(C) indicates Criterion

(B) indicates Blu Ray

(C) Seven Samurai, Directed by Akira (Stray Dog) Kurosawa,

and starring Toshirô Mifune

Samurai 7 (the Anime)

(C) Charade, Starring Cary (Walk Don’t Run) Grant,

and Audrey (My Fair Lady) Hepburn

Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels

Directed by Guy (Sherlock Holmes) Ritchie,

and starring Jason (The Transporter) Stathem

Luther

Starring, Alfred (Spider-Man 2) Molina,

and Sir Peter (We’re No Angels) Ustinov

(B) Star Trek

Directed by J.J. (“Lost”) Abrams

and starring Chris (Smokin’ Aces) Pine.

What with Black Friday coming up and Barnes and Noble having their first ever black Friday sale many more will be added and soon.

J.S. Wolfwood

This is Wolfwood and you are in the Pantry

on Blu Ray this week

Monsters, Inc. Starring John (Speed Racer) Goodman, and Billy (City Slickers) Crystal.

Up.  Starring Ed (Elf) Asner, and Christopher (Twelve Monkeys) Plummer

And on DVD

Undercover Brother. Starring Eddie (John Q) Griffin and

Chi (“Pushing Daisies”) McBride.

Next week Star Trek and who knows what else will become part of the pantry.

P.S. for those of you who care the Blu Ray releases of Snatch, and Léon

are coming this year.

Until later J.S.Wolfwood

Check out that cover blurb: “THE ULTRA-POWERED NOVEL OF A TELEPATHIC SPACE TERROR,” eh?

I’ll be the judge of that, Mr. Bantam blurb dude from the mid-’70s.

I’d delete the words “the,” “ultra,” “powered,” “a,” “telepathic,” and “terror.”  Except that would leave “NOVEL OF SPACE,” and since this novel takes place almost entirely on a planet, that wouldn’t be very accurate, either.

Oh, well.

The story has to do with the Enterprise crew exploring the planet Kyros.  In order to help not violate the Prime Directive, the landing party members have been imprinted with “doppelgangers,” or “dops” for short, consisting of the memories and personalities of Kyrosians.  By drawing on these “dops,” the crew can successfully integrate into the society for up-close sociological study.  Then, of course, something goes wrong; Spock, presumably under the influence of his dop, goes nuts and forms a religion.  Chaos ensues.

I probably shouldn’t, but I like this novel.

For one thing, there’s sex, which the Trek shows never had much of, really, not without huge layers of metaphor being slathered on top of everything: ‘60s television was too restrictive, and the ‘80s weren’t much better; by the time they got around to finally having a bit in the ‘90s and ‘00s, they were late to the party.  However, in this novel, sex is a definite motivator for at least some of the characters.  As such, this novel presents yet another alternative look at what Star Trek is and can be, and is therefore of interest.

The dwonside is that this novel might fairly be called not only sexual, but sexist.  There are far-too-frequent mentions of the “pert little bottom” of Ensign Sara George (a new character), and other such phrases.  I think Cogswell and Spano only meant to present to us a strong woman, who was charting a course toward discovering and enabling her own sexuality, and chose to do so by sexualizing her character through fairly explicit descriptions … but the approach would have probably been seen, at best, as a failure even in 1976.  In 2009, it’s downright offensive.

Uhura’s treatment, unfortunately, is even worse.  Barely present in the novel, she is described as “black” several times.  Once would have sufficed; even that many, though, seems excessive.  That sort of language was accepted then and still is now, and there’s nothing more wrong with referring to a person as “black” than there is with referring to a person as “white.”  The problem here is that it doesn’t fit with established Star Trek conventions.

And here we run into a problem: the process of turning a visual story (Star Trek) into a non-visual story (the novel) is tricky business even in the hands of expert prose stylists, and these two fellows were apparently no experts.  On the television series circa 1968, it was obviously a big deal that Uhura is black, Scotty Scottish, Sulu Asian, Chekov Russian, etc.  But the characters never mention it.  It’s not a big deal to them, it’s only a big deal to us (the “us” in this instance being late-’60s audiences); it’s not only not a big deal to the characters, it’s not any kind of a deal, but is merely a fact, no more notable than any other.

