by Kirsten Beyer

Pocket Books, out now

The Full Circle fleet take the opportunity for some R & R – but things aren’t as peaceful as they first seem.

Kirsten Beyer, as she notes in the afterword to this novel, has been a little busy in the Star Trek world of late, working on Star Trek Discovery and then Star Trek Picard. She’s also been responsible for overseeing the tie-in work, penning comics, writing episodes… and somewhere in that, coming up with the time to bring her tales of the Delta Quadrant to a close. This isn’t the final story, but a lot of things start to be brought together here, with plotlines and character arcs that have been around for a long time starting to come to their close.

One of the things that the Voyager TV series inevitably did was cast spotlights on different crew members in different episodes, and there were times when even Kate Mulgrew wondered what had happened to her crew. Beyer has added a lot of new characters to the fleet, but they’re very much part of an ensemble and this story focuses on multiple different people. Some are directly linked to the original series, others are from whole cloth, but they get equal footing… something that might not apply in-universe to the characters, a point that is made very forcibly at the end of the novel.

Beyer doesn’t shy away from ethical questions – there’s a major one at the heart of this novel that can be seen on both macro and micro level throughout the book – but wraps them in an engaging story. With the wrapping up of the novelverse later this year, I suspect her most recent novel – a direct sequel to this – may be the last, but I hope she continues to tell Trek stories in prose as well as on screen.

Verdict: A fascinating conundrum for the Full Circle fleet, with plenty of strong moments for the various crew. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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