Star Trek: The Higher Frontier Star Trek: The Original Series Paperback | Kindle | Audiobook
By Christopher L. Bennett
Publisher: Star Trek/Pocket Books
Release date: March 10, 2020
After the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, James T. Kirk retained command of the U.S.S. Enterprise and he and his trusty crew were assigned a second 5-year mission to explore new worlds. In Star Trek: The Higher Frontier, a new story in The Original Series timeline, Christopher L. Bennett weaves of tale of hatred, destruction, and betrayal, as a group of peaceful telepaths are hunted to near extinction by phantom killers and it’s up to the Enterprise crew to figure out who’s behind these attacks and how to stop them.
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History is the second in the series of Star Trek books that deal with the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations. If you don’t know what they do, that’s OK, here’s a little background. The DTI deals with crimes and incidents involving time travel and the possible alteration of the timeline. The department is made up of agents from all sorts of species from the Federation. Forgotten History starts off with DTI agents Garcia (who is human) and Agent Ranjea (who is a Deltan) on board the Starfleet vessel Everest which is on loan to the DTI. While on board the ship they stumble upon an anomaly in space that is bridging the years 2275 and 2383 together. In the middle of the anomaly is a ship that looks exactly like the Enterprise that James T. Kirk commanded, it even has the original engines on it. But it is called “Timeship II” and it belongs to the DTI. As soon as the ship is found, Garcia and Ranjea contact DTI headquarters and tell not only the director but two top notch human agents named Dulmur and Lucsly (if any of you are familiar with the two agents they were introduced in the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations).
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock is one of the most unique Star Trek: The Next Generation books I have read. Even though this book has been out for a year, I decided to read it anyway and find out what it was all about. It has one of my favorite Star Trek topics, which is time travel.
The book starts off with two agents from the Department of Temporal Investigations (which deals with time travel laws and regulations and sometimes detective work on temporal crimes) named Gariff Lucsly and Marion Dulmur who are investigating a temporal displacement of a Federation starship that has been found after being lost in time for 16 years. On board the ship Lucsly and Dulmur find an interesting young woman named Teresa Garcia and recruit her to become a new agent at the DTI.
Pocket Books has indefinitely postponed the release of four planned new Star Trek universe tie-in novels, all of which had storylines that take place just after the events of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek film, so as to not interfere with the film’s sequel plans.
After the huge success of Abrams’ Star Trek movie, which was released in theaters May 2009, Pocket Books had announced their plans to release the four new Trek tie-in novels in Summer 2010. Just last week, TrekMovie posted the summaries and preliminary covers for the planned books.
The novels were written by some big name scifi/Trek authors — Alan Dean Foster, Christopher L. Bennett, David Mack, and Greg Cox — which makes this postponement news even more disappointing for Trek fans [i.e., me].
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press
