Poll Is Star Trek: Khan khanon?

[Stevil2001]

Inspired by this thread, I've just finished reading The Lost World and The Poison Belt for the first time. I thought TLW was a lot of fun and quite well-written, but TPB was much less successful (and it seems like Doyle was already becoming occupied with thoughts about mortality and the afterlife when he wrote it). Now I'm debating whether I'm enough of a completist to read The Land of Mist out of morbid curiosity. There are also the two short stories that were written last, but that Wikipedia's "biography" of Challenger places before TLoM, so I may read them first.

The Poison Belt is very much an example of a contemporary subgenre of proto-sf; people at the time were obsessed with mass apocalyptic events, especially ones caused by astronomical objects. It's also very much a weak example of it though, thanks to the soft-pedaled ending! Give me The Purple Cloud any day. But I think it's entertaining enough up until that point.

The Land of Mist is the worst kind of bad, though, bad boring. Challenger isn't even in it very much; it's much more about the tedious and sanctimonious spiritualists.

The shorts aren't great but they're short. They read like Golden Age sf stories: a scientific idea made into a story, but not an interesting story or a well told one.

 

[Christopher]

The shorts aren't great but they're short. They read like Golden Age sf stories: a scientific idea made into a story, but not an interesting story or a well told one.

Yeah, they weren't much. Although I do find it interesting that Conan Doyle was one of the first people to write an SF story about the invention of what we would call the transporter. (Apparently the first was Edward Page Mitchell in the 1877 story "The Man Without a Body.") Although maybe I'm wrong, since "The Disintegration Machine" was a 1929 story, which borders on the pulp era, so maybe teleportation stories weren't uncommon by that point.

 

[Stevil2001]

Yeah, they weren't much. Although I do find it interesting that Conan Doyle was one of the first people to write an SF story about the invention of what we would call the transporter. (Apparently the first was Edward Page Mitchell in the 1877 story "The Man Without a Body.") Although maybe I'm wrong, since "The Disintegration Machine" was a 1929 story, which borders on the pulp era, so maybe teleportation stories weren't uncommon by that point.

The SF Encyclopedia says there were matter transmission stories in the pulps, citing ones from 1922, 1924, and 1927, so Doyle definitely had his predecessors.

 

[Christopher]

The SF Encyclopedia says there were matter transmission stories in the pulps, citing ones from 1922, 1924, and 1927, so Doyle definitely had his predecessors.

"Beam me up, Watson!" "Elementary, my dear Scotty!"

 

[KRAD]

The Poison Belt was worth reading for the characters -- seeing what the protagonists of The Lost World were up to now. As a story it was meh, but I enjoyed looking back in on the folks from TLW.

I'm perfectly happy to pretend The Land of Mist doesn't exist.

 

[Christopher]

I'm perfectly happy to pretend The Land of Mist doesn't exist.

Well, TLoM posits that the earlier Challenger books are fictional, so it isn't in continuity with them anyway. Still, I've started in on it and I don't find it bad so far. I know more or less where it's going, but at least initially it's acknowledging that there's a lot of fraudulent spiritualism and offering up intelligent counterarguments. Honestly, given the state of knowledge in the 1920s, Doyle writing a book that posits spiritualism as an open question with some validity to it seems no worse than John W. Campbell in the 1930s onward approaching psychic phenomena as real and encouraging generations of authors to do the same. Though we'll see if I continue to feel that way later in the book.

And it is kind of interesting to see Challenger with a daughter, particularly one who goes into his most loathed profession, journalism. So far the book hasn't done much with that, though.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, my opinion of The Land of Mist sank quickly after the first few chapters. It's not so much a novel as an extended polemic and sales pitch for spiritualism, and it meanders like crazy, in serious need of editing. I'm surprised this got published at all, even on the strength of Doyle's name.

And it diminishes Challenger by making him the kind of closed-minded caricature that believers in pseudoscience and mysticism imagine scientists to be, and then having him make an implausibly total conversion after a single piece of evidence he can't explain, even after a whole bunch of chapters about Edward Malone seeing abundant physical evidence yet still reserving judgment. It would've been a better story if Challenger had been a participant in the "experiments" and gradually developed a scientific understanding of the phenomena, but Doyle was too committed to his screed about how mean and closed-minded everyone was to the poor widdle Spiritualists.

I'm just glad Doyle spared Sherlock Holmes from getting dragged into all this.

 

[Yistaan]

McGivers: Oh no! The Ceti eel is crawling up my face and slithering into my ear! The pain! The horror! I'm going insane!

Joachim: Why is she graphically describing to us what we can already plainly see ourselves?

Khan: Shut up, we're recording this as an audio log so that some Federation chump like Sulu can return and listen to our horror story.

 

[Stevil2001]

Okay, my opinion of The Land of Mist sank quickly after the first few chapters. It's not so much a novel as an extended polemic and sales pitch for spiritualism, and it meanders like crazy, in serious need of editing. I'm surprised this got published at all, even on the strength of Doyle's name.

And it diminishes Challenger by making him the kind of closed-minded caricature that believers in pseudoscience and mysticism imagine scientists to be, and then having him make an implausibly total conversion after a single piece of evidence he can't explain, even after a whole bunch of chapters about Edward Malone seeing abundant physical evidence yet still reserving judgment. It would've been a better story if Challenger had been a participant in the "experiments" and gradually developed a scientific understanding of the phenomena, but Doyle was too committed to his screed about how mean and closed-minded everyone was to the poor widdle Spiritualists.

