Star Trek: Voyager — Mosaic
{4.5/5} “But to consider oneself part of an even greater group — of the family of the galaxies and all their myriad species — was to feel a fortunate child, with millions of aunts, uncles, and cousins, to be alone nowhere in the universe. To Kathryn that was one of the wondrous privileges of life in a spacefaring age.”
Star Trek: Voyager — Mosaic by Jeri Taylor, published in 1996
An away team is on a planet looking for food, and they’ve also discovered some intriguing burial sites — then the Kazon show up. Captain Janeway waits for repairs to Voyager in a nearby nebula before she can rescue her crew. Meanwhile, she reflects on how she got to this point in her life. Like the time she want cave jumping on Mars without permission, and the time she and Admiral Paris ran into some unfriendly Cardassians.
If you’re a fan of Janeway, this is the book for you. Janeway comes to terms with an event from her past and that helps her with the current situation.
There’s a scene where Janeway as a kid meets Cadet Data, and another where she meets Will Riker when they’re both cadets. There’s a surprise about one character we already know.*
Taylor only wrote 2 original novels (and one novelization) — this will make you wish she’d written more.
One more quotation: “They’d studied about salesmen in school, about the time in Earth’s history when people actually tried to talk people into acquiring things they didn’t need, just to make money. It sounded so bizarre that she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t studied the era and seen examples of the persuasive techniques such people used.”
This is the 1st book I’ve read by Taylor. She is the co-creator of Voyager.
Spoiler alert
*Hobbes, someone she’s known all her life, changes his name to Mark — it’s Janeway’s fiancé in the “present.”