Ship of the Line

Ship of the Line by Diane Carey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ship of the Line is billed as “The First Voyage of the Starship Enterprise 1701-E.” This would put it right after the events of Star Trek: Generations where (uh…spoiler alert, I guess) Riker crashed the ship and Data was overcome with emotion after finding his cat, alive in the wreckage.

This cuts to the ensuing years when Picard is no longer the Captain and the Enterprise-E is commissioned for a shakedown voyage with her new skipper, Captain Morgan Bateson.

If you are a Trekker, you will understand how this book synthesizes small one-off characters from various episodes and puts them along long-timers, Next Generation (TNG) regulars and at least one character from The Original Series. (TOS)

You would recognize Captain Bateson from the one episode where the TNG crew had been trapped in a time loop. He is the unfortunate captain they find at the end of the episode who has been stuck in the loop for almost 90 years, played by none other than Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer. So, this is the image you have in your head and in fact his face is on the cover (I wonder if he gets royalties for that?) And that Star Trek has many avenues by which a person could be and have been displaced from their own time, we also see Scotty…who as fans know, had placed himself in a transporter loop to survive into the day of TNG…

Three years after Bateson’s rescue from the Expanse, or the Rift, or the Loop or whatever the hell we are calling it…he is more or less up to speed with TNG times….

But Bateson is old school, coming from a time when the Klingons were still the enemy. And in fact, before being lost in a time loop, he had battled Klingon commander, Kozara…who (due to the longer life spans of Klingons) is still alive in the TNG era…

Picard is commissioned on a secret mission to Cardassia (keep up) where we run into Madred (There are Five lights) and oh hey, Spock makes a cameo, too.

And away we go…

Tensions are laid bare as Bateson’s old school mind meets the more enlightened crew of the Next Generation. Nominally, this is a TNG story, but it is apparent that everyone is going to get a mention. Riker tries to appeal to Bateson’s sense of reason as he implores him to hold off on a hopeless attack on the Klingon commander who has spent the last 90 years living with his dishonor of losing in battle to Bateson. But as the Klingon proverb tells us, revenge is a dish best served cold…and it is very cold in space.

One of the small joys of reading something like this is that you imagine a writer seeking a challenge of using the smallest bits from many sources and many episodes and having fun with it. These are considered “Lost Years” because they do not have a movie between Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact (And why would they?). Thus…. we have these books.

Fun fiction for the casual as well as hardcore fan.







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