World Without End (Joe Haldeman, 1979)

Sharply penned and sprung from the mind of a man who knows his physics and astronomy, World Without End is without a doubt one of the more poignant and memorable of the early slew of Trek novels. Haldeman paints vivid scenes of his eerily artificial eponymous world, with its detailed society and sound mechanical concepts. The action flows as smooth as ever, and although the plot is essentially a variation on a tried-and-tested sci-fi/fantasy MO - invent a detailed and original setting, then have some characters travel from one side of it to the other - Haldeman's high level of detail and sanguine prose elevate the novel to something considerably more than the sum of its parts.

Characters are given intelligent motivations and dialogue as they traverse Haldeman's sickeningly brutal high-concept setting, and it is extremely gratifying to read an author who is both willing and able to convincingly explore the details of the Star Trek universe that are rarely glimpsed on the show; astrophysical considerations and the immutable laws of physics are well incorporated, and this is no child's book. It's incisive and fascinating, if occasionally plodding, and makes me legitimately bummed he hasn't written any Trek books since.

So yeah, it is my absolute pleasure to report that this particular novel is not a waste of time. It's smart, bloody and sharp; exactly what Star Trek's big screen debut - which was in the works during the period of time in which World Without End was written - should have been, but totally wasn't. As indicators of the directions Trek could have taken at that very uncertain time in its history, they are fascinating to compare, and you may or may not be happy to know that the next book I intend to cover on this blog is in fact Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I think I promised very early on on this blog - the first or second post - that there would be no novelizations on this page, but the aforementioned fascination - coupled with my general interest in films cursed with difficult births - was simply too tempting, so I bought the damn thing on my Kindle a few weeks ago and breezed through it.

So join me next time for a slightly longer and more detailed blog post than you're used to seeing on here, because it'll be about a book I've actually read fairly recently, and can consequently remember almost 80% of it. Sounds like fun, right?

Trek To Madworld (Stephen Goldwin, 1979)

Trek To Madworld is one of few Star Trek books I've read where the title seems apt and fitting: Kirk and co do indeed visit a realm that makes no goddamn sense, and endure a series of hallucinogenic trials that seem concocted by a fourth-grader who has been grudgingly allowed to play Star Trek with his older siblings, only to break all the rules with his incredibly overpowered character.

Goldwin's villain-of-sorts, Enowil, is yet another bored and powerful alien being with a particular affinity for mocking the powerlessness of the humans he encounters. While I'm certainly open to the idea that a book based on such a tired cliché might still be worth reading if it's handled well, Madworld is flawed in other ways, too. Its dialogue is somewhat flat, and although there is a fair amount of intelligence woven into the Klingon/Romulan skulduggery, it fails to distract from the inanity of the novel's central story.

However, there is definitely something to be said for Goldwin's treatment of the Romulans, who actually exhibit some depth and intelligence in this one, although I sure wish Trek had never gone through a phase where all Romulan characters have to have Roman-sounding names. Don't get me wrong, I love Ancient Rome as much as the next person, but it always seems a little forced and derivative to me when writers just throw a bunch of Shakespearian Romans into whatever they're writing just to give it gravitas or some really deep symbolism or whatever, to say nothing of how patently unlikely it is that such a culture would exist in, you know, outer fucking space and whatnot (any "explanation" offered by TOS: Bread And Circuses aside).

But I am in no way super offended by Trek To Madworld. It's a little silly, granted, but it has no aspirations to be anything other than a somewhat frivolous and trippy little Star Trek adventure. A waste of time? I didn't feel that way about it; on the contrary, I kind of enjoyed the Alice-In-Wonderland ridiculousness of it, even as I seethed over its occasionally pretentious whimsy and inability to come up with a storyline that hadn't already formed the basis for some of the more regrettable tales from the Trek universe. It's not bad, but hardly essential.

Lots of things going on in my life right around now, so the posts are slowing slightly, but I hope to have an entry on Joe Haldeman's second and final Trek offering: World Without End no later than the end of this week. Dig it! 

