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The Laertian Gamble

D

donners22

Commodore
Commodore
I picked up a huge pile of Trek books recently, and have been slowly trawling through them. The latest was The Laertian Gamble.

I'm still trying to work out what on earth I just read.

The first thing that threw me was the book's structure. It has more chapters than any Trek book I can think of - 30 in the first 78 pages, 73 in total. There is no logic to the division, with many of them right in the middle of a scene.

It almost seems like a script which has breaks for every transition, and even commercial breaks (for the completely illogical breaks).

Then there's the plot itself, which seems like something out of Douglas Adams's bin after a particularly long spell of drinking.

Something to do with a mathematical theory which causes an impossible streak of gambling luck, which has side-effects of making mountains and cows disappear, until there is advice from a 12-year-old maths genius and a person named Ken solves everything in a couple of pages for no apparent reason.

Am I alone in being utterly befuddled?
 
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donners22 said:
Something to do with a mathematical theory which causes an impossible streak of gambling luck, which has side-effects of making mountains and cows disappear, until there is advice from a 12-year-old maths genius and a person named Ken solves everything in a couple of pages for no apparent reason.
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Sounds...interesting. As with many of the pre-21st century books I haven't read it, but now I'm curious, although not in the good way...
 
Is it better or worse than Triangle, Trek to Madworld and The Fearful Summons? Is it just the story that's terrible or the characters? I know I've got Gamble (and Warped) somewhere...
 
I've often wondered if the The Laertian Gamble was inspired by episode such as "Move Along Home" and "Rivals". Not just that those were average episodes, but because they had absurd premises as well.
 
DS9forever said:
I've often wondered if the The Laertian Gamble was inspired by episode such as "Move Along Home" and "Rivals". Not just that those were average episodes, but because they had absurd premises as well.
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I doubt that Robert Sheckley was that familiar with DS9 or that he would've found it necessary to borrow inspiration from its humor episodes. He was well-known as an author of humorous, absurdist science fiction long before DS9 ever existed, indeed before Star Trek itself existed. He was probably the most experienced science fiction writer ever to do a Trek novel; at the time he wrote The Laertian Gamble, he had 43 years of SF-writing experience, over 200 short stories, and about two dozen novels to his name, and added several dozen more works to the roster in the final decade of his life.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Robert_Sheckley
 
KingDaniel said:
Is it better or worse than Triangle, Trek to Madworld and The Fearful Summons? Is it just the story that's terrible or the characters? I know I've got Gamble (and Warped) somewhere...
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I found that - despite its incredibly short chapters - it was an effort to just keep turning pages. I wonder if the problem may have been that the editors didn't want to edit the highly-respected Sheckley too heavily, or that maybe the manuscript came in too tight to the deadline? (This often seems to be the case with PAD ST novels, too. Like there are many editorial glitchy things that there simply wasn't time to fix, get approvals on, etc.)

And yes, it resembles the episode "Rivals" in many ways, itself a messy script. (IIRC, the Martus character was originally going to be one of Guinan's many children. Way back in DS9's earliest planning days, there was a suggestion that one of Guinan's many children might be imprisoned on DS9 for gambling problems, setting up a reason for her character to make a cameo visit.)

There'd also already been the novel, "The Big Game", by Smith & Rusche writing as "Sandy Schofield". So gambling-at-Quark stories are almost a genre of their own.

Bitch about "Triangle" and "Trek to Madworld" all you like, but they still gave me plenty of smirks and kept me reading.

"The Fearful Summons" is a tricky one for me, because I know I read it when it came out but I had no particular negative reaction to it. I recall being excited that Denny Martin Flinn used some of his deleted original plans for his ST movie script (what was being called "the last roundup" of the main characters) but I recall little of the novel's plot. Now I almost dread taking a second look, because it is so hated by everyone else.
 
I don't remember having any particular issues with The Laertian Gamble, but I was in my teens then so I guess it appealed to me more. Didn't try too hard to understand it.
I will say though that from memory alone The Fearful Summons was better.
As for Triangle - seems to me that took two tries to get through.
 
You know, I read it back when it came out.. but I honestly can't remember a thing about it. I'm not even sure if I have it. I'll have to check after my son wakes up from his nap. (The books are in his bedroom.)
 
I just finished this one myself, and after stopping half-way through to read some other books, I finally finished it. But I must say that I was kind of left wondering why this book was even written? It feels like the author was trying to combine How Much For Just The Planet? with The Big Game or Rivals, but really it just ended up in just one huge mess that you really had no clue it was doing (just like that machine that Dax helped to build in the book, no idea what it does, but apparently it took up the entire bottom floor of a house and was draining so much energy that the power company had to be called for more energy, just like in that scene from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with the Auxiliary Nuclear Generator).
 
Basically, John Ordover is a huge Robert Sheckley fan and couldn't resist hiring him to write a Trek book . . .
 
Greg Cox said:
Basically, John Ordover is a huge Robert Sheckley fan and couldn't resist hiring him to write a Trek book . . .
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JJO did resist editing him, though. :rommie:

Sadly, due only to TLG, I have absolutely no interest in picking up other Sheckley SF novels. Ever. Still ranks as my most unpleasant ST reading experience.
 
All I remember is Dax and someone else building something, not through any logical design but just because parts "felt right". I think one of the components was a piano?

I was young when I read it but even then I thought it was silly.
 
Ah, the infamous book where the author confused chapters and paragraphs.

CHAPTER 532
Commander Sisko sat down at his desk.

CHAPTER 533
He reached for his baseball and tossed it lightly into the air.

CHAPTER 534
He caught it again.
 
I don't think I'll ever read any of his other books, especially since the Laertian culture just didn't seem "alien" to me.

But I was just looking in Voyages Of Imagination by Jeff Ayers (pages 237-238), and here's a quote from what he told Ayers:

I didn't realize I was a Star Trek fan until I started writing The Laertian Gamble. Before that I had been critical of Star Trek...I think I did all right by Star Trek, since my editor asked me for little in the way of revisions.
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I don't know about you, but that sounds like quite the oxymoron of a statement.
 
tomswift2002 said:
I didn't realize I was a Star Trek fan until I started writing The Laertian Gamble. Before that I had been critical of Star Trek...I think I did all right by Star Trek, since my editor asked me for little in the way of revisions.
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I don't know about you, but that sounds like quite the oxymoron of a statement.
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How is it an oxymoron? He had been critical of it before, but once he started writing it, he discovered he liked it after all. There's no contradiction there.
 
I love, love, love the Laertian Gamble. A few years ago there was a thread on here asking which author you'd want to write another Star Trek book, and I mentioned the Laertian Gamble...And found out that Sheckley was quite dead. I ended up reading a gigant collection of his short stories and being quite amused. I have a taste for absurdism though.

I think his style would have better meshed with Doctor Who than Star Trek, though.
 
Therin of Andor said:
"The Fearful Summons" is a tricky one for me, because I know I read it when it came out but I had no particular negative reaction to it. I recall being excited that Denny Martin Flinn used some of his deleted original plans for his ST movie script (what was being called "the last roundup" of the main characters) but I recall little of the novel's plot. Now I almost dread taking a second look, because it is so hated by everyone else.
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It's been a very long time since I read The Fearful Summons, but I can remember hating it intensely. As far as I can remember, ridiculous aliens, poor plot and the author having no grasp of the characters whatsoever were amongst its flaws. Smiling Vulcans etc...
 
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