Poll TOS #12 Mutiny On The Enterprise by Robert E. Vardeman Review Thread (42nd Anniversary Review)

[tomswift2002]

Published: October 1983 (Physical, US/Canada) / March 1991 (Titan UK) / September 22, 2000 (Digital)
Publisher: Timescape Books/Paperjacks (Titan Books in the UK)
Titan Books Number: 45
Story Arc: Klingon Gambit Arc (sequel to S&S TOS novel pilot, TOS #3 The Klingon Gambit published October 1981 but written by Vardeman in the late 1970's and was the first original Trek fiction novel purchased by Simon & Schuster)

Plot: (from cover) On A Mission of Peace, A Bewitching Woman Sets The Enterprise At War---With Itself!

The Ship is crippled in orbit around a dangerous, living, breathing planet, and a desperate peace mission to the Orion Arm is stalled. Kirk has never needed his crew more. But a lithe, alien woman is casting a spell of pacifism---and now mutiny---over the crew.

Suddenly Captain Kirk's journey for peace has turned into a terrifying war---to retake command of his ship!

HAVE YOU READ THESE OTHER STAR TREK NOVELS? The Prometheus Design. The Abode of Life. Triangle. The Covenant of the Crown. The Entropy Effect. The Klingon Gambit. Web of the Romulans. Black Fire. Yesterday's Son.

Review: It's been 13 years since I read The Klingon Gambit and I still remember the chapter of the book, imagining the Klingon farmers being drawn in my mind like the Klingons from TAS where they had that flat 1-dimensional look of the animation (or maybe cardboard cutouts on some play mat), riding tractors plowing fields over Alnath. So here is the sequel to that book, Mutiny On the Enterprise----which I already know @Therin of Andor first read when it first came out 42 years ago this month and he got it from Space Age Books in Melbourne.

First things first, I assume the woman on the cover of the book is the "Bewitching Woman" that this story is centered around.

Second, Kirk's uniform, at first glance looks like the TMP uniform, but his sleeve is orange, and I do not recall seeing him wear in TMP (maybe an ensign or that). And is that woman on fire? It seems that her orange top is reflecting it's orange coloring on both Kirk and Spock. However, it's an odd cover, because all three are apparently standing on the TOS bridge. As far as I'm aware, both The Klingon Gambit & Mutiny On The Enterprise are set possible around By Any Other Name or somewhere in Season 3. I don't think the books were meant to be part of the 1980's second five-year-mission stories.

Also, an interesting thing is that, aside from the cover, Enterprise is underlined all the way through the book in the title on the top of every page, as well as the splash page and the title page and even the "Look for Star Trek fiction" page. Not too sure why it's done like that. I guess it was cheaper to set up the presses to just underline rather than italicize Enterprise.

 

[Christopher]

Story Arc: Klingon Gambit Arc (sequel to S&S TOS novel pilot, TOS #3 The Klingon Gambit published October 1981 but written by Vardeman in the late 1970's and was the first original Trek fiction novel purchased by Simon & Schuster)

Two standalone books by the same author do not constitute a "story arc." There's a bit of character continuity between them, as I recall, but totally unconnected plots.

Really, the main continuity I recall is that McCoy was equally out of character in both, his traditionalism exaggerated into full-blown technophobia as his dominant character trait. In The Klingon Gambit, I assumed it was the result of the alien influence affecting the crew's minds, but McCoy was written the same way here.

Second, Kirk's uniform, at first glance looks like the TMP uniform, but his sleeve is orange, and I do not recall seeing him wear in TMP (maybe an ensign or that). And is that woman on fire? It seems that her orange top is reflecting it's orange coloring on both Kirk and Spock. However, it's an odd cover, because all three are apparently standing on the TOS bridge. As far as I'm aware, both The Klingon Gambit & Mutiny On The Enterprise are set possible around By Any Other Name or somewhere in Season 3. I don't think the books were meant to be part of the 1980's second five-year-mission stories.

Hardly any books did posit a "second 5-year mission," and only vaguely at best; it was more like they were set during the TOS era but asserted that more than a few years had passed since season 3. The "second mission" is more of a fan invention to rationalize that.

Mutiny was just set in the TOS era, but the cover artists back then often had limited photo references (in fact, several Boris Vallejo covers are evidently based on the same photos of Kirk and Spock) and didn't necessarily know the difference between the TV and movie eras, so we got a bunch of mix-and-match covers.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I don't think there is a single detail of @Christopher's post with which I would have the slightest disagreement.

I think I've read it maybe 2-3 times, but I don't remember it well enough to venture an opinion (although from what little I remember, I'd put it no higher than "average." And no, it's not green; The IDIC Epidemic, Black Fire, Ishmael, and Black Fire are green, but this opus is red.)

