books that should not be judged by their covers
So I just finished reading The Janus Gate trilogy by L.A. Graf, and it has some of the most wildly inaccurate back cover blurbs I have ever seen on a Star Trek novel, and that's REALLY SAYING SOMETHING.
So I'm gonna talk about it! (Under the cuts, this post is huge.)
Book 1: Present Tense
The blurb:
The crew of the USS Enterprise is exploring the seemingly peaceful and uninhabited world of M-3107 when a bizarre and inexplicable transporter accident causes both Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy to vanish completely. Transporter records show that the two men were transported somewhere, but the ultimate destination remains a mystery.
Now in command of the Enterprise, Spock dispatches a search-and-rescue team - consisting of Security Chief Giotto, Transporter Technician John Kyle, and Chief Helmsman Hikaru Sulu - on an urgent mission to recover the missing officers.
But then the rescue team disappears as well!
Things wrong about this:
M-3107
transporter accident
Dr. McCoy
search-and-rescue
Security Chief Giotto
Transporter Technician Kyle
rescue team disappears
NONE OF THAT IS FACTUAL.
What actually happens:
Picking up at the end of the TOS episode "The Naked Time", when the Enterprise inadvertently invented time travel and went back in time 3 days, they realise that showing up early to their next mission will cause questions to arise with Starfleet which their previous experience with this timeline did not experience, so they scuttle that idea and instead go to the long-abandoned world Tlaoli, where they had left a research team they had intended to pick up after the next mission concluded, intending to spend a quiet few days engaged in planetary surveys.
They arrive to discover that the survey team is in distress -- they've discovered a number of ancient wrecked spaceships on the planet not visible from orbital survey, and a six-man team that went into a cave system has lost contact. Kirk leads a landing party (which includes Uhura and SHINY NEW ENSIGN CHEKOV ♥ plus some other familiar faces) to fetch them out.
Chekov falls off a ledge into a freezing river, and Kirk goes in after him, accidentally creating a hole in the bottom of the river into a lower set of tunnels filled with alien writing. Chekov is very disoriented, sure that something happened between falling and getting pulled from the water. The medic thinks it's shock. However, after they hook up with the missing survey team (which includes more familiar characters, including Carolyn Palamas), an alien forcefield causes Chekov and Kirk to disappear. Backtracking through the cave system to escape the field unexpectedly brings the crew to a cavern where Chekov is waiting for them -- and the last thing he remembers is falling off the ledge.
Okay, in less detail: Sulu does awesome pilot things, saving the ship from crashing to the planet below, saving the other stranded surveyers, and bringing Dr. McCoy down to the base camp that the cavers do manage to get back to. They find Captain Kirk -- except he's 14, and thinks they want to kill him. Then Sulu's shuttle appears to explode, but there's no smoke, and a middle-aged Captain Sulu appears in the caves, from a future where Kirk may never have existed, and the Gorn have taken over the galaxy!
It was a helluva cliff-hanger ending, I actually went DUN DUN DUNNNN so loud I hurt my throat. Moving on --
Book 2: Future Imperfect
The blurb:
On a desperate rescue mission to recover their missing captain, the shuttle Copernicus and its crew have become lost in time and space, transported by a powerful subspace vortex to a hellish future time line where the Gorn Hegemony has all but conquered the United Federation of Planets. Stranded on a transformed Federation colony, now a Gorn mining world worked by oppressed Human slaves, Helmsman Hikaru Sulu meets an older version of a man he barely knows, Pavel Chekov, who now leads a ragtag band of freedom fighters against the Gorn.
Teamed together for the first time, Sulu and Chekov must struggle to survive in a future that should never have happened!
Things wrong about this:
Copernicus
its crew
subspace vortex
transformed Federation colony
Human slaves
ragtag band of freedom fighters
This one is the closest of the blurbs, but dammit, I was really looking forward to fresh young Sulu, grizzled freedom fighter Chekov and his ragtag band, and their shenanigans.
What actually happens:
The shuttle is the Drake and its "crew" consists of Sulu. When he meets up with future!Chekov, they are the only two Humans on the planet. They have only a small number of shenanigans. *pout*
In this timeline, Gary Mitchell was in command of the Enterprise when they encountered the Gorn (something that has not happened yet in the "present" established in the first book) and unlike Kirk, he killed the Gorn captain, causing the Metron to "ban them from space", which in this case meant destroying every space-capable thing they had, crew and all, and putting force fields around their worlds. The Gorn were understandably displeased with this development, so they developed a way to create portals that allowed them to move huge amounts of ground troops from world to world, and attacked the Federation. (Humans die if they try to go through, btw.) Spaceships couldn't respond in time to save the worlds from being overrun. They also conquered the Romulans for their cloaking tech, which allowed them to sneak ships past the Metron and do other things that are important for plot reasons, and they absorbed the Klingon Empire. The Federation is losing the war, son.
