Poll TNG-SA: #7 Secret of the Lizard People by Michael Jan Friedman Review Thread (25th Anniversary)

[tomswift2002]

Secret of the Lizard People
Published: April 1995
Written by: Michael Jan Friedman

Plot:
Cadet Data is among a handful of first-year cadets selected to observe a super-Jovian planet ignition – the collision of two huge gas-giant planets resulting in the formation of a new star. They will watch this occurrence from a safe distance aboard the Republic.
But a distress call from an alien space station draws their starship off course to an asteroid belt near the colliding planets. The rescue team soon finds itself under siege by deadly attackers, and Data and his group are separated from the main team.
With time running out, Data must defeat the invaders and rescue the aliens before the collision destroys the space station and the Republic
Review:

Again, 2020 is the 25th Anniversary for this book. This was Michael Jan Friedman's last TNG-SA novel and it was a sequel to Mystery of the Missing People and the 2nd of 4 books with Data as the lead or one of the main characters. As I recall, in Voyages of Imagination, Friedman was trying to make a Star Trek-version of a Hardy Boys story with this book (same as he'd been trying with Mystery of the Missing Crew).

Again, same as with MOTMC, I found as a kid that I really did not enjoy this book, and it did not move as fast as some of the best Hardy Boys.

 

[tomswift2002]

So I’m reading this book right now. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the front cover and spine has just Secret of the Lizard People, but the title page and the tops of all the odd number pages, with the exceptions of pages featuring full page illustrations, have the book title as The Secret of the Lizard People. Either the art department didn’t get the memo that there was to be a “The” at the front of the title, or the internals were printed before the cover, and it was decided to drop the “The” for marketing. Which, is odd, considering that the book was written like a Star Trek-meets-Hardy Boys book, and all Hardy Boys titles that start with “Secret of” have “The Secret of” (I.e. “The Secret of the Old Mill” (1927/62), “The Secret of the Soldier’s Gold” (2003)).

Also, Data and company are aboard the USS Republic in this book, in which Friedman says that Starfleet just pulled the Republic out of mothballs.