Bantam Book Club: Star Trek The New Voyages

Note: I’m doing a little catch-up here, having finished a couple of these a few weeks back. So you will be getting this and the next installment back-to-back.

Overview

After Spock Must Die! it was another six years until we had another book presenting new Star Trek stories, and Star Trek The New Voyages gave us just that. But in this case it was an anthology of stories, written by fans.

As I write this, the Trek world has its collective nose in a snit about the role of fans and their creations, what is allowed by the owners of the Star Trek brand, and other such details sure to set Trekkies at each others’ throats, and mystify anyone else who should stumble in on that fracas. For the details on the snipping back of fan productions, I refer you to others who are more knowledgable and who have more time on their hands for this sort of thing.

But for today, we go back to the innocent 1970s (and only a Trekkie could put “innocent” and “1970s” in the same sentence) and where we meet superfans Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. They loved Star Trek a lot. And they loved the characters a lot. And they loved the idea of Kirk and Spock loving each other. A lot. More on that in a couple of books later. For now, we meet them as the editors of a collection of fan fiction, for which they gathered introductions penned by the TOS actors.

This book was a big deal for me as a kid. This was the first original Star Trek book I read. But I have to say, in retrospect, I could only remember spare details of a few stories. So I was very eager to jump back into this collection, which I remember savoring the first time.

The Stories

Ni Var

Oh good God that was awful. The first thing to read after Spock Must Die ends up being … another story with two Spocks. In which much of the plot happens offscreen, and much of what we see is a tender rumination on Kirk and Spock which borders on slash. It’s a great concept: what would happen if Spock’s human and Vulcan halve become physically separate. But it completely falls apart.

Intersection Point

Better. Kind of a throwaway actioner, with a sort of a deus ex machina ending. Again very 70s emotional handling of the characters. “Jim” instead of “Captain Kirk” throughout. Well crafted if forgettable.

The Enchanted Pool

Again, I feel like I’m stepping into some fangirl’s private fantasy life, but at least this wisp of a story holds up. Kind of like a lesser episode of the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, with a magic pixie girl.

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited

Cute and not overly cute, funny story about what if Shatner, Nimoy, et al. got transported to the Enterprise in a switch a la “Mirror Mirror.” This is the companion to an earlier story, “Visit to a Weird Planet,” which put Kirk and friends being transported to the Desilu Studios of 1966-8. That story isn’t in this book, but readable online.  I remember loving this one as a kid. It hasn’t aged quite so well, as we know more about what production and the cast were like, and this doesn’t quite match. Still fun though.

Face on the Barroom Floor

A fairly inoffensive “Kirk takes a holiday” tale that doesn’t do much. I remember fan fiction like this, which had a lot of stuff involving what the crew did when things weren’t exciting on the Enterprise. Okay. Just okay.

The Hunting

McCoy has to match wits with a feral Tiger-thing/Spock, after an interspecies mind meld goes wrong. I actually liked this one quite a bit because, unlike most of the other stories, there was some suspense and good pacing. It felt more like an adventure, and not like a fanwanky “after hours” story. I always like a good McCoy story, and much of this is from his perspective.

The Winged Dreamers

Better written than several of the others, but it kind of is a rehash of elements of the episodes “This Side of Paradise,” “Shore Leave,” and “Operation Annihilate.” And it gets a little slashy, again.

Mind-Sifter

Or as I like to call it, “Kirk Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Oh, I wish I hadn’t re-read this. I loved it so much as a kid, but now it just reads like warmed-over bits of “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The focus gets drawn in on a romance-not-a-romance, and a hurt/heal scenario which has Spock out-doing Guinan at sensing a disturbance in the force across huge spans of time and space. It casts McCoy and Scotty in a unbelievable adversary role against Spock. And the time travel element is used for nothing more than putting Kirk in an insane asylum.

One thing bugged me. two actually. There is this sense of urgency that they have to find Kirk before he dies. Um, he’s in the past, so isn’t he dead already? And that brings up the bigger problem. Kirk gets thrown into the past, but it seems to cause nary a ripple in history. Um. Isn’t that the main source of tension in these time travel stories?

The Ratings

I regret to say that, because Mind Sifter hasn’t aged well, it brought down my opinion of the collection as a whole. Too much fan fantasy and not enough story, too much borderline slash and Mary Sue, and characterizations that said more about the authors than the characters. Much can be ascribed to the period being written in, but not all.

A couple of the stories work okay, but overall there were frequent pauses of, “um, no.”

The Facebook group readers tended to like this collection more than me.

Three Spirks: Enjoyable. Good as Trek and/or General: 6

Four Spirks: I loved a lot of it. Shades of future novels: 3

Two Spirks: Okay, but was this the best they had? 1

Five Spirks: A classic collection. These could be movies/pros. 1

And favorite story:

Mind-Sifter: 5

Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited: 4

The Enchanted Pool: 1

The Hunting: 1

Now, take a deep breath. next time: Spock Messiah is coming.

 

 

Bantam Book Club: Spock Must Die!