And as to the typography, I don't remember any underscores, but no, at best, underscores are no less trouble than italics/obliques (and there are obliques that don't have true italic letterforms, and even a few true italics that are upright, rather than oblique), and if you're doing letterpress, from any form of hot metal, underscores are a royal pain in the ass, because you have to cut and fit pieces of rule, and you might even have to cut them into type or slug bodies. (I speak from experience: for over a decade, I've been spending my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum, in Carson, CA.) More likely, if it has underscores instead of italics, the book was simply typeset by a yutz.

 

[tomswift2002]

Two standalone books by the same author do not constitute a "story arc." There's a bit of character continuity between them, as I recall, but totally unconnected plots.

Really, the main continuity I recall is that McCoy was equally out of character in both, his traditionalism exaggerated into full-blown technophobia as his dominant character trait. In The Klingon Gambit, I assumed it was the result of the alien influence affecting the crew's minds, but McCoy was written the same way here.




Hardly any books did posit a "second 5-year mission," and only vaguely at best; it was more like they were set during the TOS era but asserted that more than a few years had passed since season 3. The "second mission" is more of a fan invention to rationalize that.

Mutiny was just set in the TOS era, but the cover artists back then often had limited photo references (in fact, several Boris Vallejo covers are evidently based on the same photos of Kirk and Spock) and didn't necessarily know the difference between the TV and movie eras, so we got a bunch of mix-and-match covers.

They are not standalone stories, as “Mutiny” picks up where “Gambit” left off. And “Mutiny” refers back to “Gambit”, as well both books contain a plot with Scotty that D.C. Fontana picked up on a few year’s later in the prequel story “Vulcan’s Glory”.

 

[Christopher]

They are not standalone stories, as “Mutiny” picks up where “Gambit” left off. And “Mutiny” refers back to “Gambit”, as well both books contain a plot with Scotty that D.C. Fontana picked up on a few year’s later in the prequel story “Vulcan’s Glory”.

I think it's a stretch to use the term "story arc" for two standalone stories that simply have chronological or character continuity with each other, but I'll concede that they at least had more connection than most Pocket novels of the era. But you could say the same about all of J.M. Dillard's TOS novels, or Diane Duane's. My Enemy, My Ally explicitly says it takes place a month after The Wounded Sky and carries forward TWS's character threads, but TWS is routinely treated as separate from the "story arc" of the Rihannsu novels, because its actual plot and subject matter are distinct.

Also, I wouldn't say that Scotty running a still in engineering constitutes a "plot," and I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that Vardeman and Fontana both independently used it. After all, TOS established Scotty as a frequent imbiber, so it naturally follows.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

It was of course before Richard Arnold's "reign of terror," in which inter-novel continuity (and especially novelists using characters created by other novelists) was suppressed with extreme prejudice.

 

[tomswift2002]

I think it's a stretch to use the term "story arc" for two standalone stories that simply have chronological or character continuity with each other, but I'll concede that they at least had more connection than most Pocket novels of the era. But you could say the same about all of J.M. Dillard's TOS novels, or Diane Duane's. My Enemy, My Ally explicitly says it takes place a month after The Wounded Sky and carries forward TWS's character threads, but TWS is routinely treated as separate from the "story arc" of the Rihannsu novels, because its actual plot and subject matter are distinct.

Also, I wouldn't say that Scotty running a still in engineering constitutes a "plot," and I'm sure it's entirely coincidental that Vardeman and Fontana both independently used it. After all, TOS established Scotty as a frequent imbiber, so it naturally follows.

No it's not stretch. And there was never any mention or indication in TOS or TAS that Scotty was making his own Saurian brandy on the ship. And other TOS-era novels have never brought back the idea that I can recall, just Vulcan's Glory. But I'm also picking up another plot thread that seems to be ringing a bell that Diane Duane might have pulled up for Doctor's Orders with McCoy.

 

[Christopher]

No it's not stretch.

As I said, it is a stretch, because the term usually refers to the actual subject matter of the story, but I see what you mean in this specific context.

And there was never any mention or indication in TOS or TAS that Scotty was making his own Saurian brandy on the ship.

No, but that doesn't even begin to prove that Fontana was aware of Vardeman's books rather than coming up with the idea independently. I mean, if a character is a heavy drinker and an engineer, it's hardly difficult to come up with the idea that he would operate a still. Especially for writers of that era, where characters operating stills was a very common trope in fiction (e.g. M*A*S*H or The Dukes of Hazzard).

