Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The End of an Era!

All things work toward their own perfection, and unless you're a horseshoe crab, that perfection tends to presage your doom. As true as this is for cheetahs and concert violinists, it's also true for Star Trek fiction - specifically, the first, wild-and-woolly type of Star Trek fiction we've been chronicling in this series so far.

That type, as some of you will recall, was born in boozy convention rooms and lonely basements across the country even before the original series left the airwaves, written by fans so desperate to read more adventures of these characters they loved that they were willing to write those adventures themselves. And they did, in unprecedented numbers, and fanzines were born of that samizdat fervor. Random chance has almost always smiled on Star Trek (a free book to the first of you who can tell me the Star Trek quote that acknowledges this phenomenon), and here was no exception: some of those fans turned out to be talented writers, and some talented writers turned out to be fans. Actual, honest-to-gosh novels were born.

As we've discovered, they were of unequal quality (we haven't done a full-length breakdown of every single one, but we will - once this series has finished drawing the big picture of Star Trek fiction up to the present, we'll go back and gradually fill in all the books we skipped along the way, as insane and painful as that process will be). They were syrupy and sentimental. They were inconsistent (different books would hand out different fates to the same supporting characters, until it became almost a game to find out what crazy thing would happen to T'Pring or Doctor M'Benga this time). And once professional hacks learned there was a little money to be made, a great many of those earliest novels were the unthinkable: bland.

The one thing all of it had in common was simple: it was all still largely unnoticed by its nominal parent company, Paramount Pictures. Spin-off novels about a canceled series? Somebody somewhere in the vast motion picture conglomerate might have cared a bit, but the corporation sure as hell didn't.

And the way to tell that somebody somewhere cared at least a little? Those early Star Trek novels steered further and further away from the sado-erotic excesses of the earliest fan fiction. Even with the earliest professional novels, somebody somewhere must have said 'Kirk and Spock can't die, or be tortured, or kill out of anger' - even though those three things were staples of fan fiction.

So it's only fitting that this whole era of Star Trek fiction would end not only a pair of novels that actually dare to revive almost the whole of fan fiction's bag of naughty tricks - but a pair of novels that also beat out all the rest for sheer entertainment. This era of Star Trek fiction goes out with one hell of a bang.

Of course I'm referring to The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix, by the writing team of Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.

I've praised these two before, but here they come into their own for the first time: here they write the Star Trek fan fiction novels to end all Star Trek fan fiction novels.

The Price of the Phoenix came out in 1977 and is, I make no secret of it, my favorite Star Trek novel of them all (not all the novels featuring the original cast, but all the novels - this is my favorite out of 700, not 70) - a designation rendered all the more melancholy for me by the realization that this book could never be published today. Even though its every page is glowing not only with knowledge of the show (this writing team was even briefly in love with the idea of footnotes in Star Trek novels - imagine if that had caught on! They'd be running at Gibbon-esque length in the most recent books!) but with fidelity to its spirit, these books are too violent, too sexually charged, too adult to get green-lighted in today's franchise sci-fi market. Not to mention the fact that all of those fan fiction staples feature prominently here: our logical, unemotional Mr. Spock threatens murder with savage ferocity; characters are tortured with sheer brute force; and best of all, somebody dies - Captain Kirk, no less, and he's dead before the book opens with these crackerjack lines:

The transporter shimmered.

The two Enterprise security men materialized, took a firmer grip on the anti-grav lifts, and stepped carefully off the platform with the stretcher that bore the body of Captain James T. Kirk.

The scene is quickly filled in: Omne, an enigmatic rebel inventor, has created a 'black hole planet' covered in impregnable shielding, and he's invited hundreds of 'delegates' to gather there in opposition to the United Federation of Planets. Omne believes the Federation honors its non-interference Prime Directive mostly in the breach, and he claims to be worried about a future of 'wall-to-wall super empires.' Naturally, the Federation is concerned - it sends Kirk and the Enterprise to Omne's planet to assess the situation - and to assess Omne.

