This was supposedly a huge bestseller back in the day (1992). I gotta say, I don’t really get it. I think I missed the boat here.
A while back I went looking for people’s favorite Star Trek novels and then found some of them in my local used bookstores. This was one of the three I ended up picking up, and as my first Star Trek tie-in novel, I could probably have done better. Or, maybe I’m just missing the cultural context. It’s thirty-years old at this point, and it was published during the middle of TNG‘s run. (For more context, I probably wouldn’t have picked this up for a long time except I pulled it out of my TBR Jar.) (For even more context, this is going back to the bookshop from whence it came.)
I mean, it’s not like it was terrible or anything, but it was such a dude book, and turned what could have been a cool concept into a melodramatic feelings fest. How you mess up time travel like that, bro? Deanna is the supposed center of this book, and yet she has almost no actual character presence, and while the plot centers on saving her life (thus preventing old Riker from being Very Sad in another timeline) she herself has little to do with it. It’s the Riker and Data show. Which, to be fair, was kind of the case on the show as well, but it was somehow worse reading it over hours instead of seeing it over the course of one forty-five minute episode.
I will not be reading the sequel. Hopefully the other books I picked up (both written by Michael Jan Friedman, not Peter David) go over better than this one did when I eventually get to them.