Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum

When Una Chin-Riley and Christopher Pike meet at Starfleet Academy after one of his lectures, they immediately become friends. A stellar student, Una is the “poster girl” of her class, and Pike is determined to become a Starfleet captain with his own ship, rhetorically assembling his dream crew. As their friendship evolves, Pike also suspects Una is involved with the Euxhana, a Chionian cultural minority, who are seeking asylum in Federation space, leading to more questions than answers. Twenty-five years later, Una and Pike are working together on the USS Enterprise to settle a Chionian trade agreement when a pro-Euxhana saboteur launches a terrorist attack. When the suspect is taken into custody for interrogation and is discovered to have a history with Una, her past associations resurface, threatening to expose a secret she’s been harboring all these years…

Una McCormack has yet to disappoint me with her Star Trek stories and she’s yet again done a fantastic job with the franchise, breathing a few new details into the world of Trek. I believe this is the first time that she’s done a story involving Una Chin Riley, the character that was named after Un McCormack the author as a tribute by other authors well before Strange New Worlds was a thing. Has this type of thing ever happened in any other franchise where an author gets to write for the character that’s named after the author?

I will say that I’ll be happy if Trek ever gets off the two track story system, I’m pretty sure every book I’ve read in the last year has had at least two stories going on (three in some cases!) and I find the trope to be tiring. McCormack is at the top of her class in how she uses it, but I fear she’s the exception that proves the rule. Not many other authors can do this as well as she does!

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