Star Trek: The Higher Frontier
By Christopher L. Bennett
Gallery Books, 2020

Something rather noticeable happens in Star Trek between 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Cinema fans will immediately blurt out, “You’re darn tootin’ something happens! We exchange a slow, bloated flop for a trim, effective space-action hit!” But Star Trek fans will likely notice continuity-changes instead: suddenly, the Starfleet uniforms are different! Suddenly, Kirk is back at Starfleet command! Suddenly, Spock is Captain of the Enterprise! Suddenly, the Enterprise is a training vessel full of raw cadets! That later movie’s director, the great Nicholas Meyer, saw no pressing dramatic reason to explain any of these changes, and he was right: the movie is infinitely rewatchable without a single word of exposition. 

Sadly, almost the entire industry of Star Trek fiction has devolved into providing that exposition, for everything, at enormous length. In his new book Star Trek: The Higher Frontier, Christopher Bennett is so eager to provide such exposition that he’s willing to interrupt the actual plot of the novel with long digressions laying the groundwork for these continuity changes. At one point he has Kirk, Spock, and McCoy talking about the proposed changes (Kirk taking a desk job, Spock being promoted, the Enterprise being more or less mothballed) when he even interrupts that interruption in order to talk about the food court at the space station:

Kirk led the others through the exit into the large, domed recreational area beyond. This vast open space, more than a kilometer in diameter and nearly as high, was landscaped to resemble a variety of Earth terrains, with the sections subdivided by market streets representing a number of Earth’s major regional cultures. It might have seemed redundant for a station in Earth orbit to go to such lengths to duplicate Earth, when the real thing was just a transporter beam away. But the facility was for the benefit of wayfarers who were stopping off at a Spacedock for brief periods and were unable or unwilling to go through the necessary customs and medical checks to be cleared for travel to Earth’s surface. As such, it was a version of Earth tailored for the expectations and convenience of offworld tourists - which could be endlessly amusing for an Earth native to experience.And then, unbelievably, he continues:

More to the point, the attempts of alien entrepreneurs to approximate terrestrial dining experiences in a manner suited to their species’ palates had occasionally spawned some intriguing fusion cuisines. Ever since Kirk’s old science officer Rhenas Sherev had introduced him to the phenomenon, Kirk had always taken the opportunity to sample Spacedock’s culinary scene whenever he returned to Earth after years away.

There is an actual plot in Higher Frontier. Bennett has written a slew of Star Trek novels; he knows how to bolt together a basic plot, this one involving the extermination of a telepathic sub-species of Andorians by an unknown race of alien marauders, a case that involves the character Miranda Jones, from the original Star Trek episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” (played by the great Martha’s Vineyard actress Diana Muldaur), a blind human who honed her telepathic abilities on Vulcan. Bennett not only grounds his narrative on that original episode but also on the Star Trek: Enterprise episodes introducing those telepathic Andorians and also on a depressingly thick wedge of other Star Trek novels. Despite the fact that this is one of the only Star Trek novels to appear in 50 years that has nothing recognizably Star Trek on its cover, this is very much a closed party, admissible only to die-hard fans of the extended franchise. 

That wouldn’t be fatal on its own - other Star Trek novels have been similarly wonky but managed to be terrific reading even so - but a book so mired in insider allusions absolutely requires rocket fuel, and Bennett simply doesn’t provide any. Even in its action scenes, his book just ambles along, and the ambling is interrupted with calamitous regularity with very comfortable fan-talk about space stations, or local cuisine, or the procedural changes that laid the groundwork for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and the climactic revelation of the plot itself is oddly flattening, a strange and unnecessary-seeming diminution of the character of Miranda Jones). 

The result is a competent-but-bland fans-only Star Trek novel that has much more in common with Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its infamous longueurs. The Higher Frontier fills in some minutes from the last meeting, but nobody who’s not already a lore-steeped franchise fan will understand or care about a single word of it. That may be more or less par for the course when it comes to most Star Trek fiction, but it’s depressing just the same.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.