Truth to tell, Yavar, I consider the Generations novelization to be a mixed case. Parts of the book were well-developed; remember that the first third of the book is set in the 23rd century. We get the final day of Kirk’s command of the Enterprise, his final moments as the ship’s master and commander (and a nice echo to similar scenes in The Lost Years, and some indication of where Kirk went after he was mustered out of the service. What interested me the most (and something that Shatner picked up on in The Ashes of Eden) was the political situation between the Federation and Klingon Empire Dillard had used as the backdrop for Star Trek VI continued into the Generations novelization. Those Klingon border skirmishes from the VI novel were mentioned and given context in Generations.
However, the last two-thirds of the novel didn’t continue the trend. I thought the NextGen portion of the novel were nothing more than a dry-run for Dillard’s by-the-numbers approach of her succeeding novelizations. There wasn’t any sense of expansion in the NextGen portion of the story, just a rote recitation of the events of the film.
To be honest, I don’t know what Dillard could have done with the story. Generations didn’t have the storytelling opportunities for expansion that the Classic Trek films did. Because of its disjointed structure, because there wasn’t a linear plot from the Enterprise-B to the Enterprise-D, building a backdrop to Generations as she did with Star Trek V and Star Trek VI wouldn’t have been easy to achieve.