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.

The Price Of The Phoenix (Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, 1977)

Once in a literary enthusiast's lifetime, there comes along a book like The Price Of The Phoenix. It is a book that will shatter your perceptions of what a Star Trek novel can be, and leave you gasping for breath as you navigate the 320 pages leading up to its mind-boggling conclusion. Yes, this truly is, without a shadow of a doubt, the single worst Star Trek book I have ever read... or so I thought, until I read Marshak & Culbreath's next offering, The Prometheus Design, which somehow managed to be even worse.

Reading Price Of The Phoenix is like falling into a murky lake full of vaguely homoerotic mannequins, and attempting to discern from their blank, chiseled faces a plot of some kind. It's like having a sequence of events described to you by a gaggle of extremely flamboyant people who were doing amyl nitrate poppers at the time and are now drunk and competing for your attention by trying to out-hyperbolize each other.

Since I frequently lost track of what was happening, it was difficult to glean any kind of solid story from the novel, but what little there was to be glimpsed through the muck is paltrily bare-bones indeed, with Marshak & Culbreath gracelessly side-stepping any in-depth explanations of how or why anything is happening, preferring to revel in their own overwrought similes and conceits. There'll be page after page of melodramatic inner monologues and tangental reveries, usually followed by a very difficult and emotional conversation/confrontation whose purpose you can barely remember - wait, what, they're fighting now? - so lost are the characters' rationales under heaps and heaps of steaming purple prose.

The villain is particularly irritating, gracelessly named 'Omne' just to help underscore how dangerous and all-powerful he is, and I feel it's worth mentioning at this point that the literary term 'Mary Sue' in fact originates from Star Trek fan fiction. Omne is some sort of despotic warlord/inventor/scheming sex fiend, who apparently has nothing better to do than emotionally torture Starfleet officers he barely knows. He is, of course, eight steps ahead of everybody else, and usually has a weirdly inappropriate witticism that he'll throw into a conversation, and everybody else will be just devastated, absolutely stunned, while the reader remains confused and irritated.

The nameless female Romulan commander from TOS: The Enterprise Incident is also shanghaied into service to provide some female perspective on the events - certainly not her last appearance in the Trek novels - but her presence only confuses and further obfuscates the "plot." She fawns shamelessly over male characters in between poorly written action sequences, most of which feature Wild West six-shooters, because of course they do. This book does nothing right.

Granted, Phoenix is neither the first nor last Trek work that features a vulgarly over-perfect Mary Sue as its protagonist or antagonist - in fact, it seems to happen in practically every other Trek novel I've read so far - but Marshak & Culbreath are by far the most shameless practicioners of self-insertion of the Trek authors I've read so far. Phoenix's Omne and Prometheus Design's equally ridiculously named Savaj are unknowably wise and strong, and know how to do absolutely everything. They are darker, meaner and smarter than every other character in either book; Price Of The Phoenix would essentially be the tale of how Omne showed up and fucked everybody up, were it not for the fact that it occasionally spends a chapter or two talking about how sexy Kirk and Spock also are and how lost they are in the confusing maze of their feelings for one another, their sinewy bodies all rippling with taut muscle and their hands touching each other in weirdly specific places and playing games of ownership, domination and fidelity with Omne and each other... seriously, this book fucking suuucks.

Another particularly vexing thing about the extent of Marshak & Culbreath's flagrant self-insertion is the fact that their novels offer nothing else of real value. They are exercises in literary masturbation whose only purpose seems to be disguising the very real actual masturbation that both authors seem to have been doing while distractedly sketching the plot out as an afterthought. It doesn't even read as good slash fiction, since its trite teeny-bopper emotionalism and endless faux-intellectual debates are never broken up by hardcore gay sex scenes, which would certainly have improved Phoenix (and indeed most books), plus you can usually tell what's going on in slashfic.

A waste of time? Good lord, yes. I cannot stress enough how much I grew to hate Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath as I attempted to read their awful, awful books, and my mind boggles trying to think of reasons they were allowed to write licensed Star Trek books in the first place. True, no single sin of theirs is particularly greater than those of their fellow Trek authors - Mary Sues, plot holes, overly raised stakes, mediocre command of English, etc - but the problem is that Marshak & Culbreath aren't just one kind of bad; they're all kinds of bad. Their prose is bad, their characters are bad, their plots are bad, their basic concepts and ideas are bad, their grasp of science and technology is bad, and their treatment of the franchise and its characters is beyond bad. They embody the absolute worst in weak fanboy writing, completely shorn as they are of originality and talent, and if weren't for the fact that I still remember how used, dirty and depressed I felt when I finished The Price Of The Phoenix, I'd have a hard time believing I made it to the end of it. Never read this book.

