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: 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!