Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History [Mass Market Paperback]

I'm left with mixed feelings regarding Forgotten History. As a Star Trek fan, I enjoyed how well this book made sense of Original Series and Animated Series episodes just as Watching the Clock made sense of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War and time travel in general. However, as a trek literature reader, I found the book a little dry and the characters not very engaging.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. I have enjoyed all of Christopher Bennett's novels, especially how well he handles complex science fiction subjects, but with regards to the Department of Temporal Investigations as a series, I was afraid it would be a one trick pony. Through the entire read of Forgotten History, I was never able to get into the DTI characters like I did with Watching the Clock. The new characters Grey and Delgado were interesting original characters but for some reason, they weren't as engaging as Garcia and Ranjea were in Watching the Clock. I also had a problem getting hooked with the Original Series characters largely because their story often jumped through spans of months or years.

Even though I wasn't gripped by the story or characters, Forgotten History was still interesting because of what it took from and added to the Star Trek saga. What significantly impressed me was how well The Animated Series episodes and elements were incorporated into the novel. Often TAS stories are ignored but Bennett did a great job making some of the strange TAS stories fit into a modern novel targeted to adults. For example, the Animated Series life support belts are mentioned as is why what appeared to be a great technology would have been discarded by Starfleet.

Though these details are of interest to a Star Trek fan, they tended to bog down the flow of the story. The book has several pages of what I would consider rambling where a character's thoughts are described, gaps in the Trek timeline are filled in, or large swaths of time in the novel are covered which sometimes left me thinking, "Get on with it." Many of these ramblings or musings added depth to the franchise, such as supplying a back story to Saavik and Spock's relationship, but it often made for a dry read.

Forgotten History not only added to my appreciation of a fictional universe (er, multiverse) but to my perspective on real history. The book has left me questioning my view of historical events and persons, showing me the need to be objective and wonder how much of what I know is colored by those doing the documentation and what is left out of the history books.

Although I didn't enjoy the reading experience, I did appreciate the depth Forgotten History brings to Star Trek. It is definitely worth reading and I recommended it to all fans of Star Trek: The Original Series. I look forward to future works by Christopher Bennett but I have less enthusiasm for DTI books after reading Forgotten History than I did when I began.

This is not the novel I was expecting. From my interpretation of the blurb, I expected to read about Kirk and company galavanting across the ages in the timeship Enterprise. This is not what happens. Forgotten History is a story about time travel, and it certainly contains time travel, but it is not a time travel story. Those who have read the earlier DTI novel Watching the Clock (or possibly just seen 300 Days of Summer) should have a good idea about what I mean.

Forgotten History works very well as a Trek novel. The scenes and characterization feel spot on. The story takes place across ten years of TOS history. It involves many episodes (including several from the animated series) and references several other novels, but is definitely capable of standing on it's own. Similarly, it serves as a follow up to both Ex Machina and The Darkness Drops Again, and it builds upon them without requiring the reader to be familiar with either. Best of all in my opinion though, is the material linked less directly to previous works. There is a scene that takes place after TOS but manages to capture the same feel, it's like watching an episode from season 5. There is also some excellent material regarding Spock's personal relationships. Finally, the original characters, both antagonists and TOS era DTI personal managed to feel real and true to period while subverting my expectations.

The one major weakness of the novel in my mind is the "modern" TNG era section. This portion is essentially a sequel to Watching the Clock, and serves as a frame story for the rest of the novels events. Once again, the characterization stands out, and it compliments Watching the Clock, but unlike the rest of the novel, I don't think that it would stand well on it's own. When I caught references to Ex Machina I felt like I was getting an independent perspective, that I could experience one novel without even knowing about the other, but it felt like too much would be lost from the frame story without having experienced the characters before. I think this was a result of the frame story being merely a frame story rather than a full B plot. Watching the Clock had flashbacks interspersed through it that played well of the main story and felt more balanced than the narrative here. Without more time to focus on the DTI characters, the reader has to have prior experience for them to feel as real as the TOS characters.

That being said, if the worst thing that can be said about a book is that you may have to read another excellent book to get the full effect, then it can't be that bad. I would highly recommend both, but particularly Forgotten History, and I look forward to any Department of Temporal Investigations novels that may arrive in the future.

As with the first book in this DTI series, this book spent quite a bit of time pulling in all the other examples of time travel already used in the Star Trek universe. This lead to a fairly dry first half where it was more of a reunion episode than a new story line. It was somewhat interesting to see some events explained and fit into the overall ST universe; it was illuminating but not exciting.

The story itself doesn't get going until the second half of the book where different time periods and timelines meet and bleed into one another. A 'new' parallel timeline is introduced that is interesting enough I'd like to see it fleshed out a bit further in future visits. But, that may also count as a minus; by the time the story started, there wasn't enough time for detail. The story line developed, reached a critical point and was resolved fairly quickly.

Overall, I liked the book but I'm not sure how much longer I'll keep reading this series