This is number eleven of the TNG novels and Keith Sharee’s only Star Trek novel.
Troi has some dreams, the Enterprise follows a signal from a missing ship, some characters are taken prisoners on the planet, and then it’s explained what the dreams had to do with everything, the end. In short. In long: the Enterprise crew find themselves at a planet called Rampart, where a Federation ship has gone missing. The people of Rampart are descendants of Earth who left after the “post-atomic horror”, establishing their own separate colony. Importantly, they have strict laws regarding the right to think or communicate any forms of fiction (understood broadly). The more elaborate implications of these laws include drones flying around, reading peoples minds (as it were) to report on transgression, and the wearing of masks that selectively shield undesirous sounds/images.
This forms the backdrop for three plots: One, on the Enterprise some of the Rampart drones are wrecking havoc after having read the minds of key crew members, taking advantage of their technical and security knowledge. Two, on the planet Rampart itself some crew members are prisoners of the planet’s security forces, and three, on the planet Troi separates from the rest to find herself in the presence of an underground movement dedicated to the preservation of stories.
Comments: The above all makes it sound far more promising than the story itself works out to be. The society of Rampart is at face value an interesting set-up: a Ray Bradbury story with augmented reality. Unfortunately, this set-up does not pay off.
The author has a few quirks of style, including a tendency to often slip in anecdotes (e.g. character’s reporting or narrating previous experiences) or prefacing a new character by a lengthy preamble. Presumably, these are (all too) explicit efforts at justifying those character’s being worthy of our interest.
Early on in the novel, Data scans the planet Rampart, reporting “a high density of video and audio sensors–probably surveillance gear“. Unbeknownst to Data the iPhone has just been released.
External links: For even more discussion of some of the novel’s limitations, the keen reader is referred to Everett Wallace’s review at Amazon. One of the astute points made in that review is that all the impressive abilities of the people of Rampart and their technology “completely undercuts the supposed central message of the book – that creativity and imagination are a necessary part of human intelligence. Instead of being stagnant, the Rampartians are sufficiently adaptable to seriously challenge the Enterprise when, by all rights, they should have been instantly overwhelmed.“
At the time of writing, the pages over at the MemoryAlpha/Beta are almost empty.
