Star Trek Insurrection by J.M. Dillard Review Thread (27th Anniversary)

[tomswift2002]

Published: December 1998 in hardcover
Publisher: Pocket Books
Also published: Star Trek Insurrection (YA novel) by John Vornholt

Plot: Data goes rogue and Picard must rescue him from the fountain of youth!

Review: First off, Insurrection was the first ever Star Trek film I saw in theaters and bought in widescreen on VHS tape (as the widescreen version in its blue cassette was the only version out from Ottawa to Winnipeg and even today when I find the tape used it’s always the widescreen version). I also bought John Vornholt’s novelization in December 1998 with Christmas money, but never bought J.M. Dillard’s version (nor see it again) until a few days ago. Back then the $30 price tag was steep for a teen and I expected the novel to get a paperback release before the millennium.

I notice the spine doesn’t use the traditional Pocket Books kangaroo like was used my my Star Trek Generations or Star Trek First Contact hardcovers), but a kangaroo in flight. The logo looks like it should be on a Qantas airplane!

I’m sixty pages in and so far it’s been a beat-for-beat retelling of the movie with very little added, unlike her previous novelizations where she added a lot.

 

[Tosk]

I don't have much to add, so I'll just highlight the time that Michael Piller's The Dead Zone threw some comedy shade at Michael Piller's Star Trek Insurrection.

 

[tomswift2002]

I don't have much to add, so I'll just highlight the time that Michael Piller's The Dead Zone threw some comedy shade at Michael Piller's Star Trek Insurrection.

That’s similar to how I got my hardcover copy of Star Trek Generations in 1998: it had a Clearance stick on it and was on clearance for $4.99 at a Smithbooks in Ottawa (and as I recall they had at least another twenty on Clearance that day on one of the tables at the mall entrance).Regular $26.50 on for $4.99.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Since it's a review thread, added a poll.

 

[Markonian]

Read this years ago. INS is my favourite Star Trek movie. I appreciated the additional scenes and background on the Son'a and how they got started.

 

[tomswift2002]

I’m up to about Chapter 10. This is a very barebones novelization with no additional scenes. I was expecting a scene when LaForge was in engineering repairing Data, and wakes up Data, that would go back before the movie and show what had led up to the opening scene, but there was nothing, just a paragraph break to where they are on the planet getting them Artim to show them where he had been.

Reading this in 2026, any additional scenes or lines in the book are what can be found on the Special Edition DVD or Blu-Rays in the Deleted Scenes. Plus I think the novelization also has the original ending, that is also in the Deleted Scenes on the discs.

 

[tomswift2002]

This is one book where in terms of technical writing it’s high quality and outstanding, but in terms of the story, it feels like Dillard was told to just follow the dots and not add anything else. In that sense it’s a very poor book because it’s, as I said, barebones and there’s nothing added to explain parts of the movie that you would want explained.

 

[Reanok]

I like the book I reread again a few yeras ago and like the dditional scenes that filled in the blanks and added more depth to the chracters and made the story more interesting . I like wow Donatra's character was portrayed in the book and some of the romulans defied shinzon in the book and ended helping Picard near the end of the book.

 

[DonIago]

I like the book I reread again a few yeras ago and like the dditional scenes that filled in the blanks and added more depth to the chracters and made the story more interesting . I like wow Donatra's character was portrayed in the book and some of the romulans defied shinzon in the book and ended helping Picard near the end of the book.

Wrong book.

I never read this one. It's sad how far things declined from the heyday of the novelizations of TWOK and TSFS.

 

[tomswift2002]

I like the book I reread again a few yeras ago and like the dditional scenes that filled in the blanks and added more depth to the chracters and made the story more interesting . I like wow Donatra's character was portrayed in the book and some of the romulans defied shinzon in the book and ended helping Picard near the end of the book.

You’re describing Star Trek Nemesis, the film after Star Trek Insurrection.

 

[tomswift2002]

Wrong book.

I never read this one. It's sad how far things declined from the heyday of the novelizations of TWOK and TSFS.

It’s been about 20 years since I read the novelization of Star Trek First Contact, and I remember there being some added filler but nothing like Star Trek Generations where Dillard added the whole funeral scene at the beginning of the book and diving further into the 2293 part. Dillard even did an excellent job novelizing The Expanse/The Xindi and adding more background to those episodes in 2003 (which would be the last Star Trek episodes novelized as of 2026). But for the last 3 decades, when it’s come to the movies Paramount basically had a barebones approach for both Dillard and Alan Dean Foster.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

This is one book where in terms of technical writing it’s high quality and outstanding, but in terms of the story, it feels like Dillard was told to just follow the dots and not add anything else.

