New Earth: Thin Air Bk. 5 (Star Trek: The Original Series) [Mass Market Paperback]

The writing of Rusch & Smith moves along at a comfortable pace and the characters stay within character and are standard-issue Star Fleet. Uhura, Sulu and Scotty play minor roles, as it should be. The "bad guy" is a Kauld silicone gel that gradully replaces the air on the planet Belle Terre. The menace is creative and the solution plays out rather well.

The things I could've done without: * The whole part about Tegan and her son. Who cares? This bit added nothing to the whole and actually could've been a useless sub-plot in books 2, 3 & 4. * I'm getting tired of evacuating the colonists every book. And Govenor Pardonnet seemed busy but not as abrasive. Is he just tired or mellowing out? * Scotty's plan to cripple the Kauld battle fleet was a great idea but I doubt he could've done it in 10 minutes. It came off a wee bit hokey, m'lad.

Anyway, if you survived the first four books where I'm sure the authors got paid by the word with an additional dime for every extra adjective they used, then this is your treat. Read it and thank your god that there is ONLY one more book to go!

In execution, it's been a series that is, at times, utterly entertaining and frustrating. The frustration comes from the fact that there were a lot of potential conflicts brought up in book one that haven't yet been addressed by the series (methinks that Diane Carey will bring them up in the final leg of the series but that's honestly, not good enough).

This leg finds the Kauld attempting to get to New Earth for the olivium. Their ingenous plan this time is to destroy the atmosophere of New Earth, thus killing the colonists. Certainly the threat is a good one but it isn't as well realized as I'd hoped. Also, while we get some reactions from the colonists, none of them are really fleshed out enough. Indeed, it's the same reactions we saw in the other three books--horror and disdain at the fact they've come so far to possibly fail.

Kirk and company face a great dilemma and, as usual, must stop it. It's not that I don't like seeing Kirk and company in action. It's just that whole book as the been-there, done-that feeling to it. There's not much depth to the characters and while one of them faces a tragic loss a lot of balls are dropped in the course of the novels. (One potentially interesting plotline of Kirk and McCoy both being romantically drawn to the same woman and the possible conflicts this could bring up is simply dropped as McCoy just accepts that the woman chooses Kirk over him and moves on. There's a chance for drama here but it's not explored!)

This novel ends some of the on-going plotlines while leaving things open for Ms. Carey to finish up and then create a series of on-going adventures for the Challenger crew. I think that this series could have used one driving voice behind them--such as what happens with Peter David's New Frontier novels. For good or bad, they're all by one author and thus have a more rigid sense of continuity and character development. I'd gladly have endured a more long-term series of novels stretched out over several months or years that lived up to the promise that was set before us than this collection of disjointed novels.