While traveling to a medical conference, the Runabout Missouri encounters a strange anomaly that sends the runabout crashing to the surface of an unknown planet, leaving its two passengers -- Dr. Elizabeth Lense of the U.S.S. da Vinci and Dr. Julian Bashir of Deep Space 9™ -- separated. Each physician thinks the other dead, and each winds up trapped with the factions of a decades-old conflict between those who want to replace dying limbs with cybernetics, and those who want to remain pure. Trapped with no hope of rescue, both Lense and Bashir must find their way on a primitive world -- or die....
Among other things, I was an English major in college and so I know that I'm supposed to write things like, "Ilsa J. Bick is ." Except I hate writing about myself in the third person like I'm not in the room. Helloooo, I'm right here . . . So let's just say that I'm a child psychiatrist (yeah, you read that right)as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe (meaning I did an internship in surgery and LOVED it and maybe shoulda stuck), former Air Force major—and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books, and novels. Believe me, no one is more shocked about this than I . . . unless you talk to my mother.
This started out poorly, but ended (well, it's the start of a two-parter, but you understand) much better. I am not a big Dr Lense fan, angst over time gets old, but the use of the medical writing and the basic plea for humanity in her sections of the book made me want more.