Book Review | Star Trek: Voyager - Children of the Storm by Kirsten Beyer

Children of the Storm is the third title in what is fast becoming Kirsten Beyer’s very own Voyager spin-off. Following the USS Voyager’s dramatic return to the Solar System in the final moments of the television series, Christie Golden sated widespread fan appetites with her fascinating novels that explored what became of the ship and those who remained on board it afterwards, while Peter David dealt with its captain. It didn’t take long, though, for someone to realise that Voyager’s home isn’t actually Earth or the Alpha Quadrant – it’s out there in Delta Quadrant, pushing the boundaries. And so with the help of some Borg-harvested quantum slipstream technology, Beyer brought Voyager full circle.

However, things have changed. Voyager isn’t on her own any more, but part of a small task force now led by Captain Afsarah Eden. The refitted Intrepid-class starship is now captained by its erstwhile first officer, Chakotay, who has retained the services of Delta Quadrant veterans Seven of Nine, Harry Kim and Tom Paris and his wife, B’Elanna Torres. The ship’s former chief medical officer, the holographic Doctor, now serves aboard another of the fleet’s ships, though fortunately for him it isn’t one of the three that has vanished trying to make contact with the Children of the Storm – the race that effortlessly put paid to the recent Borg invasion of the Federation.

Of all the Star Trek novelists that I’ve stumbled upon thus far, Beyer is probably my favourite as not only does she come up with bold, mesmeric narratives that I don’t think we could ever have expected to see on television, but she applies the same principles to her characterisation too. Her handle on Voyager’s television characters is second-to-none, and complemented magnificently by some of her new characters, particularly Captain Eden and Counsellor Cambridge. The former is a formidable woman out of her depth; wounded in love and tormented by the idea that maybe she’s a little more than human. The latter is, as Seven succinctly puts it, “an ass” – but he’s an ass who seems able to melt an icy heart that many apparently better men could not. It’s true, of course, that the flood of new faces causes many of them to merge into a great unfathomable mass (the fact that the book carries a number of appendices, crew manifests amongst them, speaks volumes), but then the same was true of Titan at first, and now I feel as if I know that crew as well as I do any of their televised counterparts.

Of the old guard, Chakotay is generally afforded great depth by Beyer, but particularly so in this novel. Captain Janeway’s former XO is still grieving for one commanding officer when he’s suddenly presented with another who mirrors her in so many ways, yet is so markedly different in others. Meanwhile Tom and Harry find themselves fighting to recapture the friendship that the former’s recent cruel but necessary deception almost extinguished, and B’Elanna struggles to weigh her responsibilities as a mother against her duties as the fleet’s chief engineer. Admittedly it’s all a lot more involved, perhaps even a lot soapier, than the television series ever was, but I find that Voyager’s all the more compelling for it – particularly when it rests upon a plot as riveting as the one that Beyer presents here.

The Children of the Storm are great Star Trek antagonists – utterly alien and utterly ruthless with it, yet light years away from being the polarised evil that one so often encounters in science fiction (and particularly in mass-market television tie-ins). The conceit that they are so ancient and so powerful, yet so frighteningly immature, is a fascinating and terrifying one that’s borne out with real finesse in the text. At times though, Children of the Storm can be a little overpowering. Beyer’s multifarious narrative constantly segues between the fleet’s various ships and different stardates, which could easily leave some readers lost. At times I found myself flicking back a few pages, or making use of the book’s hefty appendices, simply to keep my head above water. This is certainly not a book for those angling for an easy read.

Children of the Storm thus stands as a monument to the perils of miscommunication, be it between species; shipmates; or even, at times, author and reader. Beyer fuses insightful and progressive characterisation with spectacular science fiction ideas that are quintessentially Trek, but at times you have to work unduly hard to appreciate them. But for its inordinate intricacy, Children of the Storm would probably be the best Beyer Star Trek novel to date, but as it stands, it’s not quite worthy of that mantle.