Well, in order for that to translate to the page, it’s impossible to do things like refer to Uhura as “black,” or write Scotty’s dialogue in dialect (another of this book’s sins, though it was neither the first nor the last to commit it).  It’s out of continuity with the series, and you feel it.  And yet, there is also the need to try and somehow convey that information, lest readers not be privy to all the pertinent facts about the characters.  Such matters must be dealt with delicately, and referring to the “black” Uhura on multiple occasions is about as delicate as a cement truck.

I’m of a divided mind about the novel’s plot.  The dops are an interesting conceit, but I’m not sure they’re plausible; I’m okay with them science-fictionally speaking, but don’t they seem like a severe invasion of privacy?  Would Starfleet sanction that type of tech?  Would it be put into the field without exhaustive testing?  Would Kirk really let Ensign George off the hook for what she does as easily as he does?  I think the answer to all of those questions is “no,” and that presents a severe setback to how well this novel integrates itself into the Trek universe.

Additionally, since it turns out that Spock was never really the villain, the whole novel feels like something of a cheat.  And yet . . . I like it.  I like how Kirk and McCoy accept George’s new (and substantial) sexuality with only a hint of salaciousness; I like the tension of the race to recapture the trilithium, even though it is sort of obvious and manipulative; I like the camaraderie between Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Chekov, and George; I like the espionage-esque elements.

I don’t like the religious elements.  The aliens aren’t quite well-drawn enough for us to get a true sense of their culture, and therefore the religion doesn’t feel natural.  It’s not terrible writing; the authors sort of get away with it.  And ultimately, the religious themes fit in well with the Trek S.O.P. of demystifying religion at nearly every turn.

Not great, but not bad either . . . and definitely interesting.

Honk’s rating: 3/5 spuds

In case you’re too lazy, here’s the short version: for an episode of its next season, Mythbusters is going to be re-constructing Captain Kirk’s makeshift anti-Gorn artillery cannon from “Arena” to find out if it will actually work.

Now, this is cool and everything, but hey, Mythbusters, let me give you some pause: even if you can’t get it to work, you ain’t provin nothin’ to nobody.  You don’t have access to the materials the Metrons were willing to provide for Kirk’s and the Gorn’s use.  So how can you positively say it wouldn’t work?  Huh?  Huh?  Huh?

Yeah, that’s what I thought, son.

The story deals with the station having to cease activity with the wormhole due to technobabble, and also having to deal with a serial killer who has set up shop on the station and is claiming victims with no apparent rhyme or reason.  All of this leads to Odo discovering a link — pun intended — to his mysterious past.

This novel was written by David with nothing but several screenplays for the first season of DS9 to go on, and it shows, as the end result in many ways bears no resemblance to the series as we know it today.

However, as with Diane Carey’s Star Trek – The Next Generation: Ghost Ship and (to a lesser extent) Smith/Rusch’s Star Trek – Voyager: The Escape, this is an enjoyable novel that offers a tantalizing look at some of the directions the series could have taken, but ultimately didn’t.

Points of interest:

*  The shape-shifting serial-killer-for-hire . . . is he a member of the same Changeling species as Odo?  It’s somewhat surprising that Paramount would have even allowed David to get close to this subject so early on in the show’s history, since Odo’s origins were presented initially as such a mystery … one, presumably, that would either never be solved or would become an integral plot point for the series.  Either way, David is seriously stepping on the show’s toes here.  And that’s kinda cool, from a history-of-Trek standpoint.

*  Miles and Keiko are having some fairly serious marital discord thanks to the relocation to the station, a plot thread that runs throughout the series.  It’s definitely presented in at least one early episode, and since Keiko spends the vast majority of the series off-station, this does not seem to be a rosy union.  David does a solid job of showing us what’s going on in Keiko’s mind, an always-welcome example of what to do with prose.

*  David is right on the money with his depiction of Sisko.  Presumably, he’d have been given a copy of the series bible, which would have had a more detailed description of Sisko than of any other character, but it’s still admirable that David nailed the character with so little of the series to go on.  Throughout most of the novel, I could practically hear Avery Brooks speaking.  Jake is well-drawn also.

