Hotel Royale by Todd Matthews

Thanks to MGM Casinos 

Title: Hotel Royale

Author: Todd Matthews

Publisher: not known 

Source: TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation S2 E12 The Royale

After the Klingons discover mysterious debris orbiting an inhospitable planet, and the Enterprise determines it is antiquated NASA debris, Riker, Worf and Data beam down to take a look at the apparently deserted planet. Our heroes find a revolving door, which obviously they have to boldly push through (because they are bold explorers), only to discover it is an entrance but not an exit.

The away team are baffled to find themselves in what seems to be a busy 20th century casino/hotel and after some investigation discover a human skeleton in one of the bedrooms. They find evidence that the dead man was a survivor from a long ago NASA mission, Colonel S Richey, and discover a tatty paperback book on the bedside table: Hotel Royale by Todd Matthews. The aliens accidentally responsible for the death of his crew members thought that creating an Earth type scenario based on the book they found in Colonel Richey’s space ship, might compensate for his loneliness. Oh, how very Star Trek.

The plot of Hotel Royale seems to involve a casino, a woman called Rita and a guy called Mickey D who may be threatening Rita. At any rate, it’s not exactly high quality literature. Captain Picard and Councillor Troi find a copy in the ship’s library and are aghast at the terrible plot and awful writing. Living within the book must have been dreadful. 

I don’t want to be picky, but surely if you were on a long mission travelling through space to who knows where, taking who knows how long, wouldn’t it be more sensible to bring a proper chunky read like War and Peace, or Lord of the Rings? Something you could really get your teeth into, rather than a pulpy gangster and gambling paperback.

Anyway, between them all they determine that the only way to escape this alien ‘Hotel California’ is to buy the casino. I have never got my head around this weird piece of plot but… Luckily Data is amazingly lucky at cards, or is it craps? At any rate he somehow manages to win sufficient funds to buy the casino and thus the away team manages to make their escape. Obviously it’s all a lot more complicated than that, and I have never worked out how winning all that money helps. But there we are.

Thanks to The Olive Press: How to start a casino business