List my favourite characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation and infrequent guest character Q would not be there. What is wrong with Q? He is meant to be arrogant, he is meant to be irritating – that is all in his job description. The problem I have with Q is that he is too powerful. With any character that can pretty much do anything whenever they want, you basically undermine the universe itself. Should we care for Picard when Q can snap his fingers and turn the Captain’s insides onto the

List my favourite characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation and infrequent guest character Q would not be there. What is wrong with Q? He is meant to be arrogant, he is meant to be irritating – that is all in his job description. The problem I have with Q is that he is too powerful. With any character that can pretty much do anything whenever they want, you basically undermine the universe itself. Should we care for Picard when Q can snap his fingers and turn the Captain’s insides onto the outside? Essentially Q episodes felt meaningless and any book would have to work even harder to impress the reader. With no budget to worry about you could delve deep into Q nonsense and not have to pay for it. Who cares if this would make for an awful book?



The crew of the Starship Enterprise have set out on a mission to try and probe the very extremes of known space, but before you can say “tear a hole in the space/time continuum”, Q arrives. He brings with him Q and q, his wife and child. The three of them try and persuade our intrepid adventurers that the barrier around the Milky Way is there for a reason.



To say that ‘O-Space’ by Greg Cox is a slow burn is an insult to any large tyre fire that has raged for years. This is a very slow book. TNG has always had an element of space soap opera and for the first half of the book we are deeply in feelings territory, not just of the known crew, but also some of their passengers. We get to revel in their loves and fears, when really we just want a little action. When the action does start, events are effected by the Q Factor i.e. he can do what he likes, therefore undermining everything.



Picard is taken from the main element of the story and goes on an adventure with Q through time. Here there are some interesting ideas as a new Q like creature is introduced that was released by Q millennia before. What is annoying is the need for Cox to bounce around showing us stuff just because he can in a book form. Most of the stuff he shows Picard would have been cut from the show as being flim flam and over budget. Only a race of adventurous aliens are interesting.



The entire book ends up feeling like filler. I can just about handle soap opera and even Q’s omnipotence. What I cannot stand is a book that is not a whole. This is book 1 of 3, but this is no book, just the first third if a larger story. The ending is abrupt, has no conclusion and could just be any chapter. The best trilogies have three books that can be read on their own, but work as a whole. ‘Q-Space’ is not a whole story, just part of it. Getting to the end of the book and realising that there is no end just adds insult to injury. This was not a good in the first place, by letting the reader down at the end, it become an awful one.



Sammy Stinker

