Hey, that's my cover scan on Goodreads. Certainly looks like it, anyway. For the second time today, from the ol' Lost Books page (
https://web.archive.org/web/20141017111042id_/http://www.well.com/~sjroby/lostbooks.html#88st)"
The Star Trek That Never Was (1988)
On a quarterly basis,
Locus, the "newspaper of the science fiction field," lists books due to be published in the next several months. In June, 1988, Locus listed
The Star Trek That Never Was by Allan Asherman as a planned October, 1988 release from Pocket Books. It was also listed, with a reproduction of the cover art, in the September, 1988 issue of
Science Fiction Chronicle, again as an October release. According to novelist Margaret Wander Bonanno's
website, this book "was produced, shipped to the warehouses and, the night before it was due to arrive in bookstores, sent to the shredders instead."
Judging by the cover copy ("adventures written for the original series and its planned sequel"), this was a book about unproduced episodes of
Star Trek, covering the same subject as the thin, overpriced books
The Star Trek That Never Was and
The Star Trek That Almost Was published by the
Star Trek Files Magazine group (also known as Schuster and Schuster, Couch Potato Press, Pioneer Books, etc.). Those little ripoffs had plot summaries of episodes written for the original
Star Trek and the aborted
Phase II series. Interestingly, the cover copy for Pocket's book says that it was "compiled by Allan Asherman, featuring material by Norman Spinrad" et al. Perhaps this book actually reproduced scripts and story treatments, rather than just summarizing them.
As if by coincidence, the Asherman book was due for publication during a writers' strike in Hollywood, and "The Child", the premiere episode of
The Next Generation's second season, was based on an unused
Phase II script. Did Paramount order Pocket to drop the book so they could have some unused scripts to work with? Maybe. Another script was retooled ("Devil's Due"), and only now has a book on
Phase II been published (
Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens).
As for the original series material, Theodore Sturgeon's proposed episode, which would have been in this book, has since been adapted into novel form (
The Joy Machine by James Gunn), but we may have lost some other intriguing stories.
As for the Files Magazines, there were two, The Star Trek That Never Was and The Star Trek That Almost Was. From my old Complete Starfleet Library website:
The Star Trek That Almost Was
This being a
Hal Schuster production, it should come as no surprise that the cover blurb actually describes another book,
The Star Trek That Never Was (see below). This book contains skimpy retellings of plot outlines for proposed episodes for the original series that were never filmed. Stories summarized are "Rockabye Baby, Or Die," by George Clayton Johnson (who wrote "The Man Trap" and several
Twilight Zone episodes), "The Joy Machine" by Theodore Sturgeon (who wrote "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time" and many classic science fiction stories and novels; this was turned into a novel by James Gunn); "The Lost Star" and "The Godhead" by John Meredyth Lucas ("The Changeling" and several other TOS episodes), "Shol" by Darlene Hartman, "Pandora's Box" by Daniel Louis Aubry, "The Aurorals" by Frank Paris, "Perchance to Dream" by J.M. Winston, and "He Walked Among Us" by Norman Spinrad ("The Doomsday Machine" and several classic SF stories and novels).
There may be as much as twenty pages' worth of text in this book. The rest of the space is filled with black and white behind-the-scenes photos from the original series, at least one used twice. While it's interesting to read summaries of proposed episodes by the likes of Sturgeon and Spinrad, this is still a rather
typical Hal Schuster book: badly produced, short on content, overpriced.
The Star Trek That Never Was
In a typical
Hal Schuster publishing screwup, this book's back cover blurb proudly describes the contents of another book entirely -- in this case,
The Star Trek That Almost Was (see above). This is the book described on that book's cover, a very brief exploration of the unproduced
Star Trek Phase II series from the last 1970s. Described in this book are the unfilmed episodes "In Thy Image" (which eventually became, with extensive rewriting,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture), "Kitumba," "Dead Lock," and "Tomorrow and the Stars." Considerably more information is available in the
Star Trek Phase II book by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, published by Pocket.
Because the author had only a few pages of material on the
Star Trek II series, the rest of the book is full of photographs and a section on
Star Trek soundtracks.
Norman Spinrad's unproduced script He Walked Among Us was available as an ebook on Amazon for a couple of years, but was gone the last time I looked.
ugh gods....
