Star Trek: Picard - The Last Best Hope - Book Breakdown
Star Trek: Picard - The Last Best Hope
By Una McCormack
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A while back I posted a seed about a new Star Trek book revealing that Worf became Captain of the Enterprise when Picard left. I've since bought the book and read it, and I thought I'd give a quick shout out about it, as this is the end of this year's episode posts for the Picard TV series.
It's called 'The Last Best Hope', by Una McCormack. I really don't know why the article I seeded before even exists. Worf isn't in the book at all, and the mention of him replacing Picard as Captain was only that, a mention.
The book is a gap filler, covering the period of time between Nemesis (or thereabouts) and the start of the new show. It was written last summer when Picard's first season was being produced, in close coordination with the show's creators, so the details in the book are about as close to canon as you can get without actually being a film or a TV show itself.
It covers the crisis with the Romulan sun, and drops hints at least twice that the reason it's going supernova so soon and unexpectedly might be artificial. No specific details are given, but a couple of scientists in the book have data-driven suspicions that it's not happening naturally.
Picard leaves the Enterprise and takes command of the Verity in order to lead the evacuation effort, receiving a promotion to admiral in the process. Raffi becomes his first officer, so that's how they meet and come to know each other. The book intends to make their relationship come off as being genuinely close, with her calling him J.L. when no one else would dare, but I wasn't really feeling it. Maybe other readers will.
You meet Kirsten Clancy (the admiral who keeps cussing at Picard in the TV show), but she's a captain at this time.
Geordi La Forge is in it. Picard reassigns him from the Enterprise to Mars, to head-up the rescue fleet building operations at Utopia Planetia.
Maddox is in the book extensively. He's the reason the synths used on Mars exist. Geordi tasks him with designing them because of a labor shortage. Yup, replicator technology aside, the book claims there are some things that just have to be done by hand, so Geordi needs lots of hands, and Maddox gives them to him in the form of a new kind of synthetic laborer.
You meet Aggie (which is what Maddox calls her, and what I'm apparently used to now) as a grad student who is a bit obsessed with Maddox and his ideas about synthetic life. Of course they hook up and carry on a relationship throughout the book. She works with him and encourages him to keep advancing his work.
You meet a few Romulans, and get detailed accounts of how the evacuation proceeds. The Romulan government basically blows at carrying it out effectively. Secretive, authoritarian, that kind of stuff. They make things much worse than they have to be. Lying to the people, playing the situation down, acting as if nothing was wrong at all.
You meet Zani and the Qowat Milat, with their ways of Absolute Candor. Elnor is there as a boy, too. Fortunately for them, Picard relocates them to one of the better worlds (unbeknownst to most people at the time, other refugees are not so lucky, per the Romulan government's pitiful shortcomings).
The mission goes on for years. Raffi is away from home for all of it, and gradually loses her family because of it.
The synth uprising on Mars happens before the rescue fleet is finished, though there's not much more information about it in the book than there is in the TV show. They don't explain what causes it (probably leaving that for the TV show), but Maddox is blamed (they were his synths, after all), and synthetics are banned, so he leaves Earth to carry on his work in secret.
Picard comes up with a new plan to continue the evacuation, but there is no support for it in Starfleet or the Federation. Many worlds are pissed that so many resources have gone to such a wasted effort, when they had to sacrifice for so long to provide them. Some threaten to secede from the Federation if the mission doesn't end.
Picard, of course, still wants to continue the mission, telling Starfleet to accept his new plan or his resignation, just like he does in the TV show. You know how that turns out. He's rebuffed, leaves Starfleet, and retires to his family's old estate. Millions of Romulans are left in harm's way.
The Romulan star eventually explodes, but not a lot of detail is given about the actual event or the immediate aftermath, and that's pretty much where the book leaves you. Several years later the TV show begins.
I won't say the book is great, but it is certainly good, and chock-full of backstory for the TV show. Anyone enjoying the TV show will find it entertaining, and well worth reading while waiting for season 2.
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If anyone else ends up reading it, let me know what you think of it.