Reading New Frontier from the beginning

I’ve read a lot of Trek books over the years, Vanguard, the post-nemesis books up to Destiny and a lot of the current releases. I remember the first novel I read was Rogue Saucer by John Vornholt in the late nineties after finding it in my school library.

When I read that a novel-only series was being developed back in ’97 I was excited to see where they took it. I read the first five books but didn’t manage to keep up.

I’d occasionally see the series in bookshops and had a vague idea that the series went in a different direction with new ships being added and the crew moving around, and also that the plot was more in keeping with TOS than the later series. Frankly, I was put off by how ridiculous it all sounded but I was always curious to see for myself how it turned out.

Needing a new series to read I’ve started reading New Frontier from the beginning.

New Frontier 1 – 4

As a twelve-year-old, I immediately skipped to the present-day scenes, missing the entire point of Calhounes backstory. It offers a unique take on Starfleet Captain. I like Calhoun, like the rest of the series he’s larger than life but somehow it works.

I enjoyed the introduction of Soleta. She reminds me of Vash from Captain’s Holiday here acting as the Space Lady Indiana Jones and introducing the audience to the Thallonian Empire and Si Cwan.

The collapse of the Thallonian Empire is a unique setting and gives New Frontier its own corner of the Star Trek galaxy to play in, which is probably a large part of the reason the series is able to go as over the top as it does.

Shelby and Calhoun’s relationship is another unique set-up that plays really well. Sheby is cast in the role of the straight man whose job it is to note just how absurd the rest of the characters are and it works well. There is certainly a lot of room for the relationship to grow.

The four short books do a great job of acting like a two-hour pilot episode to set up the cast and adventures and I really enjoyed the epic scope establishing various characters' backstories instead of simply starting when everyone comes onboard the Excalibur.

These books managed to make the story feel like an event at a time when most of the novels had to limit events and character growth by design to fit in with the episodes as they aired. It was an early hint at where the books could go.

 

On it!

 

I was doing one of these for awhile and didn't make it through the whole series.

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/where-i-re-read-new-frontier-by-peter-david.309261/

I am very excited about this!

Note: these books were a major influence on me as a writer and alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Big Trouble in Little China, and other action comedies, are a major reason I became the person i am today.

 

I've actually been reading this as I go along. How come you never finished?

One minute your going great guns and then it's Worf's first adventure and silence :P

 

Alas, personal family matters (my niece moved in so nothing tragic but very time consuming).

I might return to it now that I'm working on my fourth Space Academy book and use the Stephen King method of binge reading in the genre you're writing.

 

5 – Martyr

Firstly the covers for Matyr and Fire On High are wonderful showing the crew of the Excalibur on the bridge. Back then, I remember getting a kick out of seeing how the novel characters looked in person. There would be a hundred ways to easily do this today but back then it felt special that they were able to show characters who hadn’t been on the shows.

We continue to see the fallout from the previous books with the planet Thallon having hatched a giant space-faring bird, the balance of power in Sector 221-G is beginning to shift and the Excalibur has to try to hold it together.

Calhoun is claimed to be the saviour of a race called the Zondrian’s. He goes along with it to try and resolve the peace talks, but his crew don’t think it’s the best idea.

We meet our villains, the Redeemers who were ahead of the curve in terms of religious fanatics that would pop up in genre fiction in the 21st century.

In a recent episode of Lower Decks Ransom declares the Cerritos the horniest ship in the fleet but the Excalibur was giving them a run for their money back in the day. Trek novels had never spent much time with characters' personal relationships, here we open with a flashback to Calhoun losing his virginity. It’s difficult to imagine TNG doing similar with Picard. (Please correct me if this has in fact occurred in another book.)

But a few years later it is exactly what shows such as Battlestar and Stargate Universe did to try and reinvigorate the genre on television with various degrees of success.

A lot has been written over the years about Burgoyne and Dr Selar’s relationship, the way Burgoyne pursues her would politely be described as not having aged well or more accurately wasn’t great to begin with.

I enjoyed the book, it had the difficult job of the second episode where the setting up of everything is out the way and manages to tell a fun story.

