Spoilers The Autobiography of James T. Kirk - announcement and reviews

[DavidAGoodman]

I've just finished.

Not bad.

It's amusing how he deals with the events of TFF. I won't spoil it for others who haven't read the book yet.

As I said earlier I don't agree with certain things in the book, but overall it was an enjoyable read. I quite liked Spock's afterword.

I think my favourite part dealt with the events of "The City On The Edge Of Forever." I thought that was quite nicely done.

Thanks! The "City" part of the book was definitely very important to me, glad you liked it.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

I thought it was interesting the way the author -- using "Kirk's" inner voice -- juxtaposed the situations with Edith Keeler and Gillian Taylor. Kirk would definitely see parallels between the two that (as an audience member) failed to register with me, but seems authentic and obvious in hindsight.

Excellent insight into the character of Kirk by Mr. Goodman.

Thanks, and call me David.

 

[Christopher]

Maybe, but we find out about Garth during the five year mission, and Kirk has another 20-30 years of a career after that, where he saves Earth from V'Ger, the Federation from Khan, saves Earth again from the probe looking for the whales, and prevents an all out war with the Klingons. I don't think it's a "mistake" to say he was the greatest captain whoever lived.

Sure, but who knows what extraordinary feats were performed by the other captains whose adventures we didn't follow? The thing is, I've never liked the tendency to assume that the specific people we watch on TV every week are the only ones who ever actually do anything. Realistically, other starship crews should be having equally extraordinary adventures, saving planets and defeating cosmic threats and doing stuff that's just as impressive. After all, they all went to the same academy, got the same training. They can't all be inept enough to get themselves killed like the Constellation and Exeter crews. The other captains can't all be as unstable as Garth or Decker or Tracey.

I just feel that when the main characters are focused on exclusively, as if they're the only ones in the universe who had any accomplishments of note, it undermines the credibility of the story and makes it feel more like a story, like a finite imagined world with nothing going on except what we see on camera. I'd rather see the show placed into a larger context where there's a lot of stuff going on that we don't get to see, because that adds more texture and dimension to the universe. So I'd find it more plausible to see Kirk treated as one of the great captains of the 23rd century, rather than the only one who ever gets talked about. I want him to be part of a context rather than an isolated entity.

Also, there are a lot of references to Kirk in the sequel series that make it clear that his exploits are well-known: Janeway mentions Kirk having claimed to have met DaVinci; the fact that Kira only has to mention the name Kirk to Bashir in "Crossover" and Bashir is able to immediately fill in all the blanks on where they are to me says that Kirk is a well-known figure in history.

And that's just the problem -- the writers' tendency to assume the characters are just as fannish as they are and have the same preoccupations, which makes it feel more like a fictional construct and less like a big, plausible universe. In "The Naked Now," the crew didn't have Kirk's every exploit memorized, but had to do a computer search to find a reference to Kirk's crew and their prior experience with the disease. That was more plausible to me. After all, to us, Kirk's adventures are the only thing we saw of the 23rd century, but to the 24th-century characters, they were just one small piece of a vast body of knowledge about people and events in the 23rd century. I mean, sure, there are plenty of people who could recite the career of Douglas MacArthur or whoever from memory, but there are plenty of other people who know practically nothing about the subject. (Heck, I couldn't even think of a second famous 20th-century military officer to cite as an example.)

 

[DavidAGoodman]

Maybe, but we find out about Garth during the five year mission, and Kirk has another 20-30 years of a career after that, where he saves Earth from V'Ger, the Federation from Khan, saves Earth again from the probe looking for the whales, and prevents an all out war with the Klingons. I don't think it's a "mistake" to say he was the greatest captain whoever lived.

Sure, but who knows what extraordinary feats were performed by the other captains whose adventures we didn't follow? The thing is, I've never liked the tendency to assume that the specific people we watch on TV every week are the only ones who ever actually do anything. Realistically, other starship crews should be having equally extraordinary adventures, saving planets and defeating cosmic threats and doing stuff that's just as impressive. After all, they all went to the same academy, got the same training. They can't all be inept enough to get themselves killed like the Constellation and Exeter crews. The other captains can't all be as unstable as Garth or Decker or Tracey.