*  Dax, on the other hand, is almost unrecognizable.  Granted, she (along with Bashir) changed a great deal as the series went on, so this is not at all David’s fault.

*  Religion, which would be a very important element of the series, is one of the primary concerns of this novel, as well.  Similarly, Quark’s connivery takes a very prominent role.

*  The killings are gory enough to make Stephen King proud, if not quite envious.  In some ways, this seems antithetical to the Trek tone . . . but a novel has free reign to be R-rated, whereas a TV show does not, and I appreciate the occasional effort to remind us that death can be (and sometimes is) a very messy thing.

*  I’m a bit less comfortable – though, again, this is chalk-uppable to the novel’s early delivery – with how dynamic Odo’s shape-shifting abilities seem.  After all, he has plenty of occasions on the series to do this sort of thing, and rarely does; I can accept that on the series, because I understand it’s due to budgetary constraint, but when I read it in a novel, it just makes the series seem cheap.  And that’s kind of a shame.  Then again, introducing a high-budget character onto a medium-budget show was probably not a great idea in the first place.

All in all, this is another moderately entertaining example of something that amounts almost to an alternate-universe version of a Trek series.  You will either roll with that and have a decent time, or you’ll be too distracted by the differences between novel and series to get much out of it.

Honk’s rating:  3/5 spuds

For starters, if you are curious about New Frontier and its new crew and ship (the Excalibur, and yes, this was before “A Call to Arms” and Crusade over in the Babylonverse), then you should check out this Wikipedia page, because I’m not going to be providing much in the way of plot summary.  Instead, I’m going to just get my knives out and go to work.

Book One: House of Cards

House of Cards is sporadically engaging, but was apparently proofread and/or edited by meth addicts … and we’re not even talking meth addicts on Jesse Pinkman’s level; no, we’re talking more like Skinny Pete.  As such, this “pilot” novel gets the job of piquing the Trekkie’s interest done, but not by much.

The problem is that — like the vast majority of tie-ins — House of Cards is nothing more than pulp fiction.  It’s the prose equivalent of a b-movie, or of one of those movies you’d see on the Sci-Fi Channel on a Saturday night.  It’s been dropped into the world simply to milk a few bucks out of the type of people who are undiscriminating enough in their tastes to feel like this sort of thing is worth dropping a few bucks on.  Since I’m one of those people, I feel like I can make that assessment without feeling I’d been overly derogatory about it.  And speaking from my own experience, I’d say that the reason people seek out this type of fiction is because they are fans either of the specific brand (Star Trek) or genre (science fiction) in question; same goes for b-level film projects, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t get fooled into thinking zirconium is better than diamonds.  On that level, I will generally find myself enjoying tie-in novels, and heck, every now and then one of them manages to be legitimately good.

The problem is, House of Cards (and the other three of the first four New Frontier novels, which are really just one story) is serving as a pilot for a new Star Trek series, and I think Trekkies expect more from a series pilot.  Okay, sure, I suppose you could argue that “Encounter at Farpoint,” “Emissary,” “Caretaker,” and “Broken Bow” are the television equivalent of b-movies … but you’d get an eat-shit look from me if you made that claim.

Judged against those four pilots, New Frontier is lacking on every possible level.  If Pocket Books had truly wanted to turn this into a major new brand of Trek, then they’d have been wise to hand the reins over to real sci-fi writers, and tell them that so long as they didn’t break any of the major rules of the Trekverse, it was all theirs.

That didn’t happen.

As a result…?  Captain M’k'n’zy.  Which, yes, is pronounced “Mackenzie.”

