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WAGON TRAIN TO THE STARS
This is the first book in the New Earth six novel series set just after the original series when Kirk had been made Admiral but still preferred to captain vessels and has just been put in charge of a flotilla of ships that are going out to colonize a new planet. The parallels to a western wagon train on the Oregon Trail are many and obvious - there are even small ships called mules and the larger vessels are filled with families all eagerly going towards a new beginning. But all is not well as there is a saboteur aboard and soon supplies are running low and a fever is sweeping the ships. Are Kilvennon and his entrepreneurial family at fault, or does the blame lie with ex-con Billy Maidenshore? And how well does anybody know Belle Terre, the "new earth" anyway? Suppose there are already local aliens who lay claim to it? Of course there are and soon Kirk and his crew find themselves in the middle of a centuries-old war and responsible for over 60,000 settlers' lives. Personally I prefer a novel that starts before page 69 and in the pages preceding this unfamiliar characters galore are wheeled on and off with confusing speed and plunge the reader into an unknown offshoot of the Star Trek opus. When I found myself back with the familiar characters planning the venture months before I heaved a sigh of relief and settled down to enjoy the story but not until then - and by then a lot of what had gone before had rather passed by me as there was just too much totally new material to sift through. Six books makes for a long story and I felt that the writing could have been tauter in this first volume, less being more but I enjoyed the concept of a futuristic "wagon train" of settlers going towards a new home led by the well-loved cast of the original series. I will be most interested to see how the series shapes up in the next book, a short extract of which is given at the end of this first novel. |