He's a fascinating villain, Omne, and he's the cornerstone of why this novel and its sequel work so well - only a great villain, somebody who challenges our heroes on many levels, can bring out the best in those heroes. The Star Trek novels that try to do this by the introduction of a point-of-view good guy (the infamous "Mary Sue saves the universe" gambit that we'll have reason to discuss in a later chapter) almost always fail, because they distract our attention from the heroes who should be at the center of things.

Omne centers the attention like nobody's business. He appears human, though he's very tall, broad, and heavy with muscle (he's called a "giant" many times) - but he isn't human: his blood is blue-green, and he's at least as strong as a Vulcan or a Romulan. And the reason we know that is because Vulcans and Romulans play a vital part in these books. The Vulcan of course is Mr. Spock. The Romulan, as Kirk and Spock discover when they arrive at Omne's black hole planet, is the same female Romulan Commander they once encountered in the original series episode "The Enterprise Incident" and tricked out of the fledgling Romulan cloaking device.

The Romulan Commander (we never learn her public name, although she whispers her private one to Spock at one point) in that episode was played with magisterial, entirely believable authority by Joanne Linville, and her performance is so memorable that the Commander immediately became a favorite character in fan fiction and in many Star Trek novels. In The Price of the Phoenix she's come to Omne's world (with the three starships under her command) on a mission analogous to that of Captain Kirk: to assess Omne's potential to disrupt the current balance of power (the book's major logistical flaw is that the Klingon Empire would certainly also have sent a representative, yet there be no Klingons here).

Kirk and Spock don't like the look of Omne (and they naturally dislike those impregnable planetary shields), but they figure they've walked into worse places and managed to walk out again. And that's how things seem to be progressing - until in one of the alien dioramas Omne's set up, Kirk sees a woman run into a burning house with a baby in her arms. He instinctively rushes in after her - and Spock watches as the whole building comes down on his captain. Hence the opening - Spock and Omne's Romulan guards gather Kirk's remains from the wreckage, and Omne allows Spock to beam back up to the Enterprise.

But it turns out Omne is playing a deadly double - even triple - game, using both a normal transporter to whisk Kirk from death a moment before the whole roof caved in (but after he was blocked from Spock's sight) and a new kind of transporter technology to make a perfect duplicate of the captain ("we always knew we were close with the transporter process," Omne hints, of the revelatory new process his calls the Phoenix), down to the last microbe and thought and feeling. The game Omne is playing is multi-layered - one part of it is a rather improbable attempt to split the Federation along the rift of the Prime Directive by which Starfleet is bound not to interfere with the native cultures of the planets it visits ... Omne points out that it was part of that woman's culture to seek suicide in such a manner, to which Kirk responds that the baby couldn't have made such a choice. Omne challenges this kind of morality:

Omne spread his hands. "It's not possible to have it both ways, Captain. Custom is custom, or it is not. Noninterference is noninterference, or it is not. Anything else is moral judgment on the basis of feeling - and the self-indulgence of imposing your gut reaction on the universe."

Kirk straightened gravely and stood quiet. "No," he said solemnly. "It can be - which is the reason for having a Prime Directive. But there is a logic to moral judgments, and there are judgments which have to be made. That is the reason for having men who will make them on the tough ones. Right or wrong, but make them and stand responsible. There is no sanctity to custom. The many can be as wrong as the one, and antiquity as wrong as tomorrow. The sanctity is in life - and in the freedom needed to preserve and enjoy it. Custom is the frozen form of men's choices, not to be shattered lightly, but it does not abolish the need to choose."

Omne was looking at him thoughtfully, one eyebrow rising. "So - you are the true antithesis," he said. "No mere thoughtless bundle of reactions, and no apologist, but the true son of moral certainty." He nodded as if pleased. "It was what I had wanted to learn."

