Twilight's End (Star Trek, Book 77)

Rating:
Summary: Pure fun
Review: This is a comedy, almost to the point of satirising Star Trek. The background story is actually fairly impressive and intricate. To return their planet to habitability, the population intends to use tens of thousands of impulse drives to spin it up to normal rotation. A terrorist faction has kidnapped the lead engineer, attacked the facilities, and has no qualms about firing on the Enterprise. The descriptions are quite vivid. The action scenes are very clear. Throughout the book there are amusing commentaries on both and also on the characters, particularly by McCoy and Spock about Captain Kirk. The writing is generally light and amusing, although there are some very serious scenes. However, the descriptions in Kirk's section, as he searches for the engineer, seem written more for young adults than for mature readers. As a counter to that, there is a debate between McCoy and Spock over the ethics of the mechanical solution in contrast to a more 'natural' biological one. Finally, the last third or so of the book is given to firing the engines and spinning the planet. There are lots of 'Trekisms' here: "Capt'n, she canna take much more", "Hold her together, Scotty." The result is a strange but to me very amusing mixture of epic and farce: the dialogue could have been pulled from almost any episode where the Enterprise is in trouble, but instead of the ship they are dealing with a whole planet. It's weird but it works very well. In summary, I would say that this is written in the style of the humour episodes of Deep Space Nine. If you enjoy those you should enjoy this too.