Star Trek Online: The Needs of the Many [Mass Market Paperback]

I'm a little disapointed with this one. I normally consume Trek books of any era, by any author with great delight. You don't even want to know how many copies of "How Much For Just The Planet" I have.

I don't regret buying this one, but I regret not buying it at a used book store for less.

One issue is perhaps unavoidable given the overall format. With the whole "Living History" idea, I expect some certain similarities in tone and format to World War Z. But on this one, there are a couple times when I can almost hear the rustle of pages from That Other Book in the background. Again, that could be simply because it's a "living history" about a massive war.

The other, greater issue is the author's clear and obvious choice to politicize the book. Between dedicating the book to a currently active politician, and making assorted thinly veiled references to policies of a Recent President Who Shall Not Be Named as well as current events, it gets pretty ham-handed.

Social commentary has always been an enriching element in Star Trek, but this work is somewhat tainted by it's level of current-day political commentary, enhanced by the "narrator's" penchant for wistfully sermonizing, sermons which become downright sticky and gooey sweet.

"Jake" ends up reducing the notional interviews from interviews to a socio-political soapbox for the author to use him to mumble from, a vehicle for his own commentary as opposed to focussing on the experiences and stories of his interview subjects. It's rarely a good thing when the focus of a documentary becomes the interviewer, and not the subjects or their stories. If I want to read an author's politicizing, I'll go to their homepage or blog. The digs at a recent administration and political faction become a wink at the camera that damages the immersion, and wastes type that could have been used telling a better story. (This being despite my personal dislike of said administration.)

Still, there are some good vignettes, some good bits of dialogue, but it's somewhat inferior to what I've come to expect in current Star Trek reading material.

Wow...

I walked into reading this book with pretty high expectations, mostly because I've had the experience of the universe it unveils via the Star Trek Online MMORPG that's been recently released. To me this book meant a way to grasp greater understanding for the twisted events that lead up to the fractured universe that prevails in the STO game, in some hope to comprehend how things could get "that much worse" for the Federation and its allies as players quickly discover in that universe. For the uninitiated, keep reading.

In terms of the goal of being an illuminating history? It does that quite well. You come to comprehend what has happened to Star Trek's universe that leaves things in so many shambles. It even explains the mindset that the game designers behind Star Trek Online went with rather than a more classical approach to Star Trek where peaceful exploration and diplomacy would take a far stronger mantle than they really do. So far that, bravo, this novel really leaves no question as to what is going on and why it's going on.

But that's about the only goal I feel this novel achieved. I've read literally dozens of other Trek novels. Some I've enjoyed, others I'm willing to admit having hated, and others were lukewarm. At the end of the day though, I've come to accept these novels as a reasonable and acceptable replacement for the disappearance of Star Trek's ongoing post Nemesis development from the air, film, or digital waves. It's with that sentiment that I came to the point where I wanted to put this book down and not finish it on countless occasions. The excruciating level to which this book goes to exclude practically every single DS9, Voyager or TNG novel covering the post tv-series era is enormous. It was only morbid curiosity for how the author would reconcile the exception of years of novel writing from other writers involved with Star Trek today, that got me through to the end.

I was rewarded with a rather solid explanation for my efforts. The narrative certainly helped. The choice of characters portrayed also kept me going. But this book stings like a scorpion tale. It's not terrible, but it's not great. It's the wannabe Star Trek XI of the 24th-25th century Star Trek era, and in much the same way Star Trek XI was hard to swallow due to how very much it changed everything on such a fundamental level (but okay, I came to accept and even enjoy it), this novel left me bereft of any hope that we would see any kind of rebirth of anything the original Star Trek timeline had held for its audiences. That wasn't its goal I would imagine. Its goal was likely to help bridge enormous gaps between the events of Star Trek X: Nemesis and the timeline being enacted in Star Trek Online. Again, it does that well, but be prepared to go out with a heavy feeling in your stomach, if you even manage to get to the end. For though the writing is good, I can't stop shaking my head at how contrary and wrong the overall "flipping the universe upside-down" feels.

I don't read a lot of fiction because it's usually not my thing. I do love Star Trek, and I'm a subscriber to STO (Star Trek Online) so I figured this was a no brainer for 8 bucks. Is it the most compelling book I've ever read? Not by a long shot, but that's not really the point, is it?

Thus far, there have been only two ways to get the story for STO: Read the unbelievably dry path to 2409 (which is in the book's appendix) or play the game. And having done both of those myself, I still didn't "get it". The story seemed to be a series of unrelated events, and while I got the gist of path of the Federation and its enemies/allies, recognized recurring characters and such, I didn't feel connected to the universe. I felt like I was flying along earning points and getting snippets of a larger picture I just wasn't grasping.

However, this book as changed that quite a bit, and I think that's what it is for. In order to bring the average Star Trek guy up to speed they needed to bring a multitude of characters in, located in disparate and sometimes not directly interlocking stories. In short, they needed to bring this universe alive by giving it a background. With Jake Sisko as a journalist, interviewing people, it gives you deeper snapshots of pivotal parts of the Undine War. Having read this book I feel like I actually have a flipping clue what's going on now. The game is less a series of missions to be completed and more a story that needs resolution.

The Point:
For $8, if you're a regular STO player then you need to pick this up. If you're a regular Star Trek book reader (of which I am not) and you don't play STO then you probably should go elsewhere.

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