I wanted to like this better than I did. The plot is encyclopaedic and has clearly been thoroughly worked out, but of the three main elements that I read for - characterisation, language, and plot - I reliably care about plot the least. I didn't much care for the plot here, but that might not have mattered if there weren't endless pages of technobabble and a totally flat emotional effect. I just didn't feel for any of these people, and that's a problem.

A lot of that lack of empathy is influenced by a very particular authorial choice. Now granted, the entire plot is a series of crisis points, and there are people dropping like flies and so some semblance of emotional control is necessary in characters so that they don't all go into complete meltdown... but the balance is off for me. There's a lot of talk about pushing emotions aside, and a lot of comments about compartmentalisation, which in practice means lots of pages of encyclopaedia and technobabble and not that many pages about actual people actually feeling things. Let me give an example: Wesley Crusher (apparently) dies. Now, granted, I am indifferent to Wesley at best but when his own mother's reaction to witnessing her child's death is so glossed over, and when the interaction between Picard and Crusher afterwards is so muted (these people are married? I'm warmer to strangers I meet at the bus stop) then honestly, I don't see why I should care. 

I did get some ironic enjoyment out of the antagonists appearing as faceless avatars, because so many of the characters here had compartmentalised themselves into walking plot points, but otherwise: meh. I got the entire trilogy out from the library, so maybe now this set-up volume is over there'll be more characterisation (and less endless technical explanation) in the next.