Comics: Star Trek!

Scrappy upstart comics publisher IDW this week began a new "Star Trek" series based on the 2009 Hollywood reboot of the original TV series. It's not the first IDW "Star Trek" title I've read, but it's the first new adventure of any kind I've read that's set in the brand-new continuity created by that long-ago 2009 movie (why on Earth it's taking this long for a single sequel is utterly beyond me - perhaps we could speed things up if all the actors sychronized their rehab stints), so of course I was interested. As I've mentioned here before, Paramount's curious reluctance to 'expand their brand' into the fictional world of this new "Star Trek" continuity is puzzling, especially since nothing that happens in spin-off books or comics can affect the 'canon' of the movies. Perhaps the studio is worried any such adaptation might accidentally stumble upon the plot of the next movie, since the free-range of your average screenwriter's imagination has in recent years become so degraded that Aaron Sorkin's Dada-esque turn in "The Social Network" can be held up as genius. Perhaps that worry is present in the launching of these new comic-book stories set in the reboot Trek-verse.

Except that 'new' is a bit of an exaggeration. True, the issue opens with Scotty down in the engine room tinkering with the machines while the creepy gnome-like creature he brought on board in the movie just sits around and watches (somewhere along the coked-up scripting process of that movie, somebody thought it would be clever if the U.S.S. Enterprise's Chief Engineer came with his own gremlin, and somehow, nobody at any subsequent point noticed what a flamingly dumb idea that is, so now we have a mute and hostile unvetted alien masquerading as a Star Fleet officer engineer, and I guess we're supposed to believe nobody on the command crew has had a minute to notice. Sigh.). But then the action shifts to the young Captain Kirk (the visual template here is obviously pint-sized tobacco addict Chris Pine, from the movie) getting checkmated in three-dimensional chess ... by his best friend Gary Mitchell.

And every long-time "Star Trek" fan in the galaxy suddenly starts paying attention.

Gary Mitchell! The cocksure, swaggering Enterprise helmsman who appeared in the show's first real episode, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," way back in 1966 was characterized - there and here - as Captain Kirk's best friend. In that original TV episode, the Enterprise is on a mission to leave the Milky Way galaxy when a battered space-recorder is located adrift. It belonged to the SS Valiant, which disappeared with all hands some 200 years previous, and when our crew analyzes its data, they learn that at some point that earlier ship's crew grew frantic, and their captain ordered his ship to self-destruct. Shortly after uncovering these unsettling facts, the crew is jolted when the Enterprise encounters a massive 'energy barrier' at the edge of the galaxy. Passing through it causes massive electrical malfunctions throughout the ship - and also causes both Gary Mitchell and psychologist Elizabeth Dehner (one of Gene Roddenberry's classic 'remote' women, described as "a walking freezer unit") to begin developing exraordinary powers of telekinesis and telepathy. They start to lose their humanity as well, and Kirk is eventually forced to kill his old friend rather than loose him on the galaxy. The episode is the first time we see Captain Kirk, the first time we watch him favor passion over logic in a debate with Mr. Spock, the first time we hear the note of personal tragedy that will mark so many of his adventures, and the first time we see him display a willingness to go toe-to-toe with just about any adversary and win (sadly, this last trait would not be passed on to future Enterprise captains).

It's effective stuff, but still: why on Earth would IDW and writer Mike Johnson choose to overlay the events of that episode onto the new "Star Trek" continuity? Wasn't the whole idea of the reboot to free the franchise from the gigantic continuity it had built up over forty years? To create the possibility that Kirk & Co. didn't have those same adventures we all know by heart? In the movie, young James T. Kirk (in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" he infamously has a different middle initial, quickly fixed) doesn't seem to graduate Starfleet Academy with any close friends other than Doctor McCoy - yet here's Gary Mitchell. And although the idea of mapping our new crew and sensibilities onto those old episodes is interesting, why this episode? It's in many ways a clunker - the 'energy barrier' at the edge of the galaxy is never explained (the real explanation would be lack of knowledge on the part of episode writer Samuel Peeples), for instance, nor is the ridiculous idea that the flagship of the Federation would be sent outside the galaxy in the first place. When modern-day viewers watching the episode for the first time learn that exposure to the barrier causes massive extra-sensory powers to develop in those crew members who have high "ESP quotients," they naturally wonder why Mr. Spock isn't affected, given that he's the only actual telepath on board. The answer is simple: when the episode was originally written, Mr. Spock was a work in progress - nobody had thought yet to make him a telepath. Those are the kinds of gaffes that Star Trek fiction (and later episodes) expend lots of work explaining away - why invite them, when you've got a clean slate and all the galaxy to choose from?

Johnson and artist Stephen Molnar do a clean, professional job here - this is an entertaining comic, and it's a series I'll certainly follow to the bitter end. But there are distinctly uneven bits: Molnar, for example, decides to anchor his depictions of the crew on actual photographic likenesses of the supernaturally attractive young cast of the reboot movie, rather than on idealized forms that would be just as recognizable and not have the tendency to look like, well, awkward drawings of real-life people (his Kirk fluctuates in age from roughly 15 to roughly 20). And Johnson's changes to the script of the original episode are sometimes bizarrely counter-productive. For instance, we're told that Elizabeth Dehner won't be joining us this time around ... because she's still upset about a nasty breakup she had with Doctor McCoy! And worse, at the climax of the issue Mr. Spock makes the astonishing admission to Captain Kirk that while the mutating Gary Mitchell was sedated, Spock mind-melded with him and discovered that "no one is there," that whatever's inhabiting Gary Mitchell is completely alien.

First: mind-melding with a sedated sickbay patient, without their permission? So is anybody on the Enterprise safe, then? And second: a good deal of the drama of the original episode derived from the fact that the super-powers he acquired only enhanced Gary Mitchell's megalomania - not that some alien entity replaced his entire personality. Where's the tragedy in that?



