A review by octavia_cade
Power Hungry by Howard Weinstein
3.0
I quite enjoyed this, thinly veiled polemic as it was. The Enterprise has been tasked with distributing famine relief to a non-aligned planet suffering heavily from industrial pollution and exploitative environmental practices. This, combined with a changing climate, is going to lead to mass starvation and ecological collapse within fifty years. On top of that, there's essentially a civil war going on between the polluters and a splinter group of religious fanatics who, while caring primarily for the environment, are so wedded to dogma that they're largely as unwilling to compromise as the first lot.
As the book wound down, and I was getting to twenty pages or so from the end, I was thinking "Picard's going to have to come up with something pretty quick to solve this!" because that's what he does, generally. Not just him, but Starfleet captains in general. Trek tends towards optimism, so I expected a quick if not particularly credible fix. There wasn't one. Picard gets all sides to listen to his presentation on just how fucked they are... and it doesn't make a difference. On the one hand, that's quite a brave move by Weinstein, within the context of Star Trek, anyway. On the other, as I said, it's a very thin warning about what we're doing to our own planet, and if science fiction is often used as application and metaphor, well, sometimes I want a little more than that. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this quite a lot - I nearly gave it four stars, and tie-in novels don't get that often from me. It needed a little more character work for that, though, I think.
As the book wound down, and I was getting to twenty pages or so from the end, I was thinking "Picard's going to have to come up with something pretty quick to solve this!" because that's what he does, generally. Not just him, but Starfleet captains in general. Trek tends towards optimism, so I expected a quick if not particularly credible fix. There wasn't one. Picard gets all sides to listen to his presentation on just how fucked they are... and it doesn't make a difference. On the one hand, that's quite a brave move by Weinstein, within the context of Star Trek, anyway. On the other, as I said, it's a very thin warning about what we're doing to our own planet, and if science fiction is often used as application and metaphor, well, sometimes I want a little more than that. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this quite a lot - I nearly gave it four stars, and tie-in novels don't get that often from me. It needed a little more character work for that, though, I think.