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.
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.
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