I just completed this novel. I sort of found it average. First, what I liked. The story was pretty good. It features a starship arriving in a sector the Enterprise is investigated and they find it to be a futuristic Starfleet ship, but one that is run down and frankly dirty. Apparently they are rebels fleeing an organization called the Consilium, which at one time worked with Starfleet to eliminate a plague, but then ended up turning Starfleet into an almost totalitarian organization as a result. The woman nominally in charge of the ship that follows the rebels back and she has certain powers of persuasion that she uses on Captain Kirk and the crew to try to get them to help the Consilium capture the rebels. She causes a solar flare to destroy the intelligent life on a planet who's empathic abilities she realizes can help the rebels, though she does save several for her own uses. Of course Captain Kirk and the crewmembers that are aware of where the ships are from have to be careful not to alter the timeline, though they are obviously disturbed about what happens to Starfleet in the future (just under 300 years in the future). And they find out that a crew member aboard ship is the creator of the Consilium (who it is was quite a surprise at first, but made sense when I thought about it).
What I didn't care for was I found the technobabble here a bit overwhelming. I typically don't complain a lot about technobabble actually, but there is a lot of it in the novel, and what's worse is there is a lot of unfamiliar technology noted in the book and it happens over and over again making the novel a bit of a challenge to read. The work degausser must have shows up about 326 times (from context I inferred it to be a device that opens doors when the power is off). There are also a number of lifeforms listed repeatedly, like a yagghorth, that I've never heard of before. And there is a lot of that in the dialogue and it just feels unnatural for the characters to be using highly technical terms in a lot of their dialogue. Some I don't mind, but as I noted it just got too much after a while.
The story itself takes place about 3 months before the end of the 5 year mission, explicitly stated in the novel. There is also a shout out to TNG when one of the rebels noted that a Klingon serves on the Enterprise-D in the future.
So overall I thought the story was pretty good, but I thought it could have been better if some of the technical terms were thinned out.
What I didn't care for was I found the technobabble here a bit overwhelming. I typically don't complain a lot about technobabble actually, but there is a lot of it in the novel, and what's worse is there is a lot of unfamiliar technology noted in the book and it happens over and over again making the novel a bit of a challenge to read. The work degausser must have shows up about 326 times (from context I inferred it to be a device that opens doors when the power is off). There are also a number of lifeforms listed repeatedly, like a yagghorth, that I've never heard of before. And there is a lot of that in the dialogue and it just feels unnatural for the characters to be using highly technical terms in a lot of their dialogue. Some I don't mind, but as I noted it just got too much after a while.
The story itself takes place about 3 months before the end of the 5 year mission, explicitly stated in the novel. There is also a shout out to TNG when one of the rebels noted that a Klingon serves on the Enterprise-D in the future.
So overall I thought the story was pretty good, but I thought it could have been better if some of the technical terms were thinned out.