I cannot say enough about how annoyed I get with that kind of cutesy alien naming system.  Enough with the apostrophes, people/hacks.  It’s asking a lot of me to accept even “G’Kar” or “T’Pol,” but I’ll do it, mainly because when I watch a episode I don’t hear those apostrophes; I hear Zhakar and Tipol, which are fine, lovely names, and alien enough that I get the idea.  Some of y complaints are due to me being a douche, I know; but not in this book’s case.  Don’t give me a stupid fucking name that just happens to sound close enough to an English-language name that the character can then change it so that it is an English-language name.  That’s just dumb.  It’s like David wanted us to know M’k'n’zy was an alien, but didn’t want to deal with him actually being an alien, so he put in a little escape clause for himself.  A highly convenient escape clause, at that.  Christ, man, just have him be a human who was raised on an alien planet, or have him just be a human, since you’re so determined to call him by a human name!

Something in all of this doesn’t add up, and when you’ve got that big a stumbling block with the captain of your new series, well, something is majorly out of whack right at the get-go.  It’s even worse when you consider how little use David actually puts the character to; maybe that improved by book four, but by then, I was long gone.

I enjoyed some of the other characters, though: Selar, and the other Vulcan woman, and Si Cwan to a somewhat lesser extent.

There are multiple appearance by Next Generation characters (Selar included), some of which are enjoyable, some of which aren’t.  Spock’s role seems engineered merely to be able to have a picture of Spock on the cover; ah, if only this had been a film project that Leonard Nimoy could have refused to be a part of.  However, the crew members of the Enterprise-E were mostly well-drawn, Riker especially (makes sense, given how many TNG novels David has written).  On the downside, Jellicoe — remember him from “Chain of Command”? — comes off as more of a tool than he deserves; yes, in his episodes, he is a dick and everyone hated him, but let’s face it, he did get the job done.  As David writes him, he seems like the kind of officer who would never in a million years have made Admiral; that’s just bad writing, and so is his hatred of Picard.

The main problem with House of Cards is that it’s all setup and no delivery.  That’s not fair as a critique, given that this is in fact just the first part of a four-part novel.  However, any time I get a quarter of the way through a novel and feel like continuing reading out of obligation moreso than interest, it’s a bad sign.

Honk’s rating: 1.5/5 spuds

Book Two: Into the Void

Into the Void is better than House of Cards, but not by much.  The first book suffered greatly from setupitis, and book two at least avoids contracting that disease: it starts with the cast of characters mostly in place, and has some decent enough scenes involving Calhoun sparring with his new first officer and former fiancée (!) Elizabeth Shelby, whom you might remember from “The Best of Both Worlds.”

One interesting element is the notion of Hermat pronouns.  David invents various gender-neutral pronouns, such as “hir,” “hish,” and “s/he,” to deal with the issue of the Hermat (they’re a hermaphroditic species — get it?) engineer Burgoyne 172.  At first, these pronouns got on my nerves big time, but I got less annoyed once David worked in an explanation of how to pronounce s/he.  It’s a strange concept, but it’s a genuinely science-fictional concept, and it’s kinda interesting; after all, our language, understandably, is gender-based, so how would we deal with a gender-neutral species in terms of assigning pronouns to them?

Captain Calhoun continues to be a problem in Into the Void.  Apart from being a wiseass and an independent thinker, he simply isn’t a memorable character.  I’m reminded a bit of how Deep Space Nine had trouble for a while with Sisko as a character.  We understood that Sisko was supposed to be very different from Picard, and he understood how he was different … but none of those characteristics actually began paying off until sometime during the show’s second season.  Even during that shaky first season, though, we had the excellence of Avery Brooks to make up somewhat for the deficiency of the writers; in prose, no actor can save a character, and Calhoun is therefore not savable.  He’s an alien, but he frequently says things that seem peculiarly human: at some point in book three, for example, he tells another character to make sure they don’t fall into a commode while not on the bridge.  Really?  A commode?

This is the type of novel you want to avoid.

Honk’s rating: 1.5/5 spuds

Book Three: The Two-Front War

The Two-Front War is, frankly, an awful novel.  Once, during (I think) eighth grade, I wrote a Star Trek novel and invented my own ship and crew, and it was a laughable piece of garbage I’d never show to another human soul.  I’d hesitate to let my cats smell it.  I was in eighth grade, and was paid no money; what’s Peter David’s excuse?

I’m going to be brief in explaining my ire for this novel, because life is short and this book is not worth much of my time; I wasted enough of it reading the god damned thing.  (Read that in a Leonard McCoy voice, please.)

