Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox

Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain by Greg Cox
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Secret the spans the decades and holding that secret from a galaxy unprepared for the power it represents are the Captains and First Officers of the Starship Enterprise. Captain April while commanding the ship now famed in legend visits the world of Usilde and observes an alien presence that is corrupting this primitive world and it's people. Lt. Una (aka Number One) a fresh faced officer leads an away mission to gather intel and it goes terribly wrong. Captain April intervenes before the whole landing party is lost but there seems to be no room for negotiation with this alien species who are intent on subjugating the native population and terraforming the world and they seem to have the power to back up their intent. We get a potential tricky Prime Directive dilemma as Uslide is not a Federation world and the alien invaders are unknown, the choice to oppose this wanton destruction or negotiate an understanding is why some people get to don the shirt and sit at the heart of a Starship but as we see logic and reasoning can often conflict with a heart and souls desire to do anything to oppose an injustice or right a wrong.
Legacies: Book 1: Captain to Captain is the first part of a trilogy of novels each written by a different author, in this novel Greg lays the groundwork and background to the events that helped to shape Una into the character of Number One we saw on the original tv pilot. The character has been used in other novels but this trilogy could become the baseline for judging this character who we never really got to know. Greg also make full use of work by Diane Carey who described April's Enterprise in some detail, it was most satisfying to recognise many names amongst this crew. The elements of the story that centered on a much older Captain Una (commander of Yorktown) also paid off handsomely as her interaction with Spock and the mystery of her visit to Kirk's Enterprise has you on the edge, you know something is going on but at the point you are not sure what. In many ways you get lost in the events on Usilde such is the wonderful descriptive world and people Greg presents but switching back to Kirk and company makes you realise the two main aspects of the novel are feeding off each other and offering up an excellent opening to this trilogy.


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No Time Like The Past

Here is my short and sweet review of No Time Like The Past the latest Greg Cox Star Trek novel I've read, I bought the paperback on the day of release once again weighing up the cost benefits of the e-book option and again decided for a few pence more I'd prefer to own the physical book.
So No Time Like The Past at least on the surface sounds a little far fetched, granted it's scifi and Star Trek so some of more outlandish plots can be found in the genre but when done right any story can be sold as being both entertaining and consistent within the franchise. Greg in bringing together James Kirk and Seven Of Nine dallying with the potential for a disaster but by offering up a well worked time travel story with enough mystery, action and depth for the characters he pulled it off and the story never once stayed into the grave yard of cheesiness.

The basic story has Seven along with Voyager tracking an energy signature via local folk lore of a "wizard" who could transport vast distances, tempting certainly but what they find is quite surprising and more so when faced with no option Seven gets herself flung in her distant past and to a place where a certain Starship Enterprise is in orbit conducting a secretive diplomatic meeting the goal of which is to reduce the influence of the Orion syndicate in that region of space. What comes next is a race across the galaxy and the timescape to solve an aeons old mystery while dealing with a Federation Ambassador who as they do causes all sorts of problems and a determined Orion Captain and crew who see Seven as a valuable resource to be sold to any interested parties with resources to spend for access to knowledge from the future.

It was great fun seeing the crew of the original Enterprise having to deal with another time traveller, more so because in our minds we know Seven and we know Kirk and well you know but thankfully that is never an issue and it's the puzzles and adventure that really pays off. I really enjoy getting more of a taste of the worlds visited in the original tv series especially Cheron (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield) and we see the world as it was before it's fall when the civil war was in full flow leading to the tragic events which left it a barren and dead world.

I can highly recommend the novel for fans of the original series, less so for Voyager folk as it seems the love of Seven isn't universal but if you are even considering Trek then Greg has a winner as shown by the books performance on the sales charts when it was released. 

Greg's Official Site

Literary Trek 54 (Greg Cox Interview)

Amazon US and UK

Goodies

I picked up a few things from Amazon this week, the first the German Blu-ray boxset of the cancelled Primeval New World after it had a small but significant price cut. The others were two original series Star Trek paperbacks, the first by Greg Cox and the second by Tony Daniel.

The Rings of Time

I've suddenly and rather unexpectedly got an itch to jump back into Star Trek the original series novels, now I have a rather large collection of the paperbacks which kept me entertained in my younger years but the market has changed as the more modern series took precedence on the store shelves. That said we are seeing a lot more TOS novels from multiple authors so I'm going to indulge myself and given the pricing of the ebooks I'll stick to the paperbacks despite issues over shelf space:)

This week I read the novel "The Rings of Time" written by Greg Cox and published in the UK on Feb 16th 2012. The story makes full use of the well known original cast lineup in a story which deals with consciousness swapping and time travel plus a little geo-political subplot thrown in.
There may be minor spoilers but I'm going to try to avoid anything that couldn't ruin the surprise but come on the genre is well trodden and if you are reading Star Trek the characters could very well be more important than the story they inhabit:) In Rings of Time Greg drew upon the character of Shawn Christopher who was mentioned in the TOS episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" and is the commander of the first manned mission to Saturn and that mission intersects with the Enterprise two centuries later as it nears another ringed gas giant and the rescue of a mining colony trapped within a collapsing ring system. The two stories continue side by side as the pages are turned until they both come across the same alien probe in their respective timelines, events transpire slightly differently but the results led to complications on the NASA ship Lewis & Clark and the Enterprise as both are thrown into a pressure cooker of events and conflicting situations.

The story was certainly an interesting read, I really did enjoy picturing the Lewis & Clark ghosting towards Saturn in all the modern CGI effects glory and mixing with the tradition imagery from Star Trek. The main cast of characters were written well but none of them even Kirk was really pushed and we did get more depth from the supporting cast especially those from the 21st century Earth which wasn't a bad thing. Greg it seemed made an effort to reference as much of the original series as possible, at first that was fun but maybe he went a little over the top but again that's simply my personal taste and I think as we see more Trek written in our modern market the issues with dealing with Trek's history as it pertains to Earth's timeline will be harder to resolve and to be accepted. The end of the 20th century did seem far away when Trek came to our screens with an almost limitless vision of what they next couple of decades would bring and modern writers I believe are more grounded or at least the market isn't looking for the more fantastical Trek.

Color-composite Cassini image of Saturn’s northern hexagon (NASA/JPL/SSI/Jason Major)

I can recommend the novel to any original series Star Trek fan and the use of a canon character and in the case of the storm on Saturn a real phenomenon adds weight to the story and once again you wonder just how good a series could be with these characters and modern tv production.

Greg Cox Official Site

Amazon UK & US available in Paperback and E-Book.

Star Trek Novels

Since I no longer have a 3G account for my ipad and the device is really overkill for just reading a book I'm back to using my Kindle at work and I'm also reading more at home which indicates a book is good when you'd rather read it than watch telly or muck about on the PC.
Anyhow with the continued promotion of the Star Trek novels and authors from various podcasts such as Literary Treks, Ten Forward and The Captain's Table I've kept in touch with my Star Trek roots and added to my rather large collection of paperback with two novels one from Greg Cox and the other from Jeff Mariotte both original series:)
Greg Cox
Jeff Mariotte

• The Folded World
• The Rings Of Time