The Price Of The Pheonix
- Thread starter Miss Mess
- Start date
Rubbish. The first "grown up" Trek novels I read (age 12), and thus very nearly the last.
It's been a while (I re-read them about 5-6 years ago), but I don't think Marshak and Culbreath laid on the K/S stuff quite as thickly as they did in The Prometheus Design or Triangle. It is, however, loaded with meek, pandering pathos. I vaguely remember lots of thinly veiled dom/sub roleplaying stuff involving clone Kirk and the female Romulan commander.
There's a bit where Kirk cries because Omne "beat the jungle out of him", as in "broke his manly spirit". Words fail me
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Please do not judge all of Treklit based on the Phoenix novels.
It's been a while (I re-read them about 5-6 years ago), but I don't think Marshak and Culbreath laid on the K/S stuff quite as thickly as they did in The Prometheus Design or Triangle. It is, however, loaded with meek, pandering pathos. I vaguely remember lots of thinly veiled dom/sub roleplaying stuff involving clone Kirk and the female Romulan commander.
There's a bit where Kirk cries because Omne "beat the jungle out of him", as in "broke his manly spirit". Words fail me
.Please do not judge all of Treklit based on the Phoenix novels.
The Phoenix novels are kind of bizarre by today's standards, but they deserve credit for at least attempting to tackle some substantive ideas. For instance, Fate of the Phoenix was the first Trek novel to take a critical look at the ethics of the Prime Directive, although it didn't do much more than pose the question and then move on. Most of the Bantam novels were fairly generic science fiction tales that happened to feature the Enterprise crew, but the Marshak-Culbreath novels were among the first to really come at ST from the perspective of true fans, including both the positive and negative things that that entailed. They felt more like Star Trek than a lot of their contemporary novels, there was a love for the show and the characters suffusing them, but that love was somewhat out of hand and more than a little obsessive toward the characters of Kirk and Spock, treating them as superheroes and sex objects rather than as life-sized, believable characters.
Kirk bangs Sola Thane, while thinking of Spock. Later Spock bangs Sola, thinking of Kirk. Lots of talk about Kirk feeling safe in Spock's "warm, strong" hands. Kirk and Spock are described as "the two who are one". Kirk talks about spending years trying to get Spock to "break free of his Vulcan chains". You just want them to f-k and get it over with
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There is a scene that can be interpreted that way, yes.
I've read worse. Far worse. They're a bit verbose and dense, but they're certainly not even in the same league with The Starless World, World Without End, Perry's Planet, or the ever-popular Devil World.
^I would put all of those above the Phoenix duology .
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^I would put all of those above the Phoenix duology
I would put virtually every Trek book ever written above the Phoenix duology. Including Warped.
Haven't read those two books in around thirty years, and haven't had an urge to do so.
I did rather like the Romulan Commander, but then I liked the character anyway. Otherwise, Marshak and Culbreath can't write dialogue to save their lives, and have some serious issues regarding their ideas about male sexuality.
I did rather like the Romulan Commander, but then I liked the character anyway. Otherwise, Marshak and Culbreath can't write dialogue to save their lives, and have some serious issues regarding their ideas about male sexuality.
I think you just hate novels with "planet" or "world" in the title.
I've been trying to find matching editions of the two Phoenix novels at used bookstores here in Winnipeg so I can finally give them a read. My main early memories related to those books are how much people gushed about them in The Best of Trek whenever novels came up (seriously, they put them right up there with The Final Reflection and Diane Duane's novels), then later learning elsewhere (like here) how much of a heavy K/S undertone there (apparently) is to the whole thing.
That writing team seems like a weird pair. They played such a significant role in keeping Star Trek alive in print in the Seventies, even though their take on the series is so...off. I think Christopher is being generous, although I won't deny that the mythological-figure take on "the triumvirate" in general was also certainly present in those Best of Trek articles--especially the earlier ones, contemporaneous to this particular duology.
Totally agree. And I impatiently read "The Fate of the Phoenix" first, 'cos ""Price" was so hard to find. Very few ST fans were letting their copies out of their hands, unlike other Bantams (Corgis in UK) that were quite plentiful in second hand bookshops in 1980. I remember them fondly as bizarre ST novels written with lots of love.