I just feel that when the main characters are focused on exclusively, as if they're the only ones in the universe who had any accomplishments of note, it undermines the credibility of the story and makes it feel more like a story, like a finite imagined world with nothing going on except what we see on camera. I'd rather see the show placed into a larger context where there's a lot of stuff going on that we don't get to see, because that adds more texture and dimension to the universe. So I'd find it more plausible to see Kirk treated as one of the great captains of the 23rd century, rather than the only one who ever gets talked about. I want him to be part of a context rather than an isolated entity.


And that's just the problem -- the writers' tendency to assume the characters are just as fannish as they are and have the same preoccupations, which makes it feel more like a fictional construct and less like a big, plausible universe. In "The Naked Now," the crew didn't have Kirk's every exploit memorized, but had to do a computer search to find a reference to Kirk's crew and their prior experience with the disease. That was more plausible to me. After all, to us, Kirk's adventures are the only thing we saw of the 23rd century, but to the 24th-century characters, they were just one small piece of a vast body of knowledge about people and events in the 23rd century. I mean, sure, there are plenty of people who could recite the career of Douglas MacArthur or whoever from memory, but there are plenty of other people who know practically nothing about the subject. (Heck, I couldn't even think of a second famous 20th-century military officer to cite as an example.)

I agree with you that, in the context of the original series, that Kirk isn't a better or more famous Captain than other captains - I agree that it undermines the story to think so. But if you add everything that happens to the character after the original series, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that he definitely COULD BE the greatest captain - he saved the home planet of the Federation twice, prevented a galactic war several times, etc.

And to be fair, the characters talking about Kirk in the sequel series are in Starfleet, so I think that it's not such a stretch that they'd be familiar with the history of their organization. Kira didn't know who Kirk was, but Bashir did.

 

[Christopher]

^Sure, he could be, but I can't help wondering about the accomplishments of the other captains. Surely some of them must have some pretty impressive accomplishments of their own. Yes, it's a given that Kirk has all the accomplishments we've seen, but it doesn't automatically follow that other captains and crews haven't done equally great things. That's the other half of the equation that tends to be overlooked. (Except in book tie-ins like Vanguard and Seekers, say.)

Also, how come there's so much fixation on Kirk saving Earth and no mention of Kirk saving the Rigel Colonies from the Doomsday Machine? Earth isn't the only planet in the Federation. In the litany of his great accomplishments, shouldn't saving Rigel be right up there too? Star Trek is so darn Earth-centric sometimes. Like having nearly every human character be a native of Earth, which makes no sense when there's supposedly a ton of interstellar colonization going on. Wouldn't it have been more interesting if Kirk had been a native of Tarsus IV rather than just visiting there for some unknown reason? Or if Chekov had been from a Russian-founded colony on Alpha Centauri or something? Colonial populations are sometimes more purist than the folks back home, dedicated to preserving an idealized version of a culture or belief system they feel has been compromised at home, so a colonial origin might've made Chekov's caricatured Russian nationalism more plausible.

(I also wish there were more interspecies immigration and cultural mingling. Where are the humans who are culturally Vulcan and follow Surak's teachings, or the Andorians born and raised in Brooklyn?)

 

[Idran]

On that note, that does remind me of one other thing that bugged me; I don't really see how it makes sense that Kirk's roommate was the first Andorian to be admitted to the Academy. It really took the Andorians 90 years to get into the Academy? What were they doing until then? Did the Andorian Guard get absorbed into the fleet and then no one else joined for a century?

 

[DavidAGoodman]

I agree with you on all of that, but given the time tos was made, and the fight Roddenberry had to take on just to have one alien in the crew, Inthink we did pretty well.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

On that note, that does remind me of one other thing that bugged me; I don't really see how it makes sense that Kirk's roommate was the first Andorian to be admitted to the Academy. It really took the Andorians 90 years to get into the Academy? What were they doing until then? Did the Andorian Guard get absorbed into the fleet and then no one else joined for a century?

I didn't think that was such a stretch, given the way we wrote the Andorians on ST:E, and the fact that we never saw an Andorian as a crew member except in TAS. Culturally it seemed plausible that Andorians wouldn't seek out service in Starfleet. I wanted Kirk to have a roommate who was more of an outsider than him.