Future!Sulu's ship, the Hotspur, had recently discovered that all Gorn portals have to pass through a hub, and they had further found the world it was on. Only Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura survived their first, futile attempts to destroy it. Since the Gorn are massing a huge invasion force that included military units of untrustworthy Romulan slaves, it's obvious they're planning to attack Vulcan next. (Since the Enterprise also hasn't encountered the Romulans yet, Sulu is surprised to discover they look just like Vulcans.) Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov were engaged in a suicide mission to smuggle a bomb into the hub portal when the two Sulus switched, thus saving Future!Sulu and Chekov, but Future!Uhura is still dead. Sulu and Future!Chekov smuggle the warp core from the Drake in to the Romulan slaves, who agree to smuggle them and it to the portal to blow it up, for the low low price of potentially taking out their hated overlords, and a stolen cloaked Gorn ship to escape on.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Spock pilots down another shuttle and the following things are discovered: that there's an ancient alien device causing both the time travel swaps and the ship-crashing, that Chekov was swapped at all (he's 5 hours younger than he should be), that the device takes the person from now and sends them to a point in time where they were dying, with the version they're replacing put in a healing pod before being released (alas that it doesn't know Human physiology: Captain Sulu has lost his right hand), that Jimmy Kirk's account of where he was before the switch ios thereofre untrue, and the situation he was actually in. They go down into the caves and find the device, Uhura and Palamas record and partially translate the writing on the walls, the geologists bitch charmingly as they knock all the flowstone off the tech, and Spock figures out how to work it. It turns out the thing was used by the people of Tlaoli to fight some enemy of theirs for over seven thousand years, replacing and healing their soldiers. They still lost.
Problem: Captain Sulu's missing hand means the device won't send him to replace his younger, wholebodied self. Problem: Future!Chekov has such extreme PTSD that he's actively wanted to die for five years, ever since he was captured and horrifically tortured by the Gorn for twelve hours (they started by putting out his eye) [Sulu went back for him, even though he should have been dead, even though no one should have been able to survive for that long with what they were doing, and Sulu has been all that's kept Chekov going since, because Sulu went back for him. ;o; *cries forever*] --because of this, they can't get a lock on him to swap with Ensign Chekov (and passenger Captain Sulu, and a lot of bombs). So they have to send Uhura.
The device (The Janus Gate, if you will) has a function that allows you to see the moment of crisis you are heading into, in order to determine if it's the right one. Unfortunately, the Gorn have a force field capable of capturing a not-entirely-materialized Uhura, thus trapping her in neither her present or the future. She does see Chekov and Sulu with the Romulans -- and Sulu sees her, causing him to want to delay the sabotage. Future!Chekov is against this, but the Romulan commander helps him get a look at where Uhura's confined as part of a diversion to keep the Gorn from noticing Chekov setting the warp core to breach.
Uhura, for her part, discovers the horrifying truth behind the Gorn portals: they caught themselves a Metron. They're keeping it drugged so it can't fight them or escape, and cutting off pieces to create the portals. A warp core breach won't do fuck-all against that. Uhura saves the day, and the Metron lets her take Sulu and Chekov back to Tlaoli. Next on the To Do List: get Jimmy Kirk back where he came from so that he can grow up to become Captain James T. Kirk and stop all that Gorn Hegemony crap from happening in the first place.
At which point the Tlaoli's ancient enemies arrive to kick the Humans (and Spock) off the planet.
There's one weirdly, probably unintentionally flirty line from young!Sulu in this book that may cause some readers to activate their slashgoggles. Also, Spock's reaction to the kid offering to shake hands is great.
Book 3: Past Prologue
The blurb:
Thanks to the accidental triggering of alien technology, Captain Kirk has been banished to his own past. During a brutal massacre on Tarsus IV, Kodos the Executioner entered the history books as one of the most genocidal tyrants of the twenty-third century. As a boy, Kirk barely survived. Can he stand by now and let it happen again?
Lt. Kevin Riley is the only other survivor of Tarsus IV serving aboard the USS Enterprise. His traumatic memories provide Spock's best hope of finding their time-lost captain - before Kirk alters their timeline forever!
