Sue's SF Book Reviews

Star Trek:The Next Generation #39 - Rogue Saucer
Author John Vornholt
Pocket Books œ4.50

The Enterprise, with a skeleton crew, is called from shore leave
by Picard's 'favourite' admiral, Admiral Nechayev, to test out a
prototype saucer which should be able to safely survive a
planetary crash landing.  Picard, Worf, Riker, Data and La Forge
reluctantly volunteer to test it, but things go awry when a Maquis
plot causes the separated saucer to leave the hull section in the
grip of a computer simulation which is threatening to destroy both
the hull and its crew. Can Picard reclaim the saucer? Who are the
Maquis infiltrators? And what is their ultimate aim?

This is a fast paced and generally enjoyable read. All of the
characters act true to form, and the interplay between Picard and
Nechayev is nicely choreographed. The ending of the book is quite
a cliff-hanger and not totally expected. Recommended.

Star Trek: First Contact
Author JM Dillard
Hardback, RRP œ12.99

Based on the film of the same name, this sounded to me to be the
best of all the Star Trek movies so far. In it, the newly
commissioned Enterprise-E travels back in time to the era of the
first warp drive flight by Zef Cochrane. In the future, he is
venerated for making the first contact between Earth and an alien
race - the Vulcans. In reality, as Riker and Geordi especially
will discover, he is a disturbed man, made bitter by the hardships
that he and others have suffered after the Third World War. He
looks on his first warp drive flight as more of a money-making
opportunity than as a way to benefit mankind.

But, I'm jumping ahead a bit. Picard and his crew, following a
Borg ship after a huge space battle, get dragged into a temporal
vortex.  Through it they see a vision of Earth in the future
completely overrun by the Borg. When they have an opportunity to
follow the Borg back into the past, to a time where they shifted
Earth's time line into this horrific Borg-ised future, they grasp
it and find themselves in the 21st century, fighting not only the
Borg but also their Queen who having been foiled once by Picard is
as determined to take her revenge on him and those he loves as he
is to take his revenge on her.

The crew of the Enterprise becomes split, some on Earth with
Cochrane, the rest still in space on the ship, with no contact
between the two groups. The tension builds as time to the first
contact gets closer. If the opportunity is missed, the whole of
Earth's future will be changed and mankind doomed. How are Picard
and his crew going to save the day?

At the time I read the book, I hadn't yet seen the film but I
found the book excellent, and since then, the film totally lived
up to my expectations. First Contact doesn't have as many
light-hearted places that the previous films have had. All in all,
there are some horrific moments and we get a much clearer picture
of the way the Borg assimilate their enemies.  Actually it sounds
as though the process itself has changed in many ways, not so much
a surgical procedure as a taking over of a host body by a sort of
Borg parasitism which invades and infiltrates the host tissue -
rather nasty and quite graphically described!

The bonus of some screenshots from the film and the
behind-the-scenes look at the development of the storyline,
costumes, sets etc makes the book complete. Resistance is futile -
read this book now!










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