Field Trip

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Young Adult #6

by John Peel, Todd Cameron Hamilton (Illustrator)

After talking their teacher into organizing a field trip to the other side of the Wormhole, Jake Sisko and his classmates become alarmed when a Cardassian raider shoots down their runabout, trapping them on a planet run by plants. Original.

Genres: Star Trek, Science Fiction, Childrens, Media Tie In, Young Adult, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Juvenile

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

John Peel is the author of Doctor Who books and comic strips. Notably, he wrote the first original Doctor Who novel, Timewyrm: Genesys, to launch the Virgin New Adventures line. In the early 1990s he was commissioned by Target Books to write novelisations of several key Terry Nation Dalek stories of the 1960s after the rights were finally worked out. He later wrote several more original Daleks novels.

He has the distinction of being one of only three authors credited on a Target novelisation who had not either written a story for the TV series or been a part of the production team (the others were Nigel Robinson and Alison Bingeman).

Outside of Doctor Who, Peel has also written novels for the Star Trek franchise. Under the pseudonym "John Vincent", he wrote novelisations based upon episodes of the 1990s TV series James Bond Jr..

Reviews

[nx74defiant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute children's story. The field trip leads to danger. The Cardassian's are the cause of the trouble of course. Jake and his friends save the day. They meet and befriend a new race.

[Alvaro Zinos-Amaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to repeat some of my criticisms from the earlier John Peel book in this series (Prisoners of Peace):

The writing almost feels like middle grade rather than young adult, and it's padded with information we obviously don't need, like a description of what the wormhole is, and so on.

That said, the story isn't quite as slight as Prisoners of Peace, and there isn't as much repetition in the descriptions either. In fact, so much is revealed in the story towards the end that Peel may have swung too far in the other direction. Some of it was also hard to buy. (Spoiler: the Trofars being cybernetically enhanced by the Cardassians is one thing. Their being cybernetically enhanced *and* genetically modified so that their offspring are born with an immediate dependency on the cybernetic implants is quite another).

On the whole, it's a modest improvement over Peel's book #3 in this series, so up from 2 stars for that one to 3 stars for this one.

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun little adventure, in which what is essentially a school camp gets interrupted by Cardassians. It's impossible to read the book without hearing the aliens as Yoda, however, and they're basically cyborged Ewoks that look like troll dolls, which is a sentence I'd never have imagined myself making. I also feel as if I should give some credit to the author for including a supervising adult while making sure that they never get to do any supervising: the cyborg Ewok troll dolls are in advanced stages of pregnancy, and so Keiko has to help them out while her horde of charges is acting like a horde and stealing shuttlecraft... for the greater good, of course.

It's not remotely credible, but as I said: it's fun.

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty boring and there is not much here for adults. I'd also argue that the book's worth for younger audiences is limited. There is no great moral lesson here, nor is there anything that might have young people surprised or curious or questioning decisions being made. The illustrations are not always a great match for the narrative content (missing details), which annoyed me more than it should have.

[André · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice.