This is a bit of an odd one, on the surface at least. The Enterprise is faced with a society where fiction is thought crime, essentially, and anyone committing said crime is mind-wiped. Naturally Captain Picard and company can't just fly off - hostages are taken, and things pretty much turn to custard before they get any better. And the thing about a lot of the worlds of science fiction is that they're not really that plausible. The logic to them doesn't hold up, and I kept wanting to pick apart the reasoning and the society that resulted from it here, until I decided that I was missing the point. Yes, it's not all that plausible, but the novel's functioning as a metaphor for the limited understanding that occurs in the absence of metaphor, and with that interpretation it's rather more successful.

I was also pleased to see Troi had another major role here. Pleased but surprised... that's two books in a row where she's presented as an effective and competent professional who provides an absolutely necessary critical perspective. I wish I weren't surprised, but stories like that were few and far between for her in the series, so I'm glad to see the books explore her skills more thoroughly.