Star Trek: The Unsettling Stars Preview Released

Star Trek returns to the Kelvin Timeline in Star Trek: The Unsettling Stars, a new novel and audiobook written by Alan Dean Foster. Simon & Schuster has released a new preview of the novel via the official Star Trek website. The excerpt from the book finds Captain James T. Kirk, still young and inexperienced in this timeline, in a difficult position. He’s observing as a colony ship takes fire from a much more powerful vessel. The colony ship hails the USS Enterprise to plead for help. Does Kirk come to their aid without knowing the full extent of the conflict at hand?

There’s also a behind-the-scenes video with The Unsettling Stars audiobook narrator Robert Petkoff. In the video, Petkoff explains that this story takes place in the timeline of the J.J. Abrams movies. He also teases that the story reveals more of Spock and Uhura’s relationship and sees Kirk growing into the role of captain.

Star Trek: The Unsettling Stars by Alan Dean Foster is set in the alternate timeline created by the 2009 Star Trek movie and follows the events of that film. Here’s the synopsis from the publisher’s website: “Taking place in an alternate timeline created when the Starship Kelvin was destroyed by a Romulan invader from the future, this bold new novel follows Captain James T. Kirk and an inexperienced crew commandeering a repaired U.S.S. Enterprise out of spacedock for a simple shakedown cruise. When a distress call comes in, the Enterprise must aid a large colony ship of alien refugees known as the Perenorean, who are under siege by an unknown enemy. But Kirk and his crew will find that the situation with the peaceful Perenorean is far more complicated than they bargained for, and the answers as to why they were attacked in the first place unfold in the most insidious of ways…”

The book has had a complicated road to publication. Announced in 2009 as Star Trek: Refugees, it was one of four novels meant to tie into the new Star Trek film’s debut. The publisher put all four novels on indefinite hold for reasons that were never made clear. In 2019, Gallery Books surprised fans by announcing that the book would see release 10 years later in 2020 under the new title The Order of Peace. It received another new title, The Unsettling Stars, before publication this month.

Are you excited for a new Kelvin Timeline Star Trek adventure? Let us know in the comments. Star Trek: The Unsettling Stars goes on sale on April 14th.