Our book today is a new Star Trek novel set in the world of the Original Series, The Latter Fire by James Swallow, a sci-fi genre-novel hack of the first water, with a wide shelf of Star Trek, Warhammer, Doctor Who, and Stargate books to his credit. I made the mistake of reading his Author’s Bio before I started the book, and seeing that long, long list of novels written in the imaginative universes of other people, I despaired of what I’d find in The Latter Fire; all the usual caveats crossed my mind about an author who’s so often paid to provide reading pleasure composed so explicitly of checking off boxes of expected cliches.

But 2016 is of course the 50^th anniversary of the birth of Star Trek, and that’s hardly a time to begin skipping Star Trek novels, especially novels set in the world of the Original Series – so I bought The Latter Fire, braved its industrious author’s bio, and plunged in.

And I’m certainly glad I did! The first new Star Trek I read in 2016 turned out to be a corker of a good book, a straightforward mixture of space adventure and personal drama sweetly reminiscent of the Original Series at its least challenging and most enjoyable. And its setting is inherently intriguing: it takes place toward the end of the starship Enterprise‘s original five-year mission under the command of Captain Kirk, that shadowy, undocumented stretch between the end of the final Star Trek TV episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” in 1969, and the opening of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. And Swallow, bless his nerdy heart, signals some of the changes in store for the Enterprise by opening his novel with Ensign Chekhov leaving the ship to pursue security training … and Lieutenant Arex, the three-armed alien familiar to long-time fans of the show from the short-lived and much-reviled 1973 cartoon episodes, joining the ship’s crew.

Another clever twist Swallow gives his tale is to have Captain Kirk’s “recent” record come back to haunt him. As the story opens, the Enterprise is hosting a party of officials from the Federation Diplomatic Corps, who are all grimly familiar with the ways Kirk has played fast and loose with the Federation’s non-interference mandate, the Prime Directive. These diplomats are accompanying the Enterprise to a meeting with the Syhaari, a distant alien race being offered entrance into the Federation. Kirk and his crew, we’re told, first encountered the Syhaari a few years earlier, and now, the Syhaari starships are displaying suspiciously more advanced technology – leading the FDC to wonder if the Enterprise accidentally (or not) revealed bits or pieces of advanced technology. Kirk bristles at the suggestion, and despite how happy he and his crew are to meet the intrepid Syhaari captain Kaleo again, it isn’t long before Kirk’s Chief Engineer, Montgomery Scott, is detecting some very strange things going on in the Syhaari engine rooms.

But things immediately grow more serious: the fledgling Syhaari space fleet is decimated by a strange rogue moon emerging from the space debris cloud surrounding the Syhaari solar system. The moon wields overwhelmingly powerful energy-lightning that endangers the Enterprise and is lethal to the more primitive Syhaari ships – leading to a nice moment of introspection on Scotty’s part:

But what was clear was the storm of debris that appeared off the bow of the starship, spread out in a slick of shattered fuselages and broken engine nacelles. Pennants of spilled electroplasma trailed from holed warp-drives, and sparkling fields of flash-frozen atmosphere caught the weak light of a distant sun. Everywhere Scott looked he saw burnt twists of wreckage, and it made his gut knot. These were not his ships, and they had not been crewed by his people, but a man could not be a spacer for as long as Montgomery Scott had without sharing a common horror that any starship crew would feel at such a sight.

There turns out to be much more to that rogue moon than first appears, and Swallow quickly and very effectively escalates his plot, building everything to a delightfully gripping climax that mixes space-action and personal struggles so dramatically that reading it actually caused me to miss my subway stop – the first time a Star Trek novel has done that since Diane Duane’s My Enemy, My Ally back in 1984. And as full-throttle as the book’s main plot is, the parts I found myself enjoying most were the quicker, quieter moments like that scene of Scotty’s horror at starship wreckage, or, elsewhere in the book, a little awkwardness when Spock and Lieutenant Uhura find themselves working in very close quarters, or a moment when Captain Kirk and Captain Kaleo share an unguarded reflection on the job they share:

“You’re free to say what you want to me, Kaleo. We both know what it’s like to face death out here.” He motioned at the walls, but his gesture took in the void of space beyond. “To have other lives balancing on each order we give.”

“It is a great weight, yes?” she agreed. “Sometimes, it lifts off your neck long enough for you to raise your head and be the first to see something incredible … but it soon settles once more.”

“Would you give it up?”

“Never.” Kaleo showed her teeth in a brief grin. “Would you?”

“Not in a million years.”

I didn’t expect to like The Latter Fire nearly as much as I did (even despite the fact that the title is taken from a Tennyson poem that’s quoted all through the book), and now I’m foolishly hoping it’s a kind of good omen for the rest of my 2016 Star Trek reading – foolishly because I know how long the odds are that the rest of the novels coming out this year will be anywhere near as good as this one. I guess Dayton Ward’s Elusive Salvation next month will serve as my wake-up call …