 

[Warped9]

Candidly from what we've learned I don't think GR had to fight all that hard to get Spock into the show. I think it's another one of those things GR hyped to make himself look better and NBC look short sighted.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

Candidly from what we've learned I don't think GR had to fight all that hard to get Spock into the show. I think it's another one of those things GR hyped to make himself look better and NBC look short sighted.

From what we've learned from the Cushman books, NBC WAS short-sighted, even more so than we ever thought. And since I've had twenty years of knock-down drag out fights with networks over much smaller issues, I am certain that GR making one of his main characters an alien that wasn't from "Mars" or someplace the network execs had heard of was a titanic accomplishment, proven by the fact that there weren't any alien characters on tv at the time, except Uncle Martin and Debbie the chip on Lost in Space. Just the fact that they airbrushed Spock's ears and eyebrows from the promotional materials showed how uncomfortable they were with it.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Candidly from what we've learned I don't think GR had to fight all that hard to get Spock into the show. I think it's another one of those things GR hyped to make himself look better and NBC look short sighted.

From what we've learned from the Cushman books, NBC WAS short-sighted, even more so than we ever thought. And since I've had twenty years of knock-down drag out fights with networks over much smaller issues, I am certain that GR making one of his main characters an alien that wasn't from "Mars" or someplace the network execs had heard of was a titanic accomplishment, proven by the fact that there weren't any alien characters on tv at the time, except Uncle Martin and Debbie the chip on Lost in Space. Just the fact that they airbrushed Spock's ears and eyebrows from the promotional materials showed how uncomfortable they were with it.

Cushman's take has veracity problems.

Spock was from Mars initially.

 

[Idran]

The Cushman books are notoriously incorrect, though, to the point that you can't really use them as a reliable source to any degree without confirmation from something outside them. And Roddenberry was always exaggerating his troubles to make himself look good; like making up the whole "you can have Spock or Number One" story.

Also, I still don't really understand what you mean about Andorians, I have to admit; I came away from Enterprise seeing them as as close of allies to humans as Vulcans if not more so, close allies that would be eager to aid in the defense of the Federation as much as they were eager to aid in the defense of Andoria. I mean, everyone that would've joined the Andorian Guard over that century had Andoria not joined the Federation, would they just still join the Guard?

Where do you see Andoria's place in the Federation, I'm curious? Are they active members, or do they just kind of do their own thing apart from the rest of local space society?

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

I'm sure Kirk would've been deeply embarrassed by that subtitle.

And I'm not convinced it's accurate either. We all treat Kirk as the uber-captain of the 23rd century because he was the star of the show, but we tend to forget the other captains that Kirk himself admired and emulated, like Garrovick and Garth. Garth was supposedly an amazingly great and important captain before his injuries damaged his mind, so I find it implausible that his accomplishments are never mentioned. It's not like he really did that much damage while he was insane, since his crew stopped him and he was then confined on Elba II; and his derangement was the result of injury, and was later cured by the new medicine. So I don't think his bout of mental illness would be held against him to the point that his entire illustrious career was effaced from history. I mean, Kirk's had some unfortunate interludes of his own, like being split into good and evil selves and becoming an amnesiac god for two months.

So treating Kirk as the only noteworthy 23rd-century captain is making the common mistake of confusing our perception of the universe as fans with the internal perception of its own inhabitants. We should remember that others like Garth and Decker and Wesley left their own marks on Starfleet history. And who knows what kind of careers lie behind flag officers like Stone and Mendez and Komack and Nogura and Morrow?

Maybe, but we find out about Garth during the five year mission, and Kirk has another 20-30 years of a career after that, where he saves Earth from V'Ger, the Federation from Khan, saves Earth again from the probe looking for the whales, and prevents an all out war with the Klingons. I don't think it's a "mistake" to say he was the greatest captain whoever lived.

The "Star Trek" universe after TOS seems to have built Kirk up as the Lord Nelson of Starfleet.

In some respects this book reminds me of John Pearson's An Unofficial Biography of James Bond. Both books have a similar structure and approach of taking fictional events and linking them together through a connective narrative.

Pearson's book was definitely an inspiration, I love that book. Also, William S. Baring-Gould's "Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street", which is the same kind of "biography" of Sherlock Holmes.

