Christopher L. Bennett

Orion's Hounds (Star Trek, the Next Generation)

Titan, Book Three

Matthew Rasnake

First off, Titan is a Star Trek novel. As such, there's a certain amount of forgiveness and understanding one must indulge in to thoroughly enjoy it. For me, Trek novels have always been sort of like candy--like a... banana flavored taffy, sometimes it tastes better than a real banana, but it can be a little hard to chew at first, and often tastes just a bit off. All this is not to say that it's a bad book, just that there's a difference between literature and pop-fiction.

As a Trek novel, it certainly delivers, offering up a healthy helping of some of our favorite characters, a hearty dose of fleshing out some canon rarity (in this case, the space jellyfish from "Encounter at Farpoint"), and an interesting view of some original characters. Titan itself is a unique Trek undertaking, in that the author(s) are trying to involve more alien races, so those societies are becoming more well defined. This novel also draws heavily both from canon Trek and from non-canon sources as well, particularly the most recent (last 5 years) spate of Trek novels, which have all apparently been very much intertwined.

So overall, and specifically regarding it as a Trek novel,it is quite enjoyable and entertaining. I even found myself drawn into the action and emotion of some of the climactic situations (which is more than I can say for the two previous novels in this series). Now that i've finished the book, i've even altered my "would recommend this to:" from fans desperate for a fix, to fans looking for a fix.

There are some issues I have with this novel. Pretty much all the characters are now broken in some way, and a good portion of the novel is taken up in hashing and rehashing aspects of this breakage. Character and universe continuity is an important thing, but this novel could have been 50 pages shorter without repeatedly revisiting Deanna's telepathic rape at the hands of Shinzon's henchman--especially considering how many times it was addressed in the previous two novels. By and large Star Trek fans are fairly intelligent, and have elephantine memories for Trek related trivia, so I think a lot of these types of things could be handled with much more subtlety than blatantly reminding us of it every 25 pages. And this thing with Deanna is only one instance of several which are repeated throughout this and the preceeding two novels. Everyone is damaged and we have to keep dredging it up and slapping the reader in the face with it. It goes back to that writer's cliche of showing versus telling.

Also, and this is probably just me, but I'd like to see a little less cast cross-polination. It's an interesting idea i suppose, and I'm sure some people are thrilled by it, but to me it just all seems a bit forced--"I'm going to write a novel and have a character from every Trek series ever made!" Of course, for this third novel, the characters are fairly established, but Tuvok's presence still just rankles me a bit. I never thought he was that great a character, and he's totally underutilized (as tactical officer--supposedly his primary reason for being on the ship) in this novel.

So again, all-in-all it is an enjoyable read despite lacking a certain subtlety in storytelling.

Titan, Book Three Orion's Hounds (Star Trek, the Next Generation)

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