The Starless World (Gordon Eklund, 1978)

A Dyson sphere is a wonderful concept, one worthy of a billion aweXome sci-fi stories, but somehow, the scope and grandeur of the basic idea has to some degree eluded the writers who've utilized them; in Star Trek, they've served mostly as just-another-weird-alien-planetoid, with no special attention paid to the inherent unorthodoxy and potential that such a structure has to offer.

Gordon Eklund's eponymous Starless World feels particularly disappointing, as if it had been inserted last-minute into his otherwise largely unimaginative meat-and-potatoes Trek novel. The subject of religion is also broached, a creative decision I salute wholeheartedly, given Trek's general agnostic aversion to the subject, but little headway is made, philosophically speaking; The Starless World is unapologetically an adventure novel, with very little time spent on intellectual considerations.

The Dyson sphere's vast size is definitely alluded to, however, and although Kirk and friends find only a handful of primitives and the token Klingon troublemakers within the sphere, the idea of such an eerie setting - an incomprehensibly massive structure with almost no one living in it - is enough to lend the novel a foreboding air.

Another point of interest in The Starless World is its geographical setting: the Galactic Core. One of the many inconsistencies found within Trek as a franchise is the Core's accessibility to Federation ships, and although it is logical to assume - as many Trek writers did - that the level of technology at the Federation's disposal would indicate that the twenty-six thousand light years that separate Earth from the Galactic Center should be easily traversable by a powerful and well-stocked ship, Rick Berman and the powers-that-be seem to have decided by the 90s that some sort of practical restrictions have to be put in place in order to make the Star Trek galaxy a bit more nuanced and geographically divided.

The end result of this apparent reversal is that that although the original Enterprise visits the Galactic Center in The Animated Series (to find Satan), and the Enterprise-A returns there in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (to find God) in trips that take no more than a few months at the absolute most, the far more advanced USS Voyager is projected to take seventy years to travel from one side of the Galaxy to the other, meaning that a journey to the Core and back would take roughly the same amount of time. While this was later retconned by stating that the Federation was experimenting with "trans-warp" technology at the time of the Enterprise's visits to the Core, a technology that was later abandoned due to its unstable nature, it doesn't alter the fact that Original Series-era ships zip and zoom across mind-boggling distances, but somehow do not encounter the Borg or the Dominion, both of whom possess technology superior to that of the Federation, and "should" therefore have made some sort of contact by then.

This seems to fall in line with a general trend throughout sci-fi: its depiction of technology generally becomes more pessimistic over time, which I suppose is due to a gradually rising demand for realism or 'modernism' among audiences; gone are the days of silvery smooth rocket ships zipping effortlessly from galaxy to galaxy, leaving modern sci-fi to go into often painstaking detail and effort explaining just how spaceships - today, usually boxy, worn and practical-looking things - get from one planet to another. It's an often-quoted lament among sci-fi enthusiasts that film and TV has long had to lag behind the far-flung concepts found in sci-fi literature when it comes to the intellectualism of its content, with the visual medium of course far more reliant on merchandising and accessibility, but it seems as if film and TV have made strides to catch up in recent decades, a fact easily attributed to landmarks such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey pushing the envelope on what modern audiences are smart enough to grasp, especially as advances in real-life science and space exploration help to better inform the public.

Star Trek novels fit into this dichotomy in an interesting way: since they are books based on a show that tried to bring the spirit of sci-fi books to the TV screen, does the author stay close to the source material and write an action-adventure tale, go to the source of the source material and inject a more literary spirit into the work, or position themselves somewhere on the sliding scale between the two? So far, I have read Star Trek books that run the gamut, and I've barely scratched the surface; it's a source of variety that makes the reading experience that much more fascinating.

One thing I sometimes worry about is that as I read on chronologically into the 80s, 90s and beyond (and this theory is based mostly on my experience reading Star Wars books), the books will likely become more standardized, something that will probably make the quality of individual works far more reliable, but will cause the random 'oddball' novels and more bizarre ideas to fade away over time; a loss, to be sure, although I am certain there are still a great many 'oddities' left to uncover in the world of Star Trek novels.

