Revisiting Peter David's "Vendetta"

Or: when tie-in literature becomes tie-in *literature*

When people discuss the classic Star Trek novels, the focus is usually on The Original Series tie-ins from the late 70s and early 80s. Those were the days when giants walked the earth, when writers like Diane Duane and John M. Ford were redefining the basic parameters of the franchise in ambitious novels that have kept attracting readers even after their ideas were “overwritten” by later canonical broadcast material. By contrast, there are relatively few legendary individual titles for Next Generation. While the show was running, authors were constrained to reset to the status quo, and after TNG (and the other 90s tie-ins) ended and the authors gained the same kind of autonomy their TOS-focused predecessors had enjoyed, they used it primarily to set up an intricate continuity known as the novelverse. The best volumes from that era are often too tied up in that sprawling narrative world to be accessible on their own. The window to produce ambitious stand-alone novels independent of the ongoing show basically closed as soon as it opened.

Recently, though, I returned to a novel that has a claim to be the major exception to that rule: Peter David’s Vendetta. It definitely lives up to its self-declared status as a “giant novel,” because it is just jam packed with stuff. David develops unanticipated backstory for the Borg and for Guinan’s people, invents an ancient race that tried to stop the Borg by inventing the Planet Killer (from TOS “Doomsday Machine”), and gives Picard a vision of love that literally haunts him all his life.

Part of what enabled Peter David to swing for the fences was that TNG had finally come into its own. The book was published toward in May 1991, toward the end of the fourth season, which had begun by resolving the cliffhanger of “The Best of Both Worlds,” in which Captain Picard was assimilated by the Borg (and incidentally demonstrated that he can totally rock a turtleneck). After a poorly received first season and an improved but still rocky second, the third season represented a quantum leap in quality that continued unabated in the fourth. While going through this period of TNG in my ongoing rowing machine rewatch, I was excited for almost every episode—and even installments I had forgotten were often surprisingly good. The beginning of season 4 was also, as I’ve written elsewhere, when TNG started to gain confidence that it was “a thing” and therefore to begin following up on its own lore. At the same time, this confidence allowed it to confront themes from TOS more directly, where previously the writers had been over anxious to establish TNG’s autonomy.

Vendetta definitely follows up on both of those trends. David recasts “The Doomsday Machine” as a prequel to TNG’s Borg arc, claiming that it was created as a prototype by an ancient species that wanted to find a way to stop the Borg. While Kirk and friends were understandably concerned that it was headed toward Earth, the crew of the Enterprise-D is in a position to chart its intended trajectory—into Borg space in the Delta Quadrant. Now Delcara, a survivor of a Borg mass assimilation who was adopted as a sister by Guinan and incidentally also appeared to Picard as a young man (and was just so amazingly attractive that it prevented him from ever dating seriously again), has tracked down a more advanced model. Powered by the unmitigated rage of the ghosts of the Borg’s victims—who ironically become their own kind of overwhelming Collective—the new Planet Killer plans to finish the job the first one started, and doesn’t care how many inhabited planets it needs to eat along the way.

David sets up an impressive tangle of conflicts around this plot. The overarching issue here is whether they should let the Planet Killer take care of the Borg once and for all or whether it’s actually somehow even worse than the Borg. This is amazing ambition—David is taking on TNG’s most fearsome creation, and he somehow manages to create something even more powerful, which is convincingly rooted in past franchise lore. This is overlayed with Picard’s conflict with the captain of another ship, who had been his rival at the Academy, along with Picard’s ambivalence about his intense romantic connection to the increasingly mad Delcara.

The idea of forging a pragmatic alliance with the Borg vaguely anticipates one plot arc from Voyager. A more direct parallel is their rescue of a female Borg drone who turns out to be a human named Reannon Bonaventure. In a later novel, Before Dishonor, Peter David goes so far as to have Geordi (who takes her under his wing in Vendetta) claim that Seven of Nine is a riff on this character. I think this is a bit of a stretch, since Reannon cannot readjust to human life and actually winds up committing suicide—a very different arc from Seven’s, to say the least. What may have emphasized the connection in his mind, however, was Gene Roddenberry’s bizarre insistence that a female Borg is inconceivable. So deep was his objection that the novel had to carry a special disclaimer that it was non-canonical (as all novels automatically are). Why the Borg, who abduct entire planetary populations (presumably including the women) and who have babies, would be an all-male race is extremely unclear, and the moment when they “tease” the gender of the rescued Borg is definitely cringe-worthy.

And I’m going to be real with you—there are plenty of other cringe-worthy moments. Picard and his former rival trade barbs along the lines of “yeah, I’m bald, but you’re fat,” which is radically out of character in addition to being in poor taste. Indeed, few of the characters sound or act the way we would expect. We get multiple references to “Bev” Crusher, who seems to act more like her temporary replacement Dr. Pulaski (with whom she briefly shares a scene!). Geordi is fixated on his disability in a way that never happens on the show. In fact, his experience of being cared for despite his blindness is his stated motive to aid in Reannon’s recovery (although later he does confess, much more characteristically, that he had fallen in love with her—or the idea of her). Worf is characterized as a violent monster. I could go on. I know it was still early days for TNG, but surely the characters were too well established at this point to excuse David’s license here. And he definitely watched the episodes, because he absolutely strip-mines the past seasons for lore. My personal favorite was when they say, “Remember when Dr. Crusher got stuck in an ever-shrinking warp bubble? What if we did that on purpose and weaponized it against the Borg?” It doesn’t work (likely a casualty of the need to reset to the status quo and not leave Starfleet with a mega-weapon against the Borg), but I appreciate the effort.

Perhaps the looseness of characterization comes from David’s refusal to treat his novel as subordinate to the source material. In fact, almost uniquely among the novels I have read, David makes a point to bookend his work with scenes that make special use of the affordances of a novel as opposed to a television broadcast. One of the opening gambits has Geordi and Data as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in a holodeck program—but leaves it to the reader to guess who the characters are, only making it explicit at the end of the scene. More memorable is his portrayal of Delcara’s experience of approaching Warp 10, which amounts to infinite speed. Several chapters in a row repeat the exact same text. Then the repeated chapters are interspersed with the final scenes on the Enterprise while also being gradually shortened, until Delcara winds up stuck in the endless thought: “just a few more minutes.” If there’s a way to capture the same effect as elegantly in television or film format, it’s not jumping out at me.

That is the moment I remember most vividly from the very enjoyable weekend I spent reading Vendetta while supervising my family’s very poorly attended garage sale. Reading it again as an adult, I have no idea how much my 12-year-old self really got out of it, but “just a few more minutes” really blew my hair back—above all because it took me a beat or two to get what he was doing. It was, after all, a cheap paperback with yellow-edged pages, so the idea that it was a misprint or error was not inconceivable. Grasping that it was intentional was one of my earliest memories of appreciating literary form as such—and so perhaps you could say that Peter David helped set me down the path of literary criticism that led me into academia. Not every Trek novel contains that kind of aesthetic revelation, but the best of them do have moments of real artistry that refutes the prejudice that all tie-in literature is by definition disposable trash.