eaders would be hard pressed to find a storyline setting more readily available than the Star Trek universe. Lately, Pocket Books has returned to the days of James Blish's early Star Trek Logs with trade paperbacks that collect a group of stories based around a single connecting subject. In the recent The Lives of Dax, a collection of top Star Trek authors explore the lives and times of the Dax symbiont through its centuries of existence. With the new release Star Trek: Enterprise Logs, noted Star Trek writers Diane Carey, Greg Cox, A.C. Crispin, Peter David, Diane Duane, Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, Jerry Oltion and John Vornholt offer tales of the many ships bearing the illustrious name Enterprise.
The stories focus as much on the captain of each ship--historical or fictional--as on the ships themselves. The first two stories, fictionalized historical accounts of Captain Israel Daniel Dickinson's Revolutionary War-era sloop-of-war and Captain Osborne B. Hardison's 20th-century aircraft carrier, are both by Carey. The book quickly returns to the future with a story by Cox about the first captain of the starship Enterprise, Robert April, who engages in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a couple of well-known Klingons (apparently a long-lived species). Spock's first Enterprise C.O., Christopher Pike, hosts a peculiarly argumentative alien diplomat while fending off yet more Klingons.
As any well-informed Trek fan knows, the next captain is one James T. Kirk. Friedman sends the Starfleet legend on a murder investigation involving an old flame (naturally). The "movie generation" then takes over, first in Duane's journey into the mind of Will Decker (no doubt the shortest-lived captain in the book); and in Crispin's tale of Spock and Saavik, set just before the events in The Wrath of Khan.
Two "lost captains" with one film or TV appearance each then take center stage. David presents an interrogation drama starring John Harriman (the unlucky captain who "lost" Captain Kirk, played in Generations by Alan Ruck--Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off). This is followed by Greenberger's battle-filled episode featuring Rachel Garrett from the popular Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise." Finally, the book wraps up with a "Captain's Table" tale personally told by Jean-Luc Picard (and reported for posterity by Vornholt).
Too much captain, not enough ship
Not surprisingly, Enterprise Logs is a hit-and-miss affair. Greenberger states in his introduction that most of the authors chose to "focus on the captain apart from ship and crew," which may be part of the problem. A reader might assume that a book called Enterprise Logs would focus on whichever Enterprise was the "star" of that particular story. Unfortunately, a few of the stories--most notably Friedman's and Vorholt's--barely feature the mighty ship at all. This is unforgivable. While Kirk and Picard have obviously had more fiction written about their exploits than any other characters in the book, that's no excuse to take them off their familiar bridge for this of all books. The reader gets the feeling that Friedman and Vornholt both felt the need to uncover something "new and different" about the most well-known Star Trek captains. Picard's story might as well have been entitled "Star Trek: Nondescript Shuttle Log."
The remaining stories in the collection vary in quality, but all are more enjoyable than the "star captains" installments--and these captains do stay on their ships. Carey's two historical pieces offer some fascinating facts about their respective eras, with gripping stories to boot (Benedict Arnold's pre-traitor guest appearance in "The Veil at Valcour" is a high point). Cox's Robert April story, while not quite as spot-on as Carey's interpretation of the character in novels like Final Frontier, is loaded with action, and sparkles with several "guest stars" from the Trek mythos (including a young Jimmy Kirk). Oltion's tale of Pike has some hilarious moments between the Captain and two of his female bridge crew; Willard Decker finally shines as the brilliant--if still untested--commander he might have been in Duane's introspective "Night Whispers." Crispin spins a well-told tale and reveals a little bit of the reason why Spock was content to serve as an instructor during his captaincy. The least satisfying installment (other than the Kirk and Picard stories) is probably Greenberger's "Hour of Fire," which tests the mettle of the late Rachel Garrett. This dissatisfaction stems not from the captain leaving her bridge, but from the unfortunate fact that the "middle" Enterprises simply didn't have well-defined characters to draw from in the first place.
The diamond in the often-mediocre rough is David's Harriman story. Part comic relief, part morality tale, David's story shows why this man--whom he had already partially redeemed in his novel The Captain's Daughter--was qualified to command a ship with a pedigree like the Enterprise. If you haven't read David's novel, though, be warned that the author gives away the twist ending to his previous work.
