Re: Star Trek: Unspoken Truth - Discussion (Spoilers)
Another unsettling aspect of the book...is that Saavik is really presented as pretty much an adopted daughter of Sarek and Amanda. Which makes her more of a sister to Spock...which makes what happened on Genesis more than a bit disturbing...not even mentioning that in other books Saavik and Spock later married!
I know that MWB did not write the scene on Genesis or the earlier books (by Sherman and Schwartz) that depict the marriage...and Unspoken Truth is not required to adhere to previous Trek literature plot points....but depicting Saavik so strongly as an adopted daughter of Sarek and Amanda just makes the whole Saavik/Spock dynamic incredibly incestuous.
Makes me wish that Schwartz and Sherman had found a different wife for Spock, rather than Saavik. Also makes me wish that MWB had not connected Saavik so strongly to Sarek and Amanda (although I realize that other books have previously done this as well.)
You know, the “incestuous” angle never occurred to me.
Spock and Saavik may be legal siblings, but there’s no consanguinity (although I understand there’s a faction of fandom that would have Saavik be the illegitimate offspring of Spock and the Romulan Commander from “The Enterprise Incident” –!). They’re no more “blood relatives” than any natural child and adopted child living in the same household. The relationship is even more attenuated by the fact that Spock hasn’t lived in his parents’ home for decades by the time Saavik comes to them as a child.
Having Amanda and Sarek raise Saavik as their own seemed to me like a natural progression from
The Pandora Principle. Clowes as good as hints at it by having Saavik go to live with “a foster family on Vulcan” without saying who that family is.
(It’s possible she intended to, but either someone at Pocket or someone at the studio at the time put the kibosh on it.)
Quite recently, Glenn Greenberg sent me copies of the
Star Trek: The Untold Voyages series that he did for Marvel in 1998. Issue #2 essentially picks up Saavik’s story immediately after
The Pandora Principle, and – guess what? – has her welcomed into Sarek and Amanda’s home.
(And the reason I got access to Greenberg’s work was because he’d heard about
Unspoken Truth and wrote to me, and we discovered we’d had exactly the same thought about who should be in charge of Saavik’s upbringing. So there you are.)
I’ve always had the sense that Star Trek has already been written down somewhere. We writers are just grabbing pieces of it as it flows by in the eddies, currents, backwash…
)
