Synopsis
A thrilling new adventure based on the acclaimed TV series Star Trek: Picard!
2401: Just weeks after defeating a devastating joint attack by rogue Changelings and remnants of the Borg Collective, Starfleet and the Federation face a long period of recovery that requires replacing lost personnel and ships. While touring the U.S.S. Titan-A, which is just beginning an extensive repair-and-refit process that will take nearly a year to complete, newly promoted Captain Seven of Nine and her first officer, Commander Raffi Musiker, experience a bizarre temporal event which renders them both unconscious and sends Seven into a deep coma.
In the aftermath of this inexplicable attack, Admirals Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher are surprised by the appearance of Crusher’s son, Wesley. Now a Traveler capable of traversing through all of space and time, he warns them that forces he cannot identify are working to disrupt time for unknown and potentially catastrophic reasons. Reality as they know it is in jeopardy and, despite their initial best efforts, the effects are not contained but instead continue to escalate.
Picard, Crusher, and Musiker join Wesley in hunting through time to stop whoever or whatever seems hellbent on rewriting history. But what is their unknown adversary’s ultimate objective? Left unchecked, their efforts might well erase from existence those Picard and his friends hold most dear. What could justify attempting to defy fate itself?
Review
Set between the climax and the “one year later” epilogue of Star Trek: Picard’s series finale, To Defy Fate finds the titular Starfleet Admiral and associates lying low for some much-deserved rest after having saved the galaxy from annihilation once again. Of course, galaxy-threatening apocalypses are never too far away when you’re the captain of the Enterprise… or at least, a former captain of said ship in one case, and soon-to-be-captain in another.
Former Borg drone turned captain, Seven of Nine, and her partner, Raffi Musiker, are enjoying some much-needed shore leave together when they’re caught in a temporal anomaly that leaves Seven in a coma. This draws together not only Admirals Picard and Crusher, head of Starfleet Medicine, but Crusher’s long-absent time-traveling son, Wesley. Since we last him departing the Enterprise with an alien being known as the Traveler, Wesley has become something of a temporal cop, jumping across time and multiverses to fix whatever various paradoxes and reality-twisting moments whatever bad guy of the day has introduced into the timeline to alter reality for their own nefarious purposes.
Said bad guy this time around is actually bad woman, Romulan time-traveler Likara. And really, she’s not that bad, all things considered. Her goals are understandable and genuinely sympathetic, even if she goes about trying to achieve them in the wrong way, and to too many disastrous ends, most of which either plunge the universe into war or outright spell the end of both Starfleet and the Federation.
Dayton Ward draws on the vast breadth and depth of Star Trek history, touching on several key moments likely known very well by this franchise’s intense fandom. If you’re new to all things Trek, To Defy Fate is probably a poor starting point. However, if things like Wolf 359, First Contact, the Dominion War, Prime and Kelvin timelines mean anything to you, you’re certainly in the right spot.
The crux of To Defy Fate bends around Likara’s attempts to save her family from certain death amidst the implosion of the Romulan system’s sun. It’s a key moment that bridges not only the fate of the universe, but the background of both the Star Trek: Picard series and 2009’s Star Trek reboot movie. Likara attempts to change the fate of her world by changing key moments in the past. And so begins a race through and against time as Wesley, Picard, Raffi, and others chase down Likara’s various incursion points and resultant splintered timelines.
By and large, it’s a fun romp through Trek’s future-past and with plenty of “Hey, remember when…!” moments, but it’s also not as Multiverse of Madness or Sliders crazy as it could potentially be. The majority of Ward’s alternate timelines feel kind of samey-same, with one neat spot – an Earth that has been conquered by Klingon forces – being little more than a brief stopover between more consistent realities that involve war between the Romulans and Starfleet. As a fan of Seven, I was also a bit disappointed to see her sidelined in a coma for the bulk of the book’s page count.
Given the squirrely requirements of tie-in fiction, we also don’t get much in the way of either canon-breaking or canon-expanding concepts given the small window To Defy Fate is forced to exist within. We don’t get to read about the Enterprise-G’s first mission with Seven in the captain’s chair and her partner, Raffi, in the first officer’s seat beside her, as it’s still the Titan here and undergoing repairs. Those hoping for some kind of continuation of those 25th Century adventures promised in Picard’s third-season finale will still be pining away at the end of this one and left waiting for IDW Publishing’s relaunched Star Trek comic this fall (sans Raffi, who’s getting her own separate spin-off comic series), in time for Trek’s 60th anniversary. Here’s to hoping Trek’s line of lit-fic, and its lineup of authors, is given a chance to craft their own future legacy with the G’s unwritten history. All good things in due time, I suppose.
Rather than dwell on what To Defy Fate isn’t, one must meet it on its own terms for what it is. The bottom line is, it’s a fun, pulpy, time-hopping adventure. Ward handles the characters well, which should be a given as he’s spent decades writing them across a slew of bookish adventures, and it’s lots of fun to see familiar characters pop up in unexpected ways. Perhaps most importantly, though, Ward and To Defy Fate provide those moments that are most important throughout Star Trek’s long and prosperous life: hope. While there’s certainly plenty of commentary on Earth’s struggles of the 21st Century – for the characters involved, it’s with the foreknowledge of the Eugenics War to come, but for readers, particularly Americans, it’s certainly in keeping with our own travails down the path of eugenics under RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump team writ large, and conservatives attempts to rewrite and/or banish history and undo every shred of progress made in this country – Ward smartly reminds us that eventually things do get better, and that the arc of the moral universe genuinely does bend toward justice, even if it is a long road getting to there from here. Things may get worse before they get better, but they do indeed get better, eventually.
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