Star Trek: Strange New Worlds had a phenomenal first season on Paramount+ and was renewed for a second season which will start airing in June. It’s no surprise that Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster Audio set out to publish a series of novels set in this crew’s universe. As a huge fan of Star Trek and this series in particular, this was a highly anticipated release for me. Star Trek: SNW – The High Country is the first novel chronicling the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, Science Officer Spock, and First Officer Una Chin-Riley. Written by John Jackson Miller, the audiobook is narrated by Robert Petkoff and was published on February 21st, 2023.
Here’s the book’s official
synopsis: “An all-new Star Trek
adventure―the first novel based on the thrilling Paramount+ TV series Star
Trek: Strange New Worlds!
When
an experimental shuttlecraft fails, Captain Christopher Pike suspects a
mechanical malfunction―only to discover the very principles on which Starfleet
bases its technology have simply stopped functioning. He and his crewmates are
forced to abandon ship in a dangerous maneuver that scatters their party across
the strangest new world they’ve ever encountered.
First
Officer Una finds herself fighting to survive an untamed wilderness where
dangers lurk at every turn. Young cadet Nyota Uhura struggles in a volcanic
wasteland where things are not as they seem. Science Officer Spock is missing
altogether. And Pike gets the chance to fulfill a childhood dream: to live the
life of a cowboy in a world where the tools of the 23rd century are of no use.
Yet even in the saddle, Pike is still very much a starship captain, with all the responsibilities that entails. Setting out to find his crewmates, he encounters a surprising face from his past―and discovers that one people’s utopia might be someone else’s purgatory. He must lead an exodus―or risk a calamity of galactic proportions that even the Starship Enterprise is powerless to stop....”
As most Star Trek fans know, Captain
Christopher Pike isn’t a new character in the Star Trek universe. He was the
very first Captain to be featured on The Original
Series for its pilot episode, “The Cage”, all the way back in 1965 before Captain
James T. Kirk ever took the helm of the Enterprise for his own pilot episode, “Where
No Man Has Gone Before.” “The Cage” and its counterpart, the two-part “The
Menagerie”, remains one of my favourite Star Trek episodes of any series. In
2006, one of Star Trek’s best and most beloved authors, Margaret Wander Bonanno,
wrote a fantastic novel focusing entirely on Captain Pike titled Burning Dreams. Unfortunately, it’s not
available on audiobook but I highly encourage you to seek it out in print: it’s
one of the best Trek books I’ve ever read. Fast forward to 2019 when Captain Pike
and his crew appeared for a good number of episodes on TV’s Star Trek: Discovery setting things up
for the eventual Strange New Worlds
series. John Jackson Miller was tapped to pen a Discovery novel/audiobook titled The Enterprise War with a focus on Pike and company. While I’m not
a fan of the Discovery series, I
picked it up on audiobook as I was curious to see what he’d bring to the table.
It was an average story with good ideas that was too often slow-moving and not particularly
memorable. Still, I had my hopes up for this first SNW novel, also penned by Jackson
Miller.
Which brings me to my thoughts on
The High Country. I was so
disappointed by this book! It was a veritable chore to get through it and
finish it. With a running time of 16 hours and some change, it feels at least
six hours too long. The pacing is slow as molasses and the plot is drawn out to
the point of becoming completely uninteresting. It doesn’t help that it feels
more like you’re reading/listening to a western rather than a sci-fi novel for
the majority of its runtime. The thing that irked me the most is the fact that
Miller had the not-so-great idea of splitting up the away team from the get-go.
So, we have Pike, Una, and Uhura all on their own for more than half of the
novel. And Spock, well, he’s missing in action for close to two thirds of the
book, only to resurface and play a mild supporting role. What a missed
opportunity, especially for a first book in the series, to have a grand scale
plot worthy of a movie with the crew acting as a cohesive team. Instead we get
what feels like the plot of an episode stretched out into what would have probably
been a two-parter on TV.
The story takes place on Etheska
(?), a planet where technology doesn't work, and timeline-wise fits about halfway
through Season 1 of the show. I also read somewhere that this book is a follow-up
of sorts to the Star Trek: Enterprise
series episode “North Star” focusing on the Skagarans, a humanoid race. I was
never a fan of Enterprise and have
only seen a handful of episodes of that show, so I had no prior knowledge of
what transpired in that episode. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed the book more had I
seen that episode and understood some of its references? Anyhow, all this to
say that this book failed to deliver an exciting adventure for SNW’s first
literary outing. Don’t get me wrong, Jackson Miller is a good writer, I’ll give
him that, he’s just not my cup of tea, I guess. I’ve read his Star Wars: Kenobi novel from 2013 and experienced
a similar disappointment, with issues of pacing and stretching out a thin plot worthy
of a novella into a whole novel when the occasion to explore years of Kenobi’s
life between Episode III and IV was another missed opportunity, in my
humble opinion. And we had the John Ford-western style setting again for that
book. Miller seems to love injecting western tropes into sci-fi. But I digress.
I truly hope the folks at Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster give the task to a
different writer for the next SNW book because I am done reading John Jackson
Miller: three strikes, you’re out! What saved this audiobook was the always
reliable Robert Petkoff handling narration duties. He’s proven over the years
to be the voice of Star Trek in
literature. His portrayal of the various characters is flawless. I can
confidently say that if I’d been reading a print version of this book, I would’ve
stopped halfway through (or maybe sooner), but Petkoff kept me going.
In the end, sadly I can’t
recommend Star Trek: Strange New Worlds –
The High Country as it simply didn’t deliver the goods on too many levels.
Although, judging by a quick glance on Amazon, I seem to be in the minority as
the book appears to have a plethora of four- and five-star reviews. Mileage may
vary. Coming on the heels of the excellent Star Trek: Harm’s Way from late last year by David Mack, I still have faith in
the Star Trek novel franchise. I’ve lost all faith in the Star Wars books
though, as my experience with them has been awful these past five years. Star
Trek still seems to hit it out of the park more often than not, so I’m still
hopeful we’ll get a home run for the next Star
Trek: Strange New Worlds novel/audiobook.
Rating: Two
stars out of five
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