Weirdest Trek novel

[Greg Cox]

Yes....oddly enough, I liked Bloodthirst quite well, even though I'm not a big fan of vampire fiction in general. I will have to grab a copy of Possession, just for the curiosity factor. Thanks for the heads-up on that one.

I'm still jealous that Dillard beat me to the punch on the vampire thing.

 

[TrickyDickie]

I'm still jealous that Dillard beat me to the punch on the vampire thing.

Now I'm wondering if Robert Bloch ever pitched a vampire story for a TOS episode....

 

[Reanok]

Ditto I liked J.M. Dillard's novels Bloodthirst and Demons I still have both novels and read them more than once. Another good TOS novel with horror in it Dreams of the Raven by Carmen Carter is pretty spooky with the aliens and I like the story has a great Dr. McCoy and Spock friendship story arc in the book.

 

[I am not Herbert]

I loved Bloodthirst when I read it many years ago. It felt like stumbling across a lost, good-to-great TOS episode. I am a little wary of re-reading it, having mostly disliked Mindshadow when I read it a few years ago

 

[Emissary of the Prophets]

^

I have to agree with you that the Marshak & Culbreath novels were very difficult to follow. I think there was at least one that I never finished reading.

I remember when they reissued the Phoenix novels in 90’s there was a lot of excitement for them. I bought them and couldn’t finish the first one and never read the second one.

 

[Greg Cox]

Now I'm wondering if Robert Bloch ever pitched a vampire story for a TOS episode....

Or Richard Matheson.

 

[tomswift2002]

Echoes is a rather weird one that is a sequel to that episode where there are the two Voyager's (but also kind of used the plot from DS9's Meridian). And I remember every chapter started with, like "235 universes to the left" and how when the shift happened, if the shift deposited the planet's population in a universe where the planet had been destroyed, then you had billions of deaths! Out of all the Trek novels every published, I think Echoes easily has the highest death count.

Black Fire was also pretty funny when I read it two years ago. Of course it was part of the 1980's pre-TMP "Second Five Year Mission" story arc, so imagining everyone wearing a combination of TOS costumes in TMP sets (kind of what we see in the test scenes for Star Trek Phase II on the Star Trek The Motion Picture Director's Edition DVD) and TMP uniforms in TOS sets (the book had the bridge module get destroyed, so the bridge was being updated to something not quite the TMP bridge, but not the TOS/TAS bridge along with other parts of the ship getting upgraded to a "Phase II" middle ground between TOS/TAS & TMP).

Enterprise: What Price Honor? this one was just weird to where the story made no sense and it was difficult to follow. It was as bad and weird as The Price of the Phoenix.

The Laertian Gambit, this one is easily the craziest, because the author jammed 72 chapters into the book, and a lot of chapters were only one sided page. So the chapter would start like: "Odo walked through the door and looked around." End of Chapter

 

[Christopher]

Black Fire was also pretty funny when I read it two years ago. Of course it was part of the 1980's pre-TMP "Second Five Year Mission" story arc, so imagining everyone wearing a combination of TOS costumes in TMP sets

Not really. There was no "story arc," and there was never an explicit statement of a "second 5-year mission." There were just a handful of novels that claimed to be several years after TOS while still being pre-TMP, and the "second 5YM" theory is something fans made up retroactively to rationalize it. I discussed the idea in a thread in this forum about the '80s continuity some years back, as an attempt to postulate a unifying theory for books that were far less unified in actuality, and I fear many people have mistaken my after-the-fact analysis for something that was present in the actual books. If so, I regret being responsible for contributing to a false belief.

Black Fire certainly never said anything about a second 5-year mission. It did postulate that the bridge was rebuilt and the uniforms redesigned, presumably to suggest a transitional stage between TOS and TMP, but its descriptions of the uniforms and sets were at most only vaguely reminiscent of TMP. (I recall something about the new uniforms being mostly white, which was only true of Kirk's admiral uniform in TMP.)

 

[tomswift2002]

Not really. There was no "story arc," and there was never an explicit statement of a "second 5-year mission." There were just a handful of novels that claimed to be several years after TOS while still being pre-TMP, and the "second 5YM" theory is something fans made up retroactively to rationalize it. I discussed the idea in a thread in this forum about the '80s continuity some years back, as an attempt to postulate a unifying theory for books that were far less unified in actuality, and I fear many people have mistaken my after-the-fact analysis for something that was present in the actual books. If so, I regret being responsible for contributing to a false belief.

Black Fire certainly never said anything about a second 5-year mission. It did postulate that the bridge was rebuilt and the uniforms redesigned, presumably to suggest a transitional stage between TOS and TMP, but its descriptions of the uniforms and sets were at most only vaguely reminiscent of TMP. (I recall something about the new uniforms being mostly white, which was only true of Kirk's admiral uniform in TMP.)

No in Black Fire the Enterprise was being prepped for a second five-year mission and Spock was even away for nearly 18-months from the ship while it was updated and relaunched (and there was an additional character that took over sciences on the Enterprise during that 18-months in a Xon-like manner) and it was not the TMP relaunch, it was a completely different multi-year mission it was being launched for.