Stephen Goldin's 1979 novel Trek To Madworld was certainly one of the sillier entries, but nevertheless, I will bravely attempt to scrape some sense out of it in my next blog post. In the meantime: is The Starless World a waste of time? Yeah, kinda. It reaches big, and I appreciate that, but the plot falls flat in the end, leaving only the very slightest of impressions. However, we are almost at the end of the 70s on this chronologically-structured blog, and almost at the point where Pocket Books fully takes over the publishing of all Trek novels, leading to a slight increase in their average quality. Bear with me people; we'll get to the good stuff real soon.

Vulcan! (Kathleen Sky, 1978)

You never quite know which one of the holy trinity - Kirk, Spock or McCoy - the female guest characters in Star Trek novels are going to seduce. In the really terrible ones, it's sometimes more than just the one - Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath's Triangle comes to mind - but I'm always most intrigued when McCoy gets to have a "serious" romance.

Perhaps in light of the prevalent attitudes at the time of writing, McCoy can often come across as kind of a dirty old man, engaging in much raunchy banter with Kirk, but when women properly fall for McCoy in the novels, it's almost always depicted in a kind of sensible down-to-earth manner, as if the woman in question, unimpressed by Kirk's overt forwardness and Spock's aloof, alien unflappability and otherness, is simply seeking a grounded romance with a smart, sensitive older guy (the women are rarely McCoy's own age, or even Kirk or Spock's age, for that matter).

The guest protagonist in Kathleen Sky's Vulcan! wrestles with her attraction to McCoy as well as her prejudices toward Vulcans. The prose is well above average, especially Sky's nebulous-yet-vivid depiction of the Vulcan mind meld, and the premise is intriguing enough, but her characters and dialogue are fairly flat, and the book leaves little in the way of any kind of memorable impression. In addition, Sky seems to have made the unfortunate choice of depicting the Romulans as just 'space Romans,' with little creativity expended on their identity and culture. Their secret plan in Vulcan! is still pretty darn crafty though, even if it might not make a whole lot of sense when examined closely.

I did find Sky's explanation of how the Romulan Neutral Zone is defined intriguing, if politically and scientifically unlikely. It's a seldom-raised point in sci-fi that it would be really hard to draw up a boundary clear enough to satisfy two competing interstellar political powers, since everything in space is moving all the time, and Sky at least addresses this in Vulcan! However, I find it hard to believe that the Federation or the Romulans would define their borders based on "magnetic field lines" that allows stars to cross into one another's territory through their own peculiar motion. Surely, all humanoid life would define territory based on the actual solar systems they inhabit, wouldn't they? While such a border would of course slowly morph into a new shape over thousands of years, possibly creating isolated enclave systems on either side of the original line, this doesn't seem like a huge problem compared to the premise of Vulcan!, where an entire solar system is very close to changing hands due to fluctuating magnetic fields.

In any case: Vulcan! A waste of time? No, I honestly wouldn't say that. You could certainly do a lot worse, and Sky's efforts to introduce an interesting female character with her own motivations and story arc are certainly commendable, if not quite enough to make Vulcan! a memorable novel in its own right. In other words: you could do a lot worse. Next time, I'll spend some time discussing Seattleite George Eklund's first Trek contribution, 1978's The Starless World, which similarly touches upon intriguing sci-fi concepts (Dyson spheres, the Galactic Core) without fleshing out a memorable enough story... but that won't stop me from overanalyzing it in another rambling blog post.

Mudd's Angels (J.A. Lawrence, 1978)

Surely, there can be no truer test of whether or not someone is a die-hard, dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan than asking them their feelings on Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the sleazy entrepreneur introduced early in Star Trek's first season. The more zealous fan might feel some affection for the fat old goat, waddling as he did through two episodes of the Original Series and one episode of the Animated Series (as much as anyone can waddle through a primitive 2D 1970s cartoon short), and from what I can gather, he's still all the rage amongst old-school fans. Hell, they're even slapping a younger version of him into Star Trek: Discovery, just for good measure.

I, on the other hand, don't quite understand what all the fuss is about. He's an outdated stereotype of some sort of vaguely ethnic used car salesman, chewing up way too much scenery with a far too ridiculous accent (and in a show that stars William Shatner, Walter Koenig and James Doohan, that's saying something) and boring me to tears with some frivolous throwaway comic relief plots about robot women that would be offensively misogynistic if they weren't already so fucking boring.

