The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway by Una McCormack

The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway: The History of the Captain Who Went Further Than Any Had Before
Edited by Una McCormack
Titan Books, 2021

Titan Books follows up its earlier titles The Autobiography of James T. Kirk: The Story of Starfleet’s Greatest Captain and The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard: The Story of One of Starfleet’s Most Inspirational Captains with The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway: The History of the Captain Who Went Further than Any Had Before - a volume, “edited” by Una McCormack, that tells the story of Captain Janeway from her own point of view.

Kathryn Janeway, inimitably played by Kate Mulgrew on Star Trek: Voyager from 1995 to 2001, was “the captain who went further than any had before” by virtue of an accident: her vessel was instantly transported seventy thousand light-years from Earth by an alien power-array, facing the captain and crew with the seemingly-insuperable problem of getting back home before most of the crew died of old age - even at maximum warp speed, an unlikely prospect. 

It was a terrific premise, a way of adding a fresh sheen of newness to the old “planet-of-the-week” formula invented by the original Star Trek incarnation thirty years before. By throwing Voyager across the galaxy, the showrunners gave themselves an entirely new canvas on which to work, and they increased the drama by removing the safety net of Starfleet; when in trouble, Captain Janeway didn’t have a flotilla of starships at her back.

Janeway’s crew was filled with interesting characters, from impetuous young ensign Harry Kim to raffish expert pilot Tom Paris to temperamental half-Klingon engineer B’Elanna Torres to ex-terrorist First Officer Chakotay to Janeway’s longtime friend, century-old Vulcan Tuvok. The ship’s doctor was killed in the initial incident that hurled the ship across the galaxy, so the Emergency Medical Hologram is pressed into constant service and quickly became a quippy, sarcastic star of the ensemble. And the stand-out later addition to the crew was Seven of Nine, a reformed Borg drone rediscovering her humanity - with the help of Janeway as a mother-figure. 

The background tension of the entire run of the show was the quest to get home. Could they keep the ship and crew intact? Could they find technological solutions to shorten their journey? And - to ask the most obvious question - would the ship make it back to Earth at the end of the show’s run? 

Despite this series of ‘autobiographies’ from Titan Books being about the most daring individuals in the history of the franchise, the books themselves are often curiously timid - and disastrously homogeneous. For instance, why don’t these autobiographies have titles? Can anybody believe that James T. Kirk or Kathryn Janeway would have innumerable adventures, reach the rank of admiral, and then not give their long-awaited autobiographies actual titles? 

Likewise the books themselves: the fact that two such fundamentally different characters as James Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard should sound as similar as they do in their respective volumes in this series is an indictment of the caution inherent in books vetted by corporations. Kirk, Picard, and Janeway are all, as Janeway puts it in this volume, “Starfleet to the core,” but they’re radically different individuals recounting radically different experiences - their books ought to sound a whole lot different than they do.

The Janeway in McCormack’s book almost always gives the most anodyne summaries of her amazing experiences. She quotes and refers to many fictional characters and fictional works, but only works written three centuries before she was born (she hated all the contemporary fiction of her own time? One sympathizes, but it seems unlikely). Her assessments of her past and present crews sound more like official job evaluations than the reflections of a living legend with nobody left to impress. Her reflections too often read like promotional copy:

Harry Kim, struggling with homesickness and a first assignment that nobody should receive … B’Elanna Torres, trying to put aside her anger and find a way of life that used her passion and her intellect constructively. Tom Paris, who, with seventy thousand light-years between them, was finally able to live outside his father’s shadow and become his own man. Our Doctor, evolving every day beyond what his programming had ever anticipated. Chakotay, day-by-day coming back to his old life as a dedicated Starfleet officer. Even Tuvok, perhaps the most collected and stable of us all, had to find a way of living with the exigencies and irrationalities of our situation.

It’s true that McCormack follows this up with the single line “Damn, though - I wish Amelia had come on board” (referring to the fact that the ship encountered Amelia Earhart on the other side of the galaxy and she inexplicably refused to join their ongoing adventures), which the show’s fans will like. And there are other things to like in these pages, including McCormack’s decision to flesh out Janeway’s long friendship with Laurie Fitzgerald, the original ship’s doctor who’s killed in the first episode. Janeway’s relations with her family (particularly her strong-willed and outspoken mother) back on Earth are well-drawn, although even here, the main character can be maddeningly vague, something that can’t be said about either the show’s Kathryn Janeway or Kate Mulgrew, who so quickly came to embody her. 

There are little treats for fans of Voyager scattered throughout the text. At one point Janeway reflects, “Kes [a psychic early character who sometimes had visions of the future] warned us, in her last days, about a species named the Krenim; one reason why we elected to avoid entering their space,” adding: “I often wonder what might have happened had we chosen to go there.” Those long-time fans will smile at this allusion to “Year of Hell,” one of the best episodes of this or any other incarnation of Star Trek, in which Janeway and crew actually enter Krenim space and fight them for a brutal year, only to have a time-restructuring remove all evidence of it. Janeway wouldn’t remember those events, but fans will appreciate the nod.

It’s hard to avoid thinking those fans will want more than scattered nods from this book (it’s almost needless to add that most of this book will be all but incomprehensible to somebody who’s never watched the show). There will never be a Voyager reunion show or reboot; there will never be a Voyager movie, much less a string of them. Surely Paramount Pictures could relax their IP grip just a bit? Just enough to let the ‘editors’ of these autobiographies give them more of the passion and individuality that made viewers love these characters in the first place? 

When it comes to the big-name canonical TV Star Trek captains, they’ve got one more chance to do that. Here’s hoping Benjamin Sisko’s volume is more memorable than its predecessors.

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.