But Omne also has a darker motive, something entirely more reminiscent of the bad old days of fan fiction: he wants to use his Vulcanoid physical strength to humiliate Kirk - physically. To make him beg - not for principle or for the lives of his friends, but personally, for himself. And Kirk knows it's possible:

Kirk had no illusions. The giant would regain sight and speed and precision in a moment. Kirk could not beat him. And the uncanny strength, the vicious imagination, could cause the Human body pain beyond its capacity to endure.

And the soul, also. Humiliation. A sickness of soul which could be felt through the body.

At some point he would beg abjectly, and for himself.

No illusions. Tough universe. It could be done to a man, any man. He had always known it could be done to him. He had been very lucky.

For this humiliation and much more, Spock surrenders to the rage that's welling up against his peaceful Vulcan training, and the novel climaxes in a long and brutal fight between him and Omne, a fight that ends with Omne risking everything - risking that his own pre-set Phoenix machinery will work to duplicate himself - by killing himself. When he returns and confronts his adversaries - Kirk, Spock, the Romulan Commander, the duplicate Kirk, and Dr. McCoy in the Enterprise's Sick Bay, he finally realizes that these heroes will sacrifice almost anything to prevent his miracle from becoming an evil let loose on the galaxy:

Each of them had lived for a long time on the final frontier of death, and still dared to love. It had been necessary. It was the nature of the universe, and what man, what all intelligent life had had to live with, always. And it had always been unendurable, and endured.

But now it was not the nature of the universe.

She undertook to speak for all. "We would give anything for it - except what we are."

"So say you all?" Omne said, and his eyes were darkly impressed as he felt the weight of common assent like a solid unity among them. Even McCoy lifted his head and met the black eyes with a searing look of loathing and icy, bleak pride - he who fought death on his own ground  and too often lost, and would fight again.

Omne nodded. "So you will not, after all, quite sell soul, flag, fortune, and sacred honor?"

"We will not sell what makes love possible," the Commander said.

"But that is the price of the Phoenix," Omne said.

The book is rip-snortingly fast-paced (the whole of the main action hardly takes longer than a day), but it's raw and avid with emotion - it's take-no-prisoners fan fiction in which both Kirk and Spock get roughed up well beyond what later fiction would countenance. This of course is the allure of fan fiction: you can't be certain at any point what will and won't happen. The Price of the Phoenix ends with a cliffhanger, and the following year Marshak and Culbreath brought out the sequel, The Fate of the Phoenix, again starring Kirk, Spock, the Romulan Commander, and the duplicate Kirk (now called James and surgically altered to pass as a Romulan and live with the Commander in the Romulan Empire, rather than have the presence of two Kirks in the Federation reveal the existence of the Phoenix process), all again pitted not only against Omne but also against a Phoenix-generated duplicate of Omne - wearing a copy of Mr. Spock's body.

The Fate of the Phoenix is a longer novel by a third than its predecessor  - and in every way it's also a bigger novel, grander in scope, wilder in action, more sweeping in its moral and philosophical debates. Those debates once again center on the ethics behind the Prime Directive, but such a description shouldn't lead you to imagine this is a book lost in intellectual maneuvering - like the first volume, The Fate of the Phoenix is first and foremost a character-driven action-yarn in the classic Star Trek tradition - space opera with brains. Omne's Spock-double (here called the Other, if only for simplicity's sake) has his own agenda - and a biological dead-man's switch, a time bomb lodged in his Phoenix-generated body that will kill him if he can't coerce the original Omne to counter it. The Commander is facing the threat of blood vengeance from a headstrong planetary princess in her own Empire, and the Federation is facing secession by a gigantic consortium of worlds who might like to ally themselves with the Romulans, or Omne ... and who would certainly rip apart the galaxy to possess the Phoenix device, if they knew it existed. Add some great action sequences, some nifty quotes, a curiously believable mountain-climbing scene, and some prehistoric monsters, and you still have only a fraction of what's going on in this fat, satisfying sequel.

