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language: English
country: USA
year: 2025
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: The Unforgiving Stars, #1
dates read: 14.3.26-15.3.26
E.J. Isaacs’s A New Beginning (the first in his series-to-be The Unforgiving Stars) is perhaps the most Star Trek novel I have ever read, and I include the many Star Trek novels I read as a child in that count, on the grounds that, where those mostly covered what would make for one episode’s worth of material, A New Beginning feels like a collection of basically standalone episodes within an overarching season-long frame narrative.
the novel follows the crew of the Excalibur II, a brand-new human ship not-quite-stolen from its dock by Captain Rena Sheets and her crew, a mix of war veterans and fresh-out-of-training junior officers, as they set out on what is to be a ten-year mission. officially, their purpose is exploration. in reality, their secondary goal is to scout the borders between the Association of Allied Worlds and its centuries-old enemy, the “Angels”, who were driven back twelve years before when humans joined the Association’s war effort but who some human officials believe are simply biding their time.
the cast is a fairly predictable array. Captain Reena Sheets is the scion of a wealthy family of industrialists (this is not a postcapitalist future). her first officer is an old flame who has spent the past twelve years as a spy hunting down a double-agent who assisted the Angels during the war. the helmsman is a stoic (of course) Apache man named “Clear Sky”. the bright-eyed Sonja (aka Sonni) is picked out as ship’s purser — a novelty I admit I was not expecting! — for her genius with logistics; she was, of course, inspired to join “the Fleet” by her encounter with an officer named Kathryn J…ackson. the ship has a dubiously-legal AI named Shenna (the other major influence here is very clearly Mass Effect). the doctor is gay-married to the ship’s counselor. and so on.
the prose is underwhelming. it is, I will say, well-edited on a technical level. the grammar and syntax are correct and consistent, with just a few misplaced commas, though there are also a bunch of proper noun typos and inconsistencies (in one case only about two sentences apart!). but the prose itself is plain at best and clunky at worst; in particular, Isaacs tends to have characters avoid contractions in dialogue in a way that often sounds just slightly stilted.
the character development is a mixed bag. there’s very little interpersonal friction, though the weapons officer does have a breakdown because she’s in unrequited love with the captain and believes this is wrong because she’s from a homophobic religious colony called “New Haven” (lmao). it doesn’t help that the names of the main cast include Rena Sheets, Raleigh, Shenna, Sonni, and Reese. it took me a bit to get clear on who was who. once I did, though, they’re likable enough — I can imagine them as the cast of a Star Trek series, which is very clearly the goal. Sonni (the purser) and Reese (the weapons officer) probably get the most page time, but Sonni is a bit too do-gooder to be engaging enough, and Reese’s psychosexual relationship with the captain is therapized away very quickly. the most interesting character is probably, Shenna, the ship’s computer, who is in what amounts to AI adolescence, trying to understand humanoid emotions while also understanding the new emotions that she herself is having as she experiences grief, anger, and friendship for the first time.
the biggest problem here, though, is simply the plot. part of this is structural: there is no real overarching plot, except to the extent that “the crew of the USS Voyager is trying to get home to the Alpha Quadrant” is “the plot” of Star Trek: Voyager. the Excalibur’s mission is there, but it doesn’t provide enough actual narrative structure to tie the disparate episodes that make up the bulk of the novel together.
many of the episodes are relatively short, snapshots of interpersonal things, including some of the crew deducing that Shenna is an AI and not just a sophisticated computer. the most interesting bits here were, again, the sections from Shenna’s perspective as she starts to exercise her own judgment. Reese’s breakdown also could have been compelling but it does get therapized away quite quickly (everyone in this book is always being A Supportive Friend who’s Always Here To Talk (When You’re Ready)).
the two more involved episodes are both problematic, in different ways, as well as not really cohering. the first of these involves a disastrous first contact with a species newly capable of spaceflight who turn out to be religious fanatics who believe in their racial superiority over all other life in the galaxy. the captain mostly-accidentally kills their leader and so unexpectedly becomes their new leader, ordering them to reorganize their society and ~do better~ so they’re Ready for contact with the galaxy next time. it’s a boring, strawman portrayal of religious fanaticism (they literally say “but our religion says—” and then Reena cuts them off), and it brings with it so many unexamined assumptions, first and foremost that becoming a member of this interstellar polity (it seems to have more centralized authority than the UN but less than, say, the US federal government) is in some way the inevitable next step in this species’s development. either they stagnate as religious fanatics or they Get Over It and join the Rules-Based International Order. it’s very much a Star Trek premise, but the novel seems to regard the Prime Directive — part of what makes Star Trek interesting at least some of the time, to the extent that it puts its space liberalism in conflict with itself — as an inconvenience to be done away with: Rena killing the head of state might have been an accident, it says, but regime change is good, actually.
more troubling is the final episode. here the Excalibur finds a derelict colony ship that carried “traditionalist” Native Americans in search of a new world. due to an accident en route, only about half the colonists actually made it to the surface, where they have been struggling to survive for a few generations, under attack by what they identify as murderous “beasts”. these are, of course, the tool-using and intelligent native species of the planet, whom the Native American colonists want the crew of the Excalibur to genocide for them. fortunately, Commander Clear Sky is there to remind them of the history of Indigenous genocide in North America and shame them into acknowledging that the native species are intelligent and can communicate (just not verbally). this is so clearly an extrapolation from the Removal episode of TNG, but where that episode at least puts its Indigenous characters in a similar structural position (removed against their will from land that was promised to them), A New Beginning invokes the tired question: what if the colonized became the colonizers? Really Makes You Think. I assume the decision to include Clear Sky was to avoid the white savior optics of having the non-Native crew lecturing the Native colonists about colonialism. and this is not even touching the unhinged sexual/reproductive politics at the end.
this is particularly frustrating because I think the native species of the planet could have been much more interesting if they weren’t just foils in a hackneyed morality play. their nonverbal communication was clunkily handled (the language specialists on the Excalibur are all adamant that there must be something verbal going on despite the explicit mention of sign languages), but I thought the dance aspect was conceptually cool — I just wish it had been explored further. there’s an archaeology aspect that would have been interesting to see in more detail, as well, but as it is it’s mentioned in about two paragraphs and then they leave.
if it weren’t for the politics of these two episodes, I think the book would have been, you know, fine. not cohesive enough for my taste, and with mediocre writing, but fine. the characters are pleasant enough. there are some fun moments, even if there’s also a lot of de facto therapy. but these two episodes, especially the second one, really just killed the book for me, I fear.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, horny, lighthearted