Warp Your Own Way (Star Trek: Lower Decks series)

"First, some context. Star Trek: Lower Decks is an animated series from Paramount+, and it explores the junior officers in the Star Trek universe. There have been five seasons, and accompanying comic miniseries, but this graphic novel tells a separate story, following Officer Beckett Mariner aboard the Cerritos as she tries to have a day off. It’s also the first interactive graphic novel in the Star Trek franchise. By interactive, I mean choose your own adventure. And more than that – a reason for the choose-your-own-adventure nature is baked into the story itself. It’s been very well received – Strange Horizons have described it as “a clever, delightful book”, and Comics Beat as “worth more than its weight in Latinum.” (The Strange Horizons review is also in choose-your-own-adventure format, to tickle any hard-core format-fans.) It’s really fun to see something formally playful take the graphic story prize."

"Yes! This is as far as we can get from Vo’s quick, tense story: it’s a choose your own adventure, so there are multiple twisty ways to work your way through it. As you do, you start to notice that the endings have something in common – and realise there’s something deeper at work here. There’s a reason for the multiple-ending format. Writer Ryan North has form with choose-your-own adventures, including Romeo and/or Juliet , and To Be Or Not To Be (a Hamlet take). It makes sense that he has written games, as well as his multiple comics and novels; this is a formally playful take on an already playful part of the Star Trek world. Yes. Lower Decks is an animated series looking at the lives of the junior officers – hence the title. We’re following, in the words of Paramount+, “the support crew serving on one of Starfleet’s least important ships”. As it sounds, this world is fun. Warp Your Own Way finds a lot of humour in the world-weariness of its protagonist and the chipper optimism of her friends (one of whom supportively tells the other “Aw… I like your murder plan too! And you came up with it super fast.”). Some of the quicker dead ends take you on charming detours – I elected not to help a friend with their tribbles (essentially a biohazardous guinea pig), but I was delighted to see that they were in there. There’s a Lower Decks comic miniseries too, also by North and Fenoglio. Fenoglio is a big hitter – he’s also worked on Star Wars , Batman , Goosebumps , and X-Files. Yes. As well as the Hugo, Warp Your Own Way also won the Aurora Award for Best Graphic Novel/Comic, and received rave reviews – “a clever, delightful book” from Strange Horizons , and “worth more than its weight in Latinum” from Comics Beat . Not one to miss for Star Trek fans – or fans of innovative storytelling."