Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
Our previous chapter explained how a Klingon has an Orion wife, half-human kids, is on a science colony that, while not part of the Federation does maintain connections to planets in the Federation. We got to meet one of his sons, and Korsal may have some idea of what’s causing the plague…and it may threaten more than their lives! (I wish I could find a clip of just the cliffhanger stinger from Star Trek. Imagine how it would benefit some of the novel and comic reviews I’ve done over the years.)
Now we’re going to see what the doctors coming to Nisus are discovering because we’re going back to the Enterprise and with McCoy and Spock. They have an odd friendship, always trying to out insult each other in ways unique to them. McCoy is more emotional, Spock more logical. It’s the two natures that serve Kirk well, getting both perspectives and deciding which is best to follow in a given situation. It also makes for some of the more fun moments between them.
We probably won’t get a lot of that this chapter. This is the shortest chapter thus far, at 3 pages and not even a quarter of the fourth. Normally I would combine it with the previous or next chapter, but both of those are pretty long and I didn’t feel right shoving it in there. So this chapter is short and sweet. For those of you reading along, you might wait a week or jump ahead and wait for me to get to that review, or take the short chapter and…I don’t know, dust or something. Maybe get out of the house. Anyway…review.
I wonder which chapter I could have combined this with? On the one hand, it’s McCoy and Spock going over Korsal’s findings, based on Therian’s findings before he died. Still came from an engineer finding things the doctors didn’t consider because of how unusual the virus appears to be. I didn’t follow a bunch of it because I’m not a medical person nor a statistician. I wonder if Lorrah was either, but I don’t remember it coming up when I looked into her history for the Vulcan Academy Murders review, which also involved medical situations even if less prominent than this book. In the previous novel it was just a backdrop but here’s it’s center stage.
The next chapter, looking over the first page, will go back to Korsal after what he found and that’s all I know there. So you can make the case either way. What matters is what Korsal, and presumably Therian, found out. Long story short, it seems the more dangerous strains are showing up in mixed species beings, ones with parents of two worlds. This of course means that Spock will not be able to go down to the planet, being half human and half Vulcan. It would be too dangerous.
Thus you can see why this disease isn’t just a medical issue. The idea of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination is about bettering a species via interaction with other species, which of course means love (or at least lust, which unlike certain people think today aren’t the same thing) and babies. Now those babies of mixed race are, while probably not the cause of the plague itself, at least where things will get work. In his last moments, Therian went kind of crazy learning that, but you don’t have to be maddened by illness to see how this could lead to division and a total rejection of mixing races of different worlds. The virus itself seems to be a rejection of the Vulcan IDIC concept. Imagine if we had a plague on Earth and the hardest hit would be interracial children. It would give the racists and segregationists (remember when they supposedly were the same group?) more fuel to demand interracial division. Now multiply that by…a lot, honestly. This may well end poorly if a cure can’t be found.
Even then, what if that’s not enough? If the idea of mixing to produce offspring is made to look bad by the right people, rejecting the children means the adults shouldn’t be spreading seeds across galaxies with other flower beds, if you get my meaning. This could slowly tear apart the very nature of the United Federation Of Planets itself as well as mostly unaligned colonies like Nisus. It would sew division, threaten to return to old grievances or create new ones. In the most extreme issue: war. In The Orville, where classic Trek fans have gone to see what they see as proper Star Trek again, the Krill, believe that other species are unclean, or at least the ship a couple of the crew infiltrate does. Thus, in accordance with religious texts they must be wiped out. That’s the worst case scenario for IDIC and the Alpha Quadrant. So the stakes are very high and we get a reason for the book’s title: The IDIC Epidemic.
So while a short chapter it might be one of the most important chapters. Couldn’t we have been told that from Korsal’s findings directly last chapter? Technically yes, but seeing two characters with more ties to both medicine and stats, as well as ties to the reader via the show’s audience, draws our attention more. McCoy can translate the data and Spock can understand the analysis, giving us a chance to see the data ourselves. Plus we get Spock unconsciously shuddering from the information (Vulcan’s don’t lack emotion, they control it) and how he’s been working. We get McCoy telling Spock that due to his own mixed heritage it’s a mistake for him to go down. Not that it should matter because Kirk still needs his First Officer to get the Followers Of T’Vet to their new world, right? Right?
Next chapter is the moment I thought we would have in the previous chapter, as Korsal and Kevin check out just how bad the ice flow issue is going to be. Because apparently there wasn’t enough going wrong on this planet.
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