Not quite as awful as the previous volume, Into the Void, but still not very good either. The thing that's making it marginally more tolerable is that there's a lot less focus on Calhoun, who remains remarkably eyeroll-worthy. There's one point where he even refers to himself as "childish" and I thought, "Yep, that's you" - except it isn't really, and that's when I realised the bottom of the many, many reasons I don't like him. He's not childish. He is, however, a childish perception of what a Starfleet captain should be. If a 14 year old boy were to write Star Trek fanfiction, this is what I would expect to result. Perhaps the New Frontier series is targeted at adolescents, I don't really know, but all of it - from the edgy, unlikeable captain, to the supposedly UST relationships between some of the crew (which in one case frankly seems like it borders on harassment) to the one-note snarky tone, to the fridging of a younger sister... everything about it screams juvenile. Including the editing. God knows who signed off on this, but a single example should suffice to show why they shouldn't have. Following an attack on his ship, Si Cwan damages him arm so severely that he screams in agony when another character simply touches it. In his next scene he's in the middle of a fight and literally swinging from gratings and there's absolutely no mention of the arm. In the scene after that, the damage is back, but at a much milder level. It's sloppy, absolutely sloppy.

I think what most irritates me here, though, is that while Calhoun is shoved off centre stage, what we get instead is a series of aliens who are pretty much presented as lurid spectacle for the reader. There are two Vulcan women aboard, and you know, I would love to have seen the beginnings of a friendship between two individuals who simply don't relate to other people as humans do. How challenging would it be to build an interesting relationship between characters who both deliberately eschew emotion? But we can't have that, because one is going through Pon Farr (which, of course she is), and the other is weeping to her about being the result of sexual assault. It's low-hanging fruit, all of it. And this is not even to mention the gender neutral character Burgoyne, who comes out with this piece of thoughtlessness: "We Hermats have our … unusual anatomical quirks" (which David is quick to exploit, with one of the Vulcan women essentially having a wet dream about Burgoyne in an outfit which clearly outlines their female breasts and male genitalia), but why would a Hermat think themselves unusual? For them, raised in a society where everyone is this way, such a thing would be the norm. They wouldn't go around thinking of themselves as having unusual anatomical quirks... that is the perspective of an outside observer, not a Hermat individual themselves. Again, it's sloppy - sloppy, thoughtless characterisation, in a series that never moves beyond it.

You know, I'm really beginning to regret giving myself the bucket list challenge of reading through all the Star Trek novels. Some have been great, but this particular run is a disaster from start to finish. Still, three more of New Frontier and I can move onto the Captain's Table books. They can't come soon enough.