Serpents among the ruins

The Lost Era: Serpents among the ruins, by David R George III. Pocket
Books 2003.

The writers of the Lost Era series must have got together to nut out use
of characters and history ³facts². In this David George uses Klingons who
are picked up in Keith de Candido¹s novel, which comes next. This is the
second in the line, and deals with the Tomed Incident, which led to the
Romulans cutting themselves off, and the Klingons allying with the
Federation. It is a convoluted plot, which couldn¹t possibly have worked
in real life, but hey! it¹s Star Trek.
The book is all plot, and it is quite good, so I won¹t say more. The
characterisations are good, but secondary. Our leads are Captain Harriman,
Demora Sulu, and a few others we have not heard of before. This means,
with the exception of Lieutenant Vaughn, who we know will be the leader on
Deep Space Nine in the after-series books, we don¹t know which of the
subordinate characters - or indeed the lead characters - will survive the
story! This is the special attribute of this whole series - it is
characters whose history we do not know.
I enjoyed this book. I took a while to get into it, because it is lots of
politics, and I have no interest in the Klingons or Romulans. But it picks
up a good pace, and finishes well.
The title is from an old Romulan Proverb. In other words, it is
meaningless, but sounds good.

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