Bantam Book Club: Vulcan!

No, it’s not a musical. Though it could be.

So, the book starts with an interesting idea, jumping off from something that always confused me about the “map” of three-dimensional space. I’ve never been clear just what the Romulan Neutral Zone looks like, a matter made even more confusing by the egg-shaped area shown in Star Trek II as the Klingon Neutral Zone, which doesn’t jibe with the big old line through space shown on the screen in the episode “Balance of Terror.” Where does this line extend to? If there’s no up or down in space, how is it demarcated?

Anyhow, Vulcan! starts with the Enterprise heading towards the plant Arachnae, because, as it turns out, the Romulan Neutral Zone has been drifting over the years, and soon the planet will be in Romulan territory. And there’s concern about the natives of Arachnae (come on, just guess what they look like, and don’t look at the cover) may be put in harms way by this. So the Enterprise is sent to figure out if the Arachnaeans are sentient enough to save. There’s some business about how they get around the Prime Directive that I’ve already forgotten because of this book’s precipitous decline into the sillies.

You see, Spock and McCoy are all in a tizzy of a competition, and Kirk is in full eyeroll mode. Why? because a certain Dr. Katalya Tremain is coming to help with the mission, because she’s an expert on all things Giant Bug, and both these fellows think she is just the totes best thing to come aboard since Harry Mudd unloaded his “cargo” that time.

So we meet Dr. Tremain. And she is brilliant. And beautiful. And the author likes to keep reminding us that she has big boobs.

But here’s the kicker: she hates Vulcans. Hates. I’m not saying that kind of low-level bigotry that McCoy will blindside us with when the writers of the original series need to come up with some conflict to keep the dialogue going. I mean she is an out-and-out Vulcanophobe, and demands to be taken off the mission when she catches sight of Mr. Spock, whose human side is secretly crushed by this, but whose Vulcan side wants to study this like some kind of unknown fungus.

And here’s where the book starts to unravel for me. There’s a decent novel in here somewhere, or at least a short story. But it turns out that the why-does-this-woman-hate-vulcans plot, which should be the B plot completely takes over the first half of the book, grinding the story to a halt, and it takes a long time for what should be the A plot, the adventures on Planet of the Ant People, to get revving up again.

Gee, I wonder why they call the place Arachnae

So the patient reader will plod on through the story. We learn that there’s a little cadre of bigots on the Enterprise who all have petty beefs with Spock, who hope to enlist Tremain in their plan to get Spock booted. She rebuffs them, apparently concluding that her hated of Vulcans, the cause of which is still a mystery at this point but a surprise to no one later in the book, is a more worth hate, or something.

I kept hoping there was a good back story to explain her hatred of Vulcans, some horrible Hitchcock-like reveal involving her mother being killed by a pon-farr-crazed Vulcan, but no, it’s nothing that interesting.

And then, of course, we get the whole enemies-have-to-join-forces-to-survive story between her and Spock, which goes exactly where you know it will go, this being 70s Trek.

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned yet that McCoy has gone about wooing Tremain, and there’s several skin-crawly scenes where he is trying to analyze her and bed her at the same time.

As he unpacked a drawer full of soft, sheer night-robes, McCoy felt that he had to know more about her phobia. The transparent garments, scented with lavender, were telling him a great deal about her romantic nature, and he wanted to know what sort of mental mine field he might have to walk through on the way to seeing her model those delicious bits of silk and lace. Spock and Vulcans were no competition for a pretty woman, nightgowns, and a bedroom.

‘Tell me, Katalya,” he said, tucking the last of the negligees away, “just why do you hate Vulcans so much? It’s a sad flaw in a lady as nice as you are. It’s a downright pity, too.”

Ewwwwwwwww.

Ultimately, this isn’t a good one, but it has a certain bad-but-good element to it, like parts of Spock Messiah, to keep the reader going, unlike Price of the Phoenix, say.

The ending gets very trippy and yet anticlimactic, and it gets incredibly talky. Kirk doesn’t get a ton to do except yell at the Romulans. Oh, did I not mention that the Romulans show up for the first time in an original novel? They don’t come off very well.

And there’s not enough ant people.