Best of the Bantams?

[Therin of Andor]

Please do yourself a favor and skip the adaptations by James Blish, they're awful.

Can't agree there. They are definitely products of their time, and very brief by today's standards of novelization, but the early Blish ST stories are often based on early draft scripts, have tantalizing connections to other Blish SF tales, and were originally enjoyed by both adults and children - and that makes them important, fascinating, nostalgic and certainly not-awful. (Or maybe it makes them full of awe?)

Once I started on the Blish adaptations (in 1980), I couldn't put them down till all episodes had been devoured.

As a school librarian and ST fan, I've met numerous adults who taught themselves to read as kids with Blish TOS novelization collections (and Batman comics), in a time when home video was beyond the public's comprehension and everyone relied on the flukiness of a TV network to repeat a favourite episode that had only ever aired once before.

 

[seigezunt]

I have to agree with the folks above about Blish. They were great, especially at a time before VCRs.

 

[PaulSimpson]

And it's surprising how many "commonly held beliefs" about the original series sprang fromn reading the Blish novelisations and taking them as gospel. Doctor Who fans have the same problem with the Target novelisations - things that the author(s) added to "correct" errors or flesh out the original have become regarded as fact. There's a feature to be written about the divergences in the novelisations - not just the Blish, but ADF's Logs and the various movie tie-ins...

 

[JD]

^You are doing one, or you want to do one?

 

[PaulSimpson]

^You are doing one, or you want to do one?

It's one of those ideas that I've had at the back of my mind throughout the three years I've been editing the Star Trek Magazine. We covered it very briefly in the Doomsday Machine feature, looking at Blish's quite major alterations to that episode, but as yet I've not worked out where it'll fit in...

P

 

[T'Girl]

I was troubled by the nazi ss charactor in Angel, does key in to some folk's posts that the federation is a socialist state.

The Nazis weren't actually socialists. They only called themselves the National Socialist Party because nationalism and socialism were popular ideologies and they wanted to fool people into supporting them -- classic Hitlerian Big Lie propaganda. (Godwin's Law doesn't apply when you're talking about the actual Nazis, right?)

And people who think the Federation is socialist don't understand economics. Socialism is a system where the sources of wealth are state-owned and distributed according to need. What the Federation has is something totally different, a post-scarcity economy where wealth has become irrelevant. A post-scarcity economic system could not be either capitalist or socialist, since both those economic models are based on the assumption of scarcity. If resources are effortlessly attainable by everyone, if anyone can get everything they need out of a replicator, then there's no need for the state to own and distribute wealth in order to engineer economic equality.

Please do yourself a favor and skip anything by James Blish, they're awful

I can't agree there. Blish was an acclaimed science fiction author, and while his early adaptations and Spock Must Die! may have diverged heavily from Trek continuity as we understand it, they were certainly imaginative and distinctive.

I liked 'Spock Must Die', partial because it diverged from the standard trek, I like it whan a author takes to different path.

I maintain that the adaptations were awful, I understand that the gentleman lived in britain, was working off early scripts and hadn't even seen most of the episodes. and it showed.

Christopher, he did 'Doomsday Machine' in only twevle pages!

 

[Christopher]

^At the time those adaptations were written, reruns were uncommon and home video was nonexistent. So fidelity to the source material was not an overriding goal. The idea behind adaptations at the time was more along the lines of telling an effective prose story that was based on a movie or TV episode but stood on its own as a distinct work. The key was whether the story was entertaining on its own terms, not whether it was an exact duplication of its source. This changed in the later adaptations, because ST got rerun to a then-unprecedented extent, allowing fans to become far more familiar with the episodes and push for more faithful interpretations.

As for the length, Blish would've worked within the guidelines his editor and publisher set for him. Books were shorter back then, and Bantam decided to approach the Trek adaptations as short-story anthologies with six or seven tales per volume, not an atypical format for the time. If he'd been asked to do longer adaptations, he would have. But this was the format that was chosen.

 

[GHS]

I liked Spock Must Die. I'd rate it above Galactic Whirlpool on brevity alone. Whirlpool, as Keepontrekkin pointed out, would have one character talking for pages on end. It was pretty good, but would have been greatly helped by some fierce editing.

On the short story anthologies, I liked Enchanted Pool and Face on the Barroom Floor from New Voyages I.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I maintain that the adaptations were awful, I understand that the gentleman lived in britain, was working off early scripts and hadn't even seen most of the episodes. and it showed.

Christopher, he did 'Doomsday Machine' in only twevle pages!

So?

What age were you when you read the Blish stories, and how long ago? I think you're imposing unfair expectations on them that weren't around when they were first published.

Bantam was a publisher with a specialty for slim, MMPB science fiction titles and, as an anthology of short stories, the TOS adaptations are very similar in style and length as similar TV adaptations, such as "The Twilight Zone".

 

[Christopher]

I liked Spock Must Die. I'd rate it above Galactic Whirlpool on brevity alone. Whirlpool, as Keepontrekkin pointed out, would have one character talking for pages on end. It was pretty good, but would have been greatly helped by some fierce editing.

Aww, the random worldbuilding digressions in The Galactic Whirlpool were the parts I liked best. They were very entertaining and offered an unusual perspective.

Bantam was a publisher with a specialty for slim, MMPB science fiction titles and, as an anthology of short stories, the TOS adaptations are very similar in style and length as similar TV adaptations, such as "The Twilight Zone".

Oh, good grief, those Twilight Zone adaptations. They were pretty dire. The ones I remember were by this guy who was known for writing "real-life" ghost stories (yeah, right), and his TZ books were a mix of very vague, very loose episode adaptations redone to fit his "this really happened" style and generic ghost stories that had nothing to do with TZ.

 

[Steve Roby]

Oh, good grief, those Twilight Zone adaptations. They were pretty dire. The ones I remember were by this guy who was known for writing "real-life" ghost stories (yeah, right), and his TZ books were a mix of very vague, very loose episode adaptations redone to fit his "this really happened" style and generic ghost stories that had nothing to do with TZ.

Those weren't the Bantam TZ books, they were Walter Gibson's books for Tempo, Grosset & Dunlap's paperback imprint (apparently the author is the same Gibson who wrote most of the Shadow pulp novels). Dunno if Serling actually wrote the Bantam books published under his name, but they were, as I recall, straightforward episode adaptations like Blish's.

 

[Christopher]

Oh. I never came across the Bantam ones, or if I did, I assumed they were more of Gibson's rubbish.

 

[Trimm]

I got my first Blish adaptation at a garage sale when I was nine. At the time, it was a completely new way for me to experience TOS. Spock Must Die was the first Trek novel I ever read. I'd heartily recommend Blish to anyone.

 

[seigezunt]

I read the first four or five volumes of Blish's volumes while waiting in court during my parents' divorce hearing as a kid. I'm thankful to Blish for that alone.