The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix sold very well, but more importantly, they were very much loved by Star Trek fans eager for the novels they were reading to more faithfully mirror the show they loved. Both books have been reprinted several times with an array of different cover illustrations - including one for The Fate of the Phoenix that features Kirk kneeling before a shadowy figure we only see from the rear and must assume is Omne - reflecting the fact that in the entire course of both books, Culbreath and Marshak never once explicitly tell us what color Omne's skin is - he's called Black Omne, but that's easily interpreted as a reflection of his malevolence only, and sometimes our authors will refer to his 'heathen idol face' - but again, the truly telling specifics simply aren't included.

In the interval between The Price of the Phoenix and its sequel, our two authors came out with yet another sequel: Star Trek the New Voyages 2, the sequel to their first volume of fan-generated short stories.  There's the usual mix of quality in the second volume, but the whole thing is bracketed by two short stories by Culbreath and Marshak themselves - the first story in the collection, "Surprise!" a somewhat fluffy little lark about an alien gremlin playing pranks on the Enterprise, and the final story in the book, the horrendously titled "The Procrustean Petard," in which Kirk and crew are abducted by inscrutable alien technology - and have their genders reversed on a genetic level. In the story's brief interval during which they wonder if they'll have to spend the rest of their lives that way, the characters do some fun and surprisingly knowing introspection about the deeper roles gender has played in their lives without them realizing it. The moment in the story where the now-voluptuous Kirk is nearly raped by a Klingon is not only classic Star Trek thought-provoking but classic fanzine erotic overkill. It and the Phoenix volumes couldn't help but remind long-time fans of some of the truly atrocious fan-generated fiction they'd read in messy dot-matrix printings over the years - and given the popularity of Culbreath and Marshak's books, those fans might have been forgiven for thinking that in addition to the more sanitized 'mainstream' volumes being published regularly, there'd always be a place for this rougher, more suggestive, and entirely more entertaining branch of the genre.

Those fans were wrong, however. Something was about to happen to the world of Star Trek fiction - something so vast and all-pervasive that not the most optimistic fan in the entire world could have seen it coming. After ten long years of cult status and endless syndicated reruns, Star Trek was about to become a billion-dollar world-wide juggernaut. Star Trek: The Motion Picture came to theaters in 1979, and the world of Star Trek fiction would never be the same again.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The First Ladies of Fandom!

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As we've noticed occasionally in our bibliographical notes, there are two kinds of Star Trek fiction. There's the kind where the outward garments of Star Trek – a captain named Kirk, a ship called Enterprise, etc. - are simply and crudely draped over a pre-existing science fiction hobbyhorse. And there's the kind where the essence of Star Trek comes first and finds the stories it wants to tell. In a very real sense, this division is established during the original three seasons of the TV show itself – some of those episodes (a great many of them, to be honest) are pure sci-fi potboilers into which elements of Gene Roddenberry's creation are inserted with greater or lesser degrees of success, and some of them (the best of them, with one or two exceptions) are pure Trek, operating on its own principles.

As with the show, so too with the fiction. On the one hand, we have James Blish's dutiful script adaptations – sometimes heartfelt, yes, but most often mechanical yarns churned out on deadline, featuring wandering terminology and interchangeable characters. And on the other hand, there were all those fanzines, evangelical, written by fans, for fans.

The script adaptations were financially successful beyond anybody's wildest dreams, and they weren't the only sign that something unprecedented was going on in the wake of Star Trek's cancellation. Conventions were springing up all over the country, informally organized, fueled by enthusiasm and beer, swarmed by fans who came out of the woodwork to meet other people infected with a love of this particular show. That might sound routine these days, but it was Star Trek that created that mindframe and set it in motion.

So then: a confluence of passion and profit, generated by a TV show that was no longer on the air. Inevitably, books. And with books, the haploid nature of Star Trek fiction, blossoming to manuscript length. 1976 was the scene.

In that year, the first official exponents of each strain of Star Trek fiction appeared almost simultaneously: a novel called Spock, Messiah! (by Theodore Cogswell and Charles Spano), and a story anthology called Star Trek: The New Voyages (edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath).

