My quest to read or re-read the Star Trek novels published in 1983 continues with Robert E. Vardeman’s Mutiny on the Enterprise. While I’d checked this one as read in the past, I couldn’t recall any details about it before or while reading it. This may be my memory trying to protect me from an extremely disappointing novel.
Mutiny on the Enterprise plays a lot like a late third-season episode of Star Trek. The characters and settings are all there but something seems just a tiny bit off.
Pulling into a starbase for repairs and R&R, Kirk and the crew are quickly informed that isn’t happening since the Enterprise is the least banged up ship in the quadrant. But the mission should be a fairly straightforward one, racing an ambassadorial trio to negotiate with the planets of Ammdon and Jurnamoria before war can break out and the Romulans can swoop in. Never mind that one of the ambassadors is a Tellarite, who wants to pick a fight at every turn with anyone who will speak to him.
So, the Enterprise heads off, but along the way, the crew encounters a derelict ship with a woman named Lorelai aboard. Beaming her on board only begins a lot of Kirk’s troubles — surprisingly few of them come from attempting to strike up a romantic relationship with Lorelai. (Though we are treated to numerous times when Kirk can’t stop thinking about her). Seems that Lorelai is committed to the cause of peace up to the point of never firing a phaser or photon torpedo, ever. She keeps warning the crew that if the Enterprise warps into the system with Ammdon and Jurnamoria, both sides will be at war before you can say “Beam me up, Scotty.”
Despite Kirk seeing that Lorelai is influencing the crew to her ways of total pacificism and pushing them to mutiny, he continues to allow her to interact with everyone. Then he makes the mistake of having a debate between her and the Tellarite ambassador shown on the ship’s closed circuit systems. Meanwhile, Scotty is worried about the engines and things are going incredibly wrong, to the point that the Enterprise barely makes it into orbit around a previously unexplored world that might contain the salvation of their engines and Kirk is removed from the captaincy and beamed down with no way back.
For a book that advertises the word “mutiny” in the title, said mutiny takes a long time to begin. And it feels like Kirk and company have to act incredibly naive to continue to allow it to happen — especially given that Kirk becomes aware of the rumbles about fifty to seventy-five pages before it happens. Again, this one feels like season three where the characters look and sound close to how they were early in the series but something is just a bit off. (This feeling was doubled when it came to reading Trek novels recently since I revisited the first TNG novel, “Ghost Ship” before diving into this one).
I’ll give Mutiny on the Enterprise credit that it’s trying to tell a story that has a larger scope than your standard television episode. The big problem comes with Robert E. Vardeman doing a bit more telling than showing. We’re repeatedly told the trio of ambassadors are awesome at their job, but given the evidence he shows us, I can’t help but consign them into the same category of people outside the crew who make life harder than it needs to be that we saw throughout the series. At several points, I felt like Kirk should swing by Eminiar 7 to pick up Robert J. Fox instead of these guys.
The novel also feels like instead of coming to a natural conclusion, Vardeman noticed he was close to his word count and then decided to wrap things up. It all adds up to an ultimately frustrating Star Trek novel — and it makes me wonder if this is the point at which Paramount started pulling in the reigns a bit on what official Trek fiction should look like.
Nashville Book Worm 
This was the first Star Trek novel I ever read, but I confess to remembering nothing about it other than the title and Lorelai!
I’d read it as well but couldn’t remember it either.