Where Star Trek Fails to Dazzle

Star Trek: Titan #4: Sword of Damocles: Titan 4 Sword of Democle by Geoffrey Thorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was okay. I enjoyed parts, just enough to finish and give it a 3.

But I was leaning 2 or DNF for a lot of it.

This is the fourth book in a spin-off of Star Trek: the Next Generation, with Riker and Troi as familiar characters, and I hoped to enjoy it. It didn't really work for me. I would probably have enjoyed it more if I had read the first books, but this is the one I found in the used bookstore, so....

I found the action very slow, based almost entirely on characters talking about what they were doing or talking about how far along they were on doing it, with almost nothing heroic or exciting taking place. Most of the action was repairing broken technology or adapting technology, but in a very static way. Titan was trapped by strange waves similar to warp technology, and a shuttle sent to the planet surface was lost (actually split up across time, somehow) and Riker believes Troi has died. On the planet and on the ship, the crew members fight to get free of the phenomenon. Bad things happen. Good guys do their best. Not everybody makes it.

If more of the characters had been familiar to me, maybe I would have cared about them, and maybe it would have been more fun. I dunno. I might try others in the series, maybe hunt up the first ones. Not feeling it right now.

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