I feel that way about all of Dillard's NextGen novelizations. Her Trek V and VI novelizations are more expensive (she ties V into The Lost Years, for example), the first third of Generations is okay, but in the 24th century the work is much more perfunctory.

 

[DonIago]

Her Trek V novelization gave me more hope than I should have had for that film. :|

 

[Allyn Gibson]

The Star Trek V novelization is genuinely good. If I were to rank the novelizations, either it or McIntyre's Star Trek III would get top marks. I maybe lean toward V because it works with a much wider canvas.

Then there would be a blob of II, IV, and VI in some order, then TMP and Generations in some order, then First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis in some order. I haven't read the Kelvin novelizations.

Thinking about, the difference between the first six novelizations and the last four is that the last four don't try to expand the story of the film out into the universe. McIntrye tells us about other things going on in Starfleet and shows us the lives of tangential characters. Dillard did a lot of worldbuilding herself, delving deeper into Sybok's past and the state of galactic politics in 2293. The TNG novelizations don't do that perhaps because Dillard was constrained by the reality that there were other television series running alongside the films that were doing that kind of outbuilding. She couldn't have written about the state of play in the Federation in the Insurrection novelization without the risk of Deep Space Nine blowing it out of the water. (I think DSN does that to the film anyway; it doesn't fit well at all with season 7 and what the season tells us about the Dominion and their war aims. I put it after "What You Leave Behind" and Worf is enroute to Qo'noS to assume his ambassadorship.)

 

[DonIago]

I thought it was TPTB who decided to assert tighter control over the film novelizations? I could be misremembering, though.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I'm not sure the novelizations were even on Berman's radar until the Broken Bow incident.

 

[Admiral_Young]

IIRC the only differing thing the novelization offers is the original draft's ending regarding Ru'afo. It also wasn't based on the final draft of the film, but I believe like two drafts before that.

I highly recommend when you're finished reading Michael Piller's making of book for Insurrection.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

IIRC the only differing thing the novelization offers is the original draft's ending regarding Ru'afo. It also wasn't based on the final draft of the film, but I believe like two drafts before that.

True. Novelizations are written from non-final scripts (see Kirk getting shot in the back in the hardcover edition of the Generations novelization), and the studios in general became tighter on timelines and more restrictive on access. I feel like I've heard an account of a novelization that was written in a sealed room under lock and key, and even one where the author could read it on premises but not have it in front of him when he wrote so scenes had to be written from memory. I can't remember what I ate for dinner yesterday, so I'd be useless for a gig like that.

 

[tomswift2002]

Thinking about, the difference between the first six novelizations and the last four is that the last four don't try to expand the story of the film out into the universe. McIntrye tells us about other things going on in Starfleet and shows us the lives of tangential characters. Dillard did a lot of worldbuilding herself, delving deeper into Sybok's past and the state of galactic politics in 2293. The TNG novelizations don't do that perhaps because Dillard was constrained by the reality that there were other television series running alongside the films that were doing that kind of outbuilding. She couldn't have written about the state of play in the Federation in the Insurrection novelization without the risk of Deep Space Nine blowing it out of the water. (I think DSN does that to the film anyway; it doesn't fit well at all with season 7 and what the season tells us about the Dominion and their war aims. I put it after "What You Leave Behind" and Worf is enroute to Qo'noS to assume his ambassadorship.)

As I recall Dillard did a lot of world building in her novelization of “Emissary”, which is not exactly her best novelization, however I recall that she was able to flesh out certain sections more than the TV Movie could.

As for the Kelvin timeline books, I seem to remember back around 2009 Alan Dean Foster mentioning in an interview that he didn’t have as much latitude to correct on screen errors in his novelization of the 2009 movie as he had had in the 70’s with the cartoon novelizations or even other sci-Fi novelizations (like “The Black Hole”) that he had worked on, and Paramount’s orders were basically “stick to the script, no corrections or deviations”.

 

[The Wormhole]

In modern times, studios in general only want the novelizations to be a straight 1:1 adaptation of the script with no embellishments or deviations whatsoever. It's odd, particularly since embellishments are the one thing a novelization could have going for it in modern times, but it's what the studios want for some reason.

One of the rare examples are the Disney Star Wars movies, but that's like because they have the Lucas Story Group supervising things.