Spock Must Die! (James Blish, 1970)

Many a barely legible blog post has attempted to address the functions, limitations and implications of Star Trek's energy transporters (or, in layman's terms, what happens when Kirk says "beam me up, Scotty (which, of course, he never does)"). James Blish beat all those bloggers to it in his first and only original composition for Trek, Spock Must Die! Consequently, I can think of no better way to honor his efforts than lovingly shitting out the barely legible blog post you are currently reading.

Essentially, Spock Must Die! is classic Trek: an audacious attempt to beam Spock to Organia from a longer range than previously attempted (not the last time that the Trek novels would presage the Abrams movies) inadvertently creates a duplicate of the Vulcan; hilarity ensues.

Blish, a veteran pulp sci-fi author in his own right, keeps things tight and simple plot-wise, with events racing to a fairly satisfying conclusion, but the real highlight of the book are the philosophical/metaphysical questions regarding the nature of transporters, both the questions posited in debate by the book's characters, and the questions raised by the ramifications of the book's plot.

In the book's early pages, Kirk, McCoy and Scotty discuss McCoy's entirely rational fear of the transporter, with McCoy reaching deep into his first-year philosophy texts as he explains solipsism and logical positivism to the clearly undereducated Kirk. He basically posits - and logically so - that if your body is somehow broken down into energy and transmitted to another location, wouldn't the "real you" actually be disintegrated, with an exact double appearing at the other side, a double who thinks he is you? Or in other words: whenever someone in Star Trek uses a transporter, does it trigger the exact plot of 2000 Schwarzenegger vehicle "The 6th Day"?

The book kinda answers this and kinda doesn't, by creating a second Spock who, while misguided and dangerous (if I remember correctly - I read this book about two years ago), essentially acts out of logic and self-preservation, similar to the duplicate Riker that would be created thirty-three years later (or 103 years later, by the Trek calendar) on the TNG episode "Second Chances". He certainly has his own motivations, separate from the original Spock, but those seem to be derived entirely from his separate contextual existence; if their roles were reversed (as the duplicate intended for them to be), there is nothing to indicate the duplicate (or "replicate," as the book refers to it) would act any different from the original.

This all seems to imply that the "transporter" is in reality more of a duplicator, that if you as a person can be completely duplicated - memories and all - that copy would be indistinguishable from you yourself; Spock's consciousness does not extend to both bodies after the accident, so the transporter clearly created two copies of a person, with only one of them remaining nominally "real," thanks to Blish handily concocting a very Trek-ily contrived side effect of the duplication that makes the second Spock's body a perfect mirror image of the first, down to the molecular level; in the double, left becomes right, and his body's entire physical structure is reversed. This side effect makes for an easy philosophical cop-out, plot-wise; in the end, there is no confusion who the "real" Spock is, and the replicate "must die," as the book's title declares, although the necessity of his death for philosophical reasons is also neatly sidestepped by making the copy an agent of chaos, albeit one motivated by very earthly and understandable goals.

All this hustle and bustle also helps one forget the book's central question: does the transporter also transport your "soul," for lack of a better term? Is there a continuity of consciousness, or do you simply disintegrate? Blish, to his credit, not only leaves the question open, knowing that such mysteries are better left unsolved, but also underscores the fact that the characters never really learn the truth either, with the book closing on a haunting and unfinished conversation between McCoy, Spock and Kirk; Spock reasons that it is impossible to prove one way or the other, making the question "meaningless," but he still seems perturbed, no doubt from the prospect that his job as a Starfleet Officer has required him - and every other officer in the fleet - to kill himself on a regular basis many times over, and that he, too, might be a soulless doppelgänger destined to disappear forever off a transporter pad and die totally unmourned and forgotten while his exact double continues his life. Gotta love that Star Trek, always so zany and upbeat!

As a Cracked.com listicle I can't be bothered to link you to once pointed out, the implications of this "soul-death" and its incredibly frequent occurrence in Star Trek are heavy indeed. How would a society that condoned this ever come about? The military and technological advantages of the transporter are obvious - so much so that a trained soldier or operative might easily overcome any qualms about using one, but it isn't just Starfleet personnel that use the transporter - civilians, criminals and dignitaries use them fearlessly on an everyday basis, and asides from gripes and quips from luddites like McCoy and basket cases like Reg Barclay, not a word is raised in objection - certainly not on the scale that such a morally dubious practice might incite in the real world.

