The impression I’ve gotten over the years is that most of the Star Trek novel readership hates K.W. Jeter’s Warped. I’ve always been more than a little mystified by that reaction; I found Warpedto be an engaging and unusual novel that had a good deal more depth than other Trek hardcovers of the period.
Warped is not an easy novel to read. Few other Trek novels play as convincingly with the idea of a reality-clasm. In many respects, Warped is a Star Trek novel as Philip K. Dick might have written it, as it
touches on the traditional phildickian tropes:
- what does it mean to be human,
- how do people respond when the world they know begins to disintegrate, and
- how do people respond when confronted with the reality of the nearly divine?
K.W. Jeter was a friend of Dick’s during the last years of Dick’s life, and as a consequence, I think that some of Philip K. Dick’s outlook on life seeped into Warped.
I enjoyed Warped, but I know that a good many people didn’t. I think it’s unfair, though, to blame the subsequient lack of DS9 hardcovers on Warped.