This year’s second Kelvin Timeline Star Trek novel — David Mack’s More Beautiful Than Death — continues to explore Captain Kirk and the crew of the alternate USS Enterprise following the events of the 2009 film.

Like Alan Dean Foster’s The Unsettling Stars, released earlier this year, More Beautiful Than Death was originally written a decade ago, shelved, and has now finally seen the light of day.

This book is half classic adventure tale — in which the Enterprise is working to avoid a planetary disaster –and half a sly re-interpretation of a classic episode of the Original Series.

More Beautiful Than Death is a fun, light read. Originally intended for the mass market paperback format, the primary format in which Star Trek novels were published before 2019, it is also a bit shorter than other recent stories published in the trade paperback size.

Mack discusses in his acknowledgements that this story required some rewrites as the 2020 publication date approached, in order to bring it into line with canon established by the subsequent films (Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond).

But even with those updates, the book is still very firmly grounded in the Trek ’09 aesthetic – this is a new Kirk, a new crew, and they’re all still figuring out how to get along…. and Mack is extremely comfortable writing action adventure Star Trek stories, and so his style meshes particularly well with the Kelvin Timeline style.

As mentioned, the story is divided into two plots, which exist largely separate from one another. In the first, the Enterprise is responding to a distress call from the planet Akiron, which is under attack from malignant aliens from another dimension. As part of the diplomatic mission to Akiron, Ambassador Sarek is aboard. The second story revolves around the mystery of his Vulcan aide, L’Nel, and unraveling her own agenda that unfolds alongside the mission to Akiron.

Though More Beautiful than Death is a fun read, it did not properly grip me until the L’Nel storyline began to ramp up and her true motives were revealed. The storyline on Akiron, and the plight of the planet’s people, the Kathikar, ultimately feels a little under-developed.

Mack is clearly trying to balance the constraints of the novel he is writing — something pulpy, fast paced, and action-oriented — with examining some bigger questions around faith and destiny. The action is a lot of fun, but the bigger questions ultimately get shorter shrift than they could have.

For example, the ‘wights,’ a name given to the demon-like aliens who attack from another dimension, are largely unexplored. Who are they? What is their motive? The book has a section in which one of the native Kathikar hypnotizes Kirk to see his past lives and how he has run across the ‘wights’ a number of times…. but this very interesting and courageous idea of Mack’s, to explore elements of faith and the interaction of faith and science, ultimately just feels too underdeveloped.

The novel’s final conversation between Kirk and McCoy about faith and what Kirk believes lands just right, but this book would have benefited from being written from scratch today with the larger word-count afforded by the trade paperback sized Star Trek novels.

But where this book excels is not in the Akiron story, the but the Vulcan B-story that is threaded throughout the novel. The Kelvin Timeline movies do not significantly explore the implications of the destruction of Vulcan, and the loss of so much of the Vulcan people’s history and heritage. While that is not primarily what this book is about, what exploration we do get of the implications of Vulcan’s destruction are well received.

The first area where this comes through is in the relationship between Spock and Sarek. This novel sidesteps the somewhat absurd idea from the movie that the only Vulcans in the galaxy were on the planet itself — an ancient spacefaring race such as the Vulcans of course has colonies of its own — but the idea that so many people, alongside so much history, heritage and culture has been lost is one with profound implications. Sarek feels the weight of that, and the conflict between him and Spock in the novel is around Spock’s role in Vulcan society following the destruction of their homeworld.

But the best part of the novel, in my opinion, is the final reveal about L’Nel. Spoilers follow, so read no further if you haven’t finished the book yet!

L’Nel is in fact T’Pring, the Vulcan woman betrothed to Spock as a child. In the prime timeline, Spock is spurned by T’Pring in “Amok Time” in favor of her chosen partner, Stonn. In the Kelvin Timeline, Stonn is killed alongside his people, but not before T’Pring is able to rescue his katra and escape Vulcan. Planning to conduct the fal-tor-pan ritual on Spock, who T’Pring sees as unworthy because of his choice of a human partner, T’Pring hopes to restore the mind of Stonn within Spock.

More Beautiful Than Death is a great re-interpretation of “Amok Time.” The relationships are the same, but the circumstances of how those relationships resolve themselves are ultimately totally different in the Kelvin Timeline.

Mack’s handling of the return of T’Pring is vastly superior to how Khan is brought back in Star Trek Into Darkness. The writers of that movie could have learned a thing or two from this manuscript, which was sitting on a shelf at the time. I was impressed with this subplot by how it felt at once familiar to the characters we know, while also being appropriately unique to the Kelvin Timeline.

Overall, More Beautiful Than Death is both a fun action adventure story and a novel twist on a classic Star Trek episode. Though some of the ideas presented in the ‘wight’ storyline are too lightly explored, the action, adventure, and the Vulcan storyline hit all the right notes.

Given the unique circumstances behind the publication of this novel — written in 2010, shelved, and finally published in 2020 — it is unclear if there will be any more Kelvin Timeline novels coming. But there is a lot that these books could explore, and so hopefully this will not be an aberration but the start of a new Star Trek novel series to complement the existing lines.

We’re just glad to see that these two books finally made it into fans’ hands.