Summer 2022 Reading Entry #6: The Oppressor's Wrong (Star Trek: The Next Generation: Slings and Arrows, Book 2: The Oppressor's Wrong) by Phaedra Weldon (2007). The second of a six-book series of ebooks (still not available in print form as of this time) released in 2007-2008 as part of Pocket Books' commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" television series.
Each of the books in this series is written by a different author (or team of authors), and they all take place in the first year of service of the U.S.S. Enterprise-E (so, following the film Star Trek Generations, in which the Enterprise from the tv series, NCC-1701-D, was destroyed, and prior to the following film, Star Trek: First Contact, in which its replacement, the Enterprise NCC-1701-E, was introduced).
This second book in the "Slings and Arrows" series deals with the crew of the Enterprise-E, fresh off the events of book one, A Sea of Troubles, being assigned to transport a team of Starfleet demolitions experts to Starbase 375 after an explosion there resembles that of one that had just happened on Earth at Antwerp, Belgium, at a conference there. Starfleet suspects the Dominion to be behind both bombings. Lt. Pádraig Daniels, one of the members of that team, begins to suspect that that's not actually case. Meanwhile, the forces behind the attacks step up their plans once Captain Picard and the Enterprise-E arrive, and Picard also loses contact with Captain Benjamin Sisko (of Deep Space Nine), who has been temporarily reassigned to Earth to oversee security there (paralleling events seen on the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" tv series).
While I found A Sea of Troubles enjoyable enough, I liked The Oppressor's Wrong more. It was probably mostly just a personal preference for Weldon's writing style, but I also found myself more interested in Daniels (this book's primary point of view character) over Lt. Hawk (who, aside from Captain Picard, was basically the feature character in A Sea of Troubles). Weldon does a good job of telling this story primarily from Daniels' point of view (although not entirely, as the story does require scenes also to be shown where Daniels is not present). And Daniels just has more personality than Hawk had in the previous book.
I also like that this story is written more like a procedural investigation/mystery over the more straight "action" tone of the first book. Although, I have to admit, there were some passages where the technobabble was so deep, especially the ones where Daniels and his team are discussing with Picard and the others aboard the Enterprise (including Riker, La Forge, Data, and Barclay, the latter two most actively assisting Daniels and his team) exactly how they are going to modify the ship's sensors to interact with their own very complicated computer program and then feed that into one of the ship's holodecks to create an investigative simulated "amphitheater" inside that holodeck, that at times I basically had to just "push through" those passages without entirely understanding exactly what they were saying. However, it did add an additional feeling of authenticity, which was good.
One can read The Oppressor's Wrong without having read A Sea of Troubles. References are made to events that happened in the first book, enough to get the gist of what happened prior to this story. This is very much a separate story, not a continuation of the first, aside from the overarching threat of impending war with the Dominion and of Changeling spies perhaps being in their midst. One of my favorite lines in The Oppressor's Wrong is when Picard says, "We have a Changeling on board. Again. I want it caught and contained."
Again, I liked this book, a bit more so than the first book in the series. I gave it a four out of five stars on GoodReads.
Next up is book three, The Insolence of Office by William Leisner, when appears will focus primarily on Deanna Troi and Georgi La Forge (and apparently will detail exactly the circumstances of La Forge's switching from his VISOR, which he still has in these first two "Slings and Arrows" books) to the ocular implants he has starting in the Star Trek: First Contact film).
The Insolence of Office is also the first of the books in the "Slings and Arrows" series to have a very small page count, eighty-five pages. The first two books both had close to one hundred fifty pages. All of the subsequent books in the series are under one hundred pages. The shortest in the series will be book four, That Sleep of Death, which is only forty-four pages long. Page count alone is no judge of quality, of course. However, I know some would be quite irritated to pay the $6.99 cost per book without first realizing just how short some of them are. I'm reading these courtesy of my local public library's (Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library) "OverDrive" ebook checkout service.
(Previous Summer 2022 Reading Entries: #1: Star Trek: Avenger by William Shatner (1997; novel); #2: Batman vs. Ra's Al Ghul by Neal Adams (2019-2021, six-issue comic book limited-series; 2021 collected hardcover edition); #3: Superman: Birthright by Mark Waid, Leinil Francis Wu, and Gerry Alanguilan (twelve-issue comic book limited series; 2003 to 2004; read on DC Universe Infinite, also available in hardcover and softcover editions); #4: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Slings and Arrows Book 1: A Sea of Troubles by J. Steven York and Christina F. York (2007; novella), #5: The Orville Season 1.5: New Beginnings by David A. Goodman and David Cabeza (2019, four issue comic book limited series; 2020 collected trade paperback edition).
—David Young
