I think a bigger problem is that all three books, but especially the second one, suffer from too swift resolutions. That soured me on it a little, but not much.

But beware: Anyone Can Die in this trilogy, and they often do. It was great to see Data on the printed page again, and all the others, too. Can Data solve both of his problems before it’s too late? Meanwhile, a giant intelligent machine has invaded the galaxy and threatens to wipe out all life. But in Silent Weapons, he against runs afoul of the machinations of the Breen, who possess terrifying android resources of their own, and in The Body Electric, he learns that Akharin has been kidnapped by a fanatical wing of the ancient Fellowship of Artificial Intelligences.

He seeks the help of the Immortal Akharin (better known to fans as Flint), who is the only man who can resurrect his own android daughter, Lal. Soong is successful, and Data returns to life, but all is not well for our favorite android. The trilogy begins with The Persistence of Memory, in which Data’s “father”, Noonien Soong, long thought dead, seeks to resurrect his lost son, but in the course of his work, he must face the machinations of the Federation’s latest, greatest rivals, the Breen. That’s fair in principle, but the film creates the new android character of B-4, who is also played by Brent Spiner, and besides that, they weren’t planning on making any more movies anyway.īut that tragedy is rectified in Cold Equations, set four years after Star Trek Nemesis. Out-of-story, Brent Spiner felt that he was getting too old to play the ageless android character of Data and wanted to stop. In-story, there were reasonable ways for Data to get out alive, as David Mack points out in The Persistence of Memory. I was very disappointed when Data died in Star Trek: Nemesis, sacrificing his life to save the Enterprise, especially since it was done for silly reasons in a mediocre movie.

All of these books focus on one of my favorite Star Trek characters, Data. I recently picked up the Cold Equations Trilogy by David Mack because they were billed as a sequel to a previous novel I really enjoyed, Immortal Coil. However, there have been a few that interested me over the years. Just like Star Wars, I never got really deep into the hundreds of books written for the various Star Trek series.

The Persistence of Memory by David Mack