Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock
{4.5/5} “One of the unackknowledged parts of the DTI’s job was to keep knowledge of temporal incidents from being any more widely disseminated than it had to be. The more rare and unlikely the public believed temporal displacement to be, the less chance there was of idiots trying to slingshot around their local suns to undo a bad relationship or win the Lissepian Lottery.”
A civilian ship, the Verity, disappeared into an anomaly 15 years ago and now here they are — they’ve inadvertently travelled through time. DTI agents Dulmur and Lucsly are dispatched to find out what happened. After interviewing the people onboard Dulmur thinks that one of them might just have what it takes to become a DTI agent. The DTI tries to keep the timestream unpolluted, a difficult job. When a new front in the Temporal Cold War opens up, it becomes even more difficult.
Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock by Christopher L. Bennett was published in 2011. It’s a Star Trek novel whose primary storyline takes place in the 24th century just after the creation of the Typhon Pact. A secondary storyline shows Dulmur becoming a DTI agent and taking on his first case.
We first heard about the Department of Temporal Investigations (DTI) and the characters Dulmur and Lucsly in the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations.” We first heard about the Temporal Cold War in several episodes of Enterprise.
If you’re a fan of time travel, this is the book for you. I didn’t care about the scientific explanations of time travel, but if you’re like me you can skim those parts.
The DTI investigates a station known as the Axis of Time, where beings from different time periods can meet and trade. They’re concerned about the possible changes to the timeline, but since it’s not in Federation space they don’t have any jurisdiction over it.
Bennett has a great knowledge of Star Trek and always fits his stories nicely with what’s come before. This book includes many people we’ve seen before — significant ones are the crew of the USS Bozeman who were caught in a time loop for 90 years, and Clare Raymond who was cryogenically frozen in the 20th century. Troi, Worf, and Federation President Nanietta Bacco also show up.
I found several chapters near the end to be not quite as interesting, but the ending is terrific.
I’ve read several of Bennett’s previous Star Trek novels — they’re always worth reading.