Sterling Parker
This book lists two authors and I'm not sure which one to blame. A good chunk of the story contains some surprisingly skilled writing and light philosophical musings. But it's mixed with another writing style that I can best describe as "clunky" and amateurish. For example, early in the book the dialogue between several crew members has each say the full name of the planet in successive sentences to each other. It's very grating. I can only imagine the text was initially drafted by one author, and then filled in by the other, as the shift between styles happens within scenes and chapters.
Other than that, the plot is solid OG Trek and would slot near-perfectly into the TV show itself. A late fakeout regarding the demise of a primary character feels a bit cheap, but the show was also not above this. Several passages feel oddly prescient in regards to modern "AI" computing models, and musings on the simulation hypothesis seem more obscure than they would two years later with the release of The Matrix. I applaud whichever of the two authors managed to take this from a thin rehash of Talos IV and craft it into something more meaningful.
This book lists two authors and I'm not sure which one to blame. A good chunk of the story contains some surprisingly skilled writing and light philosophical musings. But it's mixed with another writing style that I can best describe as "clunky" and amateurish. For example, early in the book the dialogue between several crew members has each say the full name of the planet in successive sentences to each other. It's very grating. I can only imagine the text was initially drafted by one author, and then filled in by the other, as the shift between styles happens within scenes and chapters.
Other than that, the plot is solid OG Trek and would slot near-perfectly into the TV show itself. A late fakeout regarding the demise of a primary character feels a bit cheap, but the show was also not above this. Several passages feel oddly prescient in regards to modern "AI" computing models, and musings on the simulation hypothesis seem more obscure than they would two years later with the release of The Matrix. I applaud whichever of the two authors managed to take this from a thin rehash of Talos IV and craft it into something more meaningful.