Three Strikes

Margaret Wander Bonanno might be forgiven a certain ambivalence towards the Star Trek franchise, considering the hatchet work Pocket Books did on her submitted manuscript for Probe, a follow-up novel to the successful Star Trek IV movie. Bonanno suggests that after the book had been rewritten at Pocket's direction, about 7% of her manuscript remains. I haven't read the original, so I don't know if the percentage is a good or a bad thing. If the missing 93% resembled her 1987 Strangers From the Sky? Then her book, originally titled Music of the Spheres before being reworked into a movie sequel, would be worth a read.

But if it resembles her Star Trek debut, 1985's Dwellers in the Crucible, then oblivion is a good place for it. Bonanno posits that the United Federation of Planets, in order to reduce the risk of war between its member systems, created the "Warrantors of Peace." These are basically hostages, relatives of the leadership of the different planets, who will be immediately killed if their native world opens hostilities against a fellow Federation member. Six Warrantors are kidnapped from their Vulcan facility by Romulans, who are working with the Klingons in a plan to stir up civil war among Federation members. During the course of the novel, the only two surviving Warrantors are the human Cleante al-Faisal and the Vulcan T'Shael. Most of Dwellers concerns the way the two women bond in order to resist their captors, in a way that's intended to be in some measure a commentary on the friendship developed between Kirk and Spock. The major role played by one of the regular Enterprise characters is the espionage mission by Hikaru Sulu to infiltrate Romulus and rescue the Warrantors.

Dwellers is not necessarily a bad novel by itself, and had it been published in its own universe it might not be as silly. But given that the entire concept of the Warrantors makes no more sense in Trek's United Federation of Planets than it would if applied between states in the U.S., there's an uphill climb out of absurdity that Dwellers can't make. How exactly would a representative government with elected officials choose its world's Warrantor? If an autocratic planet's leader decided that the advantage of attacking and taking a nearby world outweighed the loss of whomever had been pressed into service, well, too bad for that relative.

By the early 1990s, Paramount had begun instituting some more rigid guides for Trek novels that put an end to Trek-universe books that focused on anyone other than the main characters, which meant that the whole Warrantors concept could fade into memory. After an 11-year hiatus, a new regime at Pocket welcomed Bonanno back for some more novels, all of which have been well-received and which eschew the nonsense of her first Trek voyage.

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Jay Allan's "Blood on the Stars" series about an interstellar war between the nominally democratic Confederation and the autocratic, vaguely Romanesque Union began in 2016 with Duel in the Dark. The Confederation battleship Dauntless, needing significant repairs and carrying a crew in need of significant rest and downtime, is sent back from the main defense line for maintenance, crew rotation and time off. Unfortunately for the ship, crew and Captain Tyler Barron, a distress call en route uncovers a covert Union operation to attack mining worlds. But the political and military leadership fear the attacks are a feint and won't release anyone to help Barron and the Dauntless. They'll have to handle the problem alone, and even if it is just a feint it may be more than the stressed ship and crew can manage.

Allan's writing is better than average, and he does a decent job of showing space battles and giving the Dauntless an air of exhausted desperation. He uses the semi-Roman culture of the Union forces to give their commander some dimension that "enemy commanders" don't always have in space opera. But he's treading ground that's well-marked -- gone over time and time again by authors able to offer something different, some tweak or another that makes their version of the Hopeless Battle Snatched From the Jaws of Defeat at the Very Last Minute something that sticks with the reader. Allan doesn't bring that tweak, either in Duel or in any of the three or four subsequent novels where the Dauntless crew is in the very same Lonely Fight for Their Lives.

So in the end, there's no real reason to read Duel instead of re-reading one of those better space-opera tales. And probably not much reason to read the string of "Blood on the Stars" books that follow it, either.

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Kurt Schlichter is probably better known as a political commentator, both in writing and on some television appearances. After serving in the United States Army, he took up the practice of law, focusing on free speech issues and similar matters. Friends with Andrew Breitbart, he began writing for the latter's Big Hollywod site, offering entertainment industry commentary with from a conservative perspective. Schlichter was blunt, pugnacious and almost always utterly convinced his point of view was the right one -- useful qualities for one's lawyer even if not always as beneficial outside the courtroom. Schlichter eventually moved on from Breitbart to Townhall, continuing to broaden his focus to include other political and cultural matters. The switch saw the quality of his commentary decline, which is not the arc you'd expect from someone leaving a Breitbart site. Reading any of his columns today requires a glossary to match the people Schlichter dislikes with the adolescent insulting nickname he coins for them -- their plentifulness makes it clear where the majority of the thinking of any particular column was directed.

In 2016, Schlichter turned his hand to adventure fiction with The People's Republic, a novel set a few decades from now after what we call Red and Blue America have actually split into two different nations. Coastal or Blue America becomes the People's Republic of America, a land with a totalitarian regime enforcing the ultimate limits of politically correct progressive lunacy. Gun-loving freedom-minded folks kept the name United States of America, and they also kept their sanity about all of the hot-button issues in today's headlines. Two more novels in this universe, with the lead character of special forces operator Kelly Turnbull, have followed. The current is Wildfire, in which Kelly has to infiltrate the PRA and work with his enemies to locate a terrorist group that wants to release a deadly virus code-named Wildfire. Infected people begin to act like zombies, attacking anyone near them, and only quick intervention with massive antivirals can save someone infected. Kelly has survived one exposure to the virus, so his former boss drags him out of retirement to hunt it down.

Schlichter lifts from a dozen sources to paste together his unsurprising story. The relationship between Kelly and PRA agent Kristina Carter owes clumsy nods to the Sylvester Stallone/Sandra Bullock partnership in Demolition Man. A scene in the abandoned Pentagon, now home to different tribes of homeless, draws on Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The split US trope is an old one, frequently done much much better, as in Robert Ferrigno's 2006-2009 "Assassin" trilogy.

There are some desultory chase scenes and dialogue in which Schlichter renders his view of modern progressivism with all the subtlety of a rhino on a rocket, but most of the book is Kelly putting bullets into bad guys in repetitive gunfights. Although Schlichter insists in his introduction that his vision of the two nations is a warning, not a prediction, the obvious glee he takes in showing the progressive PRA as a 100% failure makes that hard to believe.

In interviews and elsewhere, Schlichter has said the Kelly Turnbull books are meant to be seen as at least partly satirical, and he claims that he writes some of the scenes as over-the-top in order to be funny. How well does he succeed at humor? We can borrow an example of the Schlichter wit from his current columns about the presidential race in order to find out. Among the derisive nicknames Schlichter gives the vast Democratic field is one for South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, an out gay man with a difficult-to-pronounce last name. Schlichter calls him "Pete Buttplug," which tells you about all you need to know about the humor you'll find in Wildfire and the other Turnbull books, should you make my mistake of reading one.