The Great Song: A Review of “The Tears of the Singers”

[Cake Is Eternal]

I was hoping I could share a review I wrote of a book I really love.

https://treksphere.com/star-trek-un...-30TO8Dts8IMP8EwisJDk96-gEkHn0iT3JXx_Y1JlBaWk

 

[Reanok]

Great review Uhura's song and Tears of the Singers was one of the very first Star Trek books I ever read. It's still one of my favorite Tos novels to this day.

 

[Desert Kris]

I hope @Cake Is Eternal doesn't mind me borrowing this thread from earlier this year.

I have a copy of this book, for curiosities' sake. And a search of the forum indicates that it has come up just a little more lately in conversation this year.

Right now I'm reading through Time For Yesterday, which has a lot of references from novels I've been going through for the past year. And I came across a passage where Spock is praising Uhura for her role in past adventures. To my surprise, I spotted a reference to Uhura's Song (which I haven't read, but recognize the name of the species associated with that book). There was another reference I didn't recognize (the Taygretians), but Memory Beta pointed me in the direction of Tears of the Singers.

Tears of the Singers is easy to place on the publication order reading list. But it's a bit more difficult trying to figure out where it might be placed chronologically, which I understand might just amount to intuition and educated guesses.

Memory Beta places it in 2270, which is identified as the final year of the five year mission. Does anyone have different thoughts/perspective? Does it feel like it happens between TOS episodes, or does it feel like it happens after the show, but before the Enterprise returns home? Are the crew still in the groove, or are they tired and anxious for shore leave or home? Is the Enterprise implied to be closer to Earth, or still far out on the frontier?

 

[Christopher]

Is the Enterprise implied to be closer to Earth, or still far out on the frontier?

Taygeta is a real star, a member of the Pleiades (which means it's a "baby" star way too young to have planets yet), and it's 440 light years from Earth. But there's no way to assess how far that is in Trek terms, since Trek has always been very inconsistent about astronomical distances (right from the start, with "The Cage" having the ship going from Rigel to Vega for medical treatment even though Earth is closer to Rigel than Vega is).

Most novels back then were pretty much assumed to be after the series. There were very few that bothered to try to position themselves specifically between episodes. After all, if you're just telling more stories, the natural place to put them is after the existing stories. And most were just presented as routine episodic adventures, "timeless" within the 5-year mission, like the show itself was done. I don't recall this book being an exception to that in any way. Don't read too much into Memory Alpha's assumptions; they probably just put it in 2270 because it was generically after TOS/TAS, like so many dozens of others were.