But back in 1978, he probably seemed like he was the funniest thing ever featured on Trek, and J.A. Lawrence diligently enlisted his services for - wait for it - another mindless throwaway plot about his nagging robot women, who now want to found their own society, free of Mudd and other humans. Granted, there's a welcome undercurrent of emancipation and equal rights to Lawrence's rather ridiculous-even-for-Star-Trek yarn, but in the end, your enjoyment of his work is probably going to hinge rather heavily on how much you care for Mudd as a character, and I, for one, do not. There is also the fact that Mudd is basically a straw man propped up by his creators to mock and ridicule overtly sexist men, while many of the more subtle and dangerous aspects of misogyny were (and still are) allowed to flourish unfettered. Whatever feminist message was written into Mudd as a character instead ends up a mocking oversimplification of feminist issues that amuses and satisfies no one, save for perhaps the Trek fan so blinded by his obsession with the franchise that he (and it's probably gonna be a 'he' and not a 'she') simply cannot admit to any wrongdoing on its part, a sickness that fans of the Original Series in particular are especially prone to.

It's always interesting to see how weirdly scattered individual Trek fans' feelings toward the respective series of the franchise are. True, the predominant wisdom is to regard Next Generation and/or Original Series as the flagships of the franchise, but that is by no means a universal sentiment. Fans rank the series in every possible permutation, with some swearing by Voyager as the best one, while others feel the franchise peaked during the original cast movies in the 80s. What's even more interesting to me is what individual fans take away from individual series, especially the ones that aren't necessarily their favorites. A Deep Space Nine fan might like the characters on Next Generation, but hate the storylines, while a Voyager fan might appreciate Enterprise's special effects without caring much for any of the rest of it. It's different for everybody, and that's part of what makes Star Trek so great.

Personally, I find many things to love about each part of the entire franchise. To me, the best aspects of Original Series - the parts that still hold up after a half-century - are the characters and the grand-scope ideas (the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans), as well as the aura of excitement and classic sci-fi mystery a la Forbidden Planet, one which Trek has continuously attempted to duplicate throughout the years, but never quite matched. You never know what they're going to find during the course of any particular episode, and if it's a good one, it'll be a creepy one, populated by insidious aliens and fallible humans treading the edge of known space, or it'll be a Cold War analogy, with Klingons and Romulans standing in for the good ol' USSR, while Kirk and Spock deftly outfox them.

What I don't take away from the Original Series is hackneyed drivel like Elaan Of Troyius, Shore Leave, Who Mourns For Adonais, A Piece Of The Action, and, yes, both of the Mudd episodes. There are, quite simply, things which I think we can all quite simply forget about 1960s TV, and there is much throughout Original Series that does not stand the test of time. Offensive stereotyping, filler nonsense and retreads of stories we've all heard a million times; even if Trek was the first to implement a then-novel concept that has since been repeated ad nauseam (both within the franchise and without), the original episode to feature said concept still needs to be, you know, watchable. Wolf In The Fold's now-tired trope of the body-swapping serial killer still works because the original episode is actually pretty good, whereas the nonsense seen in By Any Other Name was already tired before the episode was finished.

Further exacerbating the issue is that several of Original Series' more regrettable ideas, many of them seemingly coined out of desperation due to the show's perennially low budget (Spectre Of The Gun, Patterns Of Force), were later repeated throughout the franchise, with either nazis, cowboys or native Americans popping up in seemingly every other season or so of Trek throughout the years, and this unfortunate tendency towards TOS homages continues to this day by way of Mudd's forthcoming appearance on Star Trek: Discovery. While I'm willing to chalk this up to the people running the Trek franchise respecting and understanding its fans about as much as Donald Trump respects and understands women ("Everyone likes classic Trek, so let's do shitty, contrived rehashes of original crew adventures and watch the millions roll in!"), the fact remains that a lot of the Original Series episodes are just really, really bad, and should in all honesty be disregarded and forgotten. There should certainly not have been any 303-page books written that further detail the escapades of an exceptionally stupid character on a show already capable of some pretty fucking stupid shit.

