Review of
Starfleet: Year One
Published:
March 2002
Reviewer Rating:
Avg User Rating:
(3.17)
With the founding of the Federation, a combined forces Starfleet must be designed, assembled and deployed. Humans and their alien allies must now determine how to work together and how they will face the rest of the galaxy. The first six starship Captains are assembled from military services as well as independent sources. Now they must face challenges together, in spite of their differences.
The early months of the new Federation and Starfleet are covered in this book. It's interesting to see how politics influences the selection of early captains and colors the missions the take on. The six captains begin the book as kind of stereotypical and flat, but Friedman does manage to develop them a bit over the course of the book. Most fans will probably see where the plot is going and how it will resolve in a general way, but the final mission is kind of interesting on it's own and how the captains have to work together to solve the problem of colonies being attacked by unknown aliens is interesting. Interesting, but ultimately not exceptional.
This book was written and conceived before the Enterprise TV show, and was intended to be the beginning of a series. Once Enterprise was green-lit to production, plans for that series fell through. Because of that, readers will see a lot of discrepancies and major differences between things portrayed here and on the series or even in the Enterprise novels. Some of these characters and situations were actually "adopted" by future authors and merged into some of the later novels. I kind of look at this as a story that happened "off-screen" of the TV show and perhaps told second-hand.
Overall, this was an decent read and take on those first few months of the Federation. Devoted fans will get more out of it than more casual fans - especially with so many differences between this book and established TV continuity.
The early months of the new Federation and Starfleet are covered in this book. It's interesting to see how politics influences the selection of early captains and colors the missions the take on. The six captains begin the book as kind of stereotypical and flat, but Friedman does manage to develop them a bit over the course of the book. Most fans will probably see where the plot is going and how it will resolve in a general way, but the final mission is kind of interesting on it's own and how the captains have to work together to solve the problem of colonies being attacked by unknown aliens is interesting. Interesting, but ultimately not exceptional.
This book was written and conceived before the Enterprise TV show, and was intended to be the beginning of a series. Once Enterprise was green-lit to production, plans for that series fell through. Because of that, readers will see a lot of discrepancies and major differences between things portrayed here and on the series or even in the Enterprise novels. Some of these characters and situations were actually "adopted" by future authors and merged into some of the later novels. I kind of look at this as a story that happened "off-screen" of the TV show and perhaps told second-hand.
Overall, this was an decent read and take on those first few months of the Federation. Devoted fans will get more out of it than more casual fans - especially with so many differences between this book and established TV continuity.
