STAR TREK:

GATEWAYS I: ONE SMALL STEP by Susan Wright
GATEWAYS II: CHAINMAIL by Diane Carey
Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster) - September 2001
ISBN 0743418549 (Book I) - Paperback
0743418557 (Book II) - Paperback
Teenage/Adult - SF TV Tie-In

Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.Com
Buy One Small Step US || UK
Buy Chain Mail US || UK

These are the first two books in the Gateways seven novel series set that span the entire Star Trek world. In One Small Step Kirk and his away team find a hostile computer guarding an abandoned planet that causes one fatality before they find a way to control it - or have they? After having been thrown a thousand light years off course they are hoping to learn as much as they can about a civilization that met its end ten millennia ago.

But when some alien impostors come along pretending to be relations of the long-lost people Kirk and his crew really have their work cut out for them just to stay alive. This was an entertaining although rather run-of-the-mill novel that could have done with a bit more plot and action - the start of such a long saga ought, I felt, to have been a bit more special. But…

The second novel Chainmail hurls the reader into the world of Star Trek Challenger. If you are scratching your head wondering who they are you haven't read Diane Carey's six book set New Earth that came out last year about the settling of Belle Terre, home to two warring races Blood Many and the Kauld as well as to a lot of human pioneers. This novel is another outing for Commander Nick Keller and his crew and if you haven't read the New Earth series it might be a good idea to start or this novel won't make much sense. The crews are off exploring an abandoned ship - but one that is full of some rather lively dead folk who mean business. Also having hostile intentions towards the crew are some aliens who are descended from people who vanished twenty years earlier; but how can they have descendents that have been away for thousands of years? Despite (or because of) the rather arcane way this novel is written there is a real feel of alien life forms on a far-off world in this novel and the squabbles between the Federation crew and their Blood Many counterparts as they serve uneasily alongside each other make for a realistic read. I found this to be a stronger novel than the first one but it needed some editing for repetition. I look forward to see how the next books shape up.