It is always, always unwise to assume that if two writers use a similar idea, it "proves" that one was directly inspired by the other. The fact is, writers accidentally come up with the same ideas so often that we can't avoid it no matter how hard we try. It's inevitable when working with a specific universe and characters that different creators will hit upon the same ideas by parallel evolution. When I wrote a TNG spec script and pitched to DS9 and VGR back in the '90s, almost every time, one of my ideas happened to be accidentally similar to something they were already doing or would later do. If you see an idea crop up in two different writers' work, it is far more likely to be a coincidence than a deliberate reference.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

If you see an idea crop up in two different writers' work, it is far more likely to be a coincidence than a deliberate reference.

And speaking only for myself, if I'm alluding to somebody else's work, I won't just acknowledge the allusion; I'll lampshade the Hell out of it.

 

[tomswift2002]

As I said, it is a stretch, because the term usually refers to the actual subject matter of the story, but I see what you mean in this specific context.




No, but that doesn't even begin to prove that Fontana was aware of Vardeman's books rather than coming up with the idea independently. I mean, if a character is a heavy drinker and an engineer, it's hardly difficult to come up with the idea that he would operate a still. Especially for writers of that era, where characters operating stills was a very common trope in fiction (e.g. M*A*S*H or The Dukes of Hazzard).

It is always, always unwise to assume that if two writers use a similar idea, it "proves" that one was directly inspired by the other. The fact is, writers accidentally come up with the same ideas so often that we can't avoid it no matter how hard we try. It's inevitable when working with a specific universe and characters that different creators will hit upon the same ideas by parallel evolution. When I wrote a TNG spec script and pitched to DS9 and VGR back in the '90s, almost every time, one of my ideas happened to be accidentally similar to something they were already doing or would later do. If you see an idea crop up in two different writers' work, it is far more likely to be a coincidence than a deliberate reference.

Nope, it's not a stretch.

And, no in this case this is not accidental considering that no other author that I'm aware of in the past 40 years has had Scotty creating his own alcohol (although I wonder if Kurtzman and the others got the idea for using the brewery for the Enterprise's engine room in Star Trek 2009 from The Klingon Gambit, Mutiny on the Enterprise & Vulcan's Glory as an in joke to those three books). And from what I have read of D.C. Fonatana's memories of writing this novel in both Voyages of the Imagination and the October 2005 Afterward of Vulcan's Glory, she was getting mixed up on her facts. In Vulcan's Glory, she mentions that she tried to reuse the female engineer she developed for the novel, as the chief engineer for the Enterprise-D (Lt. Commander McDougall in The Naked Now) and that Roddenberry and others quickly nixed that idea with the idea of Colm Meaney being hired as the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek The Next Generation. ('"...I tried to do a little later on Star Trek the Next Generation only to have the character bumped in favor of a male Irish engineer...do engineers have to come only in masculine British models?"') Fontana also claimed that Roddenberry came up with the original "Star Trek is..." proposal in 1963 and showed it to her in 1963. All other sources point out that she did not meet Roddenberry until 1964 and he didn't write it until March/April 1964.

She also notes that she seemed to be familiar with the Trek novels of the era, so it is highly possible (and I don't know how long between The Klingon Gambit & Mutiny On The Enterprise Vardeman had off, or if he had written both in the 70's and they were not printed until the 80's and just scheduled two-years apart) that she had read that in Vardeman's novels and liked it, and in later years tried to claim credit for coming up with it (clearly there was at least 10 years between when Vardeman wrote The Klingon Gambit and submitted it to S&S and her novel was published). So she was continuing a plot that Vardeman had started in The Klingon Gambit.

 

[Christopher]

And, no in this case this is not accidental considering that no other author that I'm aware of in the past 40 years has had Scotty creating his own alcohol

As I already said, it is extremely common for different writers to independently come up with the same ideas without any knowledge of each other, especially when working with the same characters and settings. But you're obviously completely unwilling to listen to anything outside your own preconceptions, so it would be a waste of time to continue this conversation.

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

The thing that has always stood out for me about this, the element that I remember when the rest fades into the background, is just... Vardeman talks a lot about how Lorelei has this compelling voice, and is persuasive... But nothing in the text actually shows that. Like we literally only get this whole thing about a debate where it's only the emotion of the two sides, not anything of substance. Even in the idea that she is somehow telepathically influencing things (which is never actually stated, I believe), I just consider that both poor writing AND poor debate.

Granted, it's unpleasantly a prelude to today and the provocateurs who set up "debates" on a stage where they control things and challenge unprepared bystanders to defend a position against their own, a position they have no intention of being persuaded otherwise, which isn't really debate, it's just yelling into a microphone...

Not some lost and forgotten gem, definitely the sort that, if you have multiple others to choose from, you are missing nothing in skipping entirely.