Okay, I'm sorry. I've tried, but I couldn't even bring myself to read more than thirty pages of this drivel. The psychological depth could maybe impress a very dim twelve-year-old. The dialogue seems to have been rewritten over and over again until it has become pure creative writing: there is now nothing but conflict.

The worst part is that Carey (and apparently Gregory Brodeur, who credits himself as a co-author in the foreword) try so hard to be brooding and foreboding in every other paragraph. Apart from simple and honest bad style (“With an aggravated frown he stepped sideways”, “Not even his two closest friends could decipher how deeply he meant those words”) there are monsters such as these: “The head of every experienced person on the bridge suddenly shot around at her, as though she had cursed a kitten—then killed it.” And: “His angular brows drew tightly inward, and for some reason too personal to be voiced, he gazed at the back of James Kirk's head, the back of a captain intensely occupied with whatever lay before them.”

All these quotes are from the prologue, and it really doesn't get any better when we are led forty-five years into the past, to a snotty and inexperienced Kirk, leader of a group of snotty and inexperienced kids who quarrel all the time, and then stumble into their first big adventure. By this time, though, I was far too exhausted to give them a second chance.