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A review by neilrcoulter
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The High Country by John Jackson Miller
2.0
I’m not a huge Trek fan—I love the original series, and I’m somewhat familiar with The Next Generation and a few of the movies—but I really enjoyed the first season of Strange New Worlds. To me, it felt like exactly what Star Trek should be, and out of eight episodes in the season, only one was not good.
When I saw a Strange New Worlds novel, I didn’t have much hope that I’d love it, but I was curious to see how a novel would expand the characters I’d grown to love in the series. Predictably, the novel was not at all the “expand the characters” that I was looking for. There is something to be said for the taut, streamlined episodes of less than an hour. That’s the kind of adventure in which the characters can shine. This novel, by contrast, takes more time to read (I listened to the audiobook) and takes more days for the characters than the entire first season of the series. It’s just so, so long. And tedious. And convoluted. The story actually seems closer to a classic Doctor Who story, but even then, it’s like one of the six-episode stories where I feel that five—or even four!—episodes would have been adequate.
I found the story in The High Country very hard to follow and impossible to invest in. The new characters introduced in this book are corny, and the situation on the planet where the Enterprise crew are stranded seems completely implausible. The TV series rarely demands that I know every detail about other Star Trek series, but this book has what I assume are important connections to someone named Jonathan Archer and something he did in the past, presumably in an episode of a series I’ve never seen. Not much fun to hear people talking about Jonathan Archer and have no idea what they’re referring to, and the novel was not nearly intriguing enough to make me spend time looking around for explanations online.
At best, a Trek novel should enjoy more space and a broader canvas to consider questions of colonization and the Prime Directive that have to be sidelined or simplified in a TV episode. And The High Country has moments like that. But those good moments are overwhelmed by what I would call “frantic tediousness.” This is not a contemplative novel, but it’s also not a particularly exciting one.
The audiobook narrator puts his all into the reading, but even though he very accurately captured each character’s accent—eerily like the TV actors in some cases—I wasn’t drawn into the reading. All the female characters sounded whiny, which is exactly wrong for Una and annoying for all the others. The reading makes the book sound like an endless stream of wry quips, and that became annoying well before the end of disc 1 (of 13!).
What I learned: Strange New Worlds is great TV, but not great literature. Not a surprise. Really glad to be done with this book.
When I saw a Strange New Worlds novel, I didn’t have much hope that I’d love it, but I was curious to see how a novel would expand the characters I’d grown to love in the series. Predictably, the novel was not at all the “expand the characters” that I was looking for. There is something to be said for the taut, streamlined episodes of less than an hour. That’s the kind of adventure in which the characters can shine. This novel, by contrast, takes more time to read (I listened to the audiobook) and takes more days for the characters than the entire first season of the series. It’s just so, so long. And tedious. And convoluted. The story actually seems closer to a classic Doctor Who story, but even then, it’s like one of the six-episode stories where I feel that five—or even four!—episodes would have been adequate.
I found the story in The High Country very hard to follow and impossible to invest in. The new characters introduced in this book are corny, and the situation on the planet where the Enterprise crew are stranded seems completely implausible. The TV series rarely demands that I know every detail about other Star Trek series, but this book has what I assume are important connections to someone named Jonathan Archer and something he did in the past, presumably in an episode of a series I’ve never seen. Not much fun to hear people talking about Jonathan Archer and have no idea what they’re referring to, and the novel was not nearly intriguing enough to make me spend time looking around for explanations online.
At best, a Trek novel should enjoy more space and a broader canvas to consider questions of colonization and the Prime Directive that have to be sidelined or simplified in a TV episode. And The High Country has moments like that. But those good moments are overwhelmed by what I would call “frantic tediousness.” This is not a contemplative novel, but it’s also not a particularly exciting one.
The audiobook narrator puts his all into the reading, but even though he very accurately captured each character’s accent—eerily like the TV actors in some cases—I wasn’t drawn into the reading. All the female characters sounded whiny, which is exactly wrong for Una and annoying for all the others. The reading makes the book sound like an endless stream of wry quips, and that became annoying well before the end of disc 1 (of 13!).
What I learned: Strange New Worlds is great TV, but not great literature. Not a surprise. Really glad to be done with this book.