A fairly dull novel, most of it is Enterprise tangling with mysterious alien missiles and ships. The narrative limps along with a contrived arc for Sulu, including a love affair with a red-shirt and a conflict with Kirk. It isn't until the last 15% or so of the novel that pieces fall into place, although the antagonists are still mysterious to me. This is apparently a setup or tie-in to other novels featuring them, but not having read them it meant nothing to me. ( )

David R. George III is/was one my favorite Star Trek novelists. The 34th Rule was a strong debut, and I also enjoyed works such as Twilight, McCoy: Provenance of Shadows, and Serpents Among the Ruins. But I didn't get much out of Kirk: The Star to Every Wandering, which maybe should have thrown up some flags before proceeding into another Kirk-focused story. The thing is, that George can write very character-driven stories, but he has a sort of pattern he uses a lot, which is someone morosely obsessed with some singular event in their backstory. This works perfectly with Deep Space Nine, where basically every character has some traumatic backstory event that informs their present day actions. It even worked for the original series in Provenance of Shadows because McCoy is the one classic Star Trek character to have that kind of backstory.

It just doesn't work for James T. Kirk. I'm not saying Kirk isn't introspective (I think he's very introspective), and that he doesn't occasionally brood over the past. But Kirk usually presses his doubts into actions, he keeps moving forward. He doesn't (in what is a bit of a George writing tic) fall into a reverie in the middle of a scene where he rues over three pages of backstory between two lines of dialogue. I definitely buy that Kirk would begin to feel uncertain as he nears the end of the five-year mission. I don't buy that it would be this kind of uncertain. George kind of piles on the uncertainties, too. When the novel opens, Kirk ruminates over a lot of random old mistakes; later in the book, a seemingly routine mission goes horribly wrong so that Kirk can obsess over that for the rest of the book.

Other than Kirk, the book's big focus is Sulu, who goes through a whole whirlwind of events here. He falls in love (with a woman who has a deep trauma in her backstory she's morosely obsessed with), she gets horribly injured, he gets mad at Captain Kirk and transfers to another ship, he comes back to the Enterprise. Again, I didn't buy it. Sulu is sort of relentlessly cheerful and optimistic, and it was hard for me to imagine him reacting toward Kirk the way he did here. Which isn't to say he ought to be Mr. Cheerful all the time, especially in the kind of circumstances we see in this book, but he comes across as petulant in a way that's hard to believe of a trained officer. A Sulu who throws himself into his hobbies as a means of distraction I could buy; ditto a Sulu who's friendly to everyone but lets no one get close. A Sulu who sits in his quarters all night every night is less plausible. I also don't think George adequately sold the relationship between Sulu and Trinh, so how angry he was over it wasn't quite believable.

The first third or so of the book was the best part. The exploration of the abandoned colony on the planet the Enterprise crew nicknames Ağdam was well done and creepy (it reminded me of, um, A Choice of Catastrophes), and the way those events climaxed was harrowing. But the novel lost its energy and focus after that; I'd've liked to have seen the Enterprise actively investigate the powers behind Ağdam rather than stumble into them repeatedly. I also don't get the purpose of the Lori Ciana subplot-- George doesn't sell the flirtation, and it doesn't resonate with the themes elsewhere in the book.

So it'll be interesting to see if the 24th-century books pick up on this book's revelations, though there's not much to them (more on that in a second), but on its own, I didn't get a whole lot out of this.

Continuity Notes:

• As alluded to above, Kirk meet Vice Admiral Lori Ciana for the first time. In Roddenberry's Motion Picture novelization, she's Kirk's ex-wife who dies in the transporter accident at the beginning of the film. (With whom he split up amicably, as I recall; in Roddenberry's book but not really elsewhere in Star Trek, people can enter into short-term marriage contracts. The Lost Years tetralogy expanded on a lot of this backstory. It's been too long since I've read those for me to know if The Lost Years is consistent with Allegiance in Exile.)
• The Enterprise makes first contact with the Bajorans. Is it too small universe for Captain Kirk to make this significant first contact? It does make you think that Kira ought to have known who Captain Kirk was a little bit more than she did in "Crossover." I was a bit bummed these colonists didn't call themselves the "Bajora"; if they had, then Picard's use of the old-fashioned collective noun could have had a subtle explanation. The Ascendants also play a role, but not a huge one, and not one that tells us much about them beyond that they don't like Bajorans. (To be honest, I don't really remember anything about the Ascendants at this point, given it's been over a decade since the relevant Deep Space Nine relaunch novels.) It's kind of neat but ultimately pointless.
• Is Wesley returning to Starfleet after his time as a planetary governor in "One of Our Planet Is Missing" a pre-established thing? The whole conversation Kirk and Wesley have about how Wesley became a governor as part of a Starfleet Intelligence plot seemed very random.

Other Notes:

• This book is the first time I can remember seeing the word "olio" (a reliable feature of the LA Times crossword puzzle) used in the wild. I might have squealed.
• Now that I have a doctorate, whenever I encounter a character in fiction with two doctorates (used as a shorthand to show someone is so smart), I just roll my eyes. Getting a second doctorate is about the dumbest thing I can imagine doing with my life.
• Despite the best efforts of some folks on the TrekBBS, I have no idea what the title is meant to mean.