Star Trek Prometheus: Fire with Fire by Bernd Perplies and Christian Humberg 

Her Grace’s rating:  1.5 out of 5 stars

Genre: sci-fi

I read it as an: audiobook

Narrator: Alec Newman

Source: my own collection

Length: 11:02:00

Published by: Titan Books (28 Nov 2018)

After several terrorist attacks claim the lives of thousands, Starfleet sends the ship Prometheus to the Lembatta Cluster, from where the attackers hail. The region is already unstable and the crew of Prometheus are tasked with stopping further attacks and potential galactic warfare. 

I really wanted to like this book. I thought it was rad that an original Trek novel was written in a language other than English at last. But damn, it read like fanfiction. I mean, I suppose all of the novels are fanfiction, but they don’t act like it. Other Trek novels are better written and more engaging. The crew of Prometheus are, frankly, kind of boring. There really aren’t any stand-out characters for me. I kind of wonder if the authors recognized that, weren’t sure quite how to fix it, and so brought in a shitload of cameos by other characters to make up for it. The Klingons were more interesting, which is saying something coming from me since I’ve never been that interested in the Klingons. 

Parts of this also came across as almost…racist? I’m not sure it is that blatant, but the way in which some of the characters were described or spoken to just put me off. If someone said things like that to me or in front of me, I would have told them off. I can’t even think of an example of it anymore – I listened to the audiobook rather than reading it where I could make notes on the pages – but some phrases just set me on edge and not in a good way. Maybe it was a translation issue, I don’t know.

The audiobook thing is another issue. Normally, I love audiobooks. I have never listened to a Trek audiobook, though, since if it’s a book about, say, Lorca, I want Jason Isaacs to narrate it. Or Patrick Stewart for a Picard-centric book, Michelle Yeoh for Georgiou, etc, etc. Since this book isn’t set in one of the actual series with the characters I know and love, I figured it wouldn’t make me mental to have someone who isn’t Jason Isaacs/ Patrick Stewart/ Michelle Yeoh narrating. And in that regard, I was correct. It didn’t bother me that the narrator didn’t sound anything like them. He has a pleasant voice, in fact, and I would probably listen to more of the things he’s narrated. However, it drove me nuts at how many words he mispronounced. It wasn’t a dialect thing, either, or a Britishism. It was just wrong. Like ‘hegemony.’ Got it wrong every time. A few other actual words I can’t think of now. And even words specific to the Trek-verse were wrong. I know, I know, they are made up and not real but even so, can you at least pronounce them like they are in the various series? It’s TAL shee-AR’ not ‘tal SHY-er,’ ‘KIT-o-mer’ not ‘kit-OH-mer.’ … It’s levi-OH-sa, not levio-SAR. I mean, it’s the little things, you know? 

Overall, this is a solid ‘meh’ for me. I like a new Trek book, but this one fell short for me.