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Scored a copy today, at Schulers. B+N still a Trek Lit desert in my area. The nice thing is that I was right there on another errand so didn't have to make a special trip.
An earlier poster mentioned not know TOS references. As an older reader, I have the opposite problem. I catch all the TOS stuff, but when I read an SNW novel, having seen most of the episodes of that series a single time, I'm kind of like "wonder what that was about".
Greg, here's your chance to make a mention of the ringship Enterprise XCV-330, in your next TOS novel. Or maybe it mysteriously disappeared on it's third time out and suddenly is found in the 23rd century by Kirk & Company.
Well, I just checked. I've got enough Rewards Points from Amazon that I can get the book for free, plus free shipping; so, I guess I'll pull the trigger in a day or two and get myself a Christmas present.
I was not implying only one author can pen TOS books. However, it seems there are few authors available to write any Trek novels. My solution is to issue more books a year
Finished it a few days ago. The Enterprise-A era has a bit of an odd identity. The only taste of it we got in TFF was very TOS (third-season TOS), moreso than all of the other movies, which were all coming into or going out of different status quos, whereas TFF was the most episodic TOS movie. I guess what I'm getting at is that I feel like the recent novels set in that era have a weird lack of specificity. Everyone's more-or-less in their TOS roles (with the major exception of Chekov, who doubles as security chief as well as navigator, even though that was only a job he moved to in TMP and, briefly, TWOK), and there isn't much of an implicit arc, just a couple of waypoints (Sulu leaves, Kirk's opinion of the Klingons hits a low that's really only notable given that he didn't seem that mad in TFF), so I think it'd take more work to distinguish what makes an eighties-era adventure different from a sixties-era one.
Though it's possible the reason I'm dwelling on this is that, if the major thing that distinguishes an Enterprise-A story from a TOS story is the aesthetic and sensibility of the late movie era, it stuck out that the book overtly describes the TOS bridge (Spock has a viewer with a dial on it, Kirk has a tray in his armrest for data tapes, and the helm has the pop-out scope). As a matter of taste, I imagine the TUC bridge and not the TFF bridge, so a little clicky-clacky tactile technology wasn't too out of place, but it eventually became hard to overlook.
As for the actual narrative, I liked the love-quadrangle element with the body-swapped characters being wrapped up in their counterparts' romances, for better and worse. I'm not sure if signposting Chekov's age difference made his fling with Dise better for worse (I'd also assumed they hadn't gone all the way until they talked about it later), but I think Ryjo being constantly put into an impossible balancing act with Simone helped color his disillusionment with his mission and his eventual decision to allow himself to be talked down. Like, saving the shuttle is straightforwardly noble and can easily be rationalized as him preserving his cover if he thinks helping out goes against his resentment of Starfleet, but there's no way to tell yourself that jerking around this lady you just met is serving any greater good.
The treasure hunters were fun, but I'd have liked it if they'd tied in a bit more with the overall storyline in some way. I also wished we spent more time with Pavel's old friend; for a Chekov spotlight story, I don't feel like we went super-deep into Chekov's character. Overall, the scope of the Enterprise-side of the story seemed a little constrained compared to Chekov's much more interesting travels to the wrong side of the tracks, an exotic space station, and stealing a yacht that may or may not have belonged to some kind of criminal. His hijacking did remind me of a scene in another book where a character was faced with the fact that you can't just say to traffic control that your ship is about to explode and they'll let you leave, you have to sell it a bit.
