A review by octavia_cade
Die Trellisane-Konfrontation by David Dvorkin
2.0
A lot of the early Star Trek novels are really quite short, and that has both advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I tend to enjoy shorter novels - there's frequently far less waffle to get through - but they do run the risk of skimming over a lot, and that's what happens here. There's an interesting idea at the bottom of this - the conflict between the sea creatures of one world and the land creatures of another, and the medical staff of the Enterprise come off very well. Both McCoy and Chapel are outstanding, and Chapel's temporary inclusion as part of a symbiotic organism (something she takes on willingly in order to treat it) is genuinely compelling, and I think deserved far more focus than it got. Engineer Scott also uses his brains, but most of the rest of the crew are functionally useless, and the entire problem of Kirk losing his ship to begin with is idiot plot, as the entire security team of the Enterprise - which both Kirk and Dvorkin are at pains to tell us is the best available - are absolutely moronic. (I've been reading these novels from the beginning, and it's come to my attention that the more time an author spends telling me how elite the ship's crew is, the more the text belies that assertion.)
But for all that, the rating had edged up to three stars up until the end, where storylines are ignored or tied up in bare paragraphs. Chapel's enormously affecting experience barely rates a few sentences. The issue of slavery is solved ridiculously quickly, and given that McCoy discovered that the people of Trellisane were eating the slaves - and that he'd eaten murdered sentient creatures as well - it's frankly staggering that this had not so much as a sentence of follow-up. What this book needed as a closing chapter was not Kirk feeling smug about his poor performance, but McCoy and Chapel working out their traumatic experiences together over a stiff drink.
But for all that, the rating had edged up to three stars up until the end, where storylines are ignored or tied up in bare paragraphs. Chapel's enormously affecting experience barely rates a few sentences. The issue of slavery is solved ridiculously quickly, and given that McCoy discovered that the people of Trellisane were eating the slaves - and that he'd eaten murdered sentient creatures as well - it's frankly staggering that this had not so much as a sentence of follow-up. What this book needed as a closing chapter was not Kirk feeling smug about his poor performance, but McCoy and Chapel working out their traumatic experiences together over a stiff drink.