The Eternal Tide is the most divisive Star Trek: Voyager novel published to date; it’s also probably the finest. Where you stand on its merits will probably depend more on your attitude towards the fate of the television series’ focal character and your views on death within the Star Trek canon generally than it will the intrinsic quality of the work, but for the purposes of an introductory soundbite, suffice it to say that Kirsten Beyer’s hottest novel is the literary equivalent of a season finale, drawing together two threads that have hung loose ever since Kathryn Janeway met her end amidst the pages of Peter David’s almighty Before Dishonor. Love it or loathe it, this book is an event.
Conceptually, The Eternal Tide is larger than even the most of inventive of us could have imagined, toying with ideas of predetermination and providence as the most creative and most destructive forces in creation collide ahead of schedule, forcing the multiverse to turn to two former Voyager captains to bring them back into balance, and in doing so seal their respective fates. It’s dazzlingly ambitious and scintillatingly written, showcasing the author’s remarkable talent for fusing hard science with soap opera as her plot turns as much on budding romantic endeavours and the wonders and terrors of parenthood as it does fixed points in time and the end of all things.
As the Voyager fleet continues to explore former Borg space, its fleet commander, Captain Afsarah Eden, continues to investigate her mysterious and unique lineage, leading her to a discovery that forces Starfleet to take stock of its understanding of the universe, and face up to a threat greater than anything that it’s ever faced before. And that’s not stock blurb hyperbole – it literally is the greatest threat ever faced by the Federation, the Alpha Quadrant, or the Milky Way for that matter; even the Q Continuum is running blind and scared. “Meanwhile”, Q – and by Q, I don’t mean the Q made famous by actor John de Lancie; I mean his son, as played by de Lancie’s son – has stumbled upon only a void where his future should be. Terrified to his omnipotent core, he probes the multiverse for evidence of what could have erased his future, and discovers that the multiverse seems to want Vice-Admiral Janeway dead. When his “Aunt Kathy” died at the hands of the Borg in Before Dishonor, she died in every single possible timeline, and that couldn’t possibly be. Drawing a link between his godmother’s unequivocal death across creation and his own omnipotent oblivion, Q posits that that the multiverse is trying to put something right – something that went wrong when the future Admiral Janeway travelled back in time to alter history to bring Voyager home early in the television series’ finale, “Endgame”. To find out what that something might be, and with a view to correcting it, he does what no Q should ever do; what is given away not only by the book’s mission statement of a cover, but its earliest passages too – he conspires to bring Janeway back from the dead.
Perhaps anticipating a backlash, Beyer offered her would-be critics justification for her actions in an introductory note, opining that this story “required telling”. I was unconvinced for one inescapable reason: whenever a long-running series brings a character back from the dead, particularly one as central to it as Janeway was to Voyager, it not only debases the significance of that death in the first instance, but takes weight away from any subsequent deaths as readers know that the apparently-deceased character could feasibly reappear at any point. Of course, Janeway isn’t the first big Star Trek character to receive such treatment in print – Enterprise’s winker, Trip, and Deep Space Nine’s Prophet-walker, Sisko, are probably the most prominent examples – but she is the only one that I can think of who met her doom in this medium, and did so quite decisively. There were no clear celestial cop-outs or hang-on-a-minute winks waiting in the wings to undo what Peter David did, and for me that made Janeway’s “cop-out comeback” even harder to swallow.
The novel also draws upon countless Voyager stories beyond its immediate predecessors, utilising Riley Frazier and the Borg Co-operative encountered in “Unity”; the eponymous Omega particle of “The Omega Directive”; and, most importantly, the Q Continuum. Were The Eternal Tide a Doctor Who novel, such a confluence would be summarily dismissed by many potential readers as “fanwank” – a term generally reserved for the most indulgent and self-referential of tales, written by the fans and for the fans. I think that anyone who has ever read any of Beyer’s Voyager works would attest that her love for the characters and the subject matter rivals that of any regular fan, and certainly her knowledge of previous novels and episodes must border on encyclopaedic, but her preceding novels all managed to strike an acceptable – no, a pleasing – balance between forging for the future and looking back over the shoulder. The Eternal Tide shows no such restraint, and it lives and dies as such.
By the time that I’d purchased it, I’d resigned myself to the fact that Janeway was coming back; I’d even convinced myself that the evident indestructibility of Spock and his Trek heredity weren’t so much fan-appeasing slams down on the reset button as they were endorsements of Gene Roddenberry’s unblemishable vision of the future. Then I remembered that Simon & Schuster had used the Borg to kill off sixty-three billion Federation citizens and bring Starfleet to its knees. Then I wondered how Janeway must feel about that, as it was her destruction of the Borg’s transwarp hub that set in motion the sequence of events that brought the Borg back to the Alpha Quadrant, hell-bent on vengeance. Then I started to get it.
Whilst ostensibly The Eternal Tide is an evasion of the ultimate consequence, it’s actually a discourse on consequences; a study of cause and effect on both a personal and a multiversal scale. Beyer’s story takes something as colossal as a sixty-three billion death toll, and looks at what effect it would have on an individual conscience. She studies loss and grief, and then turns to what might happen were that loss to be undone more than a year after the event. She even breaks the fourth wall as meta-fictional debates rage over a single death and mooted resurrection. Most movingly of all though, she looks at the bonds between parents and their children in its many forms – Tom, B’Elanna and Miral; Riley’s people and their offspring; Jobin, Teller and Afsarah; Janeway and her erstwhile Voyager crew; all the way up to the transcendent Q, Q and Q – and how it defines who we are, what we do, and what we’re capable of under duress. There is a moment in this story when a man is prepared to let the multiverse end aeons earlier than it otherwise would have, all so that he may avert his child having to sacrifice her life. It’s powerful, enchanting material hidden beneath a veil of fanwank – the ultimate guilty pleasure for any open-minded and forgiving Trekker.
