Star Trek: Voyager: Violations by Susan Wright

In a classic Star Trek scenario, a group of alien pirates (although they are more like Privateers, as they have a governmental OK to do so) disable Voyager and steal the main processor. The crew of Voyager must creatively and carefully use the back up systems to navigate their way to an alien station. Then they must attempt to keep the ship running while starting to hunt down the location of their processor through both legal and non-legal channels.

If this sounds completely familiar, you are right! "Concerning Flight" a season 4 episode, was almost the exact same plot, however that episode was done two years after this book was published.

This book is packed with technobabble (and biobabble ;-) ), which I know some people can't stand. However, if you can't keep your ODN (Optical Data Network) conduits and EPSs (Electro-Plasma Systems) straight you will not comprehend a good bit of this book. This narrows it's audience down to a small, and quite OCD, portion of Trekdom. I personally loved it! I liked that the book didn't gloss over (as the episode did) the fact that it was the heart of the ship that was removed, and that the crew was struggling to keep everything from failing. I liked the fact that the ship's bio-neural circuitry was not ignored or treated as it was merely the same as pure tech.

The characterizations were very well done, although both Kim and Paris were spotty at the start. One thing that quite confused me was that the Doctor was always referred to as Zimmerman. Pre-production and in a few scripts, that was the name was planned for the character, and for one episode of the show he considers, but rejects, giving himself that name. As this was one of the very first Voyager novels, I assume it was written when that was the planned name, and the change somehow slipped through Pocket Book's quality control.

The writing was very good, and I highly enjoyed reading this. I highly recommend it to die-hard Trekkies, but would warn those who have only casually watched that this may not be the best place to start.

5 Stars

Emme