Review: Best Destiny by Diane Carey

Wow, my second favorite Trek book ever, 5 stars. My favorite is How Much for Just the Planet, but that is a slapstick comedy totally different. Destiny is set both at the verge of retirement for Kirk and at his second ever foray into space at age 16. This book was released in 1993, and is set just after The Undiscovered Country movie. yet the young Kirk is the same brash trouble maker as the young Kirk from the first Kelvin time line movie, but this time his farther is there to deal with it, or at least try. Not sure if the creator of the Kelvin time line had read this, or if the way Kirk has been portrayed over the years just gave more than one writer the idea for a totally rebellious young Kirk.

The interplay between father and son, and Captain April, yes the very first captain of NCC 1701, is done very well. The scenes go back and forth between what is happening at the end of Kirk’s career and before it ever started. From the beginning you know there will be a common thread. This is done cleanly and without trickery, no trying to convince the reader it’s not what they think, just a straight forward tie with some necessary but unforced parallelism. At no time did I feel like the parallelism was Kirk learning the same lesson over, like many poorly written books and shows tend to do.

While this story’s heart is drama, and personal relations, it doesn’t allow the science fiction and adventure suffer. It feels well balanced, grounded in real science, as much as Trek can be. And I love the explanation of the necessity of artificial gravity in the Trek universe. Something I just accepted as suspension of disbelief, yet here, more than fifty years of being a Star Trek fan, it made it a believable science totally necessary to the universe. Not only that it is used it as a plot point key to the story. This book is very well written, and here at the end of my review, I’m tempted to just pick it up and read it again right now.