Retro Review: Star Trek: Voyager – The Escape
Star Trek: Voyager – The Escape drew our attention immediately with its bold claim as “the first original novel based on the hit series!” This claim alone made us curious: How would authors Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch rise to the challenge of crafting a story for the nascent Voyager series, which premiered in January 1995? Published in May 1995, the book likely had limited source material to draw from. Could they do justice to the now-iconic crew of the USS Voyager?
Surprisingly, they did.
Shortly after B’Elanna Torres is promoted to chief engineer, Voyager‘s dwindling resources lead the crew to Alcawell, a planet of abandoned starships. While exploring, B’Elanna, Harry Kim, and Neelix accidentally activate a mechanism that transports them 300,000 years into the past, where they are arrested by local authorities enforcing super-strict time-travel laws.
Voyager‘s crew, left puzzled by their team’s disappearance, encounters an Alcawellian fugitive who explains the planet’s complex temporal rules. Stranded in the past, the away team learns their appeal for release has failed and faces a grim fate until Captain Janeway, with the reluctant help of a Watchman named Drickel, devises a plan to retrieve and revive them without disrupting the timeline. Through clever manipulation of Alcawell’s time-travel systems, the crew narrowly avoids disaster, restoring their away team to the proper time and preserving temporal balance.
Yep, it’s a Star Trek time travel story, but this tale and the way it utilizes time travel was unlike anything we had previously read or seen in this franchise. Indeed, the creativity behind Escape’s time travel is perhaps the most striking aspect of this book. The people of Alacwell learned how to travel through time, but in a way that doesn’t cause temporal destruction or paradoxes. By limiting their traveling ability to 500,000-year increments and cracking down on those who even think of breaking the thousands of temporal laws, the Alcawellians populate their world across millions of years. It is quite a fascinating sci-fi premise.
Smith and Rusch dedicate just the right amount of time to describing how the Alacwellians cracked this system without burdening the reader. We appreciated how the authors only introduced what they needed to about the Alacwellian code of temporal laws, and we can only imagine the amount of thought dedicated to making this system seem feasible and grounded. Other Star Trek attempts at time travel seem, dare we say, boring by comparison.
Our first thought when we saw Escape was the first original novel based on Voyager was if Smith and Rusch characterized Voyager’s cast in line with the show. We wouldn’t have blamed them at all if their depictions of Captain Kathryn Janeway, Harry Kim, Tuvok, Neelix, B’Elanna Torres, Chakotay, Tom Paris, and other established characters differed from their on-screen counterparts. After all, the authors likely only had the series bible and perhaps the series pilot upon which to base The Escape’s storytelling and worldbuilding.
The authors of this book demonstrated a remarkable understanding of the Voyager crew, capturing their distinct personalities and dynamics despite the show being in its early stages. Captain Janeway is portrayed as resolute and resourceful, embodying her unwavering commitment to her crew while navigating the complexities of Alcawell’s time laws. The Escape also doesn’t shy away from depicting how Janeway starts to rely on her first officer’s guidance and wisdom, something that rings particularly powerfully 30 years later and after the events of Star Trek: Prodigy.
B’Elanna Torres’s fiery determination and vulnerability shine as she confronts challenges in a leadership role, and she even wrestles with her dual Klingon/human heritage in a way that’s remarkably faithful to her character throughout Voyager’s run. The authors also effectively highlight Tuvok’s logical precision, and Tom Paris’s loyalty to his friends, especially Kim, along with his tension-deflating and sometimes inappropriate casualness.
These collective traits among the crew combine to showcase the collaborative spirit that defines the Voyager crew as they travel so far from home. By staying true to these core traits, the book not only complements the show but also deepens the reader’s connection to the people, something that would have been especially valuable in 1995 as we were just getting to know these characters.
Our one critique about The Escape is small, which should highlight what a competent job Smith and Rusch did with this work. On more than one occasion, the authors mention the events of “Caretaker,” the series premiere, without explaining the plot, even briefly, to readers who may not have seen that episode. Nowadays, most Voyager fans would have seen “Caretaker,” but that likely wasn’t the case in 1995. If you are picking up this book now, don’t worry: it’s not like the uninformed reader will be launched into a state of irreconcilable confusion without knowing what happened in the series premiere.
In any case, The Escape was an enjoyable, brisk read that helps develop the adventures of Janeway’s crew soon after arriving in the Delta Quadrant. Smith and Rusch do a remarkable job bringing Voyager’s characters to the page, and their development of a complex, thought-provoking time travel system piqued our interest. It turns out Voyager’s first novel leaves a lasting impression.
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