Star Trek: The Rings of Time
The Original Series
By Greg Cox
Paperback | Kindle
Simon and Schuster | Pocket Books
Release date: January 31, 2012

Star Trek: The Rings of Time brings together several things that I love: the original Star Trek series, the Space Program, and the planet Saturn. The book begins in the year 2020 with the crew of the U.S.S Lewis & Clark preparing to make the first manned mission to the planet Saturn.

Heading up the 21st century mission to Saturn is NASA astronaut Colonel Shaun Christopher aboard the U.S.S. Lewis & Clark. If you’re a fan of the original Trek series, then you might recall that surname as one of importance. Captain John Christopher, Shaun’s father, was a U.S. Air Force pilot who had a brush with the U.S.S. Enterprise after the starship went through a time warp that brought them to the late 1960s in the episode Tomorrow Is Yesterday. In the episode, we learn that John Christopher will father a son who will be part of a future mission to Saturn. The Rings of Time is the story of that famed mission, but we find out there was more to it than what made it into the history books and into Starfleet’s database.

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].