Star Trek: SNW — Toward the Night
{4.5/5} “‘Are you willing to pay that price?’ La’An looked Rix in the eye. ‘All it takes is one tiny alteration right now, and we might never be born.’ She took in Pike and the others with a gesture. ‘A war that was averted might not be stopped. Lives that we preserved because of missions we were on will not be saved, perhaps even the lives of your descendants. Even the slightest of variations will have far-reaching repercussions.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — Toward the Night by James Swallow, published in 2025
Uhura thinks an unusual signal is a distress call, and Captain Pike orders the Enterprise to take a look. They find a Class M world with a bunch of radiation and evidence of a civilization who’s no longer there. When they get closer scans show some tritanium on the surface, possibly from a ship. Una takes a shuttlecraft down to the surface, where they find pieces of a Starfleet vessel — and a couple of buried bodies.
It’s about dealing with people who are not from your time.
The story connects to Discovery in a clever way in the epilogue.
I’ve read 10 books by Swallow. I previously reviewed Star Trek: Cast No Shadow.