Re-doing some of those original-run episodes must have been one of the pitches for this new series, and perhaps the dramatic impairments inherent in that approach can be overcome with some imaginative storytelling. I'd have chosen the first issue of the series to actually show some of that imaginative storytelling (quite a bit of the scripting of this issue consists of virtually line-by-line transfers from the original episode), but that's just me. We'll see what happens in the next issue.



 

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The Big Screen!

In 1979 something happened that changed the nature of Star Trek fiction forever. It was something so long hoped-for and dreamed-of that many fans - myself included - had given up all real hope that it would ever happen:

In 1979 Paramount Pictures produced Star Trek: The Motion Picture, reuniting the entire core cast of the original TV show in a big-budget big-screen movie.

 

 

I went to see the movie, um, several times that winter, and long before that I thrilled just to the sight of the movie's two posters, the first showing the new Enterprise and a row of little boxes showing our old familiar crew, and the second showing Kirk, Spock, and a mysterious woman in a shower of glinting light. I avidly soaked in every scene, every moment, every word of dialogue, the whole time in a state of happy disbelief that the experience was happening at all. I've of course developed many detailed opinions about that first Star Trek movie - about its merits and flaws, about its worth both as a movie and as Star Trek. But this is SteveREADS, after all, not SteveSEES, and besides: I'm perfectly willing to admit that my acumen might be fogged over a bit when it comes to seeing this particular franchise on film.

 

That's where my blogging colleague Mr. Anderson comes in. As a special treat, I asked the devoted movie fan over at Hello Mr. Anderson to watch that first movie cold, as it were - to do his best to take it in free of the baggage any fan of the original series must inevitably bring to such a screening. He obliged, and some of his conclusions are bitter indeed for a from-the-beginning fan such as myself to read. I wish I could say the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture fared better - especially because, as noted, it functions as THE pivotal moment in the fiction of the show, the A-bomb, birth-of-Jesus thing that forever divides the sub-genre into 'before' and 'after.'

 

The novel was written in draft by our old friend Alan Dean Foster, with fine-tunings by Harold Livingston, and with a main-stage polish and oversight by none other than Gene Roddenberry himself. This is the only Star Trek novel in which Roddenberry is listed as an author (indeed, in most of the paperback's earliest printings, as the only author), and that fact underscored the thing's canonical status.

 

Before this novel (which is doltishly titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture - as if nobody anywhere along the line realized what a nonsensical title for a book that is), all of Star Trek fiction existed in what's known in quantum physics as a superposition. All of it, in all its manifold contradictions, might be 'real' - or none of it might be, or it might be both at the same time. The Romulan Commander, as we've seen, might have any number of fates or even names, poor Doctor M'Benga might be revealed as any number of dastardly villains, every supporting character from those first three TV seasons might be hauled into any novel, given any story arc the writer wanted, and still be fair game for the next writer to come along. In quantum physics, a particle is in superposition until some conjugating event happens to determine what it actually is - before that moment, it can be both a thing and its direct opposite (Schrodinger Cat being the most famous example), but after that moment, it IS - determined, uniform, and canon.

 

The canon of Star Trek fiction begins with Gene Roddenberry's novel, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In these 252 pages, the fictional universe of Star Trek changes in several radical ways, and it's Star Trek's creator doing the changes, so they're real, as it were.

 

They were also, when you stop and think about it, startlingly severe. Roddenberry made the unusual decision to have his comeback story reflect a real-time gap in the lives of his characters: the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture take place almost three years after the return of the Enterprise from her original five-year mission - so, somewhere around six or seven years after the last aired episode of the cancelled series. Our stalwart heroes are no longer young - even Chekhov is now a fully seasoned adult. The central crew of the Enterprise hasn't changed: Uhura is still at communications, Sulu is still at the helm, Chekhov has moved to the new weapons station ... but our 'big three' have undergone radical changes since last we 'saw' them: Kirk has accepted a staff job and a promotion to Admiral; Spock has resigned his commission and gone into monastic retreat on Vulcan in an effort to purge all human emotion from his mind; and McCoy has resigned his commission and gone into early retirement as some kind of bearded recluse.

 

Roddenberry and his co-writers weave their story so smoothly that the reader at first simply accepts all this as the story unfolds. But re-reading the book in 2011, I realized how deeply, unpardonably out of character all three of those changes are. James T. Kirk (it's in this novel that we're first 'officially' told that the 'T' stands for 'Tiberius' ... a factoid that wouldn't be confirmed on screen for five more movies) taking a desk job? Spock, after making such strides to accept and be accepted by his human shipmates, seeking to overhaul himself into an uber-Vulcan? McCoy, the ultimate man of healing, giving up on medicine to sit on his porch? In retrospect, these seem like fairly desperate contortions made in order to produce a classic getting-the-band-back-together plot.

 

That plot will be familiar to anybody who's seen the movie: a massive alien entity, Vejur, is headed straight for Earth, and the only starship in interception range is the newly refitted Enterprise under the command of young Captain Will Decker (unlike in the movie, in the book we learn that he's the son of Commodore Decker from the great TV episode "The Doomsday Machine"). Admiral Kirk, chaffing at his desk duties, learns of the menace and uses it as an opportunity to force Starfleet to give him back command of the Enterprise, which he commandeers over the resentful objections of the now-demoted First Officer Decker. The ship hurriedly makes preparation to leave Earth orbit, taking on a full crew - including a brought-out-of-retirement Dr. McCoy and a new navigator, Lieutenant Ilia. Meanwhile, the alien entity has for some unknown reason made telepathic contact with Mr. Spock, who hurries to join the Enterprise as it leaves to intercept Vejur.

