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 Dinner Bell!

After the reckless abandon of the fanzines, just after the first flush of professionally-published fan fiction, the world of Star Trek fiction reverberated with a sound previously unheard in connection with any other adult science fiction TV show: the sound of the dinner bell. This sound is typically heard when a gap opens up between demand and supply, and it's almost always gonged by executive types who don't care much about how they supply that demand. To those executives, a gap between demand and supply means money - either being made or being lost. There is a large and active class of human beings that is urgently concerned with the making and losing of money, and that class always busies itself with the gap between demand and supply, be it for cars, Coldplay CDs, or 'reality' TV shows. It's through the ceaseless activities of this class of people that crap first entered the world seven thousand years ago and continues to fill it. So it is with parking garages, Will Ferrell movies, and, alas, a vast number of books - including Star Trek books.

The reason for this is of course lack of passion, and the reason it becomes an issue is simple: when executive types concerned with filling the gap between demand and supply ring the dinner bell, the first people to respond are the hacks. Almost by definition, a hack writer is someone for whom a writing assignment is a matter of pages not passion, word count not wonder, deadlines not destiny. Hacks may not live to write but they certainly make their living from writing - the lounge like sharks through the empty seas and come to full, hurrying life the instant their always-searching senses detect the erratic twitchings of a job. The nature of the job is secondary to a whole host of things: is it possible in the time allotted? Can it be done or faked without undue effort? And above all, what does it pay? If these things all check out OK, the hack will take the job - and only then will inquire what it is.

In the late 1970s, after Paramount and Bantam woke up to the fact that if they printed a Star Trek novel at $2.95 a copy it would routinely sell 300,000 copies (often more, and always quickly), they rang the dinner bell. In a financial sense, they had to - all they had on tap to fill that suddenly-perceived gap were a few manuscripts lovingly crafted by fanatics show-followers, and loving craft is time-consuming. Books were needed right away, to fill the creaking metal spinner-racks that constituted the whole sci-fi section of most American bookstores at the time.

It wasn't only Star Trek, naturally. Tie-in novels were booming, and the waters were positively frenzied with hacks. The Hardy Boys, K.N.I.G.H.T. Rider, The Man from Atlantis, (pre-cool) Battlestar Galactica, The Partridge Family, C.H.I.P.S. - all were spawning books in which familiar character-names were moved around in new "adventures" for an audience who wanted more than they'd received through the medium of TV. Every one of those books had to be written, and since it was too much to expect anybody to want to write them (it was only enough for the studios to expect people to want to read them), hacks were needed - and they answered the call, adopted pseudonyms, churned out prose, and so made their rent payments, bought their swimming pools, gave money to friends, and paid their beagles' medical bills. It's true that the field of literature was not elevated by their endeavors - but nobody got hurt, and the publishers' checks didn't bounce.

So it was with Star Trek novels in the late '70s. The dinner bell was sounded, and the books came pouring off the presses. Perhaps it's helpful to clarify here that I'm not always and only using the term 'hack' in a pejorative sense. I'm especially not using it to connote shoddy writing. When it comes to the actual mechanics of fluency, hacks are almost always not only competent but proficient - their sentences are smooth, their constructions hold up, and their dialogue is usually snappy. They are the prose professionals; while other, more heartfelt souls are torturing their sentences into brilliance over months or even Gold help us years, hacks are producing reams of writing that isn't brilliant but isn't bad. But a thing need not be technically bad to be crap - all that's really necessary to produce crap is to lack any passion for what you're doing. Andy Warhol, Sidney Lumet, Jonathan Franzen - the list of people who aren't technically bad yet produce crap is almost endless. The sad fact is, consumption doesn't usually wait on craft, or the world would have far less of practically everything man-made, and all of it would be much better.

In any case, none of this can be blamed on the hacks. They swarm in and take the writing jobs because those jobs pay, not for any other reason. In the late 1970s, there were suddenly paying jobs writing Star Trek novels (a state of affairs that would have seemed a madcap dream only a few years previous), and the work was fairly easy. The studio had a readily available 'book' on the factual scaffolding of the show (Dr. McCoy has an ex-wife, not a wife; Lieutenant Sulu is Japanese, not Chinese, etc.), and besides, by then almost everybody had seen the re-runs. What fans wanted seemed simple: more Star Trek adventures. Hacks set to work.

The resulting novels are the earliest canon of genuinely professional Star Trek novels, but they aren't the heart of that canon. In books such as Stephen Goldin's Trek to Madworld, Gordon Eklund's Devil's World and The Starless World, Jack Haldeman's Perry's Planet, or Joe Haldeman's Planet of Judgment and World Without End - this list is about a dozen books long - the general rout of readers got what it seemed to want: more adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise ("No bloody A, B, C, or D"). Hack writers took fifteen minutes to come up with a tentpole gimmick - what if stars were sentient? what if the Enterprise encountered magic? what if Spock were trapped on a hostile world with a woman who hates Vulcans? - and plugged in cufflink characterizations (Kirk = heroic, McCoy = dour, Spock = exposition, etc.), shook vigorously, and rapped out the requisite 50,000 words. Trust me when I tell you: if you switch off the part of your brain that believes in its subject, the work isn't difficult. 5 solid pages a day gets it done in a little more than a month, and the publisher's check goes a long way.

The problem was that Star Trek was built on passion. Not just a drive to broadcast a show every week (even the producers of B.J. and the Bear had that), but passion about what the show stood for, what it dreamed. It would be impossible to tell the difference between a good Space:1999 novel and a bad one, for the simple reason that such a higher passion had never touched the show at any point - either in the broadcasting or in the knock-off novels - and without that passion, kitsch is indistinguishable from craft. But for some fans, it most certainly was possible to tell the difference between a good Star Trek novel and a bad one. The key was passion, and the give-away was how that passion animated the characters at the heart of the show. The Voight-Kampff test of Star Trek fiction has always been, ironically enough, whether or not the characters seem real.

This is an intangible test, and so hacks were doomed to fail it. A few minutes cogitation can give you a gimmick you can run through the whole of a quick book - Hey, past a certain point technology looks like sorcery, doesn't it? or Hey, what if gravity just stopped working? - but as The Velveteen Rabbit taught us many years ago, you have to believe in something to make it real. In every one of these dozen or so early novels (all of which we fans eagerly devoured and re-read, all of which sold far, far in excess of all other sci-fi novels published in the same months), there are familiar character names but no characterization, dialogue tics but no real exchanges, lots of stuff happening but no drama. In virtually every one of these books, you could extract the Star Trek elements and substitute Space Cruiser Yamato elements without disturbing things at all - stars would still be sentient, gravity would still be wonky, etc. They were consumed because their recipients were starving, and for that same reason many of them were fondly remembered even once those recipients had all the sustenance they could want (when you've been hiking for two weeks on one bitter apple and a few swallows of water a day, you remember forever the first big meal you had when it was over, no matter how terrible that meal was).

Very often, once hacks swarm in and blanket an area, they blight it or nearly do. The real question at this point in the course of Star Trek fiction was: now that the studio and the word-churners were involved, would there be no more genuine, passionate Star Trek fiction? As befits this particular show, the answer turned out to be surprisingly hopeful - as we'll see next time!

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!