WebsiteWe join Captain Seven of Nine and Commander Raffi Musiker as they’re relaxing at Raffi’s desert home before heading over to observe the U.S.S Titan-A‘s refit. It’s just after the events of Picard Season 3’s Frontier Day and Starfleet are still trying to come to terms with the loss of so many officers during the Borg attack.
Visiting the bridge of the Titan-A, Seven begins to feel strange and a bright flash pulls her and Raffi into a strange scene: The bridge is the same but it’s now at red alerts, Captain Shaw is alive and in command, the ship is being attacked by Romulan Warbirds. Something definitely isn’t right, is it real or a shared hallucination?
Waking from a coma 3 days later at a medical facility on Jupiter Station, Raffi struggles to come to terms with what she experienced and the fact that while she’s okay Seven is still unconscious. Dr Beverly Crusher thinks that Seven’s Borg implants were damaged by a surge of chroniton particles and she won’t be able to wake until her implants have reset themselves.
Back on Earth, Guinan is at her Los Angeles bar, Ten Forward, when she’s beamed to some strange room seemingly with no end. Fortunately she’s not on her own as a man named Kovich has been transported there as well and the two must work together to figure out where, and more importantly, when, they are.
Out of the blue, Beverly’s son Wesley appears warning Beverly, Crusher and Picard that the cause of Seven’s coma is someone messing with the timeline for unknown reasons, and whatever they’re doing is having wide-reaching repercussions such as the Romulan’s being at war with the Federation, which explains the events that Raffi and Seven experienced.
It soon becomes a literal race against time as the group must try to stop the universe unravelling around them, with each change causing a new splinter in the fabric of space/time and the next one could be the last.
“To Defy Fate” is a fun read but it does require knowledge of several events within Star Trek history from episodes such as TOS’s “Assignment: Earth“, TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” and “Journey’s End“, DS9’s “In the Pale Moonlight” and a few more! As a result if you’ve not seen some of the episodes you might not get the full nuances of the story but you will still be able to follow the plot.
The book is well written, is easy to read and the plot moves at a fairly quick pace which keeps you engaged. It’s also nice to get a view into how the Traveller’s work, what their remit is and how they enforce incursions into the timeline.
After Wesley (and Kore) were treated as an afterthought during Star Trek: Picard Season 2, it was nice for the two of them to be given something to do, and to explain how (and why) they do it.
If I had any complaints it’s that the jumping through time (and timelines) got a bit confusing on occasion and I would have to go back and check the chapter title so I knew when events were taking place, but that is a minor quibble.
Seven of Nine got left out a bit which is a shame as I was looking forward to the interactions between her and Raffi, but what there is is well executed and fits in with the character development from within the Picard TV show and subsequent books.
The main antagonist, a Romulan named Laika, could be a figure of hate with the death and mayhem she’s causing with her changes to the time stream but writer Dayton Ward allows us to see the pain and humanity within her and understand why she’s doing what she’s doing even if she’s going about it the wrong way.
The book also poses the question: If you had the opportunity to bend time to your will, would you use that power wisely?
And, as the book shows, the answer might not be as black and white as you think.
