Engines of Destiny

Gene DeWeese

a review by Randall Landers

After Kirk’s apparent death in the Nexus, Montgomery Scott is ready to retire from Starfleet. A chance encounter with a mysterious woman named Guinan leads him to a meeting with the engineer of the Jenolen. Scotty hitches a ride to Norpin V on the small ship, but it discovers the Dyson Sphere and soon crashes on its surface. Scotty and his friend place themselves in a transporter buffer in hopes that they can survive until rescue. Seventy-eight years later, Scotty is revived and has an adventure with the crew of the Enterprise-D before being given a shuttlecraft of his own.

The novel picks up at this point, with Scotty cruising about, and through an almost preposterous series of events (the coincidence factor for this entire novel is unbelievable—and unacceptably—high), decides to actually use a Klingon Bird of Prey he happens to find to go back in time to save Kirk from the Nexus. This is not the Scotty we all know and love. This is some sort of bastardized, selfish version who sulks and pouts and decides to go change history on little more than a whim.

Guinan warns Picard of Scott’s intent, and the Enterprise-D tries to prevent the engineer from going back and changing history. Realizing they have failed, they themselves follow him back in time in an effort to set things right. Unfortunately, the universe they’ve arrived in has Sarek as the Supreme Arbiter of the Alliance which is busy fighting the Borg, contemplating on how to handle the Nexus, and dealing with duplicitous Cardassians. Earth and Andor have been assimilated, and Guinan’s homeworld was spared. Somehow the Borg have moved into the 20th century and conquered Earth. It turns out that Guinan is somehow involved with the change in history, as is the Borg Queen, and the whole things gets worse.

Frankly, this is just a practically unreadable attempt at trying to write Kirk and Scotty into the TNG timeframe, and it fails miserably on every level. There are so many contrivances that the reader ends up rolling their eyes by the middle of the book, then snorting in contempt toward the dreadful conclusion.

Pocketbook should be ashamed of having published this awful book. Clearly, an F, and not worth the trees that were chopped down and pulped for its pages.


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