What's Bully Reading? 2024 #19: Star Trek: Picard: The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack

It's been a while since I read a Star Trek novel — I haven't followed them since the Novelverse was destroyed in order to put the Paramount+'s post-Nemesis canon TV timeline in its place — but this was a pretty good one. It's a prequel to the first season of Picard (and made me appreciate that season a lot more) that fills in the details and the history of the Romulan star's destruction and Picard's attempts to provid escape and harbor to the Romulans on their affected, soon-to-die worlds.





In contrast to the cautious optimism of now-admiral Jean-Luc Picard in heading the evacuation process, (and the gung-ho, get-it-done attitude of Geordi La Forge), both the Federation and Starfleet — not to mention the Romulan penchant for suspicion and secrecy — hamper his efforts from the start, and the novel does not end happily, presaging Picard's anger and disappointment in the TV series. There's a lot of good world-building here: characters like Agnes Jurati and Elnor are well-fleshed out, and McCormack gives us good reasons that Picard's choice of Raffi Musiker was justified — she's a solid officer and fascinating balance of realism and caution against Picard's belief that everything will eventually turn out right.

Much of the novel might be described by Trek detractors as "woke," and that's 100% okay with me: Star Trek has always addressed contemporary issues by cloaking them in sci-fi metaphor, and this is no different. America's current migrant situation, mass refugee camps, climate change denial, compromised or clueless politicians, former enemies' secret political manuevering, and attacks on solid science all smack straight up against Admiral Picard, and eventually they wear him down to his inevitable resigning. But he won't go down without a fight:


I highly enjoyed this Star Trek novel, although it's nto a happy story.