By the Great Bird of the Galaxy, is this really only my second Star Trek read for 2025? Star Trek: The Entropy Effect is, despite its modern cover, a 1981 classic TOS tale that plays with the chaos of time travel. Weeks into a taxing assignment to study a singularity which has appeared and is blocking the “space lanes”, the Enterprise receives a message to report to a nearby planet: the priority is “Ultimate”, meaning Kirk has to order the Big E away in the middle of observations, much to the dismay of Mr. Scott and to the “Stoic but secretly SEETHING” Mr. Spock. When the Enterprise arrives, they find that they’ve been diverted for nothing more than a prisoner transport, which confuses and irritates all parties concerned. What they don’t know is that they — and time — are being manipulated, to tragic results: the death of Jim Kirk. When Spock realizes that there’s skulduggery afoot, he and McCoy secretly hatch a plan to go back into time and root out the problem. The overall result is an entertaining novel that entertains by accident: while the story is certainly thrilling, there’s some curious characterization and general weirdness.

Readers may start suspecting something is going on under the hood when the Enterprise reaches the planet and learn that their prisoner is a physicist with a specialty in temporal mechanics. This is not a field anyone respects, and he’s regarded as a bit of a kook — but he’s been convicted of killing several people despite Spock remembering him as a mild-mannered professor and compelling mentor. Time travel, you say? And oddities happening like one character insisting he saw Spock on-planet days ago, long before the Enterprise had been diverted? Because this book was written ‘early’ in the Trek canon — only a decade after the show went off the air for the first time — there’s some interesting characterization. This is the book that gave Sulu his first name, Hikaru, and it goes into some other background information that I don’t think has ever been revisited: we also get a sense of Sulu’s ambition, the ambition that will later take him to his own command. McCoy and Spock’s characterizations are captured quite well, I think. On the downside, the off-beat characterization creates some unrealistic drama when some space cop is able to create serious friction between Scotty, Spock, and McCoy — through some means that are patently ridiculous. The execution of time travel is a little strange, as well: at one point McCoy is desperately stalling for time while, in real time, Spock has transported into the past and is trying to carry something out. That’s effective for drama, but I don’t know if it makes sense from a temporal mechanics view. Of course, since no one has built a time machine, who is to say anything?

This was an enjoyable, if sometimes strange, old-school Trek tale.