We reach. I finally bought a Corgi, then replaced it - years later - with a Bantam early edition.
Not so much being generous as trying to be fair. I'm not saying they're good books by any means; the last time I tried to reread Price, I simply couldn't get through it. I'm just trying to present the other side of the issue and put them in perspective. By the standards of a less sophisticated era of Trek literature, they were a step forward in certain directions, and that's why so many people at the time found them admirable.
I know I read the Price of the Phenix when I was about 13, so I probably missed or was confused by yhe K/S stuff. Don't think I liked it much, but I can only really remember that Omne was in it now. When I was packing up my books for a move, it was easy enough to leave that one in a box destined for storage. Other choices were harder.
I'm looking for the predominantly-black reprints from the Eighties, to match the other Bantams I already own.
I can understand that reaction in the Bantam-only era (I guess...I don't know if I'd be into any tie-in with a weird slashy vibe just because it also happens to have a spirit of love for a show I like as well), but once the Pocket era was in full swing, and novels had come along which are still considered classic today, I found it weird how those Best of Trek writers were still holding up the Phoenix books as equal to that level of quality.
Maybe it was just the nostalgia talking--even if that nostalgia was simply the late Eighties looking back at the late Seventies?
Maybe women (or at least, some women) get more out of the Phoenix books than us guys do?
My recollections were mainly that they were verbose and dense. Although I do recall certain K/S undertones as well.
I also recall that I liked Joe Haldeman's early stuff (particularly Planet of Judgment) better.
As to why they were treated as if they were better than they were, we need to remember that Marshak & Culbreath were themselves part of the "Save Star Trek" movement at the time, in the trenches with Bjo & company. And we also need to remember that at the time, all you had were the Blish and Foster adaptations, Spock Must Die, Spock: Messiah!, and a few nonfiction and non-narrative works, and a whole plethora of fanzines. (The only "zine" I have is a purely technical work, Starfleet Assembly Manual 1.)
I also recall that I liked Joe Haldeman's early stuff (particularly Planet of Judgment) better.
As to why they were treated as if they were better than they were, we need to remember that Marshak & Culbreath were themselves part of the "Save Star Trek" movement at the time, in the trenches with Bjo & company. And we also need to remember that at the time, all you had were the Blish and Foster adaptations, Spock Must Die, Spock: Messiah!, and a few nonfiction and non-narrative works, and a whole plethora of fanzines. (The only "zine" I have is a purely technical work, Starfleet Assembly Manual 1.)
Probably because most of the articles in the Best of Trek series were written YEARS before they saw print. Myabe they didn't acknowledge Pocket's line because it didn't yet exist when the articles were written.
Series editors Irwin & Love were still mining issues of Trek from the '70's for BoT volumes well into the mid-late '80's. Essentially, apart from an occasional article discussing the latest movie (and even that generally published 18-24 months after the film came out) they were just reprinting stuff from 7-10 years earlier. I think Trek ceased publication around the time of Wrath of Khan (maybe Search for Spock). The Best of Trek series continued for another decade after that.
Anyone have a reasonably complete run of Trek, the fan/magazine that can check this out?
This is a good point--the readers/writers of The Best of Trek would've been more attuned to the state of fandom in the Seventies, and may have looked at those books as an example of high-profile fans who had "made it."
Actually, the Phoenix books were towards the end of the Bantam run, so there were already all those novels to consider, and Pocket came along soon after that. Within a few years, the Carey/Dillard/Duane/Ford books which are still talked about today had been released.
No, I'm specifically thinking of articles where someone would say something like, "The best of the novels are The Wounded Sky, The Final Reflection, the Piper books, and the Phoenix novels." It wasn't just a "Best of Bantam" sort of thing--these people were writing in the Eighties, with the Pocket line already going strong.
Considering how much praise the Piper duology got as well, it occurs to me that this particular audience, (probably) made up mostly of fans with a Seventies mindset, might've gravitated more to those novels with a heavy fanfic sensibility to them--the K/S undertones in Phoenix and the Mary Sue approach in the Piper novels.
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