I was perusing my Trek Lit collection, and found this rare gem. I remember buying this back in '77 (the copyright is '76); and after revisiting these stories, I asked myself what our auspicious Trek authors had thought when they first read these, or even if they had. I recommend this collection for anyone starting their Trek lit. The forward was written by Gene himself! "Mind-sifter" has to be one of the best Trek stories ever; so much so I felt compelled to revisit the Crucible series. I'm fishing for opinions from Cox, Bennet (excuse me-Christopher), Mack, et al--and even Marco if he still haunts this place. Now I know this book was edited by THOSE women (Marshak & Culbreath), but these are extremely good stories. I'd just like to know what current Trek writers think about them. Thanks!
I'm partial to "The New Voyages II" and stories including "The Sleeping God". And isn't "The Patient Parasites" in the second edition? It was a really nice story presented in "script form". Part of the reason it was written that way was to show (in preparation for the animated Trek series) that good Star Trek could be made in a half hour format.
Yes, it was. I just pulled my copy of that and enjoying it as well. And I agree, "the Sleeping God" is excellent. It reminds me of the "Twilight Zone" episode with Bill Mumy. I love days off!
I still have the first TNV volume (though not the second), but I haven't re-read any of the stories in ages. Rather, it actually was a script that Russell Bates submitted to TAS, one the show's producers rejected because it wasn't visually interesting and didn't take advantage of the potentials of animation. It was just a bunch of people standing around talking in a static location. There was nothing in it that couldn't have been done in live action, so it wasn't considered suitable for TAS. So Bates teamed up with animation veteran David Wise (who would later be the head writer on the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series) and they came up with the far more visual and action-oriented "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth."
^^ You know EVERYTHING!! How do you find time to write? And WHERE do you find this stuff?... It's like magic... AbraChristopherdabra!
Heck, it's all right there in the story's introduction in TNV2. (Well, all except Wise's future career, since that hadn't happened yet when the book came out.)
Ok, but you still know some obscure little factoids... There's an address to send manuscripts...I wonder who has that P.O. box now, and what kind of mail they get What did you writers think of "Spock: Messiah"?
I remember that out of the two volumes the Procrustean Pretard was my favorite story, along with that story that actually had the actors on the "real" Enterprise instead of the sets.
I love Spock, Messiah! You can't forget the exclamation point. That's important. Yeah, it's lurid and it's trashy, but it's so much fun!
Our upstart little fan production Star Trek Phase II secured permission from the estate of the late Shirley S. Maiewski to mount a production of her original "Mind-Sifter" story. (They insisted that we adapt her original story, rather than version that got edited and changed around a bit by book editors Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.) We're still in production, but we have a rough edit of one scene: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlr3vBjX0h4[/yt]
I'm not sure it would've been logistically feasible as an episode, because you'd have to rely on guest stars to carry almost the entire story. True, technically the only regulars who would've been mostly absent would be Shatner and Kelley, but still, I'm sure Shatner would never have agreed to an episode that required him to be absent for most of its running time, and I doubt the network would've gone for it either. Not to mention the difficulty of finding guest performers who could convincingly pass as gender-swapped versions of the familiar crew.
I agree that it's unlikely, but Shatner did agree to appear in "The Tholian Web." His character vanishes at the end of the first act and is absent from the episode (besides brief ghostly appearances) until the end of the show.