Spock, Messiah gives away its nature in its very attribution. Spano was a new writer, a diehard fan of the show who knew his kevas from his trillium – and Bantam Books, acting at the behest of Paramount, partnered him with Cogswell, an old, practiced hand at sci-fi potboilers. And the result is … a sci-fi potboiler in which the newcomer has been allowed to interject some weird, show-specific details. Our crew is monitoring the explosive situation on the planet Kryos when a subverted Vulcan mind-meld traps Mr. Spock in the sway of a religious zealot intent on inflaming the entire planet to war. Kirk and company must somehow save Spock and restore order without violating the Prime Directive that forbids Starfleet officers from interfering in the normal development of pre-spaceflight civilizations. Thanks to Cogswell, gigantic swaths of pages are devoted to scene-setting and Amazing Fantasy-style descriptions of the people and society of Kryos. When our characters do traipse onstage, they hardly ever sound or act like themselves, as in the quick dressing-down Captain Kirk gives poor Ensign Chekhov for breaking character around the natives:

“I wasn't talking about that,” Kirk snapped. “You're Beshwa, you idiot! You're never supposed to have handled a sword in your entire life. If you don't act as if you don't know one end of a sword from the other when you get out there, you're going to blow our cover. On the other hand, if you kill Greth, we won't be in any better shape. Either way, we'll be dead by morning. Well, we've got a couple of hours yet. Maybe we can think of something. Bones, you'd better get to work on the wounded.”

For those of us who bought a copy of Spock, Messiah the instant we saw it (for the pause-inducing price of $1.75), the book represented a classic win-lose scenario. It was original Star Trek fiction, at least technically – the first since Spock Must Die, a new adventure in which there was no pre-memorized dialogue. But it was all so, well, dull. By the numbers. Impersonal. Without knowing it or meaning to, this novel set the template for an endless torrent of Star Trek novels to come – and if it was the only such novel you read in 1976, you might have had cause for a bit of depression.

But there was another Star Trek book published that year, and to put it mildly, it wasn't impersonal.

Star Trek: The New Voyages was born of those earliest conventions, and it owes its genesis to the first ladies of fandom, the girls who were geeks before the word existed, who banded together initially to save the show from cancellation and then stayed banded together to keep its memory alive. It's easy to see the appeal for these particular fans: not only did Star Trek feature dozens of incredibly memorable female guest-characters – a forlornly brave ice age exile (“a very inventive mind, that man”), a fiercely independent blind diplomat (“I could play tennis with you, Captain Kirk – I might even beat you”), an imperious, calculating Vulcan princess (“And as the years went by, I came to know that I did not want to be the consort of a legend”), and perhaps most incredibly of all, a Romulan woman in command of her own starship (“We can appreciate the Vulcans, our distant brothers”) - but its central cast had three refreshingly realized female characters: Yeoman Janice Rand, who could be feisty and sardonic when the occasion demanded, Nurse Christine Chapel, in whom tenderness and professionalism never clashed, and most of all Lieutenant Uhura, mainstay of the bridge crew itself, voice of the Enterprise and voice of common sense to her male comrades. For the first time, young women could look at a science fiction world and feel invited instead of excluded.

They took to it with a passion. Most of those primitive fanzines we've already discussed were the brain-children of women, who did all the typing, all the proofreading, all the story-solicitation, all the tedious mailing – and most of the best writing. Most of those earliest conventions were organized by women. The two mega-selling nonfiction (hence, outside our purview) books about Star Trek – The World of Star Trek and especially Star Trek Lives – were mostly written by women, about women.

These first ladies of fandom are the ones who first realized the potential in all those Star Trek stories written by countless fans who could expect no possibility of publication. That potential was brought to the attention of Fred Pohl at Bantam, and he pounced on it, using his bottomless charm (and the seemingly limitless number of connections he had, everywhere) to get an actual book authorized. Suddenly, these first ladies had a shot at creating some new legends of their own.