Was the establishment of the Federation or Trek's United Earth Government perhaps based on a philosophically-rooted conflict of a similar nature? Blish's books would almost necessitate such a conflict having taken place, since the transporter is standard-issue Treknology by the time of Spock Must Die! (Star Trek: Enterprise would later establish that the Enterprise NX-01 was the first Starfleet vessel equipped with a transporter, almost 120 years before the events of SMD!), making it highly unlikely that Kirk, Spock and McCoy were the first to ever debate the nature of the transporters. Someone must have come to the conclusion that transporters were killing people, and maybe even led a full-scale rebellion protesting their use, a rebellion that United Earth, Starfleet and/or the Federation subsequently quelled; I can only hope that at least one of the thousands of Star Trek books I will manage to read in my lifetime will detail such an aweXome event.

One could also argue that at some point between the present day and the events depicted in the Trek franchise, humanity experiences a more existential transformation - perhaps something akin to the one predicted by the Ghost In The Shell franchise - that heralds its intellectual ascendance over the ties between the mind and the body, or the idea that only life conceived of other life is entitled to a "soul" - certainly ideas that are relatively prevalent in Star Trek, especially as Starfleet ships encounter increasingly bizarre and exotic forms of life, many of whom engage in exactly the kind of consciousness and body-swapping shenanigans that the transporter implies, and perhaps simply encountering sentient aliens and learning their way of viewing the nature of life and the physical universe will so alter humanity's moral compass that they no longer regard physical death as "death"; imagine if instead of a different way of relating to and thinking about time, the aliens in 2016's "Arrival" had proved to us beyond a shadow of a doubt that consciousness is a far more fluid and resilient thing, one that continues after death and can, with the right technology, be safely transferred and transmitted.

There is ample circumstantial evidence to contradict this, however. People not caring about death or dying or the human consciousness would completely eliminate debate on the subject, such as the one seen in Spock Must Die! and, more importantly, would render the plot of almost every Star Trek story ever told nonsensical, since the protagonists are usually motivated by the desire to save lives.

A more plausible explanation is that the transporter might incorporate some kind of mysterious (possibly alien) technology that allows a consciousness to be stored and transmitted. This is a variation on a common catch-all explanation for plot holes and indeed entire plots within the sci-fi genre: can't explain a thing? It's just alien technology we haven't discovered yet.

However, this explanation would not really allow for the discussions seen in Spock Must Die!, where the Enterprise crew casually debates a topic that should not only be long-settled, but that the crew should all be well-versed in already, being Starfleet Academy graduates, and upon further analysis, Blish is actually opening a fairly crucial set of floodgates by depicting the metaphysical considerations behind the transporters as an unsolved mystery. I have a very hard time believing that any society that uses the transporters in such a casual manner would not have settled the debate decades ago, and if there were still dissenters to the commonly accepted wisdom, there wouldn't be just one or two, such as McCoy, but millions - if not trillions - of them, depending on the number of humans extant in the 23rd century.

The debate depicted in the book might take the form of arguing the philosophical merits of a movement of thinkers and scientists, or perhaps even have an almost seditious air, as ideas that clearly conflict with Starfleet doctrine are discussed in hushed tones, since the only reason I can think of for McCoy and Scott not already knowing the true answer to their question would be that the truth is being actively suppressed. Whatever the case, it would most certainly never be idly discussed in a Starfleet rec room by a highly experienced doctor and an extremely qualified engineer while their commanding officer cheerfully plays referee. Blish makes it sound as if Scotty and McCoy had just read an interesting article about a scientist who might in theory develop a working transporter soon, and are now pondering its implications, or that they are planet-bound working schmos who never have to actually beam anywhere themselves.

Blish seems like he wanted to do what any good Star Trek writer would - fill in the blanks and help flesh out a fascinating universe, and it makes sense that the subject would come up at point, but I feel like a truly great sci-fi writer would have thunk all this through before putting pen to paper. Nevertheless, Spock Must Die! is still an ambitious attempt to try and bring the intellectual considerations of literary sci-fi to the often oversimplified meat-and-potatoes logic of TV sci-fi. And Blish also does something that is not to be overlooked or understated: he tells a good, tight story, even if he raises the stakes to somewhat ridiculous levels (the Klingons buck the Organian peace treaty and are consequently sentenced to one thousand years without space travel - I understand the desire to think big and want to change stuff up, but a universe already established by one of the most popular TV shows on earth might not be the best venue for that). His prose is also fluid, sleek and legible, which isn't something I'd normally go out of my way to mention, were it not for its nature as a Trek novel (some of these books can at times read like fridge magnet poetry run through Google Translate). Thanks to Blish's ample experience writing episode adaptations, he also captures the characters quite faithfully, making Spock Must Die! a satisfying read for any fan of the original crew.

