Crossover (Star Trek: The Next Generation)

While teaching the logic of the Vulcan way to Romulans eager to reunite with their Vulcan ancestors, Spock and his students are taken hostage by an enemy Romulan spy, and it is up to Picard, with some help from Scott and McCoy, to effect a rescue. 135,000 first printing.

Veteran Trek scribe Friedman (All Good Things...) delivers the goods again with the most interesting and ambitious novel to come from this complacent franchise in a while. Friedman assimilates characters from the original TV series into a rollicking adventure/rescue story. Ambassador Spock, still working toward reunification of the Vulcan and Romulan cultures, is captured with several of his proteges by a regional Romulan dictator with delusions of grandeur. Viewing Spock's capture as a security risk, the Federation sends Captain Jean-Luc Picard's Enterprise to negotiate Spock's release, assigning 140-year-old Admiral McCoy to the ship because of his familiarity with Spock. Meanwhile, Scotty steals a starship and engages in his own one-man rescue attempt. The interplay is fast and furious, as is the action, while the political intrigues are sufficiently interesting, if not very complex. Readers will have a fine time second-guessing some of Friedman's claims (Scotty went to the Academy?), while nodding in agreement with most of them. The prose, like several of the rescue attempts, lacks subtlety and grace but is suited to its task of telling a story that stars characters of whom most readers have already formed full and sympathetic portraits.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The latest Star Trek novel, by one of the most seasoned producers of ST fiction, is aptly titled. Not only do members of both the original and the Next Generation casts appear in it, but it deals with a situation in which both the Romulans and the Vulcans are striving to cross over from their long-standing mutual isolation from and hostility toward each other to some form, at least, of reunification (they were once members of the same race). The story takes place during Jean-Luc Picard's command of the Enterprise but involves Mr. Spock, now a diplomat who is caught up in Romulan factional fighting that leads to his vividly described and nasty incarceration, among other things. Dr. McCoy and engineer Scotty, each of whom may be slowing down but has lost none of his ingenuity, must join forces, unofficially, with Picard and his crew, too, in order to bail out Spock and prevent the reunification effort from coming to a bloody end that would be disastrous for the United Federation of Planets as well as the two cultures directly involved. It's a classic helping of ST adventure (you can almost hear the ST theme, sawed out on schmaltzy violins, welling up between the lines) that ought to please the seemingly endless saga's legions of fans. Roland Green