The result was Star Trek: The New Voyages, and it was mainly the prodigy of two of that first generation of fans: Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Their infectious enthusiasm got the project off the ground and helped it soar – and unlike in a production such as Spock, Messiah, that enthusiasm is palpable on every page of this anthology (in which, in yet another industry first inaugurated by Star Trek, there are no stories by men). Here there is no question of precedent: these are stories that grew entirely out of love for the show and its characters. So the characters are in character, from first to last – the passions, the wisecracks, the ethical dilemmas … everything reads as if these, too, were novelizations of broadcast episodes, as though this were a companion volume to the fourth season original fans never got.

Virtually all the first ladies are represented here. There's Claire Gabriel (in “Ni Var” Spock is genetically separated into two beings – one human, one Vulcan, both Spock), Juanita Coulson (in “Intersection Point” the Enterprise crashes into something that isn't there), Ruth Berman (in “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited,” William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley find themselves accidentally beamed onto the real Enterprise during a crisis – the companion and continuation of the fanzine story “Visit to a Weird Planet”), and in the best story of the collection, Shirley Maiewski (in “Mind-Sifter,” a memory-shattered Kirk is stranded in a 20^th century mental hospital) – and many others.

Although they will later be quite prolific, Marshak and Culbreath give us no story of their own in this first anthology – although their prose is all over it in other guises. Paramount requested that each of the stars of the original series pen a short introduction to one of the stories in the collection, and, well, several of these introductions sound quite a bit like our editors, writing in their telltale breathlessly, charmingly hyperbolic diction. And there's their introduction, a short piece of prose in which the clean breath of vindication moves like a wind through the barley:

Here are not merely bold knights and fair damsels, but flesh-and-blood men and women of courage and achievement, knowing the value of love, and of laughter. They know also tears and terrors, doubts and divisions, frailties and fears, yet they do not bemoan their fate, and they do not merely endure; they prevail.

If Camelot and Man of La Mancha are legends of glorious quests for the unattainable, and Star Trek is our new dream, the possible dream – to reach for the reachable stars.

No, we have not forgotten Camelot.

But if this be our new Camelot, even more shining – make the most of it.

Spock, Messiah racked up decent sales numbers - fans clearly did their duty and bought it - but Star Trek: The New Voyages was a meteor: fans bought two or three copies apiece, passed them around, read them until they were falling apart, underlined, annotated, cross-referenced. This was the first true taste of Star Trek fiction – the first real taste of Star Trek itself since the show went off the air. A calm retrospective now can hardly convey the water-in-the-desert perfect satisfaction it produced – long before there was firm talk of a new movie, these women had been tending the flame and writing the further adventures, and this book stands as a monument to their dedication. A geeky monument, but a monument all the same.

Star Trek Then and Now!

Our books today are The Prometheus Design by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath and The Fearful Summons by Denny Martin Flinn, and together they span 13 years of Star Trek fiction - a fact which even casual movie-fans can detect immediately from their respective covers, which display our Starfleet heroes at the age and in the costume of whatever Star Trek movie happened to be in theaters near the time of publication. The Prometheus Design was written in 1982 and shows Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in the trim-line gray uniforms of Star Trek:The Motion Picture, whereas The Fearful Summons was written in 1995 and shows an older, stouter Captain Kirk - and a Mr. (now Captain) Sulu who's himself approaching middle age.

When The Prometheus Design was written, it was one of only a handful of Star Trek novels in print - it's got the Pocket Books logo on its spine, and Greg Benford's dear, departed "Timescape" design on the top of its cover, signifying that somebody, somewhere considered it science fiction first and fan fiction second. By contrast, The Fearful Summons, still technically a Pocket Books imprint, has the Paramount Movie Studios logo outside and inside, along with the telling cover proclamation: "A stunning sequel to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country by one of the writers of the film!" In 1982, Pocket Books was putting out books about Star Trek. In 1995, they were producing book-sequels to film-movies. All sorts of subterranean changes can be justifiably suspected, but hoo-boy, there are changes right on the surface too!


