Read the first 6 when the films were current. Novelizations usually came out right in front of the films so I would read them and be happily spoiled. TMP is really good. Read it and read Christopher Bennett's Ex Machina immediately after- they read like 2 volumes. The TFF book made me think the film would be good- vastly superior to the movie. If only they had filmed the book, the 3 dozen TFF Hate posts on this board wouldn't exist.
I loved the Batman novel....and dearly miss a lot of the eighties film novelisations. I really want Batman, Tron, Back to future 2, Dick Tracy, and Grease. My copies literally disentegrated or disappeared somewhere in the early nineties. Maybe I will get lucky and they will resurface as ebooks.
I wonder if the incredibly stilted "I'm delighted. Any chance to go aboard the Enterprise, however briefly, is always an excuse for nostalgia," line is why they trimmed the scene. Who the hell talks like that? George Takei's weird way of pronouncing "nostalgia" doesn't help either, but I suppose that could have been fixed in a looping session.
It's been many years, but I've read both the TMP and TWoK novelizations. The polytheism thing turns up in dialogue near the end of the latter: Sulu says "oh, gods" when he learns of Spock's death. And he does die completely; the torpedo-tube coffin is described as burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet. (I never read any further tie-in books, so I have no idea how he's brought back in TSFS. His combusted atoms reassemble on the surface?) In the TWoK novelization, I also recall several halfhearted stabs at continuity from TMP - an offhand mention of a crew member being a Deltan, that sort of thing. Wasn't worth the minimal effort to have done so.
Actually there is a direct connection because McCoy mentions that Kirk should have kept his command after Voyager. They also quote "Thattaway" when leaving drydock. The Deltan characterS are more than offhand. They are Regula scientists and being Deltan turns into a plot point. The torpedo is INTENDED to burn up. Saavik programs it to intersect the last remnant of the Genesis wave. As we see in TSFS (both film and book) that's not what happens. Oh, and Sulu's "Oh gods" is actually McCoy making fun of his performance on the Kobayashi Maru sim. McCoy is mocking Sulu's reaction to Spock's "death". I'll have to look it up. I don't think Sulu says anything when he finds out about Spock. He finds out from Christine Chapel because he's in sickbay after his console explodes. David Marcus saves his life.
Which was a thoughtless move on Roddenberry's part, as TOS clearly featured characters believing in the Judeo-Christian God. That does not vanish in the alleged few years between the end of TOS and TMP. Moreover, one cannot look at a character like McCoy or Kirk in the movies and think they are atheists to any degree. In fact, Kirk's battle against Sybok in TFF was typical of Kirk: tearing down false Gods (recall his "We find the one quite sufficient" to Apollo and psychologically dressing down Gary Mitchell's self-made notions of being a god), as he clearly believed in the one. In any case, the Roddenberry issue would not be the first time he dumped weak or strange ideas on ST.
In the novel of TMP, he gave the Vulcans a seventh sense that left them know there was a creator. Diane Duane expanded on it in Spock's World. (I love that book.)
"Dammit, Spock!" "Doctor, please elaborate. Which deity are you invoking for the purpose of condemning me?" "Uh, none of them. It's just an old Southern expression I picked up. I don't believe in any of that nonsense." "Fascinating. Perhaps you can educate me further on your use of colorful metaphors when you consider the source material meaningless." "Dammit, Spock!"
I looked it up this morning. I had it wrong. SULU makes fun of McCOY after the Kobayashi Maru. But Sulu's response to the news of Spock's death is "Oh gods." Damn it, now I have to see if anyone ELSE in the book other than Sulu is explicitly polytheistic. Chekov is rather hilariously communist (as opposed to just Russian). I also had forgotten how VM took the dialog from the script as a suggestion. Kirk's eulogy hit's the same beats but uses almost none of the same words. It (and TSFS) are such fascinating novels because they almost thread through what we saw on screen. Going in a slightly different direction, I don't like it when a novelist inverts a fairly plain scene after the fact. I already mentioned J.M. Dillard's take on the mind meld in TUC. In TSFS Valkris says "Success, my lord ...and my love" when she knows that Kruge will kill her to tie up loose ends. Kruge is one cold Klingon SOB, right? Welllll according to VM he wasn't really her love. They didn't know each other, but Kruge was going to restore her family's honor. She just said that in a flood of emotion. Um... Ok. Other than that, Valkris' story in TSFS is fascinating and is definitely an early example of Klingon world building. (If I have my timelines right, it predates The Final Reflection by a year.) There's a whole subplot with her and the crew of the tramp freighter she ships out on. Damn it, people. Now I'm going to have to re-read all of these!
Agreed. Nothing throws me out of a novelization faster than the author working at cross-purposes to the screenplay. And 90% of the time, it's not an improvement. How does making Kruge less ruthless serve the story?
Thanks to the magic of Google Books search. I checked out the 'gods' references in McIntyre's novelizations: TWOK: https://tinyurl.com/y9a8dhrb 10 references TSFS: https://tinyurl.com/y87jwwch 20 references Oddly enough TVH has Scott use "God's". She must have been slipping (or perhaps her editor was a monotheist). https://tinyurl.com/y75738l
Nice! Thanks! VM's characters are AMAZING. I do have half a mind to compile a comparison between her dialog and Meyers'. Fine young Scott from Aberdeen going in for that hippy nonsense? Started reading TWOK last night. Wow, what a different feel that opening has when it 1) doesn't have the "gotcha" of the film and 2) zeroes in on Saavik's character and her relationship to Spock right away. I'm sure it's this book as much as if not more that Alley's performance that makes me cringe at most other representation's of that character. (Pandora Principle is of course wonderful.) If TUC had kept Saavik as the turncoat instead of "Valeris" (a pretty obvious Saavik retread) it would have broken my heart and jumped up and down on it. Which was, of course, the idea. Apropos of nothing, I first read TWOK on the plane flight home from my granmother's funeral, about a month after the film came out. A fellow passenger was kind enough to lend a thirteen year old nerd his copy.
I too, read all the novels 1-5 before the movies came out and they so exciting and engrossing. The movies never quite matched up because so much was missing.
I read the novels of 1 and 5 when I was a teenager and thought they were okay, although I don't really remember them. I did like the descriptions of future earth in 1, like how they changed the Mediterranean sea, and I liked how Kirk was in a relationship with some lady admiral who turned out to be one of the people who got killed in the transporter accident. In 5 I think they showed more of Sybok using his mind powers, including on Sulu, I think, to remove their guilt about something that happened to their friend when they were a kid. This thread has got me really interested in tracking down the 2, 3, 4 ones though.