 

For Kirk, being back in command of the Enterprise is the consummate homecoming, and Roddenberry is urgent to point that out:

 

Kirk eased himself down into the center seat. This place was officially his now and he left himself savor the first moment, pretending to survey the bridge stations. No that he expected anyone to be deceived - but he knew they would be tolerant of a moment like this. His eyes fell on Decker, whose eyes were fixed rigidly ahead, his expression taut. Kirk felt sympathy, then reminded himself that if they survived, Decker would still have his own moment like this. But for James Tiberius Kirk to sit here again was like Lazarus stepping out into the sunlight.

As the ship leaves the solar system, we get an odd little aside from Roddenberry, a reminder not only that 2001: A Space Odyssey had begun the modern era of sci-fi but also that the many books of ErichVon Daniken were still phenomenally popular when this novel was written:

 

The moon Io had held some shocks for the first Earth scientists to land there, although not nearly as shattering as the earlier discovery that Earth's own moon had once served as a base for space voyagers (their identity still a mystery) who had conducted genetic experiments with Earth's early life forms a million or more years before human history had begun.

The single most interesting thing about this novel is an innovation Roddenberry adopts early and then simply abandons: the book starts off as a transcript of the whole Vejur adventure as written up by Roddenberry at the behest of ... Admiral Kirk, who also pens a preface in which he complains about how exaggerated and distorted his adventures have been over the years. This very promising gambit is pursued a bit at the beginning of the novel, where footnotes often clarify the text, as when we're told that Spock thought of Kirk in terms of the Vulcan concept of closest friendship:

Editor's Note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t'hy'la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock's recollections (from which this chapter has drawn) is that it was was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t'hy'la can be used to mean lover, and since Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:

 

"I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years."

Readers are left to dream wistfully about how fascinating this novel would be if those footnotes had continued throughout, but alas, ether Roddenberry quickly tired of the idea or his co-writers considered it too much work: the footnotes peter out after less than fifty pages and make only the briefest, most perfunctory returns throughout the rest of the book.



The rest of the book could have used something fascinating. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (the book, not the movie) is a failure as a novel - it's boring, thinly imagined, and worst of all virtually lacking in the character interplay that shines in some of the best Star Trek ficiton we've encountered so far. The scenes in which a tormented Mr. Spock, still trying bitterly to retain his near-emotionless state, snubs his former friends and shipmates are well-enough done but could have been truly moving in better (or fewer?) hands. And as a certain (anonymous) reviewer sagely pointed out thirty years ago, Roddenberry's use of italics quickly slips out of his conscious control - whole passages toward the end of the book are italicized for no reason whatsoever, and the effect is extremely distracting.



The book isn't a total loss, however: there are classic Roddenberry moments scattered throughout, sharp little reminders that this entire series, this entire concept, originated in the invincible optimism of this one man:

Kirk felt a rush of sentiment for these men and women here who had seen death strike form that cloud and had still stayed. The "ordinary" and lovely blue-white planet below them deserved protection - it had bred a sturdy and decent race, certainly a courageous one. From the beginning of time, other groups like this had gone out, handfuls of puny humans standing together against the dark night, against saber-toothed killers, against the sea, and finally into space. The shape and face of the unknown had changed during all those eons, but there had been no change in human courage.

And artistically successful or not, Star Trek: The Motion Picture - both the book and the movie - were seismic in  their implications for the franchise. The movie made lots of money for the studio, which guaranteed sequels, and the book took all of the Star Trek fictions that had come before it - all that fan fiction, all those heartfelt novels - and plopped them firmly into the category of 'imaginary' stories, ex cathedra fantasies that never 'really' happened. This forlorn property, this little show that had been kept alive by fans when nobody else cared, was now a multi-million dollar corporate cash-machine. Suddenly there was a canon; suddenly there were corporate executives imposing standards. And one more element was introduced, something that seemed inconspicuous at the time but would go on to have the biggest, most unprecedented ramifications of all: for the first time ever, time had been introduced into an ongoing adventure series.

What would Star Trek fiction do, in the wake of all these changes? Well, at first it would do what it always did: just keep being dorky. We'll see a few choice examples, in our next chapter.

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!

[caption id="attachment_1567" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="forgive me - I couldn't resist"][/caption]

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.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: TV Logs!

My nice, neat plans for a rundown of Star Trek novels have once again been complicated by the Silent Majority! First they demanded that I backtrack and talk a little about all those fanzines I mentioned, the ones that started cropping up even while the original series was on the air. That forced me to relive some gruesome memories (it's just possible I was involved in the production of some of those fanzines), and it added not one iota of information about Star Trek novels – but I do as I'm bid, and those things did contain the first Star Trek fiction ever written outside the series itself, so there was at least the semblance of justification.

And if I couldn't resist the Silent Majority over something like that, how much less can I resist this new complication, this call that I give attention to the written versions of the episodes? After all, most people in the universe never saw any of those fanzines when they were being made (ah, the grandiose schemes we had, to increase readership! I declare, no matter what kind of publication you're involved with, everything always comes down to increasing readership) – whereas the twelve volumes of script-adaptations done by James Blish (and completed after his death by his wife Judith Lawrence) were the first genuine successes in the history of Star Trek publication. All of them became genre bestsellers, often out-selling their Asimovian competitors so handily that one New York publisher used to browbeat his stable of authors by yelling, “Jaysus Mary and Joseph, you're gettin' beat by a cancelled TV show here!”

Not quite any cancelled TV show, as its growing legions of fans were beginning to demonstrate even as early as 1969, when the last of the original episodes aired. They wanted more, and they were mostly bookish types in the first place – only natural that they would seize on any Star Trek books the instant they appeared. James Blish was tapped to write up the TV scripts (often he had nothing else to go on – no interviews, no film footage), and he did the first volume with his customary hack's reliability: it was on deadline and at length, and pretty much all it did was adapt seven scripts: “Balance of Terror,” “Charlie X” (originally called “Charlie's Law”), “The Conscience of the King,” “Dagger of the Mind,” “Man Trap” (originally called “The Unreal McCoy”), and “The Naked Time.”