Have you also checked out The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower?

 

[Christopher]

On that note, that does remind me of one other thing that bugged me; I don't really see how it makes sense that Kirk's roommate was the first Andorian to be admitted to the Academy. It really took the Andorians 90 years to get into the Academy? What were they doing until then? Did the Andorian Guard get absorbed into the fleet and then no one else joined for a century?

I didn't think that was such a stretch, given the way we wrote the Andorians on ST:E, and the fact that we never saw an Andorian as a crew member except in TAS. Culturally it seemed plausible that Andorians wouldn't seek out service in Starfleet. I wanted Kirk to have a roommate who was more of an outsider than him.

Hmm, I've gone for a rather different approach in the Rise of the Federation novels, assuming that the Federation Starfleet starts out as a loose merger of UESPA Starfleet, the Andorian Imperial Guard, the Vulcan Space Service, etc. -- sort of like how the European Space Agency is an umbrella organization made up of the various member nations' space agencies. There's not a lot of intermixing of crews so far, but they do all participate. The novels have suggested that the Andorians' reproductive crisis led them to turn more inward later on, perhaps explaining their relative absence from Starfleet in later centuries.

This is another case where I've tried to avoid the Earth-centric tendency of a lot of Trek. I didn't want the UFP Starfleet to be just a straight-line continuation of the Earth Starfleet without anyone else contributing.

Hmm, it is possible, though, that the Andorian Guard could've remained a fairly distinct subset of Starfleet with its own separate academy.

And since I've had twenty years of knock-down drag out fights with networks over much smaller issues, I am certain that GR making one of his main characters an alien that wasn't from "Mars" or someplace the network execs had heard of was a titanic accomplishment, proven by the fact that there weren't any alien characters on tv at the time, except Uncle Martin and Debbie the chip on Lost in Space. Just the fact that they airbrushed Spock's ears and eyebrows from the promotional materials showed how uncomfortable they were with it.

Spock was originally described as "probably half Martian" in the '64 series prospectus. I think it was his alienness itself that was the issue for the network, and the "Satanic" design of his makeup, rather than the unfamiliarity of his planet. (Besides, "Vulcan" was used as the name of a hypothetical inner planet between the Sun and Mercury for decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before we discovered that the anomalies in Mercury's orbit were caused by general-relativistic effects rather than an undiscovered planet's gravity. So it wasn't really an unfamiliar name even at the time.)

 

[JonnyQuest037]

The only strange thing was that Kirks attitude toward religion seemed to be uncharacteristically hostile.

That struck me, too. I always figured that Kirk had at least a smattering of Christian religious belief, judging from his amazement over the "Children of the Sun" at the end of Bread and Circuses and his line "we find the one quite sufficient" in Who Mourns For Adonias?. And after his initial shock, he seems to go for the idea of finding God in STV, only questioning it when the God they find needs a starship and reacts with anger.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

I'm sure Kirk would've been deeply embarrassed by that subtitle.

And I'm not convinced it's accurate either. We all treat Kirk as the uber-captain of the 23rd century because he was the star of the show, but we tend to forget the other captains that Kirk himself admired and emulated, like Garrovick and Garth. Garth was supposedly an amazingly great and important captain before his injuries damaged his mind, so I find it implausible that his accomplishments are never mentioned. It's not like he really did that much damage while he was insane, since his crew stopped him and he was then confined on Elba II; and his derangement was the result of injury, and was later cured by the new medicine. So I don't think his bout of mental illness would be held against him to the point that his entire illustrious career was effaced from history. I mean, Kirk's had some unfortunate interludes of his own, like being split into good and evil selves and becoming an amnesiac god for two months.

So treating Kirk as the only noteworthy 23rd-century captain is making the common mistake of confusing our perception of the universe as fans with the internal perception of its own inhabitants. We should remember that others like Garth and Decker and Wesley left their own marks on Starfleet history. And who knows what kind of careers lie behind flag officers like Stone and Mendez and Komack and Nogura and Morrow?

Maybe, but we find out about Garth during the five year mission, and Kirk has another 20-30 years of a career after that, where he saves Earth from V'Ger, the Federation from Khan, saves Earth again from the probe looking for the whales, and prevents an all out war with the Klingons. I don't think it's a "mistake" to say he was the greatest captain whoever lived.