Amazingly, that entire first sentence is both true and relevant to the book! The rest of it is NOT. I would have loved to see how Captain Kirk would have dealt with Tarsus IV as an adult, and the emotional drama of making Riley in any sense go there again. That would have been a helluva book!
What happened instead:
Captain Kirk finds himself on Drax, a planet where his father had been Chief of Security for the Federation freed the native population from Orion slavery. Jimmy and his brother and mother had had the misfortune to be vacation-visiting Commander Kirk when local racial enmity apparently erupted into all out war. Jimmy had given up his spot on the last civilian evac shuttle to a pair of toddlers, and is sent up with a shuttle of commandoes instead -- but the shuttle is shot down. The commandos order him to go back to the Embassy, and they are all killed while he escapes. Jimmy's dad found him on the route between crash and Embassy, saving him just second before aggressive locals shot him in the brain with a gauss rifle. This is what Kirk remembers. But this time he runs into his father, and his younger self being no where to be found, they keep searching instead of evacuating themselves (along with a young security officer named Tony Giotto, who'd been shot in the head by a sniper) the way they were supposed to.
Meanwhile, on Tlaoli, they manage to stuff 15 people into a shuttle meant for 10 and Sulu, whose awesomeness as a pilot is really highlighted in this trilogy but especially in this book, gets them back to the Enterprise. A bunch of stuff happens I'm not going to into, but as you have probably guessed they get back to the planet despite interference and Security Chief Giotto (mentioned erroneously in the blurb for Book 1!) is their key for finding Kirk this time, since they're not sure the Janus Gate will consider replacing a healthy adult with a teenager a good trade. Things... go wrong. Sulu is INTENSELY FUCKING AWESOME. Uhura is A GREAT COMMANDER despite Mr. Kyle's bitching. (Another thing wrongly placed on Book 1's blurb!)
Really, woundly emotional, gutwrenchingly tragic things happen.
Tarsus IV is never mentioned.
So, despite all this bitching, it's just the blurbs I'm irritated with: the books are really good. Being L.A. Graf books, they are especially good if you like Kirk being awesome and Sulu, Uhura and Chekov being not only individually awesome, but also the greatest of friends.
These books are also great if you like seeing more of canonical minor or background characters among the crew, including ones that were maybe spotlighted in an episode. I think that all the people we saw were canonical, but Memory Alpha's search function is apparently fuxxored, so I can't confirm that at this time.
TL;DR I RECOMMEND THIS TRILOGY BUT IGNORE THE JACKET BLURBS.
So I'm gonna talk about it! (Under the cuts, this post is huge.)
Book 1: Present Tense
The blurb:
The crew of the USS Enterprise is exploring the seemingly peaceful and uninhabited world of M-3107 when a bizarre and inexplicable transporter accident causes both Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy to vanish completely. Transporter records show that the two men were transported somewhere, but the ultimate destination remains a mystery.
Now in command of the Enterprise, Spock dispatches a search-and-rescue team - consisting of Security Chief Giotto, Transporter Technician John Kyle, and Chief Helmsman Hikaru Sulu - on an urgent mission to recover the missing officers.
But then the rescue team disappears as well!
Things wrong about this:
M-3107
transporter accident
Dr. McCoy
search-and-rescue
Security Chief Giotto
Transporter Technician Kyle
rescue team disappears
NONE OF THAT IS FACTUAL.
What actually happens:
Picking up at the end of the TOS episode "The Naked Time", when the Enterprise inadvertently invented time travel and went back in time 3 days, they realise that showing up early to their next mission will cause questions to arise with Starfleet which their previous experience with this timeline did not experience, so they scuttle that idea and instead go to the long-abandoned world Tlaoli, where they had left a research team they had intended to pick up after the next mission concluded, intending to spend a quiet few days engaged in planetary surveys.
They arrive to discover that the survey team is in distress -- they've discovered a number of ancient wrecked spaceships on the planet not visible from orbital survey, and a six-man team that went into a cave system has lost contact. Kirk leads a landing party (which includes Uhura and SHINY NEW ENSIGN CHEKOV ♥ plus some other familiar faces) to fetch them out.
Chekov falls off a ledge into a freezing river, and Kirk goes in after him, accidentally creating a hole in the bottom of the river into a lower set of tunnels filled with alien writing. Chekov is very disoriented, sure that something happened between falling and getting pulled from the water. The medic thinks it's shock. However, after they hook up with the missing survey team (which includes more familiar characters, including Carolyn Palamas), an alien forcefield causes Chekov and Kirk to disappear. Backtracking through the cave system to escape the field unexpectedly brings the crew to a cavern where Chekov is waiting for them -- and the last thing he remembers is falling off the ledge.
