The Devil’s Heart — a legendary object of unsurpassed power and mystery. Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness’s mightiest talisman; worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people’s minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others thing it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery — until now. An isolated archaeological outpost has suddenly stopped responding to repeated requests for information. Sent to discover why, the U.S.S. Enterprise crew finds a devastated outpost and a dying scientist, whose last worlds fall on disbelieving ears: the Devil’s Heart has been found. Now, as the quest for the Heart unfolds, Captain Jean-Luc Picard discovers the awful truth behind all the legends and age-old secrets: Whoever holds the Devil’s Heart possesses power beyond imagining…

We’re counting down to the January 2020 return of Jean-Luc Picard by revisiting some of the pivotal stories about the beloved Starfleet captain from across the last three decades of Star Trek: The Next Generation published fiction.

Welcome to the next entry in our retro review series Prelude to Picard!

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Set during the show’s fifth season, author Carmen Carter’s 1993 hardcover giant novel Star Trek: The Next Generation — The Devil’s Heart hit store shelves just as the show was becoming a runaway success. Grand in scope and pulling in many threads of Star Trek canon and continuity, The Devil’s Heart is a fun adventure that pushes Captain Picard to the limits.

The book’s plot revolves around the USS Enterprise answering a distress call from an archaeological expedition being led by a team of Vulcans, including prominent Federation scientist T’Sara. When the Enterprise arrives, they discover T’Sara and the rest of the Vulcan scientists have been murdered. In investigating the murders, they come to understand why; T’Sara had discovered a mythical relic known as the Ko N’ya… also known as the “Devil’s Heart.”

Picard takes possession of the Devil’s Heart and finds himself and the crew of the Enterprise caught in a galactic power struggle as Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi, Orions — and more — all seek to claim the power of the Heart for themselves.

The Heart is an ancient relic, eventually revealed to be a piece of the Guardian of Forever, that had for the longest time been in possession of the Iconians. When their world fell and the remainder of the race started to build new lives for themselves on other planets, the Heart moved on. Throughout the book, we see that the Heart influenced Iconican, Vulcan, Andorian, Romulan, and Klingon history in some way.

Picard learns much of this history through a series of dreams, as he begins to obsess over the Heart. With each new person who possesses it, the Heart provides significant power over reality itself, including the power to bring people back from the dead. But the Heart has a sentience and agenda of its own, and ultimately betrays and moves on from each of its owners.

As Picard becomes more obsessed with the Heart, it reveals its history to him in a series of dreams that also give the reader cool little flashbacks and side scenes to other major races in the Star Trek universe. The small vignettes of the heart’s history elevate the novel to a grander scale than simply an adventure of the week story.

The book also explores the remnants of the Iconian culture following the destruction of their homeworld, as described in “Contagion.”

The Devil’s Heart postulates that some Iconians escaped their homeworld through the gateway seen in that episode, to planets like Icobar, Dynasia, and DiWahn — portal destinations all namechecked in “Contagion.” On those planets, the race attempted to rebuild, but largely developed in their own directions away from the original Iconian culture.

It says a lot of the character of Jean-Luc Picard that, of all the owners of the Heart throughout its history, he is the first to try and understand the Heart and what it wants rather than immediately use it for his own ends.

Despite the difficulty in pushing back against the natural impulse to succumb to the power offered by the object, Picard is able to understand that the Heart is on a mission, and help fulfill it. Ultimately, the character’s higher nature prevails over his baser instincts… which is exactly what you expect from Captain Picard.

The rest of the novel plays out like a good episode of The Next Generation. There are nice scenes for Data, Riker, Troi, Crusher, and Guinan, and the book touches upon the Picard–Crusher relationship in a way that most other books during this period of novel publishing largely avoided.

If there’s one criticism about The Devil’s Heart, it’s that the editors of the Star Trek novel line did not seem to catch – or did not seem to care – that there were several similarities to other major novels that had been (or were about to be) released around the same time.

For example, it is explicitly acknowledged in the foreword that this book uses the Guardian of Forever as a plot device, and that it had also appeared in Peter David’s Imzadi, and another El-Aurian who has a history with Guinan in an antagonistic role similar to David’s Vendetta.

Ultimately, though, that’s a small criticism of what is otherwise a fun book. When I first read this novel, I was pretty young, and stealing the opportunity to read a few pages here and there between classes. I remember of this book that it unlocked my mind to what Star Trek fiction could be – telling great stories on a grander scale than televised Star Trek would ever be able to afford.

The Devil’s Heart does exactly that.