 

There’s a deleted scene from “A Matter of Perspective” where Picard and Riker realize they both had an affair with the same woman in their Academy days, decades apart.

 

Plus Picard's flashback/Q thing to his academy days involves him getting laid multiple times and his relationship with an older woman.

Edit:

FYI - loving the book reviews so far.

I agree that Soleta and Shelby are pretty much the glue that keeps NF together.

I also think making the Thallonian Empire as the "place we're we're doing adventures" was a very smart move of Peter David and appropriate at the time of the Soviet Union's fall.

 

Thanks, I never really know what to put in reviews and was a bit nervous about posting them!

I'm co-writing a book series called The McMurdo Rift and it was something we were very conscious of from the start. We wanted to paint our own little corner that we could build out from similar to Babylon 5 which stays small for the first season or two before taking plots to various characters' homeworlds.

 

6 - Fire On High
Were you to have told me that the executive officer from the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" was to be brought back as an immortal character it would probably have put me off picking up the series, in fact I'm pretty sure someone did tell me that and that's why it's taken over twenty-five years for me to continue with it.

I’m not sure that I enjoy this book as much as the previous ones. Not that it's bad it just didn't quite land for me.

The Morgan Primus character works fine if you don't focus on her connection to TOS. Her relationship with her daughter Robin is an interesting development for Robin. As with much of NF, it works for me within its own context but would feel out of place were the Excalibur to show up in an episode of DS9.

Finding out her mother not only didn't die but cannot die is certainly a lot for her to come to terms with. The gag about her being played by Majel Barrett would undoubtedly play better on screen than on the page. Bringing back the character of Number One is subtle which is no bad thing, and not something Peter David can always be accused of, however, if I hadn't been aware of the connection before picking up the book I'm not sure I would have initially noticed it.

I did enjoy how the book picked up exactly where Martyr left off with Shelby still on the bridge dealing with the battle at the end of that book. I also enjoyed seeing Burgoyne and Selar as a couple once they got together. They both have very different personality types and it will be interesting to see where that goes.

Fire On High was not a bad book by any means but not my favourite of those we've had so far, I’m excited to see what The Captain’s Table brings us with Once Burned!

 

The humorous thing is that Morgan Primus could very well be like Tom Paris in-universe in that she is a character who just so happens to look like Number One and Christine Chapel and Lxanana Troi. She's never 100% spelled out to be Number One, I believe, just heavily implied to be.

No encounters with Spock or Christopher Pike for example.

I do love Robin Lefler in the books, though, and her oodles of drama left and right.

 

Hey i am glad to see someone else is actively reading the series! I haven't read many Trek books but once I heard of this series, with freedoms that the TV show tie-in novels just don't have (because of the constraints you mentioned) and only minor characters returning in the main cast I went for that immediately! I often try to talk about these books on social media but no one really goes for it.
I'm excited to see what you think of Once Burned! It's the book that made me actually like Calhoun whereas I had previously seen him as just kind of an annoying macho type. It's one of my favourite in the series so far (i am at the Excalibur trilogy rn)

 

Pardon my absence, I've been overseas dealing with a family emergency.

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Well then...

Captain's Table – Once Burned

I remember when the Captain's Table series was first released in the late 90s it was an unusual departure for Star Trek at the time the books were trying to find ways to create events and crossovers without upsetting the narrative of any of the ongoing TV series. I did read the Deep Space Nine Entry, way back when and wouldn't exactly describe it as memorable. Captain’s Table isn’t a series that you see mentioned that often but they did do a follow-up short story collection so it must have been fairly successful.

Peter Davies has used it as an opportunity to fill in some of Captain Calhoun's backstory that had been hinted at in the earlier novels and we finally got to see the Grissom incident that left him with his reputation in Starfleet.

First off I'm just gonna say this is my favourite book so far. Calhoun is a great character and whilst we get to see him become the man we meet in the first book he doesn't start so far from it that he feels out of character here.

