Star Trek: New Frontier, Book Five: Martyr

By Peter David

Martyr is the first full length novel in the New Frontier series, following the four short chapter books that launched the concept.  I remember being particularly excited when this book was first published because the cover had a picture of some of the members of the primary cast, and I had been curious as to what some of them looked liked.  I was disappointed that the dual-gendered character, Burgoyne 172, was not featured, although s/he is finally shown on the cover of book six.

Okay, enough about the cover, how about the story?  The plot follows directly on the events of book four, as the crew of the Excalibur discovers that a planet that has been fighting a generations-long civil war has come to view Captain Mackenzie Calhoun as a messiah.  Despite first officer Elizabeth Shelby's protestations, Calhoun decides to use this perception to his advantage, in hopes of bringing peace to the divided world.  Of course, as the title of the book suggests, there is a sinister aspect to the prophecy regarding Calhoun.  Meanwhile, the subplot of Selar's Pon farr continues, as does the Selar-Burgoyne-McHenry love triangle.  In a surprising twist, when Selar feels she has lost Burgoyne to McHenry, she formally requests that Captain Calhoun have sex with her and father her child!

I found the soap opera elements of this book to be vastly entertaining, while the main plot with Calhoun as the messiah was only mildly interesting.  I also found the inclusion of another group of aliens, the Redeemers, to be somewhat confusing, in that I couldn't figure out their relationship to the aliens who thought Calhoun was the messiah.  Ultimately, I think these are simply two separate groups who have nothing to do with one another.  The Redeemers play a relatively small role here and are presumably being set up as adversaries for a future novel, but, again, I felt their inclusion was needlessly confusing and unnecessary.  One bright spot of the "A" plot was the introduction of Ensign Janos, the Mugato(!) security officer who fought Burgoyne on the planet's surface while under an alien influence.  Ensign Janos was certainly a unique character, and I look forward to learning more about him.

Ultimately, while the messiah story was not that interesting to me, the heart of the New Frontier story is the characters and their relationships to one another.  On that front, Martyr is a successful novel that sets up some very interesting possibilities for future books.