Roughly half of this book shows the viewpoint of Commander Ael t'Rllaillieu, a Romulan military officer. Most of the remainder shows us Captain James T. Kirk's perspective, or occasionally that of one of his other officers. Diane Duane has a good sense of humor which is useful in livening up the scenes showing the viewpoint of one of the oldtimers from the original TV series, but what really made the book fresh was seeing how an old enemy from the Romulan side of the infamous Neutral Zone perceived those oldtimers of the Enterprise when meeting them face to face for the first time.

A word of warning: I understand it has since been decided by the official lords and masters of Star Trek at Paramount that this novel is not "canonical," i.e. it is inconsistent with later developments in portraying Romulan culture. You see, this was first published in 1984. At that time the concept of "ST:Next Generation" was still in the future, and other TV series set in the same universe were even farther away, and all we knew about Romulans was whatever we could glean from a couple of TV episodes from the 60s, principally the idea that they had turned out to be long-lost cousins of the modern Vulcans, only much more emotional and militaristic. Allowing for that, there was plenty of elbow room for an imaginative author who wanted to focus on them in a novel, so Duane got creative. On the one hand, she emphasized parallels between the present state of the Romulan Empire and the later days of the historical Roman Empire. On the other hand, she then turned around and insisted that the "Romulan" name was just something humans had pinned on that militaristic culture when they first bumped into it, based on human memories of the legendary brothers Romulus and Remus who founded old Rome, and that the real "Romulan" name for their own race and culture was "Rihannsu." Similar to the way the various tribes of Native Americans found themselves arbitrarily tagged as "Indians" by Europeans because Christopher Columbus made a slight mistake in calculating how far he had traveled and how big the circumference of the Earth really was, i.e. he thought he was somewhere in the Far East. What's several thousand miles between friends?

Not that I care if it's canonical. Even when I was first reading lots of Star Trek novels in the mid-80s, I noticed discrepancies concerning such basic details as the name of the Klingon homeworld, the normal inheritance patterns within the Klingon Empire, whether or not self-respecting Vulcans even conceded that they had any emotions at all, hidden or otherwise, and other items. It was painfully clear that Gene Roddenberry, who presumably knew more about Star Trek than anyone else (until he died, several years ago) was not taking the time to proofread every word of every Trek novel to make sure it corresponded in every detail to some master template of the Trek Universe contained in his head. I learned to rate each novel on its own merits instead of expecting dozens of different authors to have any consistency as a group.

This became one of my favorites as soon as I read it, not long after its publication. Our heroine, Ael, an old war hero among the Romulans, has been removed from the command of her old ship, one in which the crew was personally loyal to her, and "promoted" to command of a squadron of ships (crewed by misfits nobody else wanted) along the Neutral Zone. She had taken some unpopular positions, politically, you see. She finds reason to believe plans are being prepared back at HQ to order her to take her squadron into Federation space, posing as Klingon vessels, and wreak havoc to trigger a war between the Romulan Empire's two larger neighbors. This is bad enough, but there are other plots afoot which simply disgust her, and she has resolved to seek out her old enemy James T. Kirk of the Enterprise and ask his help in foiling one of her own Empire's secret Research & Development projects.

Her plan involves having Kirk "pretend" to let her capture his ship, lock him and his people up in detention cells, and then start escorting the "captured" ship back home as a triumphal display of Romulan derring-do. This plan obviously calls for a great deal of trust on Kirk's part regarding the purity of her intentions. Recognizing that, she raises the subject of a possible mind-meld, performed by Spock with Vulcan psychic techniques, to prove that she is being frank and earnest because of her desire to save the Romulans from themselves by destroying a disgusting "secret weapon" before it causes their own moral collapse.

That's as far as I will go with the plot - I respect this book enough that I don't want to ruin the whole thing for you. I will only say that Duane does an outstanding job with characterization, particularly in extrapolating what the idiosyncracies of Kirk and Spock in particular (and to some extent, various other characters from the old TV show or invented by Duane) look like through alien eyes. She also has a sense of humor, perhaps most vividly displayed in the scene where Dr. McCoy actually beats Mr. Spock at that brand new game, four-dimensional chess! (Pieces can move vertically, horizontally, and forward through time, or any combination of the above. If your opponent's bishop disappears, for instance, you don't know how many moves it will be before it suddenly reappears, nor which square it will have moved to out of all the possible ones it could reach with a legal move. A lovely concept!)

Given the strictures within which any Star Trek novel must needs operate (you can't actually kill off any of the permanent characters from the TV shows and movies, for instance) this one is about as good as such a work could possibly be. Duane had the sense to create several interesting characters on both sides of the fence, Federation and Romulan, in order to maintain some degree of suspense concerning who might indeed die, and why, even if Kirk's old reliables weren't going to.

Recommended: Yes