The Prometheus Design takes place right after the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so to some extent it, too, is a sequel to a movie - a movie in which young Captain Decker is ultimately absorbed into a higher, collective consciousness (in one of film's most unabashedly prolonged orgasm scenes). Captain Kirk is helming the Enterprise again, and he and his stalwart crew of regulars - McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura, and of course Spock - are investigating an escalation in violence among the Helvans. The book starts with a street riot (Marshak and Culbreath are masters of the rip-snorting plot) - and with Kirk & Co. starting to realize that a mysterious alien race (don't act surprised - this IS Star Trek, after all) is experimenting on the Helvans like lab animals. When the suspicion arises that the Enterprise crew might also be experiencing tampering without their knowledge, Starfleet sends the legendary Vulcan Admiral Savaj (I know, I know ... just ignore it ... we were all much younger then ...) to assume command if Spock refuses (Vulcans are immune to the mental coercion of the villains, called the Designers).

The plot is full of great cheesy dialogue and sharp, snappy action - and with a fair-sized helping of good old-fashioned moralizing, especially when McCoy, Spock, and Savaj bat around the subject of animal experimentation in general:

"Spock [says McCoy], I don't mean them. I mean us. Billions of little lives. For research alone. When the antivivisectionists tried to stop research on live animals in the nineteenth century, it was maybe a thousand animals in the world. I remember some figures from twenty years before the year two thousand. One hundred million laboratory animals per year in the then United States alone - driven insane, suffocated, poisoned, battered, scalded, blinded, radiated, crushed - to death. And eighty-five percent of it was done without any anesthetic. Much of it was for research that was crude, repetitive, the answers already known in school. And it didn't stop there. Food. Furs. And the incalculable cruelty of our own kind. Spock, maybe there really is a flaw in the mechanism in us, all of us - a fatal flaw. The inhumanity ... I've done it too, Spock. With my own two hands."

McCoy held up his surgeon's hands and they were shaking. Spock covered them with one of his own. "There is nothing in those hands, Doctor, but the antidote for whatever flaw we fight here. I am not certain what answer we will find, but I know it requires your survival." Spock paused a moment, then added quietly, "As do I."

A great little moment, which is then rudely interrupted:

Savaj also looked sharply at Spock. "Indeed, your recent behavior is virtually a catalog of Human influence on a Vulcan - down to a certain release of aggression and other emotions. Perhaps you had better let me attend the Doctor" Spock made no comment, but permitted himself to be displaced. "In all logic, Doctor," Savaj said, "your predecessors were dealing at that period with a rate of cancer that had gone in decades from negligible to one out of four. It was to to go to one out of two - in places nearly to one out of one - before environmental and medical research - sometimes on animals - reversed the trend. The increase of other diseases was also epidemic. Certain environmental trends, if not detected through animal and other research, would swiftly have rendered the planet uninhabitable for your life form and all others - and all of the little lives would have died with you in their hundreds of trillions. The same is true of most worlds at some point. That is the Designers' position now. And if they go, we go. We must, in logic, offer them some other argument than the pain of mice - when their children are dying."

This is strong, pointed stuff - Marshak and Culbreath wrote four Star Trek novels when the sub-genre was at its very beginning (indeed, two of them take place before the beginning, which is now officially marked with the publication of Gene Roddenberry's novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture), and all of them bristle with this kind of ideological hip-wading - their plots revolve not just around action but issues, and they give their principals lots and lots of juicy scenes and lines.

Six movies and several hundred million (perhaps a billion, world-wide? Studios don't divulge, but how many times have you rented at least one of the various Original Cast Star Trek movies in the last 15 years?) later, how things have changed! What was once an ignored little backwater of the publicity department has by 1995 become a publishing industry with nearly 200 titles in its backlist and a bulging studio-dictated "bible" of characters and settings, from which no author is allowed to deviate (unless that author is the proverbial - almost literal - 800 pound gorilla; William Shatner and his ghostwriters were able to write a series of "non-canonical" Star Trek novels in the mid and late-1990s).