 

[Christopher]

No in Black Fire the Enterprise was being prepped for a second five-year mission and Spock was even away for nearly 18-months from the ship while it was updated and relaunched (and there was an additional character that took over sciences on the Enterprise during that 18-months in a Xon-like manner) and it was not the TMP relaunch, it was a completely different multi-year mission it was being launched for.

I just searched the full text on both Google Books and Archive.org's lending library, and the phrase "five-year mission" does not appear anywhere in the novel. The only thing that's stated to be five years long is Spock's prison sentence. It's true that the story spans close to two years and shows a transition toward TMP-era sets and costuming, but it's unspecific about how or whether that fits into the "five-year mission" premise from the title narration. As I said, the '80s novels never actually said anything about a second 5YM. They just let the tour of duty be as many years long as the story needed it to be. As I recall, I always struggled to reconcile the novel's chronology and its idiosyncratic interpretation of the transition toward TMP.

I did misremember about the uniforms, though; the book says they're gray, not white. The blue TMP uniforms are often misinterpreted as gray because of the dim lighting in the bridge scenes, particularly in the TV/home video transfer, which washed out the movie's colors (although that first came out in 1983, too late to influence Black Fire, which came out in the same year). It doesn't clearly describe the new bridge consoles, but says the command chair is only "subtly different" than before, and says "They were planning even more drastic changes in the future." So it wasn't meant to be the TMP design style yet, just an incremental change toward it.

 

[KRAD]

I think Echoes easily has the highest death count.

Excuse me, but I wiped out several entire universes in Q & A, thank you very much..........

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Excuse me, but I wiped out several entire universes in Q & A, thank you very much..........

Coda would like to have a word with you.

 

[FredH]

Black Fire was also pretty funny when I read it two years ago.

Issues of chronology aside, Black Fire was certainly a weird book. It actually makes a “that’s one way you could do it” attempt at demonstrating why Kirk looks a bit more than three and a half years years older in TMP, as after the initial incident (very early near the beginning), if I’m remembering correctly, McCoy has to essentially rebuild him. On the lighter and pulpier side, you’ve got bejeweled space pirates (the most important of whom is a protagonist you wouldn’t picture becoming one), and an army that’s conquered an eighth of the galaxy (apparently mostly via ground-based blade-wielding armies). And even more weirdly, if my faded memories are correct, there’s a foreword by Theodore Sturgeon of all people talking about how good he feels this novel is!

(Can’t say I agreed. The book was certainly fun and nuts, but basically in a “13-year-old runs a Star Trek campaign by way of D&D” way — speaking as someone who was a 13-year-old D&D-playing Trek fan at the time. As always, your mileage may vary.)

EDIT: I think it was also the first novel to involve both Klingons and Romulans at the same time? Which back then would have felt like a big deal.

 

[Christopher]

(Can’t say I agreed. The book was certainly fun and nuts, but basically in a “13-year-old runs a Star Trek campaign by way of D&D” way — speaking as someone who was a 13-year-old D&D-playing Trek fan at the time. As always, your mileage may vary.)

I always figured it was a series of fanfiction novelettes that Cooper edited together into a novel. After all, it is a rather episodic tale with several distinct stages. I have to admire how ambitious and epic it is despite the silliness of it all.

 

[The Wormhole]

Coda would like to have a word with you.

Eh, weren't there only three actual universe destroyed over course of that trilogy?

 

[FredH]

I always figured it was a series of fanfiction novelettes that Cooper edited together into a novel. After all, it is a rather episodic tale with several distinct stages. I have to admire how ambitious and epic it is despite the silliness of it all.

That is certainly true — I remember how big a break it seemed at the time with what Trek novels were generally like.

 

[Timewalker]

I have a copy of the original fanzine version. Yes, there were changes made before it was deemed acceptable for professional publication.

 

[Steve Roby]

Just been going down the Fanlore rabbit hole on Sonni Cooper, which ultimately led to an archived version of her website, where I learned that “One of her science fiction novels, Black Fire (Simon and Schuster) was on the bestseller list and was chosen the best Star Trek novel published in the first 25 years of Star Trek. […] She was a consultant-writer for the Star Trek films.” Gosh.

 

[Timewalker]

Obviously not in the first 25 years of Trek novels, just Trek itself (in my opinion; of course YKMV).

I did enjoy Black Fire, though. It's fun, and I met Sonni Cooper when she and Bjo Trimble were the co-Guests of Honor at Calgary's annual science fiction convention one year in the '80s. Some of us got to tag along with them the following Monday when they went to the Calgary Zoo (they'd issued an open invite at the banquet the day before, for anyone who wanted to join them, to meet at the zoo gates at 10 the following morning). It was a blast.

 

[Dukhat]

The Laertian Gambit, this one is easily the craziest, because the author jammed 72 chapters into the book, and a lot of chapters were only one sided page. So the chapter would start like: "Odo walked through the door and looked around." End of Chapter

Welcome to every James Patterson novel ever written.