The "Star Trek" universe after TOS seems to have built Kirk up as the Lord Nelson of Starfleet.

In some respects this book reminds me of John Pearson's An Unofficial Biography of James Bond. Both books have a similar structure and approach of taking fictional events and linking them together through a connective narrative.

Pearson's book was definitely an inspiration, I love that book. Also, William S. Baring-Gould's "Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street", which is the same kind of "biography" of Sherlock Holmes.

Have you also checked out The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower?

Yes! I've had it for years! Also, read all the Hornblower books, many of them twice, they were a big inspiration.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

Hmm, I've gone for a rather different approach in the Rise of the Federation novels, assuming that the Federation Starfleet starts out as a loose merger of UESPA Starfleet, the Andorian Imperial Guard, the Vulcan Space Service, etc. -- sort of like how the European Space Agency is an umbrella organization made up of the various member nations' space agencies. There's not a lot of intermixing of crews so far, but they do all participate. The novels have suggested that the Andorians' reproductive crisis led them to turn more inward later on, perhaps explaining their relative absence from Starfleet in later centuries.

This is another case where I've tried to avoid the Earth-centric tendency of a lot of Trek. I didn't want the UFP Starfleet to be just a straight-line continuation of the Earth Starfleet without anyone else contributing.

Hmm, it is possible, though, that the Andorian Guard could've remained a fairly distinct subset of Starfleet with its own separate academy.

I don't think what you've done is incompatible with what I've done - I think you could have separate fleets for individual planets that aren't part of Starfleet - Journey to Babel implies that the Tellerites have their own ships, and have separate mining interests etc, so I think the Andorians would probably have their own too, and wouldn't necessarily intermingle.

 

[Christopher]

^By the way, David, for future reference: if you click the "Multi Quote" button on every post you want to reply to and then hit "Post Reply" at the bottom, you can reply to them all in a single post instead of one at a time. The moderators here generally frown on one person making multiple consecutive posts. And it's a bit quicker and easier to respond with only one post than multiple ones.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

The Cushman books are notoriously incorrect, though, to the point that you can't really use them as a reliable source to any degree without confirmation from something outside them. And Roddenberry was always exaggerating his troubles to make himself look good; like making up the whole "you can have Spock or Number One" story.

Also, I still don't really understand what you mean about Andorians, I have to admit; I came away from Enterprise seeing them as as close of allies to humans as Vulcans if not more so, close allies that would be eager to aid in the defense of the Federation as much as they were eager to aid in the defense of Andoria. I mean, everyone that would've joined the Andorian Guard over that century had Andoria not joined the Federation, would they just still join the Guard?

Where do you see Andoria's place in the Federation, I'm curious? Are they active members, or do they just kind of do their own thing apart from the rest of local space society?

I take my cue from "Journey To Babel", which is really the only TOS episode to address it - at that point and afterward in the original series, we haven't seen any Andorians as members of starship crews, even after that in the movies and sequel series. The Tellerites in that episode, who also aren't in any crews before or after, have their own ships according to Sarek. So in my mind Starfleet, which protects the whole federation, is still not the only fleet out there, that Federation members also have their own fleets, and their own services to man them. These may or may not be military in nature, they could be for commerce or colonization or whatever, but you would still need a service of some kind to run them. In addition, I think the way we wrote the Andorians in ST:E, and the way they're portrayed in Journey to Babel (the Ambassador describes his people as a violent race) is that they wouldn't necessarily run to join up with a peace keeping organization like Starfleet, and even if they did the standards of Starfleet Academy might be difficult for them to attain (Kirk says in "The Apple" that Mallory's father helped him get into the Academy - that implies it wasn't easy or a given that anybody could go). But there would be the occasional Andorian who might get in.

 

[DavidAGoodman]

^By the way, David, for future reference: if you click the "Multi Quote" button on every post you want to reply to and then hit "Post Reply" at the bottom, you can reply to them all in a single post instead of one at a time. The moderators here generally frown on one person making multiple consecutive posts. And it's a bit quicker and easier to respond with only one post than multiple ones.

Thanks so much! I was trying to figure out how you did that!