Fans loved it – they bought that first paperback (with the cover that used the studio's original ad-poster, complete with Mr. Spock's green skin – a special effect that, mercifully, proved too expensive to do every week on TV) and kept buying it: it was the first screen-to-print adaptation to rack up any kind of sales numbers and one of the first science fiction paperbacks to pass the 100,000-copy mark in terms of sales. And Paramount Pictures listened – oh, they didn't listen well, mind you. If they'd listened well, they'd have hauled the cast and crew back into the studio, immediately begun filming Season 4, and then listened to all those book-buying fans and given the show a nice stable berth in the weekly schedule – Wednesdays at 9, say. If they'd listened that well, the original Star Trek might have gone on to seven or even ten seasons, and we'd all be living in an entirely different reality right now.

But the studio did listen well enough to tell Blish he had a steady job, and in due course more Star Trek volumes appeared – and they all sold instantly. In a little drugstore in small-town Iowa – the kind of shop where the paperback books were sold in one of those metal spinner-racks that squeaked really loud whenever you turned it – their copies of Star Trek 1, 2, & 3 sold so fast the clerk had to re-order not just the books themselves but the re-order forms! Since the scripts were studio property (despite some of them having been written by fairly well-known sci fi authors) and Blish was paid a standard flat-rate fee, these unassuming little books quickly began generating substantial profits.

Movie studios are inherently evil conglomerates, so Paramount mostly just gobbled up those profits. But they funnelled a bit of money back into the series that was generating it all: they prettied up the covers of the books. To this day, the covers of some of those first twelve Star Trek script-volumes stand as some of the most vibrant and evocative sci-fi covers of the era, often lurid and exotic in their lighting and viewing angles, as though exulting in their freedom from TV-budget restraints. These were as far from the dot-matrix photo-reproductions of those early fanzines as you could get: for the first time, fans could see the Star Trek they'd always imagined, the one that had always existed for them side-by-side with the plywood TV sets and the salt-shakers doing double-duty as futuristic medical scanners.

And Blish warmed to his task. He was still sticking to his original guidelines (roughly 30 pages per episode), but his descriptions became more detailed, and although he couldn't really deviate from the action or dialogue in the scripts, he more and more often – at the pleading of the fans who wrote him letters by the thousands – threw in little descriptive flourishes. They weren't much, but to starving fans, they were delightful. One example: in his adaptation of the great second-season episode “The Ultimate Computer” (the script was by the mighty Dorothy Fontana, with a technical assist from Laurence Wolfe), at the tense moment in which the Enterprise, helplessly controlled by the super-computer M-5, deviates from its course in order to hunt-and-destroy an old automated freighter (thereby revealing to a horrified Kirk & co. that the machine isn't fully under the control of its ersatz-wunderkind designer):

The Woden was an old, lumbering spaceship, clearly on her last enfeebled legs. As a threat, she was a joke to the galaxy. Moving slowly but gallantly in deference to the rejuvenating influences of automation, she was a brave old lady trying to function with steel pins in a broken hip.

OK, so it's not exactly Ursula LeGuin – the line, for instance, should clearly be “as a threat to the galaxy, she was a joke,” and that use of “deference” isn't quite right either – but for fans who'd had nothing, it was something, it was the investiture of an at least rudimentary level of narrative into the scripts they could so often recite from memory.

There were only just so many of those scripts, however, and eventually Blish and his wife ran out of them. A few years before that happened, however, Paramount, awakened at least to the possibility of making money off such titles, authorized Alan Dean Foster to novelize the scripts of the Star Trek half-hour animated series. Foster published Star Trek Log One in 1974, adapting three of those half-hour cartoons: “One of Our Planets is Missing,” “Beyond the Farthest Star,” and the bittersweet “Yesteryear” (the best of the animated episodes by a wide, wide margin – written by the aforementioned Dorothy Fontana). Despite the fact that the animated series was in general a pale and hokey sliver of the live-action series that preceded it, Star Trek Log One promptly sold a squintillion copies, and over the next four years, Foster wrote up adaptations of all the animated episodes. His adaptations never failed to improve on the originals, giving them character, depth, and continuity and working miracles with some very, very derivative stuff (more tribbles, more meetings with gods, more time-travel, etc).

And his adaptations quickly got longer than anything Blish had ever done. In Foster's early volumes, each 20-minute cartoon episode got roughly 70 pages of prose treatment, but by the time he was writing the final volumes, that ratio had expanded considerably - indeed, the entire lengths of Logs eight and nine are devoted to a single 20-minute episode apiece. Foster had the ravenous support of Star Trek fans everywhere for any and all license he needed to take in doing these herculean feats of gaseous expansion, and although he shared much in common with James Blish as a writer (in both cases, Paramount had wisely chosen to go with a good-enough and utterly reliable author instead of a great and flighty one), the difference in how he viewed the breadth of his brief was obvious from the first page of the first Log:

Veil of stars.

Veil of crystal.

On the small viewscreen the image of the Milky Way glittered like powdered sugar fused to black velvet.

Here in the privacy of the captains cabin on board the Enterprise, James T. Kirk had at fingertip's call all the computerized resources of an expanding, organized galactic Federation in taped and microfilmed form. Art, music, painting, sculpture, kinetology, science, history, philosophy – the memory banks of the great starship held enough material to satiate the mind of any civilized being. Satisfy and fulfill him whether in the mood for matter profound or trivial, fleeting or permanent, whether curious about the developments of yesterday or those as old as time itself.

