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.