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| Trade paperback, 368 pages Published 2017 Acquired September 2017 Read October 2017 |
by David Mack
The first Discovery tie-in novel is a prequel, set one year prior to the events of the Discovery pilot, "The Vulcan Hello." It has a neat concept courtesy of series co-creator Bryan Fuller, one which will probably never be done on screen: the Shenzhou meeting the Enterprise under the command of Captain Pike, which means that Michael Burnham meets her foster brother, a young Lieutenant Spock.
The plot is honestly pretty perfunctory: a mysterious alien ship threatens a Federation colony, so the Shenzhou and the Enterprise are sent to stop it. Captain Pike is ready to follow orders to destroy the ship with minimal investigation, while Georgiou favors a more scientific and diplomatic approach. It's in its characterization of Pike where the book falters the most: I never felt like I was reading about the thoughtful man played on screen by either Jeffrey Hunter or Bruce Greenwood. Pike here is too violent and too by-the-book.
Better was the characterization of Burnham and Spock. A young Spock is tricky-- there are points where he's more Data-esque-- but I liked these two characters together: mirrors of one another, both human-Vulcan outcasts in their way. I didn't always exactly get where Burnham was coming from, but that's consistent with her characterization on the television program (I finished the book after watching episode four), where she's very rash but says she's logical and focused, and where her attitude towards ends and means fluctuates. Burnham and Spock solving puzzles together on an alien ship was okay, but the part near the end of the novel where each has to confront what it means to live as the other, was excellent, some really sharp character-based writing from David Mack. Alas that we will never get to see Sonequa Martin-Green and Zachary Quinto do this on screen.
The best part of the book is Saru. On screen he's probably my favorite character. I didn't like the implausibly unprofessional bickering he and Burnham participate in, but that's an accurate reflection of the television series, unfortunately. (I feel like you could write a rivalry that wasn't so immature-- its brazenness reflects poorly on both captain characters for not quashing it.) What Desperate Hours lets us do that Discovery itself has not yet done is let us see those parts of Saru that have nothing to do with Burnham; since the show is mostly told from her perspective, so far we've only seen Saru interacting with her. Here, we get Saru running his science lab on the Shenzhou, Saru contributing ideas that help save the day, Saru interacting with the Enterprise's Number One (who he kind of falls for, as she's the first human he's met who doesn't act like a predator), and Saru ruminating on his past (he was rescued from his planet, where his people lived in caves, by a Starfleet crew). I really liked the way the book handled Saru.
Number One was characterized well, though I was mildly grumpy that Mack calls her "Una"; however, I understand that originates from a Greg Cox novel. I know it's hard to work with an anonymous character like this in prose, but it just seems wrong, like translating Chewbacca's dialogue directly in print. I was a little sad to get almost none of the other Pike's Enterprise crew: Boyce has one scene, and Tyler, Garison, and Pitcairn make tiny contributions, but there's no Colt (who's my favorite), and the only "expanded universe" Pike crewmember I noticed was Caitlin Barry from the 1980s/90s novels by D. C. Fontana and Peter David. Give me some Mohindas or Burnstein or Dabisch or Nano or Moves-with-Burning-Grace or Carlotti! You shouldn't really take this complaint seriously, though, because ultimately this isn't a Pike's Enterprise novel, it's a Discovery (Shenzhou) one, and the focus is in the right place. I just really like Pike's crew.
I do wish we'd seen more of the various Shenzhou crew, though. Mack wrote biographies for them all, and named many of them (including Kayla Detmer, the only one to make the transition to the Discovery other than Burnham and Saru), but there's not much in the book to make you care about them: I want previous adventures for Danby Connor that make me even more sad when he bites it at the Battle of the Binary Stars!
Anyway, on the whole this was an enjoyable book. I like the way CBS and Simon & Schuster seem to be handling the Discovery novels: rather than so-so outings slotted in between television episodes like how Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise all started out in prose, they're being used to flesh out the universe of the new show and connect it to the world of the old ones.
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