Headlong Flight

Headlong Flight is a Pocket TNG novel written by Dayton Ward. Published by Pocket Books, it was first released in January 2017.

Summary[]

From the book jacket

Surveying a nebula as part of their continuing exploration of the previously uncharted "Odyssean Pass," Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise encounter a rogue planet. Life signs are detected on the barren world's surface, and then a garbled message is received: a partial warning to stay away at all costs. Determined to render assistance, Picard dispatches Commander Worf and an away team to investigate, but their shuttlecraft is forced to make an emergency landing on the surface – moments before all contact is lost and the planet completely disappears.

Worf and his team learn that this mysterious world is locked into an unending succession of random jumps between dimensions, the result of an ambitious experiment gone awry. The Enterprise crewmembers and the alien scientists who created the technology behind this astonishing feat find themselves trapped, powerless to break the cycle. Meanwhile, as the planet continues to fade in and out of various planes of existence, other parties have now taken notice…

Excerpts of copyrighted sources are included for review purposes only, without any intention of infringement.

Background information[]

• Cover art by Doug Drexler and Ali Ries.
• The novel was announced at the Shore Leave convention in August 2015.
• In the course of the novel, the Enterprise-E comes in contact with two alternate timelines at different points in the past. One timeline in set in an alternate version of 2367, where Captain Picard died as Locutus of Borg and William T. Riker is the captain of the Enterprise, Natasha Yar is still alive, Beverly Crusher continues as head of Starfleet Medical with Katherine Pulaski serving as the ship's doctor, and Wesley Crusher is acting as a civilian consultant having recognized that he will not fit into Starfleet Academy. Another timeline is set in the 23rd century, with a reminiscence by a Romulan commander suggesting that, in this timeline, the events of "Balance of Terror" ended with the destruction of the USS Enterprise rather than the Romulan ship.
• Within the book, Picard describes a series of novels his son particularly loves involving "a group of exceptional children representing different planets, living and working at a special academy that had been constructed on an asteroid". This is a tribute/reference to Star Trek author A.C. Crispin's StarBridge series, no doubt as a posthumous homage after her passing in 2013 to cancer.

External links[]

• Headlong Flight at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works

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