So: a waste of time? Certainly not. It's food for thought, at the very least, and at 119 pages, it's not like there's much time to waste. Spock Must Die! hints at the complex weave of philosophy and technology that would later make for Trek's finest moments, both on page and on screen, and is well worth the read, if you're looking for a quick, easy fix.

I honestly don't remember if I read 1976's Spock, Messiah! and I feel like I'd remember if I had, since by all accounts, it is little more than 182 pages of insipid racism and misogyny, although I do feel like there were a few books I did read which might also answer to that description. In any case, my next review will still be an overwhelmingly negative one, as I tackle Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath's abominable afterbirth of a novel, 1977's hideously awful The Price Of The Phoenix. Should be fun, right?

Mission To Horatius (Mack Reynolds, 1968)

Let me just start by saying something I forgot to mention in my earlier preamble to his blog: I'm not going to be bothering with novelizations of movies and TV episodes, several of which precede Mission To Horatius. Not because those are never good or relevant (just check out Matt Stover's fantastic novelization of Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith for an example of a novelization done right (then read all his other Star Wars books - he really is the best)), but because I've got like a million bajillion novels to read already and something's gotta give, dammit.

I admit I am curious, though, especially about the Original Series and Animated Series adaptations (even if many of them were written by Alan Dean Foster - a writer who's been boring for nearly half a century now), since the confines of television in the 60s and 70s didn't allow for much complexity when it came to the kind of heavier intellectual considerations that were to be found in sci-fi literature.

But for now, I'll have to be content to read between the lines, and try to decipher deeper meaning from the early episodes by how they're referred to in original works. I've found that TOS novels tend to fixate on 1-3 episodes in particular when it comes to references to the show, rather than attempt to accommodate every single episode (which would probably require establishing a firm timeline of events, which even the most diligent Trekkers and Trekkies are still struggling to do). This has the effect of making individual novels sometimes function as a direct or indirect sequel to an episode or story arc from the show, tying up loose ends and expanding on its larger consequences within the Star Trek universe.

In any event, Mission To Horatius will never be counted among the more thought-out or intellectual Trek novels, being basically a children's book (complete with coloring book-grade illustrations by someone hilariously named Sparky Moore) with an extremely predictable bare-bones plot whose primary purpose seems to be teaching the "young adults" toward whom the book was marketed the meaning of the word "cafard." It also begins what quickly becomes an incredibly tiresome tradition in Trek novels: establishing at the very top of the story that the Enterprise is in rough shape, with crew members not having seen shore leave in months, supplies running low and technical problems abounding. Maybe a lot of the writers were sick of the TV Enterprise always running smoothly at the beginning and end of every episode, and wanted to subvert that?

There is, in fact, something of a weird prevalence for 'hive mind' writing happening, at least in the novels of the 70s and early 80s, where there will be two or more books with recurring themes coming out back-to-back: two or three 'artificial planet with a complex society' books, then two or three 'Enterprise encounters intelligent cat people,' followed by/intermixed with several books that highlight one of the less prominent members of the regular crew (Chekov, Sulu and Uhura are particular favorites in this category).

Mission To Horatius plays it pretty straight, however, with Kirk, Spock and McCoy guiding us through a very color-by-numbers investigation of a distress signal sent from the eponymous Horatius system, which has three non-allied inhabited worlds, and they basically have to find out which planet is the evil one (hint: it's probably gonna be the one inhabited by space Germans, same as always).

Running parallel to this is McCoy's attempt to fight the aforementioned space cafard, a plot that is, anticlimactically enough, resolved after the space nazis have been stopped in their tracks in a confrontation that is equal parts confusing and simplistic, somehow. The cafard resolution, meanwhile, is very much in line with the ba-dum-tiss punchline jokes often featured at the end of TOS and TAS episodes, and one can't quite shake the feeling that Reynolds would have preferred to focus on just one of the storylines, with the other forced upon him by Whitman Publishing, who would never again publish a Trek book.

