Teaser

Time is unravelling. With the nature of reality at stake, Wesley Crusher enlists the aid of his mother, Admiral Picard, and Seven of Nine to protect time from an unknown, and unrelenting, foe . . .

Review

Few Star Trek shows have been as uneven as Picard. The first season was a sombre and occasionally gritty look at a Federation that had failed to meet its lofty goals. The second was a bizarre tangent into time travel and parallel universes. The third was a reunion designed solely to please the fans. Let the record show that I loved the first, disliked the second, and tolerated the third. To Defy Fate is the first Picard novel to take place after the main events of the third season (technically the coda occurs after this book). It also folds in events from every incarnation of Star Trek from the original series, to Deep Space Nine, to Enterprise, to Discovery, and even throws in a nod to the JJ Abrams films. To Defy Fate is a book that grabs the entire sixty years of canon and smashes them into a single story.

The results are predictably mixed. On the one hand, this is a reminder of a dozen of Trek’s finest hours, poking at the corners to see how events could have unfolded differently. On the other hand, it is only that. Reminders. It brings little new to the table, and beyond including Raffi as a major character, never really feels like a Picard novel at all. It reaching so broadly, it fails to grab hold of much of substance.

A lot of my issues with To Defy Fate stem from my general antipathy towards stories of this nature. Oh, so all of reality is unravelling is it? Well, the nature of episodic storytelling is such that it will all be wrapped up rather neatly. And you expect me to care about all of time and space? Why don’t we start smaller and work our way up to that? Incidentally, Star Trek is not the only offender in this manner. Most large franchises end up there sooner or later, with Doctor Who having been caught in a vicious cycle for over a decade now. With that show now on hiatus, we’ll have to see how it pans out.

Returning to Star Trek, there are some things the book does well. I will always appreciate a connection to Enterprise, and this has some of the most interesting Temporal Wars material out there. Meanwhile, connections between Discovery‘s third millennium seasons and the rest of Star Trek are naturally few and far between, so seeing one particular character crop up was a nice way of tying it together. If you forget about the Picard banner on the cover and treat To Defy Fate as a sixtieth anniversary special, it makes a whole lot more sense.

Unfortunately, this is being sold as a Picard novel, and in that regard it falls flat. Like the show’s third season, the big hitters are all from The Next Generation, and it can’t help but feel like a reminder of past glories. This is probably the best use Wesley Crusher has seen in years, and I’m glad to see Kore being involved too (though my hopes for more Soji and Elnor were cruelly unfulfilled). Likewise, seeing fallout from a choice Sisko makes in the Dominion War makes for a fascinating ‘what if’ scenario, but it really just serves to remind me of how good that episode of DS9 was.

Like Picard‘s third season, To Defy Fate is, on it’s own terms, a fun adventure. But that fun is only possible because of the decades of storytelling that have gone before, and in reminding us of those stories, To Defy Fate shows us how faded those old glories now look.

Book Stats

• Narrated by Robert Petkoff
• Set After Picard: Season 3
• Published 2026
• Runtime: 12hrs 49mins