One pages 50 and 60, two different Vulcans experience emotional outbursts for unrelated reasons.  This is unacceptable.  Look, I get it; one of them is mentally stuck in pon farr (which is kinda interesting as a plot device), and the other is half-Romulan.  There is nothing out of character in either of the outbursts.  In and of itself, it is not bad writing in either instance.

Here’s my problem: why, oh why, can nobody write Vulcans as Vulcans?  Why are so many Star Trek writers incapable of simply dealing with the Vulcan society on its own merits?  Why must they feel the need to emphasize the nonemotionality of Vulcans by finding any possible reason to make that nonemotionality go away?  Good God man, just let ‘em be what they are!  In this novel, it’s surely the hallmark of a lazy writer who would rather invent goofy bullshit — under the guise of “cleverness” — than deal in an honest fashion with one of the most interesting and iconic alien species ever created.  What a crock of crap.

Here’s an example of the quality of dialogue David brings to the table.  On page 76, one character asks who another “Zoran” is, having just heard the name mentioned.  “A very unusual man,” replies Si Cwan.  “He’s someone who wants to kill me.”

Why would anybody ever phrase something in that manner?  Why not simply say, as an alternative, “A man who wants to kill me.”  There’s no need to say that he’s an unusual man, since that has no relevance.  Oh, wait; if he’d said it that way, then Kebron couldn’t have replied as he does in the next paragraph: “I hope you don’t think that wanting to kill you makes him unusual.”  Oh, har-dee-har-har, Peter David.  What an excellent bit of wit and edgy humor you’ve brought to the Trekverse.  This is a chump’s idea of wit.

That is at least a styled bit of garbage.  Other garbagey bits are lacking even in attempts at style.  Some are just plain inaccurate.  For example, Si Cwan’s sister’s name is spelled “Kalinda” in The Two-Front War; in previous novels, it has been spelled “Kallinda.”  That sort of authorial/editorial fuckup is unforgivable in a professional publication.

Even worse, in my eyes: on page 118, one of the Vulcan women reminds the other that Vulcans tend to live long lives.  This is bad writing on multiple levels, and is dialogue that would never be spoken by one Vulcan to another.  For one thing, Vulcans likely would not think of themselves as having long lifespans, since, for them, they would be normal lifespans; instead, they would think of other species as having short lifespans.  That’s arguable, of course; if shorter-than-Vulcan lifespans were a universal majority, then logical Vulcans might actually think of themselves as having long lifespans.  By that same token of logic, though, or by any other, one Vulcan would have no need of reminding another of such an obvious fact.

That’s just dumb, and it’s obviously only there for David to remind readers that Vulcans have longer life spans.  Again, dumb.  For one thing, if you’re reading this novel and don’t know that Vulcans have longer lifespans, then you shouldn’t be reading this novel.  For another, even though it serves a hypothetical purpose, it’s an example of lazy writing; why cop out with a line of illogical dialogue rather than find a way to mix the information into the story in an organic fashion?  I’ll tell you why: laziness.

The book ends with a cliffhanger, but it’s not interesting enough that I’m going to be picking up book four any time soon to find out how the whole thing ends.  I’ll read it eventually, I’d imagine, but the third part of this series is bad enough that it’s put me off the entire thing.

Honk’s rating: 0.5/5 spuds.

For those with more patience than me, here’s a link to book four, End Game.

First impressions: “The production looked flawless”; “Most of the characters rang true”; “I was impressed and taken with the obvious concern to honour our original series.”

Solow’s review is largely positive, but he does have reservations about certain aspects.  To find out what they are, visit the full article.

Mack Reynolds’ Mission to Horatius has the somewhat dubious distinction of being the first original novel to be published within the Star Trek universe.  Whitman brought the book out in 1968, and as one of the earliest examples of Star Trek being told in a medium other than television, it is of great historical interest to hardcore fans.

To everyone else, though, the novel is probably a near-complete bore, and even hardcore fans will be hard-pressed to find much entertainment here.  It isn’t terrible, but there’s almost nothing to recommend outside the historical-curiosity factor.

