In the UK it was also issued as #1 in Titan’s Star Trek line. So any country that had Titan’s line vs Pocket’s would’ve had “Chain Of Attack” as Book #1 rather than “Star Trek The Motion Picture”.
"Trek to Madworld" by Stephen Goldin (1979)
- Thread starter Damian
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In the UK it was also issued as #1 in Titan’s Star Trek line. So any country that had Titan’s line vs Pocket’s would’ve had “Chain Of Attack” as Book #1 rather than “Star Trek The Motion Picture”.
Similarly, the ST IV novelisation (just before "Chain of Attack") was an unnumbered novel in the USA. TMP and ST II were originally unnumbered, then their reprints started to sport numbers, and ST III had one.
Okay, after reading this discussion, I finally started reading (the german version of) this novel.
It's one of the old Goldmann-books in Germany.
Now I am at page 70, and they finally are caught in this bubble and discovered the Klingons. Until now, there is absolutely nothing funny in this book, but maybe it starts now. For a comedy, it seems very strange to have no funny elements in the first third, but okay, lets see, how it continues...
Something very strange about these old books are the german translantions.
In the TV-Series, they kept all the original english ranks like, Captain, Commander, Lieutenant Commander, and so on, except ensign (which was translated to "Fähnrich").
In these old novels, they even translated the ranks. It's okay to make Lieutenant "Leutnant", but Lieutenant Commander Scott became "Fregattenkapitän Scott", which means Captain of a smaller ship.
The books were translations from the 70ies, but Goldmann reprinted them in the 90ies. Obviously the didn't even read the books. Or they really thought, "Fregattenkapitän Scott" would be right....
I'm guessing that's a cognate of "frigate captain."
I sort of felt the same way. It had it's comedic moments but I just really didn't connect to well with this particular novel. About halfway through I couldn't wait until it was over. I never give up on a book so I finished it. But I'd probably rate it as fair in retrospect.
The portrayal of the Klingons in particular just didn't jive for me, and I was only comparing it to the original series Klingons (I realize it's not fair to compare them to post-TNG Klingons). The Klingons of the original series to me at least seemed to favor direct action. I have a hard time seeing them use a proxy, esp. an "Earther", to do their dirty work for them. When I think of Kang, Koloth and Kor, I can't see any of them engaging in that kind of subterfuge. They might try to do what the Klingon in the book did, but they'd send a Klingon to do it because they wouldn't trust anyone else to do it. That's my impression anyway.
Until a quick script change in ST III, TOS/TAS Romulans and TOS/TAS Klingons were essentially the reverse of the races we see in TNG.
Valkris' ritual acceptance of her death, dying with donor, and even the Bird of Prey itself, the ship's cloaking device, and the Neutral Zone, were all Romulan until a pen stroke changed them into Klingons.
Yeah, I've heard that myself, and it makes sense. I'm currently reading Dayton Ward's "In the Name of Honor" which is offering an explanation of why Klingons became more honor bound in later shows (I've seen other novels in this period pick up similar threads).
I just thought even in the original series, while they weren't as concerned with honor as portrayed in TNG, DS9 and so on, they still had a sort of martial philosophy. They'd have to have some sort of code to go by or Klingon society would have devolved into anarchy. And Kor, Kang, and to a lesser extent Koloth, the 3 most familiar Klingons from the original series, were a bit more complicated then just simple bad guys. There seemed to be an underlying code that Klingons followed. I just had a hard time buying the Klingons actions in Trek to Madworld. Not only did he use a proxy, but he was a coward also. But that was just a small complaint I had. I just didn't find the story to be all that engaging. And it basically started an almost entirely new story midway through. At first I thought it was going to be a book about the colony and trying to solve the problem they were having with the radiation. But then almost halfway through it they end up in the madcap Organian's 'playroom' and the colony is almost forgotten until almost the end.
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