Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven
By David Mack
Pocket Books
Release date: March 27, 2012
Paperback | Kindle

Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven is the first Vanguard book I’ve read, though it’s the eighth – and final — installment in the series. As I began reading Storming Heaven, I couldn’t help but wonder, where has this series been all my life?

The Star Trek books I’ve read before mostly centered on the crew of the original series, and for some reason, I was under the impression that the Star Trek: Vanguard series contained all new characters with no one from any previous Trek movies or television shows. Man, was I wrong. While Vanguard does introduce a lot — and I mean a lot — of new characters, there’s plenty of familiar faces as well, including Captain James T. Kirk, as the events take place in what would be the second half of the original television show’s third season.

But Kirk and crew are not the center of the Vanguard story, though if you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll recognize several other people in Storming Heaven, including Dr. Carol Marcus, the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (when he was Councillor), and the Klingon General Chang (when he was a Captain), all in their pre-Star Trek movie incarnations. This is something about the book that I absolutely loved, because we got to learn about significant events in their lives that lead up to the events of the movies.