After a surprisingly long rest, Sword of Damocles sees the care of the starship Titan’s crew entrusted to debutant Star Trek novelist Geoffrey Thorne, who takes them to Orisha: “…a world at the edge of reason.” Thorne’s story is careful and dense, characterised by its slow-burning, hard-hitting ‘proper’ science fiction and its powerful – but, ultimately, far too fleeting – flashes of inspiration. The idea of a species being in possession of warp technology but not using it for interstellar travel is a fascinating conceit, for instance, but it doesn’t take long for the narrative to get behind this interesting incongruity and betray the prosaic technology-suppressing force that’s holding back the Orishans. Similarly, I’m an ardent advocate of stories built upon temporal tomfoolery, provided that they’re duly neat and don’t threaten to press the much-maligned reset button. And, to its credit, Sword of Damocles manages to eschew the usual sins that generally follow this type of tale – only to replace them with fanciful coincidences and impenetrable technobabble.
It’s quite fitting that the paperback edition of Sword of Damocles carries several glossy pages’ worth of competition winner Sean Tourangeau’s Titan schematics as Thorne spends much of his word count dissecting the ship and its running. Indeed, viewers of The Next Generation will see shades of the episode “Lower Decks” in his exacting exploration of Titan’s routine operations, particularly in the threads that focus on the young Cardassian cadet, Dakal, and his Bajoran foil Jaza Najem. The latter, in fact, serves as the embodiment of the author’s central thesis as circumstances force him to resolve his “lifelong quest to balance faith and scientific truth” once and for all. Fans of Deep Space Nine, meanwhile, will see Will Riker and Deanna Troi rehearse that series’ Worf and Dax ‘duty versus love’ angle, albeit with a potentially game-changing twist; whereas Voyager devotees will be hard-pressed not to see the parallels between that ship’s captain and Titan’s here, as for the first time since his promotion Riker is forced to agonise over breaking – or, indeed, bending – Starfleet’s Prime Directive for the good of his lonesome ship and its endangered crew.
Fortunately though, Sword of Damocles does do one thing magnificently that I don’t have to qualify with a ‘but’, ‘only to’ or ‘borrowed from’ – break into the hitherto-hidden hearts of some of Titan’s most captivating crewmembers, and without overselling the crew’s patent diversity. This novel probes the smouldering guilt that isolates divisive libertine Xin Ra-Havreii from the rest of the crew, the shattering loss that instilled a misplaced sense of invincibility within Jaza, and even the fluctuating physical forms of Y'lira Modan that provoke such acute reactions from her peers - it’s like the eponymous protagonists of Beauty and the Beast have been merged into one.A largely derivative, but nonetheless often enlightening, piece, Sword of Damocles fuses undiluted science fiction with expressive character drama to create a novel that is, if nothing else, absolutely nothing like the three that it follows. It lives or dies by the same.