So is Mudd's Angels a waste of time? Oh yes, absolutely, but again, the answer really depends on how much you like Mudd. So if bumbling ba-dum-tiss comedy that blatantly insults women even as it pretends to understand them is your kind of thing, then by all means, dig up a copy and tuck in. I, on the other hand, will be lovingly preparing my next blog post, one dedicated to a slightly more successful foray into feminizing the boys' club that Star Trek still was in the late 70s, Kathleen Sky's Vulcan! Its secret? A strong female lead character written by a woman. It really is that simple sometimes.

Planet Of Judgment (Joe Haldeman, 1977)

Just right off the bat, let me say that this book has a scene where Spock tries to convince McCoy to seduce Nurse Chapel, believing it the only sensible way to get her to stop chasing after him. It's funny, and well-written, as is most of Planet Of Judgment, and I would expect nothing less; after all, it's written by the guy who wrote The Forever War.

His prose is deft and adult, not quite as sparse as that found in the non-Trek books of his I've read, and the sickening, bone-crunching violence, while not quite as graphic as Pvt. Mandella's war with the Taurans, is never far off, what with the tracheotomies and whatnot. I cannot stress enough how welcome Haldeman's more mature touch was to read after some of the utter travesties that preceded him, and although the somewhat uninspired plot doesn't really amount to much, it still makes for an all-around solid and satisfying read, an intriguing mystery full of esoteric ideas a la classic Trek at its best, but also grounded by just enough grit and realism to give it a subtle edge.

The only disappointment is, as I mentioned before, that the conclusion feels a little hackneyed, and although it is movingly depicted - no one writes action quite like Joe Haldeman - the epic climax is still basically (and stop me if this sounds at all familiar) an alien race judging if humanity is ripe for conquest by fighting them in a no-holds-barred simulated battle scene from Earth's warlike past. While that may not have been quite as much of a tired trope in 1977, it's still ridden with enough cliché that I cannot help but wonder if Haldeman was forced into some sort of weird contractual compromise by Paramount, Pocket Books, Roddenberry himself or whoever had that kind of veto power at the time. The history of Star Wars literature is certainly rife with such incidents, from Michael P. Kube-McDowell's attempt to depict Wookiees as polygamous, to Karen Traviss and Matt Stover's near-constant battles with Lucasfilm in the 2000s that led to their eventual departure from the franchise.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to segue into the topic of canon in Star Trek vs. canon in Star Wars, and the ill-founded misconception that the Star Wars Expanded Universe was riddled with inconsistency. One of the things that I always loved so much about the Star Wars Expanded Universe was its attention to detail, and the great amount of effort expended by its various creators to keep everything consistent, which you might correctly surmise to be a gargantuan fucking task, considering the sheer amount of Star Wars stuff that came out. Consequently, there were occasional slip-ups, which led to people being hired solely for the job of modifying said inconsistencies and linking together seemingly disparate tidbits from the Star Wars universe; a video game villain of an indeterminate race was identified as being a native of a planet from a decades-old comic, and an unnamed pilot from a movie was retroactively identified as the lead character from a novel. It wasn't always seamless and it didn't always make sense, but goddammit, they tried, and for the most part they did a pretty bang-up job. Wookieepediea, the unofficial Star Wars wiki, was also a neat, informative and lovingly detailed database on the Expanded Universe, with links and sources and in-depth info on every little place, person and event across all of it (the Expanded Universe can still be accessed on Wookieepedia, its pertinent articles labeled with the moniker 'Legends'). It was a thing of beauty to behold.

I'm also a lifelong fan of the Alien franchise, and let me tell you, nothing is anywhere near as well-tended in that world. Comics contradict movies, dates are off by centuries and events are in near-constant dispute, thanks to overlapping timelines and a general halfheartedness on the part of the franchise to keep anything in check. Some semblance of continuity can occasionally be glimpsed within individual media formats, but for the most part, it is very much the hopeless mess that people hastily dismissed the Star Wars Expanded Universe as being. And the last time I even checked the Alien wikia, it was a disjointed morass of poorly written articles swimming in typos, redlinks and unfortunate liberties taken by editors.

