Star Trek: The Last Roundup Book Review
Joe Siegler
I was home visiting family recently, and when I left, I borrowed this book from my brother for the flight home. It’s 280 or so pages, and I read the entire thing waiting for my plane in the terminal, and for about the first 45 minutes of the flight. I flew through it pretty good, and I don’t know if that’s because the book is good, or I was bored.
The book was pretty decent – I generally tend to get suckered in by books that proport to tell a story of a single event in an already existing universe that we don’t get to see on screen. In this case, it’s the “final adventure of the original crew”. Which is an odd phrase for the book, because the bulk of the story has Kirk, Chekov, & Scotty in it. The remainder of the original crew is barely there, and only superficially involved with the main plot of the story. We do get Kirk’s two nephews from his rarely mentioned brother. This story takes place right before the events of movie #7, “Star Trek Generations“. There’s a lot of characters in it that play a MAJOR part in the story, but are new characters. This almost reads like a fan story – “Hey, let’s put me in the story at the expense of some other character(s)”. It’s not quite like that, but I’ve read enough of those kinds of stories in the past, that this somewhat feels that way. I suppose it’s just a gripe at seeing McCoy, Uhura, Spock, and Sulu relegated to backgrond status when this was billed as an original crew adventure.
That said, the book was enjoyable, if a bit predictable. Definitely a bunch of “I’m old – I’m useless” stuff from Kirk, which seemed to be a theme of the latter original crew adventures. Still, it was a good read – I can’t say it’s my most recommended book, but I did enjoy it. I also felt that the main villian of the story “gave up” a bit too quickly, and the reason he was coerced into giving up was well.. never explained, so it felt really rushed and cheap to me.
I’m glad I borrowed the book from my brother instead of buying it – you might want to see if your library has a copy of it to borrow it from them. If you’re a Star Trek fan, it’s probably worth a read, but I would have felt ripped off if I actually paid full price for the book.
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There never were all that many decent original Star Trek novels, and its been a while since I’ve seen any that *don’t* feel like fan fiction. But heck, some of the ones I really liked (and in fact reread) weren’t necessarily great literature– they just caught my attention. So perhaps this one will catch someone’s eye, too, thanks to your mention of it. Good for you!