TSONL provokes wild, praiseful rave from geniuses at the Kirkus Reviews!
Booklist April 15, 1998
Enough with the jokes about odd foreheads! Let's look seriously at the carbon- and occasionally silicon-based life-forms on the decks of good ships Enterprise, Voyager and Defiant and good station Deep Space 9. Just how likely is a shape-shifter like Odo or an android like Data? How possible is the inter-species coupling so prevalent in the Star Trek cosmos, with its human-Vulcan Spock, its human-Betazoid Deanna Troi, and human-Klingon B'Elanna Torres? Charming us by eschewing the role of mere debunker, biologist Andreadis interprets ST and its science marvelously. She clearly enjoys the original series and its many spin-offs as much as any con-going Trekkie. She is not even above the occasional, parenthetical wolf-whistle when it is biologically appropriate, yet she moves from melodrama to serious science gracefully. Where are memories stored, she asks, when Trills are joined? What synapses allow mind-melding? What happens to the excess matter when human-sized Odo shrinks in to a wine glass disguise? Andreadis answers clearly and wittily. (Patricia Monaghan)
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