed The Rift, and absolutely loved Burning Dreams.

This is a good one as well. In a lot of ways it's also more of a Dr. Boyce book than a Pike book, which gives us a nice in-depth view of the early Enterprise crew. The relationship between Number One and Spock is great; one of the things I like about the Pike era is that Spock isn't first officer, he's the up-and-coming whiz kid. I like the different dynamic that brings to the Enterprise.

The story also deals heavily with the Orions, including shedding some light on how a race that both treats its women as slaves yet at the same time is a slave to their women. It was a neat twist when they revealed it and the end of the Orion episodes in Star Trek: Enterprise, and it was certainly more 21st Century PC, but it left me going "Wait a minute, how does that work...?" This book proposes that it's something of a constant power struggle between the two genders, and it's an interesting one to watch.

This is also the last new Trek book on the schedule until November, so I'll be taking the opportunity over the next several months to catch up on some older Trek books. Next month will be last month's Star Trek: Online - The Needs of the Many, and the next four months after that I plan on reading Keith R. A. DeCandido's IKS Gorkon series. I took a look at my bookshelf and discovered that if they stopped publishing Trek books completely, I could still read a new Trek book off of my shelf every month for two years! So while some people are cranky about the break, I welcome it.

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