Crucible: Kirk

      Crucible: Kirk The Star of Every Wandering, written by David R. George III, was published in 2007 by Pocket Books. This book starts off where Star Trek Generations left off, Kirk is dead on Veridian III, but the nexus (a ribbon of time and memory) flies over Kirk as he dies. This causes Kirk to time travel by jumping through significant parts of his life. You think he's traveling through time to change these events, but he's really there more as a witness of his past. The real point of his time traveling is to prevent himself from ever getting caught in the nexus and still help Picard (a future captain)  stop Soran (villain trying to use the nexus) on Veridian III.

     The best element of this book is surprise, you get to learn what happened behind the scenes of some Star Trek episodes, learn more about the characters you did and didn't know, and the biggest surprise is that the purpose of this is to make it not happen in the first place. Captain Kirk is definitely my favorite character in Star Trek, he's brave, smart, and almost perfect but yet he's a human like all of us. The author keeps a lot hidden from you and unfolds the story piece by piece.

     "I can best describe this place as a timeless dimension of the mind, through it must also have a physical component in it, since my body had survived within it,"(p.g. 234)  Kirk's description of the nexus is better than any one I can think of. This whole story revolves around the nexus so this is a very important description of what the book is based on.

     I like how continues where Star Trek Generations (William Shatner's last Star Trek appearance/movie) left off. That's what really separates this novel from other Star Trek books, other books have told of time travel but this happens after Kirk died in his last movie. I do enjoy how this story uses the nexus to have Kirk jump through his past, but I found it confusing how this time traveling adds up to him having to prevent it from ever happening. It almost defeats the purpose of the story to me, he's erasing what he's done by preventing it from ever happening in the first place. The idea of traveling back to witness some of the greatest moments of your life is something I believe everyone can relate to. I believe the time traveling through the nexus is a bigger part of the overall theme than his death. Unfortunately I get the same sad feeling I got at the end of the Generations movie when I finished this book, it's all over. This time it's not only all over but everything leading up to it happened but was erased from time.

     Overall this story was a little confusing for me, even as a Trekkie, so I definitely don't recommend this novel to anyone who doesn't know or like Star Trek. It's also important to have seen the movie Star Trek Generations because this novel is more and less of a sequel to that movie. With all of the time traveling and revisiting of his past events it only helps if you've seen some of the episodes so you can relate to what Kirk is going through. I say that this is a good book, very different than the average Star Trek or Sci Fi book, but with it being such a complicated concept I can't say that it's great. Still a thumps up on this one.