How Much For Just The Planet?

[Captain59]

Are they real songs, or made up for the novel?

 

[Christopher]

^The song lyrics are original to the novel, but they're implicitly meant to be sung to the tunes of various existing songs from musicals and the like. One of them is quite clearly meant to be sung to the theme from Rawhide, but the others I'm not sure of. Nobody's ever compiled a list that I'm aware of.

 

[General Martok]

One of the others is "Just a Gigolo," as I recall. A robot falling apart, and ending on "I ain't got no body..."

One of my absolute favorites of Trek lit. I wish somebody would take a stab at Trek comedy again... ?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Christopher said:
Nobody's ever compiled a list that I'm aware of.

I'm working on it, I promise. I have several friends who are huge fans of stage musicals and they worked out almost all of them - and would sing the songs during our ST newsletter printing weekends back in the 80s - much to John M Ford's amusement and delight when we told him so while he was visiting Sydney for a SF Lit convention.

It was the late Mr Ford's intention that the novel carry a list of the tunes necessary for singing these pro filksongs karaoke-style, but Pocket Books' lawyers were not keen to do all the legal clearances, so the song lyrics had to remain tuneless.

I loved HMfJtP?, and my friends and I thought it was funny, at the time, how many fans pounced on the novel assuming it would be a direct sequel to "The Final Reflection", then discovering it was a musical comedy, complete with a Vaudeville-style cream pie fight, instead! It was Ford's warped sense of humour to taunt his audience in such a way, ie. to make people reassess their original assumptions.

 

[TGTheodore]

General Martok said:
One of my absolute favorites of Trek lit. I wish somebody would take a stab at Trek comedy again... ?

I've pitched, I've tried ... my god, I've tried. Although two of my three SNW stories are primarily comedic. Especially the Voyager one with Janeway and Paris' three salamander kits. ("On the Rocks", SNW V)

And one of the TNG spec scripts that got me invited to pitch to Ron Moore was a humorous script with major holiday overtones (secular, objective, and historical) called "And All Through the Ship".

My comedic DS9 two-time SNW alternate's title was inspired by "How Much for Just the Planet?" and was entitled "Wake Me When the Planet Gets Back."

So we humorous Trek writers are out here ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... it's just very difficult to consistently carry Trek humor through an entire novel, and balance it with a worthwhile story as the backdrop. And especially hard to convey your style of intended humor in a written or verbal pitch.

Short stories? No problem.

Oh, look ... a replicated banana peel. WHOA!!!!!!!!

--Ted

 

[General Martok]

Well, keep up the effort. I'd buy it! Heck, I'd buy two copies!

 

[USS Intrepid]

I loved this book when I first read it many years ago, and still have my copy.

 

[ClayinCA]

I'd love a comedic Trek novel as well, if it was even close to as good as How Much...?

 

[JD]

I'd certainly be willing to check out a comedic Trek book.

 

[DorkBoy [TM]]

I remember really liking this book when it first came out, back in the 80s.

Very, very funny.

 

[Mandra]

Love the book, one of my favorites.

And I'd be interested in seeing the list of songs too, the only one I recognized was "Just A Gigolo".