Book Review: STAR TREK – PICARD: TO DEFY FATE by Dayton Ward
When CBS Paramount elected to move forward with the Star Trek Picard series on its streaming service it spelled curtains for a long-running Star Trek literary universe that tied together previous concurrently set Star Trek series of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Like the Disney Star Wars sequels that relegated all those novels to ‘legends’ to make way for a new official “canon” so went Star Trek. Just as those Disney sequels now make the whole endeavor seem so not worth it, so too would I argue went Picard. The series was very hit or miss, far too simultaneously over- and under-developed. And the official canon Picard novels were generally tangential and mediocre by way of avoiding to do anything of substance, as the show still went on its wild course. Unlike the Star Wars novels, however, some of the biggest Star Trek literary universe authors were allowed to publish books that ended the continuity that they and their colleagues had built up, and pave the way (through the standard multiverse model of SF) to set up new canon continuity for characters and the setting. These were the Star Trek Coda trilogy by Dayton Ward, James Swallow, and David Mack. It too was wild, maybe a bit over-developed, but it was also glorious and a satisfying way to tie things up. Now that Picard is over and we’re back into having novels that may or may not stay canon, Dayton Ward returns to the characters of those three older Star Trek series… and the newer streaming series of Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds to pen a novel very similar in style to Star Trek Coda. Something that takes characters and ideas from all these franchises and puts them into a multiverse adventure that imagines where a new literary universe (or multiverse) can go from where things left off in Picard. This is Star Trek – Picard: To Defy Fate.
