After The Next Generation finished, the adventures of Picard and his crew continued in a series of feature-length films. The first three released while Deep Space Nine and Voyager were still airing, but the final film, Nemesis, served as a capstone for an entire era of Trek storytelling. A few years later, the Enterprise crew returned in literary form to truly kick off the Litverse of novels. To pave the way for this new age, a series of nine books was commissioned. Set between Insurrection and Nemesis, these novels told the story of the breakup of the Enterprise crew in the run-up to their final on-screen mission. With one exception, this series comprised of a sequence of two-part adventures, and while it is very much a Next Generation story, it folded in enough of other series to simple bear the Star Trek banner.

A Time to Be Born/A Time to Die
by John Vornholt

John Vornholt kicks of proceedings with a story that picks up where the Dominion War left off, with Picard tasked with cleaning up the wreckage of the conflict. It isn’t the strongest of starts, but that’s largely because of the tone it sets for the series ahead. the underlying theme of this series is that this two-year period is a struggle for all involved, and a low ebb for the entire crew. That’s fine for a series, but it feels oddly out of place, as no such annus horribilis was apparent in Nemesis.

A Time to Sow/A Time to Harvest
by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore

Things pick up once the ever-reliable Ward & Dilmore take up the reins. Things are a little bleak, but this marks one of the very few crossovers between the 24th and 22nd centuries, with a notable Enterprise character appearing in a brief cameo. That alone was enough to put the book in my good graces, but it’s a great pair of books on top of that. Yes, it racks up more defeats and hard victories for the crew, but those feel earned rather than forced, and the development of Data takes another interesting turn.

A Time to Love/A Time to Hate
by Robert Greenberger

Personally, I found this to be the weakest arc of the series. On a practical level, there’s nothing wrong with Riker and his father reuniting. The issue I had is that all of the emotional weight fell flat. Kyle Riker’s single on-screen appearance was fine, but the relationship was rarely referenced again. throw in yet another unwinnable scenario, and you get a book that is the literary equivalent of hammering the same nail long after it has disappeared into the wood.

A Time to Kill/ A Time to Heal
by David Mack

The high point of the series comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the mind of David Mack. The Tezwa incident depicted here is much referred to later on in the Litverse, so it was nice to see how it really unfolded. The political brinkmanship is adequately matched by a sequence of great action scenes, and the entire crew is used well. This also feels like the tipping point in terms of several long-running character arcs

A Time for War, a Time for Peace
by Keith R. A. DeCandido

As you can tell from the presence of Martok and Scotty on the front cover, this last book is less about the Enterprise and more about the galaxy as a whole. It’s the novel that introduces us to future President Nan Bacco, and even if the politics do have a distinctly US flair to them, it is easily the most enjoyable element of the book. There is a certain degree of authorial arm-twisting involved in lining everything up to fit the start of Nemesis, and it could definitely have benefitted from being a double-volume like the rest of the series, but this is still a strong climax to the series.

Overall, A Time To . . . is stronger in execution than in premise. Captain Picard and the Terrible, No Good Year it may be, but there’s some classic Trek material in here, and it’s a more than fitting bridge between the episodic stories of the past, and the more involved Litverse relaunch that is to follow.