You know, when you spend a good chunk of the year reading Chuck Palahniuk novels, you need something light and breezy to let your mind rest.

Normally, I’d read a Doctor Who novel.  But I was in my local SF bookstore (Slow Glass) and I saw Q&A (a Star Trek Next Gen novel) by Keith De Candido and because I’ve been reading his delightful LJ of late (that would be [info]kradical), I thought I might give it a go.  And it was the perfect antidote to reading books by Chuck.  It was light and was breezy and most of all it was plenty of fun.

I’m not going to do a detailed plot synopsis, and I’m not going to give away spoilers.  But I am going to say that this is an assured Star Trek novel by someone who knows the characters and knows what he’s doing.

The last Next Gen novel I’d read, from memory, was Vendetta by Peter David.  And that was so very long ago.  I could tell, reading Keith’s book that the Universe had moved on.  But, if you’d kept up with all the Star Trek movies, and had watched Next Gen and Voyager (well maybe not Voyager, because that would be torture), you’d have no problems keeping up with the changes in personnel.

Also, the book is about Q, which also attracted me.  He’s the famous bad boy of the Next Generation, and all powerful entity who had plenty of fun poking and prodding the human race, and more specifically Captain Picard and his crew.  He was also played brilliantly by John de Lancie.  Not all his appearances on the show were great – and by the time he reached Voyager, the character had lost plenty of its bite – but I was interested to see what Keith did with him.

And what he did was something really very clever indeed.  This is the Q we know and love and he’s being his old impish self.  At the same time there’s something BIG going on.  What makes it all cleverer is that Keith somehow (and I’m still not sure how) ties in all of Q’s previous appearances (and I do mean all… I’m sure he also references other Q books and comics, and probably playing cards, fan fiction, musing from mates and something he heard someone say at a bus stop one day) in this book.  And it’s bloody clever,

It means that this book is laden with continuity references.  For a Doctor Who fan, this amount of references might make them cringe.  Fanwank, (as it was so wonderfully coined by the late, departed Craig Hinton, who himself enjoyed writing continuity laden books) has become a swear word in Doctor Who fan circles.  I don’t know if that’s the case in the Star Trek world. 

Fortunately, Keith pulls it off, and while I’m sure I didn’t get all the references, I was surprised at how most of them didn’t smack of self indulgence.  Well, OK, some of them were a little self indulgent, for example, some of the chapters that deal with the appearance of a weird spatial anomaly feature plenty of famous faces, but none of these scenes hurt the book in any way, and for the most part move the plot forward.

And yet it’s with the character work where Keith really shines.  All the regulars are handled well, but it’s the new cast – the one’s who weren’t on the TV – who come off as very three dimensional.  For a book that’s packing so much, Keith finds room to let his characters breathe.

Yeah, this is light and breezy and will take a day to read.  But it’s also bloody good stuff.  It’s TV tie in fiction written the way it should be.  Filled with fun and an in-depth understanding of the show, but also featuring a strong story and interesting characters.

So if you know a bit of Star Trek and think Q is cool, you can’t go much further than Q&A.