Yet, now, in this particular off-hour, the man responsible for guiding the Enterprise safely through the multitude of known hazards and an infinitude of imagined ones that lay strewn throughout space – when he could have devoted his thoughts to little things of no importance and rested his mind – chose instead to study a smaller though no less awesome version of the same scene he was compelled to view so many times from the commander's chair on the bridge of the starship.

His eyes strayed idly to the lower corner of the screen. Gossamer thing threads of crimson and asure marked a spectacular nebula of recent origin – flaming headstone marking the grave of some long vanished star …

To put it mildly, that's certainly not James Blish penning those words. Fans ate it up, and by this point they had guaranteed the continuation of their own feeding in the only way that ever guarantees such things: they put their money where their mouth-breathing was. Paramount listened, and suddenly the path was smoothed for more Star Trek fiction. What would follow would be an almost mind-numbing profusion of titles and concepts, and these shall be our mission: to boldly read where no one single blog has read before!

One thing we won't be reading must surely count as the biggest money-making blunder the print division of any movie studio has ever made: there are no books of those original TV live-action episodes. Even now, fifty years later, those two final volumes of Alan Dean Foster's – the last two Logs in which a single TV episode apiece is fully dramatized in prose – represent the only time that innovation was allowed. Once the concept of Star Trek fiction had proven itself profitable, if Paramount had gone to the authors of those original live-action scripts and said, “Look, if you agree to write this up as a novel – throw in as much extra stuff as you want, these nutty fans love that kind of crap – we'll pay you the going rate and publish it,” they'd have gotten a long line of enthusiastic “yes”s. A line of such novels – perhaps with a cover-painting of some scene from the episode, perhaps the the actual script in an appendix – would have sold nicely. Hell, a much, much longer line of such novels (including all the TV-incarnations that have appeared since) would sell well even now. But as far as I know, it's never even been considered - and bare approximations have been tried only twice. “Do me a favor, Mr. Spock,” poor Dr. McCoy says at one point, “and don't call it fascinating.” But Spock would certainly have added: it is interesting.

Still, might-have-beens shall delay us no longer! Now that we've covered TV-adaptations, I trust I have everyone's permission to move on to novels at last? We'll begin with the small group of 'pre-canon' novels – in our next thrilling installment!

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Fanzines!

Response from the Silent Majority was surprisingly favorable for my new ongoing regular feature (I love regular features! I'm only allowed just so many over at Open Letters, my overlords there being reactionary tween tyrants, but here at Stevereads I can have has many as I like!) on the long, strange literary history of Star Trek. Apparently, most of you have watched the show in one incarnation or other over the decades, and several of you have loved it dearly.

Favorable, yet nit-picky! In my very first chapter of this feature, I looked at James Blish's Spock Must Die! - I used it as a kind of starting point, noting the slim pickings that came before it: a moronic kids book and a vast sea of fanzines. My implication was that those primordial beginnings weren't worth the time to examine in detail, but I reckoned without the x-factor of curiosity! This makes sense: virtually none of you will have been around and involved in the production and reading of those early fanzines, and the only other place to come across them is deep in the bowels of a Star Trek convention, which is not a place sane and healthy people go. Curiosity would naturally prompt you all to wonder what those fanzines were like, back at the very dawn of Star Trek itself.

They were mostly awful. I was there from the very beginning, I read most of them, I may even have participated in some of them (back when I was declasse enough to use pseudonyms), and I'm telling you: they were mostly awful. Labors of love, every one of them – and like all labors of love, ugly and ill-conceived. “Labor of Love” is a recognized euphemism for 'ugly and ill-conceived,' for Pete's sake!

Still, several of you wrote (privately, of course! Don't know what I'd even do if a lively debate erupted in, oh I don't know, the Comments field) expressing curiosity over this sub-layer of forest flooring you've missed all these years, so I'm pausing from my look at Star Trek BOOKS for a brief posting on the Star Trek fanzines that came before everything. This is where the very earliest Star Trek fiction was born – this is where it underwent its first mitosis from Star Trek, the show, itself. And like all infants, it was loud, ungainly, and prone to soil itself.



One thing some of you younger readers must understand: we did all this without technology, using the equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. There were no personal computers then, no scanners, no Internet. There were gigantic mimeograph machines, and there were typewriters (some of them which were electric, so if you paused to think you got a row of mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm's – and you couldn't just 'delete' – you had to start again on a new sheet of paper), and there were heavy metal telephones connected to cords that came out of the wall, and these were the only tools available to the earliest Star Trek fiction pioneers. So the results look primitive by today's standards. Fan homages now take the form of unbelievably sophisticated pastiches done on video. Are there any privately circulated print-fanzines anymore? I don't know.

Fifty years ago, they sprouted like toadstools. From the very first, Star Trek created in its fans an urgent desire not just to watch but to contribute. The show seemed to belong to us, rather than to some studio that only let us watch it. Fanzines were born of that urge, and they started appearing soon after the original series started airing. One of the earliest, something called “Spockanalia” (you were warned), was already several issues old before the original three-season run was done.



And even in the midst of that fabled run, fans were doing what fans do best: complaining. Even back in 1968, one issue of “Spockanalia” could feature the following wail of disappointment from its editors:

There's a new season starting. Please [it was addressed directly to Gene Roddenberry, who did indeed read it]. Bring back your original standards. Write us another “Menagerie” and let the “Omega” [a reference to the episode “The Omega Glory”] be past. If we fans have any voice in the creation of STAR TREK, then we say, “Keep it the way it was. That is what we want.”

It's one of the little ironies of the fanzines that although they were all animated by that same geek-anthem of “keep it the way it was,” they all featured Star Trek scenarios that Roddenberry would never have countenanced in any incarnation of his show. Main characters are usually only caricatures of themselves; dialogue is clumsy and blockish, torture and degradation are frequent and gratuitous, and illicit romantic relationships are everywhere (the main variation being a homosexual pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock – all because Roddenberry and his writers dared to show two grown men whose close friendship with each other actually meant something to each). At the same time the harried and hard-working editors of these fanzines were urging Roddenberry not to abandon his vision, they were publishing stories that threw that vision out the nearest airlock.

