My review: new DC comic series Jenny Sparks (2024) #2-7 ►

◄ My review: Defenders of the Earth (2024) new comic #2-4

Well, sort of. This is as much an entry to talk about Trek in general as the book, which I'd recommend and the conceit of which works as an in-universe record of events. You can hear Nimoy in the words, and the writing team manage to pull off making the narrative, supposedly by an incredibly intelligent, wise and experienced character, actually include plenty of those insights. Goodman I don't know but McCormack has a long history of turning in decent Trek novels.

It must be quite daunting. There are few characters with as much exposure in the Trek universe, as many episode writers and authors wanting to include him, and as much commitment to bringing him back from certain or actual death to do so. What you get here is definitely A Spock, and whether you only accept the Paramount version of things as The Spock or not it sounds authentic.

Taken as a whole, there's a lot packed in. It's a similar issue to prequel books in series such as Dragonlance that start off as a tightly written core series of stories... it often feels as if too much has been retrofitted into the timeline of the characters before we encounter them in the main media of TOS. Then again, Star Trek is a show that right from the beginning included a wide variety of time travel episodes and an entire film about rescuing whales from the past. It's canonical to the TV series, courtesy of a DS9 episode, that the Federation has an organisation tasked with straightening out the damage to causality done by crews such Kirk's, and something other books have made some great stories from.

Spock has had multiple previously unheard of siblings revealed over the years, which sort of works because after you've established and accepted one major secret that's kept to protect the characters concerned, it's normalised. There's more time travel around this courtesy of the animated series and Discovery, and the book would feel stretched at the seams even if it kept the Red Angel parts to passing references. I suppose there's the plus that even though it feels to be as if gets undue page time, it's still a small part of a whole. In addition, I'm used to the books published non-stop after the ending of TNG, VOY and DS9, where Spock pops up in any number of series such as New Frontier.

The book leads into into the Trek film reboot, another bit of ignoble time travel guff but perhaps a better capstone than Picard. It's interesting as an ending. There are always possibilities, but whilst AI and CGI exist, and in fact we got a nice coda with 2024's Unification short film starring Kirk and Spock by the Roddenberry Archive, the full circle of the so-so 2009 reboot film and Nimoy's death in 2015 sends Spock off into legend very quietly. (As fellow fans/autists note, he's born in 2230, goes back in time in 2387 to 2258 into the Kelvin timeline, and lives in that until 2263, so the half-vulcan lasts for only part of what's considered the upper end of vulcan lifespans.) Removing Spock from his main timeline to die off-screen, like Kirk's final scene in Generations, is inherently unsatisfying, and a book like this autobiography does do more to present it as another ongoing chapter and open question.

(For info, there's a four issue arc in an IDW comic series, 55-58, Legacy of Spock, which goes into the re-founding of Vulcan in which Spock joins his father, the Vulcan elder T'Pah who seems to be visually modelled on Judi Dench, and the rest of the surviving Vulcans. Two of Nero's crew also survived and the Romulan senate determines to use the last of the red matter to finish off the remaining millions of their forebears on the colony world they intend to settle. It doesn't do a bad job of adding to some closure.)

This seems as good a place as any to unpack a bit of my dislike of what's happened with modern Star Trek. Not shrugging about Enterprise or Discovery, which I can take or leave, or Lower Decks, Prodigy and Strange New Worlds, which are pretty cool, but Picard. I love that Patrick Stewart is happy with it, and Todd Stashwick is also a magnificent bastard from various interviews and podcasts, but the continuations of TNG in book form are really the only ones I'd care to follow and prioritise. It's Picard getting on with his life, not wasting decades of it out of Starfleet. Riker and Troi in Titan, New Frontier, Corps of Engineers, Department of Temporal Intervention, etc. Pocket Books is far from all gold, and has its fair share of time travel and alt universe bollocks too, and commercial editorial decisions towards half-baked event books, but it's teeming with things and possibilities. The IDW comics likewise, if you can reconcile any of titles like the recent Godshock or Defiant arcs with other media. There's a solid twenty years of material.

Helpful suggested chronology for new readers: https://www.thetrekcollective.com/p/trek-lit-reading-order.html

And also DTI is time travel done well, with encyclopaedic referencing and fleshing out the concept that in era every species that's temporally active will have agencies dedicated to protecting their timeline's existence, and many will see themselves as parenting 'lesser' species. Interestingly, Star Trek: Prodigy of all things seems to be revisiting Wesley Crusher.

Maybe it's childish not to let go. Maybe we've been inculcated that anything but forever is failure. But "dum spiro spero" (loosely, where there's life there's hope) isn't exactly a new sentiment, nor is "rage against".

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