Gordon Eklund
1978
Grade: B-
A thoroughly enjoyable story, engagingly told, and perfectly situated in the world of Star Trek. The amount of tension, mystery, and science is enough not only to make this a viable product for an episode of the series, but I believe this is weighty enough to have been a whole feature length film.
All of the characters are immediately familiar and treated with great care by Eklund. Particular mention should be made in the case of Uhura, who gets her first extended characterization in the novels, and not only does this characterization make sense within the context of the novel, but it also supports the main thrust of the theme being explored.
The plot revolves around the Enterprise surveying the galactic core, which Eklund describes as a collection of black holes, when they come across a lone survivor in a shuttlecraft who claims to be a dead man and servant of the god Ay-nab. This leads the crew to the discovery of a Dyson sphere built around a star headed directly into one of those black holes. After being dragged helplessly into the planet Lyra’s massive interior, the crew meets a small village of diminutive people who worship Ay-nab, whom they associate with the star at the center of the Dyson sphere. There is also a mysterious band prowling the short nights created by the planet’s many artificial moons. This group is made up of all of the crews of ships captured by the Dyson sphere and is presumably the food that Ay-nab eats.
All of this leads to a wonderful amount of tension as the reader is drawn further into the mystery of the sphere, what happened to Thomas Clayton, the one time roommate of Kirk and deranged escapee from the Dyson sphere, and what, if any, powerful consciousness is controlling everything. The pacing and prose are tight with little in the way of ostentation or digression, and the ultimate litmus by which a Star Trek story should be measured, namely what fundamental questions about the universe is the reader left pondering furiously, is certainly not found wanting here. This story lingers after the last lines in all the best ways a science fiction tale can hope for. Not simply the grand feats of engineering such as the building of a structure like a Dyson sphere, but also what amount of sin, for lack of a better word, the Lyrians could rightly be held accountable for by Ay-nab. The story is wonderfully ambiguous both about the nature of what Ay-nab actually is and, as in all great Star Trek tales, the reader is forced to decide for themselves what they think. For myself, whether Ay-nab was in fact a sort of conscious star or a sentient and extremely advanced computer is irrelevant to the conversation the novel seeks to have. The most powerful element comes during the climactic moment where Kirk is trying to convince Ay-nab not to destroy everyone trapped within the sphere and the latter asks, “You wish to see me perish alone?”(143). The implications of this line ripple through the whole work. Even though the characters continuously confuse the issue with their insistence in using the lower-case “g” god, it’s clear that even Ay-nab has an intimate understanding of his own mortality despite its dismissive use of the term mortal, and it makes the whole thing compelling beyond words.
There is not much to complain about here besides a few rogue moments and a few unnecessary elements. The first of these are a couple of Kirk lines that are very unflattering to the captain though they are clearly a work-around for some desired plot progression, “He had no idea whether [the phaser] would work, but he wasn’t about to test it now. If it didn’t work he’d just as soon not know. There was a certain confidence to be gained from being ignorant”(94). This statement is ludicrous on its face and thankfully is not representative at all of the Kirk in the rest of the work who is both the lead and hero of the story. I felt that Eklund left room open for Ay-nab’s powers of control to be limited by the eclipses of the moon, hence Clayton’s phaser working in the one short night scene of the novel, but this opportunity is missed and the working or failure of the technology seems completely arbitrary and subservient to the needs of the plot. (ie. Scotty can’t contact the crew during the night, Clayton’s phaser does work at night, Kyanna’s weapon works once during the day then immediately fails) The last weakness is the inclusion of the trapped Klingon Battle cruiser. It’s addition is the closest thing to padding in the short novel, and the interactions between the Klingons and the Enterprise crew don’t amount to anything. The madman, Clayton, has several plot necessary escapes from custody that make the reader doubt the crew’s competence, but otherwise the plot is sound throughout.
The climax can seem a bit cliche nowadays with the main character being forced to justify the existence of civilization despite its tendency toward war and violence (Fifth Element), but it is sincere and earned. Uhura gets some real time to shine as we are introduced to the story of her father, one of the last lone “Starmen”, who disappeared before age of the starship and is revealed to have been captured and fed upon by Ay-nab. A great read and worth any sci-fi reader’s time and a reread for me.
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