by Una McCormack

Gallery Books, out now

The tales of Michael Burnham’s “missing year”.

The current regime in charge of Star Trek are very well aware of the legions of fans who are interested in the tie-in material – books, comics etc. – and there’s been a concerted effort by producer Kirsten Beyer to keep them as close to canon as is possible. Inevitably if it comes down to it, a TV episode will always trump what’s in a book (as has happened with the earliest of the Discovery tie-ins) but there are distinct gaps where stories remain to be told – and the jump between the first and second episodes of Discovery season 3 is an obvious one. Michael Burnham meets Book and Sahil in the opener; come the arrival of the ship she’s been in the far future for a year, and is quite definitely the person her friends said goodbye to, for them moments earlier.

Una McCormack doesn’t simply tell the story of what Burnham does. She fills in swathes of information about the set up in the post-Burn era, how the courier network does (and doesn’t) work, and through a diary that we and Michael read as the book goes on, learn something of the Burn’s immediate aftermath. We get to spend time with Book (and Grudge, of course) and McCormack gives us a Burnham more out of place than she’s ever been in her life before, where the Federation doesn’t exist any more (and maybe even doesn’t deserve to), and, worst of all, in an era where there’s money! A Burnham who needs friends and allies, who has to look at lofty ideals and apply them on the ground. A Burnham who needs to find her place in the same way a certain children’s heroine needed to when she entered another Wonderland…

Verdict: Far more than just an exercise in joining the dots, this is a well-crafted character study of Michael Burnham. 9/10

Paul Simpson

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