While it does indeed feature the intriguing ideas and enlightening premises that has always made Star Trek so great, Horatius is still significantly hampered by its childish tone, so much so that I would deem reading it mostly a waste of time (unless you can find a print version and crayon in those sweet line drawings). While it can hardly be blamed for reading like what it is - a kid's book - and its plot, while contrived, is no more stupid than the more asinine of the Trek TV episodes and movies, I still feel there's always room for a little more thought and character, and I personally found Mission To Horatius lacking beyond the point of excusability.

Bottom line: is it a waste of time? Yes, almost totally. Reynolds has probably already taken a lot of smack from Trek fans for inadvertently starting getting the Star Trek book party started with a hollow 'glonk' rather than the explosive bang it should've, and I feel bad about adding to that echo chamber, but the fact remains that this book is not very good.

Next up: we jump ahead to 1970, when episode novelization guru James Blish has his first stab at an original Star Trek work, Spock Must Die! with considerably better dividends.

Trek Wars: An Introduction

Hello! Welcome to my new blog! You are great!

This is the place where I intend to critique and informally assess every single Star Trek novel ever written, in order of publishing. Since I am already about 30 books in, the first reviews will take the form of short blurbs, and then get gradually more in-depth as I assess books I've read more recently, until finally, books I've just finished will receive more thorough treatment.

But first, an inaugural word about this blog, Star Trek and me.

I was never super big on Star Trek as a kid (or so I thought - more on this later), and only recently got into it. I used to be a huge Star Wars fan (or so I thought - more this later), and since I grew up in the 90s, most current Star Wars releases took the form of the sci-fi novels that were becoming the basis of what is now known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars had been in a bit of a slump since the mid-80s, with only the odd Ewok movie or West End Games roleplaying supplement appearing occasionally to satiate fans.

That changed in 1991, with the release of Timothy Zahn's 'Star Wars: Heir To The Empire,' now considered a classic among fans, and largely responsible for Star Wars's steady climb back into the spotlight. It spawned first dozens, then hundreds of novels, comic books and games, all serving to slowly add to the endless detail and variety of the Star Wars universe.

My fandom had somewhat receded by the time the Star Wars prequels were coming out, but my favorable opinion of Revenge Of The Sith inspired me to get deeper into the Star Wars novels again, and I was impressed by the way they seamlessly incorporated the prequels into the grander story, which now stretched decades into the future and millennia into the past of the Star Wars universe. The Expanded Universe was a rich, diverse, breathing entity, crafted in minute detail by a wide variety of sci-fi and fantasy authors - some better than others, granted, and I loved it... until, of course, George Lucas decided to start fucking with things.

First came The Clone Wars, an awful kid-friendly rewrite of the masterful work done by authors such as Karen Traviss, James Luceno and Matt Stover. Then came the Disney buy-out and Episode VII, which promptly erased the Expanded Universe and started from scratch, a blow to my fandom made all the more heavy by the fact that I hated The Force Awakens almost more than I hated The Clone Wars.

But what was mystifying me most about these developments was the fact that it seemed like I was the only one who felt like this. Fellow Star Wars fans diligently followed The Clone Wars and its spinoff, Rebels, and lauded Episode VII as a return to form for Star Wars. I couldn't disagree more.

At around that time, I'd made the decision to sit down and try to watch all of Star Trek, mostly out of curiosity. I'd seen the occasional episode growing up, and had always been intrigued, especially by Deep Space Nine, which I felt on played on the same universe-expanding sensibilities of the best Star Wars novels, being an attempt to broaden the scope of the universe that before then, had only been glimpsed at the periphery of the Enterprise's viewscreen as it zoomed from flashpoint to flashpoint.

Almost from the very beginning of my Star Trek-watching, I was curious what kind of stuff the Star Trek novels got into (I knew they existed, because they were usually on the shelf next to the Star Wars books at the bookstores I shopped at). Lots of intriguing things are never directly addressed in any Trek TV episode or movie. How did the Klingons and Romulans first meet? How did the Borg come into being? And what happens after DS9 and Voyager end? Does the Federation go back to the Delta and Gamma Quadrants? Under what circumstances? I had a feeling these questions had been answered in the novels.

As I read the books and rewatched Trek episodes and movies, I realized I was on some weird subconscious mission to become as well-versed in the Trek universe as I had been in the Star Wars one; I was playing catch-up for a youth spent ignoring Trek and focusing on Star Wars. I craved the same detail, scope and mystery offered by the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and although the two franchises are ostensibly about very different things and connected only by their setting - outer space - there is, unsurprisingly, a fair amount of overlap and parallels between them.