I'm just glad Doyle spared Sherlock Holmes from getting dragged into all this.

I did say.

 

[Yistaan]

I don't think Sulu was in Space Seed either. Wonder if this audio will address if Sulu was around offscreen like Chekov or happened to be offship at the time

 

[The Wormhole]

The only reason the Chekov thing stands out is because the character hadn't even been introduced in the show yet. Sulu was definitely a part of TOS at the time, having appeared in many episodes prior to Space Seed and indeed his first appearance was in WNMHGB. I see no need to overcomplicate why we didn't see him in the episode with anything further than he was off-duty or needed to help out in another area of the ship. If they even choose to acknowledge that Sulu wasn't in the episode, which they may not.

 

[JD]

It seems like this will be partly set while Sulu was Capt. of the Excelsior, so I'm not sure if him not being Space Speed will be much of an issue since he'll be familiar with Khan from being in Wrath of Khan.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Okay, my opinion of The Land of Mist sank quickly after the first few chapters. It's not so much a novel as an extended polemic and sales pitch for spiritualism, and it meanders like crazy, in serious need of editing. I'm surprised this got published at all, even on the strength of Doyle's name.

Oh, well. At least (like The Novel That Is Not Named) it demonstrates that stuff far worse than my own novel-in-progress can get published without the dubious "help" of a vanity house.

And of course, just because an Enterprise crew member doesn't appear in the "Space Seed" (in the case of Chekov, because the character didn't yet exist) doesn't mean the crew member isn't somewhere aboard the ship. I think one novelist said something to the general effect that Khan met Chekov while visiting the heads.

 

[Yistaan]

It seems like this will be partly set while Sulu was Capt. of the Excelsior, so I'm not sure if him not being Space Speed will be much of an issue since he'll be familiar with Khan from being in Wrath of Khan.

I mean, any examination by Sulu of, say, the fate of Marla McGivers is going to have less emotional impact if he never met and didn't even know her or witness her betrayal firsthand.

 

[Christopher]

And of course, just because an Enterprise crew member doesn't appear in the "Space Seed" (in the case of Chekov, because the character didn't yet exist) doesn't mean the crew member isn't somewhere aboard the ship. I think one novelist said something to the general effect that Khan met Chekov while visiting the heads.

I think that's a joke Walter Koenig tells at conventions.

In DC Comics' Who's Who in Star Trek, Allan Asherman explained that Chekov was serving in Engineering before being transferred to the bridge (like Kevin Riley), and Khan remembered him because he led the defense against Khan's takeover of Engineering. I referenced that explanation in my novels, and Greg Cox and possibly others followed suit. (I'm sometimes credited with originating the idea, so I always make sure to credit Asherman.)

 

[Stevil2001]

I think that's a joke Walter Koenig tells at conventions.

In DC Comics' Who's Who in Star Trek, Allan Asherman explained that Chekov was serving in Engineering before being transferred to the bridge (like Kevin Riley), and Khan remembered him because he led the defense against Khan's takeover of Engineering. I referenced that explanation in my novels, and Greg Cox and possibly others followed suit. (I'm sometimes credited with originating the idea, so I always make sure to credit Asherman.)

Kevin Killiany actually used the bathroom anecdote in his Strange New Worlds story "Indomitable."

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Thought I'd seen it in something. And fleshed it out into a full-blown scene, if I remember right.

Hmm. Allan Asherman. I remember when he wrote for Star Trek Giant Poster Book. For those who don't remember that short-lived prozine, it was a single 34x22 sheet, folded octavo, with a poster-sized ST frame blow-up on one side, and six pages of articles (plus front and back covers) printed on the other side. One issue contained a semi-playable set of rules for Fizzbin. Same publisher did one for SW, too. Maybe also CE3K.

 

[Christopher]

Hmm. Allan Asherman. I remember when he wrote for Star Trek Giant Poster Book. For those who don't remember that short-lived prozine, it was a single 34x22 sheet, folded octavo, with a poster-sized ST frame blow-up on one side, and six pages of articles (plus front and back covers) printed on the other side. One issue contained a semi-playable set of rules for Fizzbin. Same publisher did one for SW, too. Maybe also CE3K.

I know him mainly from The Star Trek Compendium. But DC's Who's Who had some pretty interesting conjectures about character backstories, alien cultures, and the like.

Anyway, getting back to Professor Challenger for a bit, part of the reason I read the books was that I wanted to reread Greg Bear's sequel Dinosaur Summer, in which a team of historical characters including the producers of King Kong and a young Ray Harryhausen return to the dinosaur plateau decades later. But I've found out it isn't really a direct sequel to Doyle's The Lost World, as it alters a number of details -- e.g. it attributes the book to Challenger as told to Doyle, rather than Edward Malone, and it calls the plateau El Grande rather than Maple White Land, as well as describing the adjacent peak as being a mile wide at the top instead of barely wide enough to stand on. I'm surprised that Bear took such liberties, and I wonder if he based it more on one of the film versions than on the original novel.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I know him mainly from The Star Trek Compendium.

That, too. And when I got my copy, seeing his name prompted exactly the same reaction I had to seeing it here.