So imagine my disgust and disappointment to find that the world of Star Trek is far more akin to the Alien world than the Star Wars one. Since the core of Trek canon is hundreds of episodes of television produced over a half-century, as opposed to Star Wars, which is based on a handful movies released in quick bursts, contradiction unfortunately became the rule rather than the exception, and although the fanbase gradually rallied, ensuring that Trek eventually became much more contiguous, the novels were seemingly allowed to venture off on almost whatever tangent they deemed fit. The novels I've read so far often explicitly contradict each other, with only a scant few of them even acknowledging the existence of any of the others. The Star Trek wiki is accurate and relatively informative, but absolutely nothing that is not explicitly stated in the shows and movies is to be seen anywhere. You won't even find concrete measurements for the starship sizes, since even those numbers are in dispute, and anything not captured on film is dismissed as 'apocrypha.' The sense of continuity and realism that I derived from reading Star Wars books is almost nowhere to be seen.

However, I am confident this unfortunate fact will gradually resolve itself in coming Trek novels, especially as I start delving into the Next Generation books, and the importance of maintaining a canonical consistency will become apparent to the authors as Star Trek canon - which in 1977 consisted of three shoestring-budget seasons of TV and a season-and-a-half of shoddily made cartoons - expanded into thirteen movies and a whopping thirty-and-counting seasons of TV, a far more extensive databank of knowledge to conform to. And I'm also hoping the books will start taking the trouble to better mesh with one another; I've encountered some of that, but to a very limited degree so far, and it would definitely help sell the idea that the Star Trek universe is a real and thriving place, rather than a loose collection of disparate musings, reflections and rehashes of what has already been done in front of the cameras.

So while I definitely prefer the intellectual optimism at Trek's core to Star Wars's vapid populism, the Expanded Universe remains to me the most complete, thorough and fascinating fictional universes ever created, and I continue to mourn its dismissal and neglect. Only time and more reading will reveal if the Trek universe ever reaches those glorious heights.

In the meantime: Planet Of Judgment: a waste of time? No, although it is by no means essential. What could have been a solid piece of tech-savvy Trek is left wanting by its middling conclusion, but Haldeman brings Trek novels to new heights of intellectualism in what is still a good read, all things considered. Haldeman would return to Trek with his similarly promising-but-ultimately-disappointing World Without End in 1979, but that was still a better read than the next book I'll write about, J.A. Lawrence's frivolous Mudd's Angels, which takes a stupid, outdated and already-tired character and makes him even stupider, outdateder and tireder. Fun times!

Spock, Messiah! (Theodore R. Cogswell & Charles A. Spano, Jr., 1976)

It seems I was mistaken a few days ago when I wrote that I never read Spock, Messiah! Upon checking my Kindle and finding a digital copy in there, I thumbed through a few pages, and yes, I do remember reading it about two years back. Vague images returned to me, images of Kirk swathed in veils and traveling between small rural villages on some shithole planet or other, disguising himself as a wandering merchant of sorts.

It surprises me somewhat to find how harshly the novel is condemned - its status as the first original Star Trek novel for adults has led to its being singled out for how bad it is - and yeah, it is pretty offensive at times, but as a work of fiction, it definitely exceeds the two-and-a-half books I read by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath; to each, his own, I suppose.

I do remember thinking how silly it all seemed - if I really wanted to read a book that takes place basically in the past (the planet, Kyros, is very primitive) and doesn't have much in the way of an original plot, why would I be reading a Star Trek book? It amazes me sometimes to find what certain authors chose to write about when presented with the opportunity to write a Trek novel. "Spaceships, Klingons and strange stellar phenomena? Who cares about that crap? Let's get Kirk and the rest of the gang down on a rural planet with no technology!" Seriously dude, just write a fantasy novel; at least that way, your racial stereotyping and islamophobia will fit in a little better.

That's really all I have to say about this one. It's hard, trying to remember details of books you read two years ago, especially when so many of the thirty-odd Trek novels I've read so far are quite similar in many ways. The ones that stood out will receive better treatment, but it won't be until my blogging catches up with my reading in about 25 posts or so that these reviews will get really detailed again.

But is Spock, Messiah! a waste of time? Yeah, pretty much, even though it's not super bad; just not very good, either. Not worth the trouble, in my opinion. See you next time for 1977's Planet Of Judgment, written by none other than Joe Haldeman, who set the bar for military sci-fi with his 1974 classic The Forever War.