Okay, in less detail: Sulu does awesome pilot things, saving the ship from crashing to the planet below, saving the other stranded surveyers, and bringing Dr. McCoy down to the base camp that the cavers do manage to get back to. They find Captain Kirk -- except he's 14, and thinks they want to kill him. Then Sulu's shuttle appears to explode, but there's no smoke, and a middle-aged Captain Sulu appears in the caves, from a future where Kirk may never have existed, and the Gorn have taken over the galaxy!
It was a helluva cliff-hanger ending, I actually went DUN DUN DUNNNN so loud I hurt my throat. Moving on --
Book 2: Future Imperfect
The blurb:
On a desperate rescue mission to recover their missing captain, the shuttle Copernicus and its crew have become lost in time and space, transported by a powerful subspace vortex to a hellish future time line where the Gorn Hegemony has all but conquered the United Federation of Planets. Stranded on a transformed Federation colony, now a Gorn mining world worked by oppressed Human slaves, Helmsman Hikaru Sulu meets an older version of a man he barely knows, Pavel Chekov, who now leads a ragtag band of freedom fighters against the Gorn.
Teamed together for the first time, Sulu and Chekov must struggle to survive in a future that should never have happened!
Things wrong about this:
Copernicus
its crew
subspace vortex
transformed Federation colony
Human slaves
ragtag band of freedom fighters
This one is the closest of the blurbs, but dammit, I was really looking forward to fresh young Sulu, grizzled freedom fighter Chekov and his ragtag band, and their shenanigans.
What actually happens:
The shuttle is the Drake and its "crew" consists of Sulu. When he meets up with future!Chekov, they are the only two Humans on the planet. They have only a small number of shenanigans. *pout*
In this timeline, Gary Mitchell was in command of the Enterprise when they encountered the Gorn (something that has not happened yet in the "present" established in the first book) and unlike Kirk, he killed the Gorn captain, causing the Metron to "ban them from space", which in this case meant destroying every space-capable thing they had, crew and all, and putting force fields around their worlds. The Gorn were understandably displeased with this development, so they developed a way to create portals that allowed them to move huge amounts of ground troops from world to world, and attacked the Federation. (Humans die if they try to go through, btw.) Spaceships couldn't respond in time to save the worlds from being overrun. They also conquered the Romulans for their cloaking tech, which allowed them to sneak ships past the Metron and do other things that are important for plot reasons, and they absorbed the Klingon Empire. The Federation is losing the war, son.
Future!Sulu's ship, the Hotspur, had recently discovered that all Gorn portals have to pass through a hub, and they had further found the world it was on. Only Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura survived their first, futile attempts to destroy it. Since the Gorn are massing a huge invasion force that included military units of untrustworthy Romulan slaves, it's obvious they're planning to attack Vulcan next. (Since the Enterprise also hasn't encountered the Romulans yet, Sulu is surprised to discover they look just like Vulcans.) Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov were engaged in a suicide mission to smuggle a bomb into the hub portal when the two Sulus switched, thus saving Future!Sulu and Chekov, but Future!Uhura is still dead. Sulu and Future!Chekov smuggle the warp core from the Drake in to the Romulan slaves, who agree to smuggle them and it to the portal to blow it up, for the low low price of potentially taking out their hated overlords, and a stolen cloaked Gorn ship to escape on.
Meanwhile, back in the present, Spock pilots down another shuttle and the following things are discovered: that there's an ancient alien device causing both the time travel swaps and the ship-crashing, that Chekov was swapped at all (he's 5 hours younger than he should be), that the device takes the person from now and sends them to a point in time where they were dying, with the version they're replacing put in a healing pod before being released (alas that it doesn't know Human physiology: Captain Sulu has lost his right hand), that Jimmy Kirk's account of where he was before the switch ios thereofre untrue, and the situation he was actually in. They go down into the caves and find the device, Uhura and Palamas record and partially translate the writing on the walls, the geologists bitch charmingly as they knock all the flowstone off the tech, and Spock figures out how to work it. It turns out the thing was used by the people of Tlaoli to fight some enemy of theirs for over seven thousand years, replacing and healing their soldiers. They still lost.
Problem: Captain Sulu's missing hand means the device won't send him to replace his younger, wholebodied self. Problem: Future!Chekov has such extreme PTSD that he's actively wanted to die for five years, ever since he was captured and horrifically tortured by the Gorn for twelve hours (they started by putting out his eye) [Sulu went back for him, even though he should have been dead, even though no one should have been able to survive for that long with what they were doing, and Sulu has been all that's kept Chekov going since, because Sulu went back for him. ;o; *cries forever*] --because of this, they can't get a lock on him to swap with Ensign Chekov (and passenger Captain Sulu, and a lot of bombs). So they have to send Uhura.