'Publishing' here is an extremely equivocal term. These things were hand-mimeographed, hand-stapled, hand-set, and hand-distributed. Some of the funky sci-fi bookshops in San Francisco and New York at the time might actually have one or two of them for sale, but they were novelty items only. You read one largely because you were in some way involved in producing one, otherwise you got one in the mail (late, and bent) if you paid your 75 cents postage.

And this provincial distribution reflected – and in many cases encouraged – a provincial tone in the contents. There were innumerable typos. There were execrable puns and in-jokes. There were inept doodles and insufferably earnest fan drawings. There were limericks. If somebody's sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend's brother so much as breathed on the galley sheets, he was solemnly thanked in the credits. Reading through one of those early fanzines was like having a lump of raw faith in your hands. Potent, but sloppy.

Potent, sloppy, and, as mentioned, mostly awful. Paragraphs like this one abound:

The U.S.S. Enterprise, an unbelievably massive and graceful island of life, appeared first as a small shape of credible proportions, then as a gigantic array of metal, lights, and plastics gleaming in the glare of a crimson sun. From that moment on, I became a part of the vessel's life. And, along with the regular personnel of the Enterprise, I became fascinated with one phase of Starship life in particular … a Vulcan-Terran humanoid known as Spock Xtmprsquzntwlfb. Mr. Spock (as he is referred to by his ship-mates …) is the logic-minded science-officer. Aboard the Enterprise he is second-in-command. Within Starfleet, he holds the rank of “Commander.”

(In the interests of painful accuracy, not one hyphen, capitalization, or quotation-mark of the above has been altered)

The 'phase' in question here, the character of Mr. Spock, is a perennial object of, well, fascination in the fanzines – as indeed he was on the original show. Fans seized on every conceivable detail of the character, from his green blood to his enhanced physical strength to his race's odd mating habits, even to the fact that in the episode “This Side of Paradise” he tells Leila Kalomi that she “couldn't pronounce” his real name – hence the alphabet-soup stand-in that fans (encouraged, it should be noted, by Roddenberry) concocted to serve as his 'last name' (fans concentrated so much on creating a last name made of English language letters in such a sequence as to be unsayable that they overlooked the far more explosive implication of the original question and answer: that Spock itself is simply a nonsense-word, that when this character's at home he's actually called something else entirely). The emphasis gets tiresome very quickly, but readers looking for a little relief will be sorry when they find it – characterizations of everybody else are ever so much worse. Kirk is the golden jock every nerd and geek (hence, every Star Trek fan) loves to hate in these earliest stories, and Dr. McCoy is most often portrayed as a ranting drunk. The secondary characters are almost always delineated by how similar/dissimilar they are to Mr. Spock, or else how deeply they lust after him (in the fanzines, as in all later Star Trek fiction, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is the least explored character of all – later on in this regular feature, when we get to Character Dossiers, we'll examine reasons for that).

The miracle of Star Trek is this: when the show was canceled, the fanzines didn't limp along and die out the way they would have with any other show. They kept going. They flourished. In the barren years between the last aired episode of the original series and the appearance of roughly regularized Star Trek novels, the fanzines were the lifeline through which Star Trek survived in print (meanwhile, an innovative and largely unprecedented deployment of network reruns of the original series was keeping the visuals alive and making new fans all over the Western hemisphere).

Even as the 'technology' of producing that lifeline improved (better mimeograph machines, better binding, even clunky, primitive dot-matrix printers), the lifeline itself was still mostly awful. Relatively successful later fanzines like “It Takes Time on Impulse” were still self-confessedly amateur productions (a poem at the beginning of one issue reads: “red's running out of ribbon/and I'm running out of words./red's going to be repaired/and I'm going to bed./typos there are,/apologies there aren't”)(“red” being a typewriter – we named our machines, back in 1985) full of clumsy, largely deplorable fiction and nonfiction. But these later fanzines had one key difference: they were all animated by hope. By that point, every Star Trek fan was feeling the first flickers of that hope – that somehow, in some way, their beloved show would return.

There were, against all odds, some good stories in those early fanzines (including a couple that became legends, like “Visit to a Strange Planet,” in which a transporter accident – that again! - lands the real Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on the set of Roddenberry's TV show – a story that spawned an entertaining sequel, as we'll see), and some good writers (Juanita Coulson deserves special mention for consistently hitting a level of professionalism – on the page and in the 'back room' – that so often eluded her colleagues) managed to show up amidst the dregs, but by and large there is no reason to return to the fanzines yellowing in attics or preserved in Mylar bags at conventions, any more than even the fondest yearning for the innocence of childhood would make strained beets appealing to an adult. But the fanzines are worth contemplating, mainly because they're remnants of a world that no longer exists, a world that will never exist again (now that the various entertainment conglomerates have learned that there's money in that there franchise): a world without Star Trek.

We have regular novels now, and we just had a very successful movie relaunch of the whole concept (a relaunch that's been curiously shy about kicking off its own line of books – another thing we'll examine in due time), and we have Fanfiction.net to handle the continuously swelling tide of fan writings that were once the sole province of fanzines. The ratio of crap to quality hasn't changed (the great science fiction writer Ted Sturgeon hinted that it was a physical constant, like absolute zero) – you still have to sift through a huge mountain of poorly written garbage to find the one or two gems worth reading. But at least you get to keep your 75 cents.

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Spock Must Die!