Trek was created before Star Wars, and perhaps in some way paved the way for Star Wars's eventual production and release, but the Trek movies would never have been made if it wasn't Star Wars's mind-boggling success at the box office. The 1980s saw Trek hard on the heels of Star Wars, never quite equalling the Fox franchise's innovation or production values, and the look and feel of the original cast movies owe a great deal to Star Wars. In the early 80s, Star Wars was king, and Trek followed in its wake, eventually finding its own special tone, but still never quite rising to the level of Star Wars.

But then came the 90s, and Star Wars was, by then, largely underground. The huge success of Star Trek: The Next Generation had put Trek on top as Star Wars languished in relative nostalgia, with only crazy superfans - like me - still keeping up with the Expanded Universe. Star Trek now set the course for the tone of pop sci-fi, with dozens of copycat shows appearing rapidly on TV, and Star Wars duly followed suit, not with a TV show, but in the novels of the Expanded Universe.

The Expanded Universe features a lot of complex political worldbuilding, and are written as something far more akin to true sci-fi than the sci-fi/fantasy cocktail that distinguishes Star Wars, and it was this that drew me to Star Wars, perhaps even more so than the movies. Don't get me wrong, the movies are great, but my knowledge of the Expanded Universe enhanced and deepened my love for movies to the point where the movies almost became secondary addendums to the grander story depicted in the books - the movies showed you one group of influential characters that changed the galaxy, but the books told you the entire history of that galaxy, and showed you how the events in the movies tied into that.

And I've now come to the realization that the Expanded Universe owes much more to Star Trek than it did to Star Wars. The sheer amount of detail contained within its vast volume of works is something far closer to the TV series airing throughout Trek's 90s heyday than it ever was to Star Wars (which perhaps explains why George Lucas never seemed to give much of a shit what the Expanded Universe was doing). I was deeply enthralled by West End Games' roleplaying supplements and Del Rey's reference works, which now, looking back on them, were of course far more influenced by the practical, tech-heavy and grand sci-fi concepts featured on Star Trek shows than the swashbuckling adventure seen in the Star Wars films.

So, in short: I think I was always a Star Trek fan, but I just didn't know it. I am now closer to the roots of the Star Wars Expanded Universe than I ever was as a Star Wars fan. The truth of this is underscored by my distaste for J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot films, which resemble nothing so much as a desperate attempt by Star Trek to reinstate its position in pop culture by attempting to replicate Star Wars, with its cool dudes punching people and getting into gunfights and blowing things up. Star Trek flopped with Enterprise while Star Wars soared into the money-making stratosphere with the prequels, pulling a whole new generation of fans in, and the two franchises' incestuous tug-of-war continues to this day, with Star Trek: Discovery hoping to combine the flashy modernism and nostalgia fetishization that dominated Abrams's films with a return to Star Trek's true home: television (certainly an overdue return, considering that TV has been critically outperforming mainstream movies for well over a decade), even as Disney kicks Star Wars into overdrive with its impressively greedy one-film-a-year plan.

So as Star Trek becomes more like Star Wars again, I am left to play catch-up with all those wonderful (and some not-so-wonderful) Star Trek books I never read, but fell kind of like I should have, years ago. It's a task I am of course doing willingly, but it'll be a monumental journey; Trek, like Star Wars, has inspired hundreds of novels that I will probably never finish in my lifetime, since they're coming out faster than I can read them (and I'm already decades behind).

I feel, however, that there is tremendous value in coming late to the game, and being able to analyze things with more recent developments in mind. The books I'm currently reading were released in the 1980s, and it is often very interesting to see how certain books presaged Trek's future and interpreted what had already come out, often laying out groundwork for a universe quite different from the one the movies and TV series eventually set in stone, and it's also fascinating to see the tone of the books gradually change with the feel of the times and evolution of the onscreen Trek.

So I thought the least I could do was share my thoughts, revelations and experiences as I delve ever deeper into the world of Star Trek. I rarely write for my own pleasure anymore, being a translator and copywriter by occupation, and I wanted to tackle something I actually enjoy writing and thinking about. I can't guarantee that anyone else will enjoy it as much as I do, but I promise to try to keep things light and inviting, so you don't have to be some fat, smelly Star Trek geek like me to enjoy these. Think of it as me reading Star Trek so you don't have to, if that helps.

So! The next post will be a quick retroactive blurb about Mack Reynolds' 'Mission To Horatius,' which quite frankly I barely remember at this point, so the read should be interesting, at they very least. In the meantime, enjoy long life and prosperity, and welcome again to my new blog. Good things will happen here, I promise.