The story begins with the crew showing signs of something Reynolds calls “cafard,” which is essentially cabin fever due to being cooped up in a starship for too long.  Reynolds presents this not as a condition, but as a full-blown disease.  In the midst of this, the Enterprise receives a distress call from the Horatius system and, in trying to locate the source of the signal, investigates three very different planets.

The problems with this novel are easily identified: (1) the plot is broken into two parts that have too little to do with each other; (2) the characters are only slightly similar to the characters we know and love from the series; and (3) the novel is — duh — not especially well-written.  Let me talk a bit more in-depth about each of these problems.

The first part of the novel involves McCoy’s (apparently well-founded) fears that the crew is contracting cafard, and while that idea doesn’t exactly fit with what we know as Star Trek, it isn’t entirely ridiculous, either, and might have made for an interesting story if written correctly.  The problem is that the rest of the novel is about the distress call from Horatius, and that plot has nothing to do with cafard.  The idea, I guess, was that the mission was worsening the crew’s condition, but Reynolds does a poor job of playing this idea out; I don’t believe for one second that Kirk (or any commander) would ignore a serious medical threat that could endanger the very existence of the crew.  But even if I did believe Kirk would make such a decision, it isn’t developed.

The mission itself is mildly interesting.  I’m not a huge fan of the Star Trek episodes in which the crew discovers a surprisingly Earth-like planet full of gangsters and Nazis and Romans and whatnot, and in this novel we get not one such story, but three of them: Indians in space (I’m in 1968 right now, I don’t have to call them Native Americans!), religous cults in space, and Nazis in space … again.  All three societies are composed of dissatisfied Earthlings who emigrated from the Federation in order to seek their own path, and while that is an interesting (if un-Roddenberrian) concept, little is made of it.  It is mainly interesting as an indicator of how Star Trek as a storytelling format had not yet quite become concretized; it’s easy to think of it as a break with format, but heck, the format hadn’t even really been established yet.

My biggest problem with this part of the plot, however, is that the Enterprise‘s mission has been classified at such a top-secret level that even Kirk is unaware of it.  And yet, there’s not really much of a reason for all the top-secretiveness; it’s just bad writing.

The cafard plot is better … a bit, at least.  The concept of space-madness is intriguing, and makes for some mildly entertaining reading.  I enjoyed the resolution, which involves Spock working with McCoy to fabricate a threat to the ship; the idea is that this “threat” will keep the crew’s minds occupied just enough to keep them from being lost.  If you take that concept and totally rethink it, you might be able to concoct a decent episode of the original series in your brain.

(Side note: the Reavers in Firefly are said to be suffering from space madness, and in Serenity the planet Miranda has been made so top-secret that it may as well not exist anymore.  Coincidence?  Or did Joss Whedon rip off Mission to Horatius by Mal Mack Reynolds?  You tell me.)

Back to complaining.  Another problem with this novel is that the characters simply don’t sound like themselves.  (A problem I made excuses for in my review of Ghost Ship; am I hypocritical?  You be the judge.)  There’s no way of knowing how familiar Reynolds was with the series, but based on how he writes Kirk here, I’m going to guess that he wasn’t too familiar with it at all.

Worse — or, possibly, better, depending on your point of view — Reynolds doesn’t seem to have even been aware that Chekov was Russian.  There’s not a “keptin!” to be found anywhere, and while this is kinda okay, it becomes rather annoying when you consider how overboard Reynolds goes in making sure we understand that Scotty is Scottish; if he were doing the accent thing with multiple characters, at least it’d've been consistent.  (Reynolds would hardly prove to be the last writer to give in to the temptation to prosify Scotty’s brogue.)

The final problem is that the novel is just plain badly-written.  That might sound like a strange complaint to have about a tie-in novel; after all, they’re 93% garbage.  But it doesn’t mean I’m going to hold back from complaining about it.  After all, if a novel is bad, then it’s bad; I don’t see the need in cutting these things any slack.  That way, when one of them actually manages to be entertaining, it means a little bit more.