From its publication date of 1970, you’d think Spock Must Die! by James Blish must certainly be the first original Star Trek novel. It’s true that Blish himself had been adapting the individual episode scripts into short stories for a year at that time, but the show itself had only just been cancelled by an indifferent parent company, which hardly left the time or inclination for a Star Trek novel.

You’d be wrong on a couple of technicalities. A different licensing arm of that indifferent parent company had commissioned the release of a hardcover kids book called Mission to Horatius – it was called a Star Trek novel, and for that reason it would technically qualify as the first, but the physical description of the ship, the characters, the general fabric of known science … all of it was entirely generic throughout. It’s clearly a prefab space-opera scenario onto which some thankless, faceless Hasbro flunky hastily pasted on the specific brand-names of this obscure TV show. I suppose all beginnings are inauspicious, and perhaps I’m reacting naturally when I want to disavow Mission to Horatius as the first Star Trek novel (although, as we'll see, it was hardly the last cut-and-paste job in the series' publication history).

And if that’s the case, how much more must it apply to all the various Star Trek novels written but not professionally published prior to 1970? I refer to ‘fan fiction,’ of course, which by that point was already operating at a strong pitch. The novels it produced, however, though better versed in Star Trek specifics (indeed, often way, way too versed), were usually documents displaying deeply unbalanced psychological pathologies (and to those of you who say that applies to all science fiction, I say kroyka!). Again: unacceptably inauspicious.

No, in true Star Trek form, we’ll just have to settle for a couple of alternate beginnings to things. We’ll call James Blish’s book the first non-continuity Star Trek novel, and we’ll deal with an entirely different first book when we get to carefully numbered, continuity-safeguarded, corporate-overseen Star Trek novels.

First, we have the precursors, the trailblazers in the Wild West of Star Trek novels – and the first of those is Spock Must Die!

As you might be able to guess form the lurid title, it’s a deeply imperfect book – almost as inauspicious a start as all those Spock-whips-Kirk-unconscious-then-nurses-him-back-to-health weirdo fan fictions of the late ‘60s. The story opens with the Enterprise on standard cruising exercises ‘not far’ from the Klingon Empire but still enjoying the peace treaty imposed by the super energy-beings from the planet Organia (as seen in the episode “Errand of Mercy,” which introduced the Klingon commander Kor, played by veteran character actor John Collicos). It’s a peaceful interlude, during which Captain Kirk joins in a discussion between Commander Scott and Dr. McCoy (who’s called ‘Doc’ rather than ‘Bones’ throughout the entire book, revealing a little-known fact about pioneering fan favorite Blish: he never actually watched the show) about how the ship’s transporters are actually death-chambers, since they have to annihilate a person’s original body in order to reconstitute it elsewhere. But since the reconstitution is instantaneous and molecule-perfect, Scotty can’t see the problem. As he puts it, referencing Mr. Spock, “a difference which makes no difference is no difference.”

McCoy, predictably, believes otherwise, and Kirk remains wisely uncommitted. But soon it’s everybody’s problem, when a transporter malfunction (where would plots be without those?) duplicates Mr. Spock. Suddenly, Kirk and the rest of the crew must deal with the moral and philosophical (as well as ship security) problems of having two identical Spocks, each claiming he’s the real one. The crisis is only heightened by a subplot involving a major disruption in the Organian Peace Treaty and the warlike return of some of the show’s best known Klingon bad guys.

The writing is competent enough (Blish was an old-school hack in the best sense of the word, never late with a deadline, never great, never unprintably awful – the periodic attempts to reappraise his writing at the level of artistry, usually by citing his novel A Case of Conscience as some kind of lost sci-fi masterpiece, are so misguided he himself would have chuckled at them); the book’s imperfections spring mainly from its unintended resemblances to Mission to Horatius. The problem here is that this is only nominally Star Trek: there are no physical descriptions of the characters, barely any character descriptions, and none of the interplay of character personalities that made the show special in the first place. Kirk is just Starship Captain X, Spock is just Victim of Anomaly X (the veneer of ‘logic’ Blish gives him is actually just a liscense to cut him out of cardboard and leave him that way), and poor ‘Doc’ is just a nameless, faceless exposition machine:

As a replicate, and a mirror image, he [one of the duplicated Spocks] was left-handed, just as we had guessed, but he was suppressing it, as we had also guessed. Now, Jim, handedness is the major physical expression of which hemisphere of man’s brain is the dominant one, the one chiefly in charge of his actions. It’s a transverse relationship; if the left hemisphere of your brain is dominant, as is usually the case, you will be right-handed – and vice versa. And so, Jim, the retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed – in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles – badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and among other bad outcomes, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering. You thought Spock One was stuttering from emotion or confusion, and that puzzled you. And well it might have. But in fact, he was stuttering because he was countertfeiting not being a mirror image, and hadn’t gotten all his reflexes for the impersonation established yet.

Sounds just like Bones, doesn’t it?

No, Blish’s intentions were undoubtedly good, but he, um, badly bollixed up his core characterizations (at one point Lieutenant Uhura hopes – aloud, on the bridge – that a new duty officer will be “cute”), and the core characterizations were the heart and soul of what differentiated Star Trek – and by extension Star Trek novels – from cookie-cutter pop sci-fi like Mission to Horatius.

Spock Must Die! did some things right – it was competent science fiction, for starters, playing some interesting speculation with some interesting ideas. And it was respectful to the original series, making plentiful references to pertinent episodes (the references came not only in the text itself but also as footnotes, the first time any popular TV series had prompted such textual respect … as we’ll see, Star Trek footnotes form an interesting little footnote in our ongoing history of the Star Trek novel). But it was the equivalent of that first Wright Brothers flight at Kill Devil Hills: sketchy, inexpert, and really, really short. A first trickle only – of a deluge the volume of which James Blish couldn’t have guessed in his darkest nightmares. We’ll continue to delve that deluge in our next thrilling chapter!

