Star Trek #90: New Earth, Book Two of Six: Belle Terre

By Dean Wesley Smith with Diane Carey

This novel is much more tightly focused than the first book in the New Earth series.  Whereas that intricately constructed novel saw Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise dealing with a multitude of problems while en route to the new colony world Belle Terre, this second book deals primarily with a single threat to the newly colonized planet.  It is discovered that one of Belle Terre's moons contains a powerful element called olivium, a strange substance that exists in a state of quantum flux and which has not previously been found outside of laboratory conditions.  Olivium is extraordinarily rare, and, in theory, could be incredibly beneficial to the advancement of all of the sciences.  However, what at first seems like the discovery of a lifetime soon becomes a harbinger of doom, when Spock discovers that the unstable olivium will explode in about a week's time, destroying both the moon and all of Belle Terre.

Most of the book is taken up by the Enterprise crew's attempts to stop the explosion.  Eventually, the surface of the planet is evacuated and all of the colonist and Federation ships must work together to tractor a smaller moon into a collision with the olivium moon, in the hopes of releasing the building pressure without destroying the moon or the planet.  This long sequence with the fleet of ships moving the moon is very well handled, building in tension until the final pages.  Of course, Belle Terre is saved in the end, but not without a sacrifice that will have lasting consequences for the fledgling colony world.

There are a couple of subplots in the story, as well.  One, involving a mother left behind on the endangered planet to search for some missing children, is not particularly interesting.  The woman and her son fail to come across as fully developed characters, and seem as though they've been inserted merely as representatives of the Belle Terre colonists with whom the reader is supposed to empathize.  More literary devices than real people.  The second subplot, involving a small, three-person crewed Starship scouting for a nearby world that the colonists could inhabit should Belle Terre be destroyed, was much more interesting.  That storyline ends in a cliffhanger, presumably to be resolved in a later New Earth novel.

In Jeff Ayers' Voyages of Imagination, Dean Wesley Smith says that he wrote the novel from an outline provided by Diane Carey, who wrote the first book in the series and co-created the New Earth concept.  Carey is a phenomenal author of Star Trek fiction, whose attention to detail and rich characterizations are absent here.  Still, Smith's more straightforward prose works nicely for a more focused story like the one being told here, and ultimately I enjoyed this novel and look forward to future books in the series.