The device (The Janus Gate, if you will) has a function that allows you to see the moment of crisis you are heading into, in order to determine if it's the right one. Unfortunately, the Gorn have a force field capable of capturing a not-entirely-materialized Uhura, thus trapping her in neither her present or the future. She does see Chekov and Sulu with the Romulans -- and Sulu sees her, causing him to want to delay the sabotage. Future!Chekov is against this, but the Romulan commander helps him get a look at where Uhura's confined as part of a diversion to keep the Gorn from noticing Chekov setting the warp core to breach.
Uhura, for her part, discovers the horrifying truth behind the Gorn portals: they caught themselves a Metron. They're keeping it drugged so it can't fight them or escape, and cutting off pieces to create the portals. A warp core breach won't do fuck-all against that. Uhura saves the day, and the Metron lets her take Sulu and Chekov back to Tlaoli. Next on the To Do List: get Jimmy Kirk back where he came from so that he can grow up to become Captain James T. Kirk and stop all that Gorn Hegemony crap from happening in the first place.
At which point the Tlaoli's ancient enemies arrive to kick the Humans (and Spock) off the planet.
There's one weirdly, probably unintentionally flirty line from young!Sulu in this book that may cause some readers to activate their slashgoggles. Also, Spock's reaction to the kid offering to shake hands is great.
Book 3: Past Prologue
The blurb:
Thanks to the accidental triggering of alien technology, Captain Kirk has been banished to his own past. During a brutal massacre on Tarsus IV, Kodos the Executioner entered the history books as one of the most genocidal tyrants of the twenty-third century. As a boy, Kirk barely survived. Can he stand by now and let it happen again?
Lt. Kevin Riley is the only other survivor of Tarsus IV serving aboard the USS Enterprise. His traumatic memories provide Spock's best hope of finding their time-lost captain - before Kirk alters their timeline forever!
Amazingly, that entire first sentence is both true and relevant to the book! The rest of it is NOT. I would have loved to see how Captain Kirk would have dealt with Tarsus IV as an adult, and the emotional drama of making Riley in any sense go there again. That would have been a helluva book!
What happened instead:
Captain Kirk finds himself on Drax, a planet where his father had been Chief of Security for the Federation freed the native population from Orion slavery. Jimmy and his brother and mother had had the misfortune to be vacation-visiting Commander Kirk when local racial enmity apparently erupted into all out war. Jimmy had given up his spot on the last civilian evac shuttle to a pair of toddlers, and is sent up with a shuttle of commandoes instead -- but the shuttle is shot down. The commandos order him to go back to the Embassy, and they are all killed while he escapes. Jimmy's dad found him on the route between crash and Embassy, saving him just second before aggressive locals shot him in the brain with a gauss rifle. This is what Kirk remembers. But this time he runs into his father, and his younger self being no where to be found, they keep searching instead of evacuating themselves (along with a young security officer named Tony Giotto, who'd been shot in the head by a sniper) the way they were supposed to.
Meanwhile, on Tlaoli, they manage to stuff 15 people into a shuttle meant for 10 and Sulu, whose awesomeness as a pilot is really highlighted in this trilogy but especially in this book, gets them back to the Enterprise. A bunch of stuff happens I'm not going to into, but as you have probably guessed they get back to the planet despite interference and Security Chief Giotto (mentioned erroneously in the blurb for Book 1!) is their key for finding Kirk this time, since they're not sure the Janus Gate will consider replacing a healthy adult with a teenager a good trade. Things... go wrong. Sulu is INTENSELY FUCKING AWESOME. Uhura is A GREAT COMMANDER despite Mr. Kyle's bitching. (Another thing wrongly placed on Book 1's blurb!)
Really, woundly emotional, gutwrenchingly tragic things happen.
Tarsus IV is never mentioned.
So, despite all this bitching, it's just the blurbs I'm irritated with: the books are really good. Being L.A. Graf books, they are especially good if you like Kirk being awesome and Sulu, Uhura and Chekov being not only individually awesome, but also the greatest of friends.
These books are also great if you like seeing more of canonical minor or background characters among the crew, including ones that were maybe spotlighted in an episode. I think that all the people we saw were canonical, but Memory Alpha's search function is apparently fuxxored, so I can't confirm that at this time.
TL;DR I RECOMMEND THIS TRILOGY BUT IGNORE THE JACKET BLURBS.