STAR TREK: A HARD RAIN

Captain Picard takes on the holodeck persona of Dixon Hill in order to save the Enterprise

By Chris Wyatt     March 27, 2002

In what can only be an experiment to see if STAR TREK fans will ever get sick of holodeck stories, a usually relatively reliable author (Dean Wesley Smith) has churned out an emphatically lackluster novel. A HARD RAIN is a pulp fiction detective pastiche in which the Enterprise is being disassembled by yet another nonsensical space anomaly. This particular anomaly is called "blackness," but is actually some kind of "quantum overlap" - whatever that means.

Between the Enterprise and the Voyager, you'd think Starfleet would somehow have developed a way to check out areas of space before flying straight into them. Perhaps they should amend their motto to say: BLINDLY going where no one has gone before. Anyway... the ship can only be saved by a device that Geordi and Data, with MacGyver-like speed, are able to throw together from spare parts. For safety they need to test the device on the holodeck. The device works, but suddenly and inexplicably, Picard's Dixon Hill program comes on and a holographic bad guy steals the device, now called the "Heart of Adjuster." For some useless and unbelievable reason, the guys can't just shut the holodeck off and take the Heart back, so there's nothing for it but to dress up like it's Halloween and go solve the big mystery of who the thief is.

I don't know about you, but if I was in a starship that was in the process of disintegrating and my captain went to play dress up, I'd be a little pissed. These people can build a quantum un-overlapper out of scrap metal, but they can't figure out how to turn off a hologram without playing some endless video game? Of course the whole set up is just a device for the writer to get a chance to write a story where Picard plays a hard boiled detective. And Smith does a decent job of taking a riff on the pulp fiction style of writing. But even astute word choice can't possibly save a plot so incredibly hackneyed that they wouldn't use it for an ANDROMEDA episode. Even the so-called mystery that Hill has to solve is so simplistic that the reader stays three steps ahead of Picard at all times.

A HARD RAIN cannot be recommended. Not to anyone. Interested readers might have more luck trying some of Smith's non-media tie-in materials, like VOR THE MAELSTROM.