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The Wounded Sky

The Wounded Sky
The Wounded Sky.jpg
front cover art
Author Diane Duane
Cover artist Boris Vallejo
Country United States
Language English
Series Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre Science fiction
Publisher Pocket Books
Publication date
December 1983
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 255 pp
ISBN (first edition, paperback)
OCLC 10260350
Preceded by Mutiny on the Enterprise
Followed by The Trellisane Confrontation

The Wounded Sky is a 1983 Star Trek novel (Pocket Books #13) by Diane Duane, featuring James T. Kirk as captain of the USS Enterprise. The author would four years later adapt the novel's plot for the teleplay of the first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Where No One Has Gone Before".

The Enterprise, equipped with a radical new "inversion drive" which allows the ship to bend spacetime and transit immense distances instantly, is sent on a mission to the Magellanic Clouds just outside the Milky Way, in order to place navigation beacons for future extra-galactic voyages using the new technology.

The inversion drive is a product of the "creative physics" practiced by the natives of the Hamal star system, a race of crystalline spider-like beings. The chief designer of the drive is aboard, advising Captain Kirk, as the Enterprise makes its first "jump", after outmaneuvering a Klingon squadron which was sent to capture the new technology. Unknown to anyone on the starship, however, the use of the drive destabilizes spacetime itself on a fundamental level, creating a rift or tear through which another, external Universe penetrates and begins to mix with the Enterprise's own, with rapidly spreading, potentially fatal consequences for all life everywhere.

The denouement of the novel follows as Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew, experiencing bizarre, dream-like experiences of other times and worlds during the use of the drive, realize that something is dreadfully amiss. Arriving near the rift and observing the destruction it inflicts on nearby star systems, they discover that the price for traveling distances that would take centuries to cover with warp drive may be the loss of their own Universe. Deliberately using the drive one, final time, they cross the "boundary" between external "reality" and their own collective inner consciousness, where they must together draw on mental, emotional and spiritual strengths to heal the wound that they have caused.


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