Series Overview

One of the banes/blessings of my life is my involvement in the online community of Trekkies, and one of the constant irritations that I find myself needlessly getting sucked into is debates about the new movies and how they veer from the franchise that some of us grew up with.

Only it’s always been veering, I repeat over and over to the gatekeepers, until the discussion inevitably falls into a True Scotsman contest.

But that’s a bit of nastiness that I’m only referring to to lead into the much happier topic, coming back to read the very first Star Trek novels, which are often Exhibit A in my arguments with Trek canon gatekeepers. Between 1970 and 1981, Bantam Books –alongside publishing James Blish’s adaptations of the complete line of episodes of The Original Series– published 16 novels and collections of stories representing entirely new adventures of the USS Enterprise.

When I go off about the flexibility of “canon,” it’s likely because I became a Trekkie during the early days of TOS syndication. Before TNG, or any of the movies. Before VCRs. All you had was catching TOS when you could (for me being WPIX-11 out of New York, bless their hearts for showing TOS every freaking day), the Blish adaptations, and fanzines. If you were lucky, you got to some of the early conventions (I was not lucky) or other appearances by the cast (I was lucky in this regard: William Shatner brought his college tour to North Adams State College on Oct. 13, 1976. Yes, I remember the date). Or there were those Power Records.

Or you caught the Bantam novels.

In my recollection, they were a mixed bag. Sometimes they got simple things blatantly wrong, like the red-haired Scotty in the wonderfully-titled Spock, Messiah. Sometimes the characterizations were off. Sometimes they crept into territory that I didn’t quite pick up on as a quite naive ten-year-old (“boy, Kirk and Spock seem really close…”) But, hell, they were new stories, and in some cases they were quite epic, and as I read them, they would play out in my head as how the rumored movie might look. We knew a movie was coming, and it was going to be EXCITING.

In retrospect, some of these went down alleys which have since been contradicted by what would later happen in the movies, and they of course can’t be faulted for that.

One Facebook group I belong to is devoted to Trek of the 70s, and the 70s alone, and it is a nice place, free of the rancor that has particularly plagued fandom since 2009. It’s a well-moderated forum, possibly by an Organian, which simply avoids the ponderous debates over NuTrek and allows us to plunge into nostalgia full-throttle.

Having just finished a weeks-long contest where we ultimately ranked our favorite TOS episode (spoilers and shockers, it was “The Doomsday Machine”), I decided to start up a book club where we could re-examine, or read for the first time, the Bantam books.

I’m going to share here my comments and reviews I will be making there, copying and expanding on reviews I’ve been leaving on my Goodreads page. We’ll start with the 1970 novel, Spock Must Die!

[Yes, I am aware that the very first Trek novel was Mission to Horatius, but that was published in the 1960s, and by my experience not widely available until its republication in recent years. We may go back to it, though]

Spock Must Die! (1970)

Do I give a spoiler warning for a 46-year-old novel?

Well, forward…

I had never read this one back in the day, I think because it was harder to find by the time I really started reading these books in the mid-70s. It was probably around 1975 when I started picking through drugstore bookstands for the Blish adaptations, and the first original book I found was the next book in this series, Star Trek: The New Voyages.

Or possibly I didn’t like the title. Kill Spock? That’s not Star Trek. That would be terrible.

But on to the book. I think Blish is a strong writer, having a background in writing science fiction proper, and I started off this read really liking this slim volume.

Short version: the Enterprise finds itself isolated when a war with the Klingons breaks out, and Scotty conducts a very science-y experiment to transport a person (basically) over a much greater distance than usual (now that could never happen in Trek, right?), and a mishap occurs leaving us with two Spocks, one of which represents a danger to Kirk and Co.

This book comes off at first doing some very good Trek and very interesting sci fi. It even starts with McCoy ruminating on the idea –which some people ponder now like it’s a new consideration– that, hey, if you are disintegrating a person when you are transporting them, aren’t you basically killing them and making a copy?

The book continues in this philosophical vein as we try to figure out which Spock is “ours.” It reads like some sort of logic puzzle which was never my strong suit, but still, you don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes to enjoy him working out a case.

While it can’t be faulted for violating canon that was established later, of course, I felt the resolution of the two Spocks story a little anticlimactic, and the leadup to it a little confusing. In the end I thought the characterizations good but a bit thin because of all the time spent talking out the “who’s the real Spock” issue. As one reviewer in Goodreads notes, WTF is up with Blish’s descriptions of Scotty? He never talked like that. I dinna ken where that accent comes from.

Pluses included the countless little references to details from episodes, and Uhura comes out a winner, smart and competent, calling Spock on his calculation of odds, and devising a code based on the writing of James Joyce!

The Verdict

As of May 24 –and I’m not seeing any budging on it– the folks in the FB group voted thus. The bold one is my vote.

Two Spocks: it was good, but wanting: 6

Three Spocks: I liked it. Good Trek or Good Book: 5

Four Spocks: I loved its Trek or its General quality: 1

Five Spocks: Great on all accounts. Why wasn’t this a movie? 1

Plus: here’s a good column about the book.