As you can tell from the page count on these books, it’s short and punchy.

In Golden’s favour, she has her actual writing. Klingon spirituality has never been a favourite of mine, and The Farther Shore continues the trend of it dominating all Klingon character arcs. This storyline is at least something that makes the most of Voyager – B’Elanna’s split heritage, specifically – but all it really achieves is a prolonged reunion that stretches even more thinly than the first half of Homecoming. This involves a trip to Boreth, and a lengthy spiritual voyage in search of a lost family member. Rather than having an engineer alongside the rest of the crew, the story has B’Elanna seeking out her Klingon mother. B’Elanna is separate from the crew or almost the entirety of this two-part.

There is another story here, which is so memorable, I forgot to mention it in my previous review. It’s all swept under the rug in favour of more Borg. This becomes the B-story here, and aside from a few rather grim references to the holograms involved in seedier programmes, the horrors of sentient technology being treated as slaves is rarely addressed. Book one set up a revolution for hologram’s rights to personhood. To make matters worse, the most interesting thread is all but abandoned. Hardly an auspicious start to the Voyager relaunch. That, coupled with the involvement of Data, make the book feel more like a problem for Picard and his crew rather than Janeway and hers. What frustrates me about The Farther Shore is that the Borg threat is tied directly to First Contact. there’s plenty of material to be mined there if you do want to bring the Borg back into play. Now, Voyager had more than its share of run-ins with the cybernetic foe, across five seasons of television. As I noted in my review of Homecoming, Borg stories are in abundance, and if you’re not going to do something new with them, you’ll struggle to hold my interest. Sad to say, it is the least interesting that take precedence in this second volume of the relaunch. Homecoming set up a lot of plot threads, some of them more interesting than others. Not even the timely arrival of Commander Data may be enough to see them through this crisis. With corruption at the heart of Starfleet, only Janeway and her crew can save the planet. A virulent Borg plague spreads across the Earth.

The Farther Shore by Christie Golden