Novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture

[flandry84]

/\Exactly.I always believed that the "long range scanner"was meant to be like a tricorder with a telephoto lens.

To refer back to the TMP novelisation,has anyone ever followed up on the brain implants through which Kirk first receives information about the V'ger incursion?I remember the novel mentioning that the general populace were uninformed about flag rank officers having these implants as it could be misconstrued as smacking of "mind control".

 

[Jinn]

To refer back to the TMP novelisation,has anyone ever followed up on the brain implants through which Kirk first receives information about the V'ger incursion?I remember the novel mentioning that the general populace were uninformed about flag rank officers having these implants as it could be misconstrued as smacking of "mind control".

Because the only thing the public loves more than knowing that their military leaders are mind-controlled is being lied to about that.

 

[flandry84]

Yeah but the tech is never referenced again.
Was it removed or just unused after that?
Did Jim spend the rest of his life with a bug in his head?
And if all flag officers are on some sort of very private interweb just how connected are they to one another?Lori Ciana was an admiral,did Kirk feel her death in the transporter accident?

 

[Christopher]

Yeah but the tech is never referenced again.
Was it removed or just unused after that?
Did Jim spend the rest of his life with a bug in his head?

More likely, it never existed at all except in the novelization. It doesn't really fit with what later Trek productions established about the lack of transhuman enhancement. The Borg wouldn't have seemed so unusual if humans had been putting implants in their brains for a century already.

Basically, Roddenberry's TMP novel attempted a degree of futurism that the subsequent movies ignored (because Nicholas Meyer was pretty aggressively anti-futurist and tried to pretend Star Trek was set in the 19th century) and that TNG mostly avoided as well (because it didn't have the budget). I mean, TMP-novelization Kirk and Ciana have what they consider a routine holoconference of the sort that DS9 treated as a novelty in episodes set 100 years later. So obviously we're not talking about a consistent shared reality here. It's not just the comm implants and the holocom -- there's the "new human" movement on the verge of evolving into a collective consciousness, and there's an evolution in cultural mores as well with the year-long marriage contracts (a popular bit of futurism in the SF of the period). There's a ton of stuff in the book that just doesn't fit the Trek universe portrayed in any other work -- not even Roddenberry's own later work on TNG.

 

[flandry84]

You are right Christopher,Trek is oddly anti-futuristic at times.

 

[Tenacity]

Lori Ciana was an admiral, did Kirk feel her death in the transporter accident?

That would add something, wouldn't it?

 

[Christopher]

You are right Christopher,Trek is oddly anti-futuristic at times.

Not so odd, because it's made for general audiences who aren't as comfortable with futurism as regular SF readers are. Maybe Roddenberry felt free to go further in the novelization because it was a book, and so he could expect its audience to be more comfortable with those ideas.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

There's a ton of stuff in the book that just doesn't fit the Trek universe portrayed in any other work -- not even Roddenberry's own later work on TNG.

And for that, I shall be forever grateful.

flag rank officers having these implants as it could be misconstrued as smacking of "mind control".

There was a Trek novel in which that actually happened:

Spoiler: novel

Cross Road.

And in that case, it WAS mind control, perpetrated by a corrupt group called the "Consilium".

 

[flandry84]

I know that I have read that book but honestly cannot remember that plot point at all.