The crew of the Grissom are much more grounded than the New Frontier regulars but Calhoun doesn't feel too out of place either. There is a lot of the discussion about first officer not letting the captain go on away missions. This was covered in early Next Generation and would feel like a retread if this novel didn't have the consequences that it does by the end.

I didn't feel that Calhoun necessarily earns the opinion that Jellico has of him in House Of Cards. which left me slightly disappointed with Once Burned but that's not to say this isn't one of the strongest Trek novels I've read.

it's a very difficult task to reveal a hero's dark and mysterious past but not have him do something so dark that would turn readers off him. The way things play out with Captain Kenyon where Calhoun does something morally grey but no one else realises it due to how the phase fight plays out was a very nice touch.

When I started reading the novels my initial assumption was that the crossover events probably didn't play a big role in the ongoing NF series luckily I searched other posts on the boards that dispelled me of this notion and it almost feels like a mistake that this wasn't told in the main series.

Due to the Captain’s Table format, the book leaves us with Christopher Pike setting up the next novel in the Captain's Table. Before you had your Anson Mounts and your Bruce Greenwoods there were only a handful of novels that had touched on Pike and he had only appeared in The Menagerie on TV. I'd be very curious to see how this book compares to more recent portrayals in strange new worlds if anyone read it would you think is it worth the read?

 

I hope it's nothing serious and things turn out well.

Fantastic review!

It was a great book for establishing Captain Calhoun's badass credentials. I do think the Grissom is one of the strongest stories you're going to see for an "episode" because I understand why the captain did everything he did and am not even sure it was the wrong thing to do in terms of protection of the region but shows the absolute DEVASTATION that Starfleet technology can bring about.

I also think it's interesting the warlord never seemed to understand that it was his own murder of a messenger that resulted in the utter destruction of his empire. I mean, Genghis Khan knew this was a bad idea.

 

I felt the same way about the Double Helix crossovers. It didn't help that they were branded as TNG, and I had no interest in TNG novels. I even recognized Calhoun on the cover of one, but the way it was advertised made me think it was a cameo, not something intrinsic to the series. It was a long time before I realized that it was actually pretty important, and explained both a seemingly-dropped plotline, and several minor and major events in later novels and doubled back to read it.

 

Is the Double Helix book featuring Calhoun more of an NF book than a TNG book then?
I'm considering starting that series, but I haven't read many of the NF books (and even then, not for many years)

 

Yes, I'd definitely read Double or Nothing as part of a NF read. And honestly don't read the whole Double Helix crossover. Just read Double or Nothing. There are enough continuity problems and head scratchers between the entries in that series that I think it might make more sense as a standalone than it would as part of the series. Double Helix was not a Trek publishing line highlight.

 

Wishing I hadn't just bought the omnibus now, haha!

 

7 – The Quiet Place

I don’t know how much of New Frontier was planned from the start and how much was made up as the series went along, I dare say a good deal of both. Si Cwan, the Excalibur’s Thallonian Ambassador was established as being motivated by his search to be reunited with his younger sister Kalindar.

Whilst I do think Peter David does a good job of cycling through the different characters in each instalment so we don’t get too much of Calhoun or Lefler, The Quiet Place introduces us to several new faces and perhaps at the expense of our series regulars.

Xyon is an interesting character, especially with context from later on. A rogue Han Solo type fits pretty well into NF.

We get more Redeemers who work well as our ongoing baddies and meet The Dogs Of War, who are actual dog mercenaries. I mean… It’s New Frontier don’t question it.

Despite what people who have read the Prologue to my third novel, The McMurdo War might think I am not a massive fan of David’s opening chapters that drop us right into a new character situation and leave any set-up for later. I enjoy seeing our crew on the Excalibur, unfortunately, there isn’t much of that to be seen this time out, apart from a delightful moment with Robin Lefler making a tit out of herself.

I liked that this entry felt like a quest to find the titular place and some interesting twists and reveals, and it moves along at a nice pace. Whilst not a favourite it feels like an improvement over Fire On High.

After what felt like a decade of television modelling itself on LOST, having Si Cwan find his sister without it being drawn out for years felt great.