Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

An alien scientist invents the Intergalactic Inversion Drive, an engine system that transcends warp drive -- and the U.S.S Enterprise™ will be the first to test it! The Klingons attempt to thwart the test, but a greater danger looms when strange symptoms surface among the crew -- and time becomes meaningless.

Now Captain Kirk and his friends face their greatest challenge -- to repair the fabric of the Universe before time is lost forever!

Average Customer Rating:

"Are they here? High time"

Customer Rating:

According to the book "Voyages of Imagination", Diane Duane set about writing "The Wounded Sky" with the intention of creating the best "Star Trek" book anyone had ever seen. Well, she certainly succeeded. I first attempted to read "The Wounded Sky" about fifteen years ago, and got bogged down about halfway into the book. There was no question of the richness and depth of Duane's prose, of a far higher quality than that found in most "Star Trek" novels, but the intellectual complexity of the story made it almost the opposite of a light read. I've now finally gotten around to finishing the book, and I'm very glad I did. Perhaps my previous experience with the book made it easier to get through, or perhaps my increased familiarity with Duane's influences made it more accessible. Somewhere in this book Duane gets in a reference to practically every major work of twentieth-century British fantasy and science fiction. While I was always something of an Anglophile, this tendency has blossomed in my reading and TV and film-viewing over the past ten years. The books Duane read before writing "The Wounded Sky" are now, to a large extent, the same books I've read, making the reading experience even more rewarding. At the heart of "The Wounded Sky" is K'tl'k, an alien scientist resembling a glass spider who is surely the single most memorable "Star Trek" character who has never appeared on screen. Despite her wildly alien physiognomy, her wise and humorous personality is so richly and beautifully revealed over the course of Duane's tale that, by the end, we love her as much as Scotty, who clearly loses his heart to her. K'tl'k's final fate is as emotional for the reader as it is for the characters. Not only is "The Wounded Sky" the best "Star Trek" book I have read, it stands alongside such acclaimed "Doctor Who" novels as "Venusian Lullaby" and "Human Nature" in transcending the limitations of media tie-in novels and resonating longer in the reader's memory than many works of "serious literature".

The Review on the Edge of Forever...

Customer Rating:

I haven't read too many Star Trek books, partly because the few I have read tended to go off on tangents in an effort to be 'different' from the TV series. 'The Wounded Sky' is a good example of this, taking a story that certainly would have been too 'grand' for the original series, and maybe even the movies or spinoffs. As the lower reviews noted, the theorizing, and overwrought prose, get in the way of the story on several occasions. There are some good character moments, especially involving K't'lk and both 'J'm' and 'Mt'gm'ry." Yet there are a few too many instances of characters behaving somewhat out of character simply to voice the author's deep interest in both physics and metaphysics. Eventually, all the scientific jargon, as well as the ultimately-pointless 'shared experiences' of the crewmembers, become something of a jumble. I'm not knocking Diane Duane as a writer, I just feel like she opted not to tell a 'Star Trek' story, and instead molded the regular characters to fit her story. And despite the somewhat cliched 'alien name with lots of apostrphes' and 'stilted alien dialogue that mixes up common English idioms' on display, it's an okay read. It's just that it's hard to take the book at face value when the 'profound changes' the crew experiences are not followed up by other authors. Not a book for the casual 'Phasers on stun, beam me up' 'Trek' fans, like myself, but those who like their 'Trek' on the 'trippy' side will enjoy it.

a little hard to swallow..and a little verbose

Customer Rating:

ok, I know it's science 'fiction'..but there are just some concepts that even in the context of star trek that just go a little too far...the birth of a new universe in the manner of which this book goes about doing it is one of them... between the introduction of all kinds of new species and their ways of speaking and all the 'shared moments' by the crew, I found this book losing my interest on more than one occassion... In the end, not everything's for everybody. The average review of this book is rather high, but it definetly wasn't to my liking. It was not up there with books such as Black Fire, Web of the Romulans or Yesterday's Son.

A good idea wasted

Customer Rating:

Have you ever attended a particularly bad musical, and found yourself dreading each moment that a character bursts into song? If so, you have an idea what this Star Trek novel is like. It starts with a terrific premise: the invention of an "inversion drive" that utilizes some truly alien approaches to geometry and physics. Unfortunately, each time this drive is activated, it triggers lengthy and very tedious fantasy sequences in the minds of the characters. The story comes to a complete standstill during each of these scenes, and I found myself cringing each time the inversion drive was used. I also wish most of the Star Trek authors would go back and read James Blish's original episode adaptations, in which the Trek characters behave with a quiet military dignity and treat each other with mutual respect. Duane falls into the familiar trap of having the Enterprise crew behave like fans at a sci-fi convention: swapping in-jokes and insults, whooping and cheering on the bridge, singing songs together during their off-duty hours, addressing each other by their first names, etc. I guess this isn't surprising, given that fandom is the only model of social interaction that these authors know, but it's nevertheless embarrassing.

Great Premise Fizzles

Customer Rating:

The book starts out with a terrific premise - the idea of using an "inversion drive" to travel through de Sitter Space to travel extraordinary distances. Extra-galactic travel would be possible, for instance. One third of the way through the book is a Klingon ambush that I wish would have been more developed, but was nevertheless very exciting. Midway through, however, the story begins to rely heavily on fantasy sequences that are happening in the minds of the crew. A little bit of this is okay, but by the end, the story is dominated by it. That was very disappointing, and didn't have much of a science-fiction feel to it. For that reason I can't recommend this book.