The events in The Fearful Summons take place shortly after the sixth Star Trek movie; Kirk is retired from Starfleet, as are the rest of his crew - all except Captain Sulu, who commands the Excelsior and, at the novel's start, gets himself and his command crew taken hostage on a backwater planet by religious fundamentalists who then try strong-arm the Federation for their release. The retired Kirk learns about this and is outraged at Starfleet's apparent inactivity - why isn't anyone riding to the rescue of his old shipmate?

Naturally, he decides to do it himself. He sets the big personal computer in his apartment to tell him whenever 'Sulu' or 'hostage crisis' pops up in a news story, and he goes to the big computer at Starfleet Headquarters to hunt down the location of his former crew (1995 - the present reach of the Internet still unglimpsed, the staggering sophistication of cellphones undreamt ... you can pretty accurately date when any Star Trek novel was written by looking at what things aren't yet possible in the 23rd century), and they all agree to charter a private luxury space yacht and fly off to attempt a rescue on their own. They encounter no resistance from Starfleet or Earth government; they don't get picked off by pirates en route, and when they reach their destination, they meet with Sencus, the Vulcan officer Sulu left in charge of the Excelsior before he was taken hostage.

Long before this point, readers have been bucketed over the head with the fearful prose in The Fearful Summons. It isn't just that it's wooden and free of any spark of life - it's that it's careful, mincing in a way that smacks of committee approval. None of the characters sound like people - instead, they sound like the very worst writing workshop homonculi, and none worse than Kirk himself, the nominal star of the book. Not that he isn't given a run for his money in some places! Look at this conversation between Spock and Sencus - two Vulcans, mind you - and see if you can count all the different cliches and Earth-idioms:

"A rally?" Spock said. "To what purpose?"

"An anti-Federation gathering jointly sponsored by the Clerics and Klingons. An antigovernment rally, in fact, possibly to put pressure on the Ruling Family."

"Have they always been political bedfellows?"

"Not at all. It is an unholy alliance, to be sure. But they seem to have found common ground this week. They are going to fan the flames of hatred."

Yeesh.

There's no excuse for writing that lazy, but there is an explanation for it: the writer doesn't really think he's writing science fiction anymore, and he's long since absolved himself of the responsibility for it being smart, fast-paced, or interesting. In other words, he's writing for fans, not readers. And in turn those fans aren't actually reading the book, they're checking items off a list: continuity? check. Correct designation of hardware? check? proper protocol sequence followed for engine start-up? check.

Even in the midst of this flab, some hint of Star Trek occasionally shines through. Perhaps Flinn was at some point a fan - and it should be said that the movie he helped to write is quite good. When the aging Captain Kirk at one point muses on the vastness of space, we get a little bit that Marshak and Culbreath might have liked:

Billions of stars, uncountable planets, he thought. How many more to explore? Another five-year mission? It would take a lifetime. It took mine. And we barely scratched the surface. I don't mind leaving the task incomplete. No, but I mind leaving it to others. How selfish of me. As if there weren't enough star systems to go around.

That's pretty good, but it certainly isn't good enough to carry a novel, and it's hard not to blame Paramount Studios for the drastic change. Good Star Trek novels that are actually good science fiction novels simply aren't published anymore, and I can't help but think it's due to the success of the movies.

One of the biggest surprises attendant that success is that Alan Dean Foster's trade paperback script adaptation of the latest financially successful Star Trek movie is so far the only novel set in that universe (which, as you fans will know, is not the same universe as all the other Star Trek incarnations - the director's canny way of making it all new for new fans). Surely this too is due to craven corporate thinking? Bad idea to have some writer coming up with a story-book that might conflict with what we'll see on the screen in 2012. Given things like The Fearful Summons, maybe the lack of such books is a mercy.