Comics! Star Trek!

IDW recently slipped something in under the radar (well, they might have been crowing it from the rooftops for all I know, but it sure as Hell slipped under my radar) that evoked two different kinds of nostalgia. The item in question is the first issue of a Star Trek series called “Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor,” and the first kind of nostalgia is the sweet kind, because the series is written and drawn by none other than John Byrne, and there was a time –it doesn’t feel all that long ago – when something, anything, written or drawn (to say nothing of both) by Byrne couldn’t have slipped under the radar of anybody even distantly connected with the world of comics. Byrne shot to stardom with his artwork on X-Men, made the cover of Time magazine with a drawing of Superman, and has been a fan favorite in the comics world for thirty years. Finding his latest work in an unheralded project by a company I’ve never heard of – well, it gave me pause (although again, IDW might be well known and just new to me, although the clerk at the Android’s Dungeon – Ho-Ho’s belly, too-tight black T-shirt, scraggly hair, you know the guy – made it sound like any actual Quality you find in an IDW title would be purely accidental in origin).

The second kind of nostalgia was bittersweet, because even a glimpse at the inside of the first issue is enough to tell any Star Trek fan the setting of the thing: the famous gap in the show’s continuity, the uncharted (officially, at least) span of time between the end of the 1960s TV series and the opening of Star Trek – The Motion Picture. When our original cast went off the air, they were still in space, boldly going where no man had gone before; when the much-maligned franchise-relaunching movie opens, Kirk is an admiral, Spock has gone back to Vulcan, and the Enterprise has been in refitting mothballs for months. I remember the little shock I felt, watching that movie in the theaters, thinking, our crew broke up.

This series opens with a shot of Admiral Kirk at his desk at Starfleet Headquarters – he’s got the Shatner pompadour of the period, the pajama-style uniform, the works. And he’s telling an assistant that overseeing the refit of “his old ship” has got him feeling nostalgic. Star Trek fans can instantly share that nostalgia (and instantly become annoyed with Byrne’s typically sloppy storytelling – Admiral Kirk obviously didn’t oversee Enterprise’s refit, since when he takes over in the movie’s emergency, he knows nothing of how the ship works), because this version of Star Trek was loudly and successfully supplanted in the movie theaters last summer. We don’t know yet if the new Jim Kirk will ever become an admiral – his history has yet to be written.

Those same fans have to wonder if it’s ever going to be written. The 2009 Star Trek movie launched to much fanfare and was more or less positively reviewed everywhere, and it did well at the box office. And yet there’s no sequel planned until 2012 (three years to make a sequel? Half the new cast will have od’d by then), and in the meantime there’ve been no novels set in the new continuity, no short stories (excepting the roughly one trillion ongoing soft-core porn fan fictions involving Spock and Uhura) – only a skimpy comic book adaptation of the movie (also by IDW) … nothing to keep this new vision alive. That’s not how we did things with my Star Trek (if it had been, there would never have been an original movie, let alone all the rest of this).

That new vision isn’t kept alive by “Leonard McCoy: Frontier Doctor” either … an old vision is. This is John Byrne’s take on some of what transpired during that famous gap between the original series and the first movie – this is his version of what Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy was doing in the missing years.

Fans will recall his  scene-stealing appearance in the first movie, bearded (and sporting a kick-ass ‘70s medallion), grousing about the little-known ‘reserve activation clause’ Star Fleet used to ‘draft’ him back into service. This series takes place well before that moment – the beard is still in full force. McCoy has written an old-fashioned letter to his friend Jim Kirk, telling of his adventures with the Federation’s Frontier Medics program, and the story opens as McCoy is accepting the thanks of grateful Andorian colony-leaders for his help in delivering a baby (we’re left to presume there’s a lot more to why the Federation’s greatest medical mind would be needed for that instead of Hattie McDaniel – again, you’re wasting your time if you’re reading Byrne for the words). He and his assistant are on their way to their next assignment when two things happen: they discover they have a stowaway in the person of a feisty teen Andorian girl named Theela, and they receive an emergency summons to the planet Ophiucus III.

Turns out the surface of Ophiucus III is almost totally covered in an endless variety of planet life – the planet has no animal life, but it does have seed-pods that take wing like birds, and giant roots that migrate during the dry season. And it has one thing more: a deadly infection that’s spreading among the human inhabitants. The planet’s livestock are unaffected, as is Theela, who’s eventually pressed into service by an ailing McCoy to implement an antidote that’s long on convenience and short on plausibility. The issue wraps up neatly, and more issues are coming.

It’s not all that effective as Star Trek, but it took me a little bit to realize some of the strengths on display here, most especially in John Byrne’s artwork. True, he shows throughout a weird decision to make McCoy look like an elderly Chinese man, but his lines are clean and neat (his 23rd century nighttime cityscapes are quietly evocative in a way I like more each time I look at them) and relaxed – and that last one is the key: in this series, Byrne is completely freed from the typical comic book convention of bulging muscles and chiseled physiques – and despite the fact that Byrne made his entire reputation off those physiques, this style suits him infinitely better.



Having Kirk in the story’s framing device is a nice touch (nice and necessary, since it’s hard to picture McCoy having any kind of contact with anybody else from the old crew, especially Spock), and it raises a question I’m hoping (against hope, admittedly) Byrne isn’t too lazy to pursue. In Star Trek – The Motion Picture, Kirk quips “For a man who swore he’d never return to Star Fleet…” - But the McCoy of this series seems to bear no such animus. Let’s hope the coming stories angle closer to the interpersonal and away from the ‘one medical mystery per planet’ formula that’s enacted here.

And while we’re planning pipe-dreams, how about signing Byrne up to use this new, relaxed, dynamic drawing style to chronicle lots and lots more Star Trek adventures? With a couple of Trekkies looking over his prose for howlers, of course …