So, yes, this is a badly-written novel.  Certain elements of the plot work relatively well, and there are interesting bits if you care to indulge yourself in a discussion of how this novel fits into the larger Star Trek framework.  Otherwise, you’re advised to skip it.

One final point of interest: on page 158, the phrase “bread-and-circuses” is mentioned within the context of gladiatorial bouts.  This novel was published in 1968, and the second season episiode “Bread and Circuses” — also about gladiators — premiered on March 15, 1968.  Chicken or egg?

Honk Mahfah’s rating: 1/5 spuds

From the back cover:

1995: A mysterious creture destroys a Russian aircraft carrier — and just as mysteriously, disappears…

And three hundred years later, Counselor Deanna Troi awakens in her quarters from a nightmare, a nightmare where she senses (and understands) the voices of the crew lost aboard that ship, a crew whose life-essences were somehow absorbed within the creature that destroyed their ship long ago.

Now, Picard must find a way to communicate with the creature — or he and his crew will be similarly absorbed by the “ghost ship”!

According to Diane Carey as quoted in Jeff Ayers’ Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion, this novel was a tough write: “I was asked to launch the new series by writing the first TNG original fiction book — interesting mostly because it was written without ever having seen the series because TNG hadn’t aired yet.  [M]any of the characters hadn’t been cast yet, so I couldn’t even look at photos of the people.”

For this aspect of TNG’s newness alone, Ghost Ship would be well worth reading for fans of the show; it represents a rare opportunity to see what amounts to an alternative version of the series as it could have evolved.  Obviously, as would have been the case with virtually any novel written under such circumstances, there are many elements here that do not jibe with Trek canon, but that probably shouldn’t be held against Carey.  In fact, it’s surprising how much Carey “gets right” in comparison with the series itself.  It may be that this says less about Carey than it does about the series bible, which was (I assume) written at least in part by creator Gene Roddenberry; if so, then this novel becomes even more interesting, and can be considered a near-direct descendant of Roddenberry’s vision for the series.

The novel’s characterizations of Picard, Riker, Date, Troi, and Geordi are good … provided that you can accept the differences between the characters as written here and the characters you’ve been familiar with since 1987.  And there are definitely differences.  For example, Data’s speech patterns include making contractions between words (and it’s worth noting that even a few of the early episodes also had this retroactive “mistake”).  Another example: Deanna’s nickname for Riker is “Bill,” rather than “Will” (David Gerrold’s novelization of “Encounter at Farpoint” also uses this nickname, which suggests to me that it might have come from the bible).

Probably my favorite element of this novel is the way in which Carey examines the tension between Picard and Riker.  Each officer has serious reservations about the other, about himself in relation to the other, with the implication being that such doubts are completely internalized but always present, and that that is part of what it means to serve in Starfleet in a command capacity.  This fits in quite well with the first couple of seasons of the series, during which the dynamic between Picard and his first officer was filled with confrontations over away team assignments, and so forth.

Carey is, in general, pretty good at character scenes.  Take this passage, which follows Picard’s having chastised Wesley for referring to an alien vessel as being haunted:

“As he caught Wesley’s whipped-puppy expression, Picard felt once again the sting of his decision to make Wesley an ensign, a decision no good parent would make, yet one that he, as a man who had never had children, had made without realizing the consequences.  He should have known better, for as commanding officer he was indeed the father of all his crew and complement.  Wesley’s face was the face of a child; no seasoned officer would take the reprimand so personally.  And having given it, Picard could not take it back.”  (p. 69)

The chapter that passage comes from is probably the best of the novel, and contains multiple such passages of characterization.  It isn’t great writing, by any means, but it’s a great example of why tie-in novels like these were so poular for so many years.  Seeing that side of Picard spelled out is a rare thing for the series.  It’s there in Patrick Stewart’s performance, but by using prose, a novel has the opportunity to make the interior more plain.  When done well, it’s captivating for a fan of a series.

One of the major elements of Ghost Ship is the antagonism Riker feels for Data, based on his assumption that the android is not, and cannot be, a true life form.  Carey presents this as a rather dark facet of Riker’s personality, and his arc over the course of the novel involves his feelings of guilt over thinking of Data in that way, and his eventual acceptance of the android as a valuable crewmmate and living being.  Data’s arc lies in accepting — with his customary brand of emotional emotionlessness (it could have come right out of an episode of the series) — that Riker’s doubts about him mirror his own doubts about himself; his attempts to prove Riker wrong about him are more or less the same as his attempts to prove to himself that he is a living being.

