Star Trek: The Original Series — Harm’s Way marks a return to one of Star Trek fiction’s most impressive and ambitious ventures, with a sometimes successful — and sometimes not — addition to the overarching Star Trek: Vanguard meta-narrative. David Mack’s Harm’s Way is at once a tense submarine cat and mouse drama between two classic Star Trek characters, and also an overly violent gore fest that has a few interesting ideas that are mostly lost among pages and pages of mass death.
Running from 2005 to 2012, the Vanguard series of novels from authors David Mack, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore told a serialized story over the course of eight novels that saw Starfleet investigating the mysteries of the ancient galaxy after establishing a starbase at the edge of Federation space — all while contending with the Klingons and the Tholians.
Vanguard was a triumphant masterpiece, and highly recommended reading for any Star Trek fan looking to explore the novels. The books are packed with big ideas, bold stories, and great characters. The narrative has an epic scale, and really established the idea that Star Trek novels did not need the main characters from any of the television shows in order to be successful. Vanguard also established that Star Trek could be more mature than what was on television, with great drama, violence appropriate to the story, and some sexual themes that were more adult than anything we saw on screen.
If you’re just interested in Harm’s Way as an Original Series novel, or you’ve read Vanguard and are interested in seeing what Harm’s Way adds to the story, stick around. But if you have never read Vanguard and you’re interested in checking out Harm’s Way stop now. Go get yourself a copy of the first Vanguard novel (Harbinger, also by David Mack), and enjoy going from there.
David Mack is an accomplished Star Trek novelist. He’s written some of my all-time favorite Star Trek novels, and has never been shy about taking his books to dark or adult places, oftentimes to great effect. Unfortunately, while Harm’s Way has a compelling narrative, it’s not one of Mack’s greatest books. It’s a mixed bag that adds almost nothing substantive to the Vanguard narrative and has uneven execution throughout.
The USS Enterprise is asked to team up with the USS Sagittarius, one of the key starships from the Vanguard series, to track down a Federation scientist who crash landed on Kolasi III and is potentially experimenting with the dangerous Shedai metagenome — the DNA of an ancient and powerful extinct race that enslaved portions of the galaxy millions of years prior. Meanwhile, Captain Kang of the Klingon Defense Force has also been dispatched to the same planet, with similar motives in mind.
The standout part of the novel for me is everything that happens in space. There aren’t enough straight Kirk-versus-Kang stories, and reading the two square off against each other as Kirk works hard to evade Kang and Kang works hard to try and find Kirk, is great reading. Mack successfully gets inside the heads of Kirk and Kang, showing us more about their thinking process, and the fears and insecurities that they conceal from their crew as commanding officers of their respective ships.
Harm’s Way is set shortly after the events of “The Doomsday Machine,” and the impact of those events plays an effective role in shaping Kirk’s thinking. It’s a nice little narrative arc that allows him to deal with what happened in the Doomsday Machine incident, and considering what he might have done in the same position as Commodore Decker. And on Kang’s side, we get to see more about how the fabled Klingon commander became the man that we saw in “Day of the Dove,” and later in “Blood Oath,” to great effect. Kang is a great character, and was a good choice of foil for Kirk in this novel.
The cat and mouse game between Kirk and Kang in orbit is by far the best part of the book, but it’s definitely the B-plot to the storyline that takes place on the surface of Kolasi III, where Starfleet and Klingon away teams must work together to destroy a threat to bother galactic powers. The away teams are led by Spock and Mara, and while there is some great stuff in this story about Starfleet and the Klingons being forced to work together, and what that might mean for the future of Federation/Klingon relations, I just can’t get over what an extremely violent slog the last act of the novel was as Mack continuously ups the body count.
Harm’s Way leans hard into darkness without, in my opinion, successfully pulling me back to the light again at the end. There are a couple of scenes, as Starfleet officers are murdering whole ranks of the native sentients on the planet’s surface, where the characters begin to grapple with what they are doing, but these thoughtful moments are quickly swept aside in favor of more grimdark violence in service of the relentless narrative.
It’s definitely exciting –- David Mack has always known how to skillfully and capably capture the reader and serve you an engrossing tale –- but I didn’t feel good by the time I reached the end. I suppose that’s how Mack wants you to feel, the same as the Starfleet officers put in an impossible situation and forced to compromise their morals for a mission of utmost importance.
But this is the second book in a row of Mack’s, following last year’s Oblivion’s Gate (the concluding chapter of the Coda trilogy), that I have finished feeling… empty. And even though Vanguard –- and lots of other amazing books that Mack has written –- have a lot of violence, the violence always felt important, measured, and important to the story. This just felt violent for the sake of it, and I don’t like that to be my Star Trek.
Overall, David Mack is a great storyteller, and you’ll find yourself swept along in the narrative of Harm’s Way. If that’s all you’re looking for from your Star Trek books, then I recommend it. If you are looking for something a little deeper, or that makes a substantive contribution to the excellent Star Trek: Vanguard, I don’t think that you will find it here.
Star Trek: The Original Series — Harm’s Way is in stores now.