Booksology To Defy Fate, the new Star Trek: Picard novel from longtime Star Trek novelist and franchise consultant Dayton Ward, is a welcome — if tentative — foray back towards everything I like about Star Trek novels: gripping stories, big stakes that go beyond what a television budget allows for, interesting and unusual mixes of characters, and stories that add something tangible to the Star Trek universe. To Defy Fate feels like the first step for Star Trek publishing back to its heyday of storytelling in the 2000s and 2010s when the books had more latitude to push characters’ stories forward, and play forthrightly in the Star Trek story sandbox. Since Star Trek returned to TV in 2017, and the long running Star Trek novel continuity was wound down, new Star Trek books have — in addition to becoming much less frequent — felt increasingly “safe.” Bound to the strictures of canon Star Trek in an era when 20+ and sometimes 50+ new episodes were released each year, Star Trek publishing has resolutely taken a back seat and limited itself to smaller episodic stories that don’t seek to rock the boat. Because how could they when the shows might contradict what happened in a novel 6 months later?
The best thing that can happen to Star Trek novels, therefore, is for there to be less Star Trek on TV. With less televised Star Trek, there’s more room and more freedom for novelists to take bigger swings with characters, and begin to forward their stories beyond the latest point we’ve seen them on screen.
To Defy Fate is a step on that road now that Picard has ended and there are no announced plans for 25th century Star Trek projects. It gives us a story that inches in the direction of taking characters to new places and pulling back the larger curtain on the 25th century to see and hear things that Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Picard, have not yet shown us.
I don’t want to overstate the case for how much To Defy Fate feels like a Star Trek novelverse story: it’s still painting largely within the lines of what’s already been shown on screen. Set between the main events of the end of Picard and the launch of the Enterprise-G, all the main characters in To Defy Fate are established canon characters from Picard — and other shows! — and take them in expected directions.
But To Defy Fate has a welcome scope that feels new for Star Trek novels over the last few years.
It is a Star Trek: Picard novel… but it’s also somewhat a Star Trek: Prodigy novel, with bit of both Star Trek: Discovery and the Kelvin Timeline lens flare thrown in for good measure? Where Dayton Ward succeeds in this book is in confidently pulling together lots of different ideas and characters from the Kurtzman era and deploying them in a way that feels fun, interesting, and like it’s adding something to the overall universe, even if the corporate straight jacket of painting well within the lines remains mostly in place.
To Defy Fate is anchored around Jean-Luc Picard, Wesley Crusher, Beverly Crusher, Raffi Musiker, Seven of Nine, and a few surprise characters I won’t spoil. It’s a time travel and alternate universe romp that takes our characters through different timelines on a mission that draws on a lot of ideas from Prodigy, Picard, and Enterprise.
It’s a lot of fun, and the characterizations are great. It gives you some moments the show denied you — Beverly and Wesley, and Picard and Wesley reuniting for example — and lays out more detail around a key event in the Kurtzman-era Star Trek chronology than we’ve ever gotten before.
Dayton Ward has always been a master of pulpy fun Star Trek novels and To Defy Fate is no exception to that trend. I had a delightful time reading it, and luxuriating in all the different parts of the Star Trek canon he chose to deploy in telling this story. I think most of the series got some kind of important callout or nice moment in To Defy Fate, and though it’s billed as a Picard novel it’s more of a big crossover.
If there’s a weakness in To Defy Fate, it’s that the time travel mechanics don’t make a ton of sense. That’s not really Ward’s fault — Star Trek has gotten so convoluted about time travel and whether you’re erasing history or creating branch timelines that no story could really reconcile all that effectively — but it does undercut a few narrative beats, and the main character’s motivations, when there’s an open question about what changing the past really means. The book needs you to feel that changing history erases things for the stakes to fully work, but in a few moments acknowledges things or characters probably aren’t erased just continuing in a different timeline.
But ultimately, time travel is fun and you shouldn’t think too much about it anyway, because it’s a mechanism for telling a fun story, examining our characters, and seeing some roads not taken.
To Defy Fate capably does all three of these things. I hope Paramount and Simon & Schuster feel emboldened by the slowdown in televised Star Trek to carry forward the energy from To Defy Fate and make the novels the unmissable events they were a decade ago.
Star Trek: Picard — To Defy Fate is in stores now.
