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?
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment