Diane Carey

Belle Terre by Dean Wesley Smith and Diane Carey

by

Book 64 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Having made it through saboteurs and alien conflicts, the colonists now need the Enterprise’s help dealing with a moon set to explode in a week. The setup sounds far-fetched, but works to keep the overall tension going, plus a few new mysteries are tossed in, sure to be addressed again later in the series.

Me holding Belle Terre

Wagon Train to the Stars by Diane Carey

by

Book 63 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

An interesting start to this six-part series. Shortly post-V’ger, Kirk and the Enterprise guide a 70-ship convoy of 60,000 settlers to a new home six months away. Of course, things do not go well. Most interesting so far for its treatment of Kirk, somewhere on his road from the (perhaps overly) brash self-assurance of TMP to the depression of the start of TWoK, questioning his place and the effects of his career. The new alien races are interesting, as well. However, the primary antagonist is a little too one-note, and while “the Orions” are involved, I’m very confused by them, as they’re described in ways that don’t match the green-skinned humanoids we know as Orions (descriptive bits include: “…slimy muscular arm…”, “…arrowlike orange eyes…”, “…his many-fingered limb…”, “…his claw still tightened around [their] jaw…”, “…purple skin…”, “…turned burgundy with both fury and fear…”, “[his] excuse for eyes…those milky orbs…”). At some point in the editing process, those descriptions should have been corrected or they should have been given some other name than “Orions”.

Me holding Wagon Train to the Stars

📚 Cadet Kirk by Diane Carey

by

16/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The final and best of this YA series. The main trio finally end up all adventuring together, as a simple shuttle hop gets sidetracked by mercenaries. Overall, while all of the books have a certain amount of overly-convenient happenstance to get the characters together, they’re a quick entertaining read as one “what if?” version of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy’s Academy days.

A note on the illustrations: Oddly, it kind of felt like the illustrator just skimmed the plot, if that, particularly with this book. Much of the action takes place aboard a shuttle, clearly described as an early version of the TOS “box on two cylinders” shuttlecraft, but the cover and one of the interior illustrations shows a more angular, TMP-style shuttle with warp sled (but the sled is outfitted with the cylindrical TOS nacelles rather than the flatter TMP style). And towards the end, a character described in the text as human (at least in appearance) is drawn as a TOS-style Klingon, complete with gold sash. Odd mistakes to make (and while the target audience for these books might not notice these things, they do stand out to me).

Me holding Cadet Kirk

by

Book twenty-eight of 2020: Ghost Ship by Diane Carey ⭐️⭐️ #startrek #tng 🖖

Painfully obviously early in the TNG novels (it is the first not adapted from an episode). Characterizations are wildly off base (Riker’s distrust of Data is basically overt racism). Just…oof.

by

Book forty-seven of 2019: Starfleet Academy, by Diane Carey ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A quick and simple bit of fluff, based on an early CD-ROM game. As such, not exactly the most complex or demanding of novels, even among Trek books, but that’s about what I expected, so no disappointment.