I can well imagine many TNG fans hating these parts of the novel, but I find them to be pretty fascinating.  Riker and Data are two of my favorite of all Star Trek characters, and I don’t find anything in Carey’s writing here to be contradictory to how the story unfolds durig the actual series.  Granted, we’re not used to seeing Starfleet personnel as bigots (The Undiscovered Country notwithstanding), and you can certainly make the case that Carey goes a bit too far; Riker seems just plain callous at a few points.  It is interesting that even this early on, Diane Carey seems to have intuited that some interpersonal conflict was going to be necessary to the series lest it seem too pleasant for people to take it seriously.

I was a bit annoyed by how annoyingly Carey presents Wesley in this novel, but once again, it seems as if she correctly intuited how people would respond to the character.  Me, I kinda like Wesley on the show, but a lot of people didn’t.  The standard anti-Wesley rant involves him either saving the ship too often or getting the ship into trouble too often.  Personally, I think this is a bit of an urban legend, a bit like Kirk’s cocksmanship on the original series: Kirk kisses a bunch of dames, but if you take a look at things closely, he actually only screws a small handful of women.  Likewise, Wesley’s ship-saving and ship-wrecking are implied more than actually shown, and I think people have built it up a bit over the years.

Not in Ghost Ship, though.  Here, Wesley is running an experiment that is so dangerous and irresponsible that he really ought to be tossed off the ship for it.  And then, of course, it ends up helping to save the ship.  I hate all of this, but I do love Geordi’s reaction to fiding the experiment: “Goddamn, Wes!”  Can’t help it; I’m a sucker for curse words in Star Trek.

Other points of interest:

Ghost Ship contains what might well be THE first attempt to deal with the fact that Klingons in 1987 look very different from Klingons in the original series.  Check out this sentence from p. 27-8: “Worf’s big brown face didn’t look in the least apologetic, given a particularly animalistic texture by the riblike cranium of his Klinzhai racial background, the strai which had emerged dominant during the last Klingon purge.”  Interesting … especially if this, like so many other elements of the novel, came directly from the show’s bible.  There were later elements in both Deep Space Nine and Enterprise which would seem to invalidate this idea of a “purge” as having been responsible, but I’d definitely be curious to know if Roddenberry had attempted to account for the discrepancy in developing The Next Generation.  More likely, this was simply an aside by Diane Carey.

Carey also attempts to deal with the fact that the position of Counselor is new to the Star Trek universe by making it clear that it is also a new position in Starfleet, and adding that Starfleet has not yet really figured out what to do with the position.  This mirrors what ends up happening on the show itself; the writers never seemed to figure out what to do with the position, either, and if J.J. Abrams ever decides to remake The Next Generation, he’d be well-advised to consider making the confusion over the position a part of the story, as Carey does here.  It’s another good example of prose doing something screenplays failed to ever get around to doing.

One thing the series definitely did not fail to do was deal with matters of ethical and philosophical complexity.  Ghost Ship does so, as well, and it’s one of the best elements of the novel.  Here, Carey tackles the hot topic of euthanasia, which Trek had never dealt with up to this point in its history (with the slight exception of Spock wrestling with whether or not to have his pet Sehlat put to sleep in “Yesteryear”).  It would become a major element of the Next Generation episode “Ethics,” but Carey probably deserves credit for recognizing this as an issue rife with Trekian potential, and she deals with the subject quite well.

Final thoughts: worth reading for fans of The Next Generation, but probably skippable for anyone else, this is a flawed, but interesting, novel.

Honk’s rating: 2.5/5 spuds

Their picks for the original series’ best: (1) “The City on the Edge of Forever,” (2) “Mirror, Mirror,” and (3) “Space Seed,” with “Spock’s Brain” clocking in as the worst.

To find out which episodes of the spinoffs Empire chose, check out the full story.