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!
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!
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