Trek Lit: A Collegiate Curriculum

[historypeats]

In looking at a couple of recent threads regarding the best TrekLit has to offer, I got to thinking about which books had the most "literary merit" - the most complex thematic treatments, most interesting structural choices, "best writing," etc. If I were teaching a discussion-based course that covered 1-3 Trek novels per week for an academic year, which novels would make for the best lessons and talks? Which texts were richest and/or would benefit most from a collective (re-)evaluation?

I split the "course" into "Pre-Relaunch Era" for the first term and "Relaunch Era" for the second term. I tried to be inclusive of different series, authors, visions, etc.; for the first term, I tried to sample the "numbered novels" fairly healthily, for they were such a dominant part of TrekLit for so long. I also tried to avoid having too many weeks with three novels; I wanted to give the "students" at least a few weeks where they were only covering one text. This is what I came up with:

First Term
Week 1: TOS #13: The Wounded Sky
Week 2: TOS #16: The Final Reflection
Week 3: TOS #21: Uhura's Song
Week 4: TOS #11: Yesterday's Son + TOS #39: Time for Yesterday
Week 5: TOS: Strangers from the Sky
Week 6: TOS: Spock's World + TOS: Sarek
Week 7: TOS: Prime Directive
Week 8: TOS: Federation
Week 9: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages
Week 10: TNG #3: The Children of Hamlin + TNG #4: Survivors
Week 11: TNG #5: Strike Zone + TNG #10: A Rock and a Hard Place
Week 12: TNG: Vendetta
Week 13: TNG: Reunion
Week 14: TNG #25: Grounded + TNG #37: The Last Stand
Week 15: TNG: Imzadi
Week 16: TNG: Immortal Coil
Week 17: DS9 #27: A Stitch in Time
Week 18: VOY: Pathways
Week 19: NF #s 1-4: House of Cards, Into the Void, The Two-Front War, End Game
Week 20: NF: Once Burned
Extra Credit: TOS: The Empty Chair; TNG: Q-Squared

Second Term
Week 1: VAN: Harbinger + Reap the Whirlwind
Week 2: TOS: Crucible
Week 3: TOS: Cloak + TOS: The Shocks of Adversity
Week 4: TOS: Ex Machina
Week 5: TNG: Rogue
Week 6: TNG: A Time to Kill + TNG: A Time to Heal
Week 7: Articles of the Federation
Week 8: DS9: Avatar + DS9: Abyss
Week 9: DS9: Mission: Gamma: Twilight
Week 10: DS9: Unity
Week 11: SCE: Have Tech, Will Travel + Wildfire
Week 12: The Lost Era: Serpents Among the Ruins + The Art of the Impossible
Week 13: VOY: Full Circle
Week 14: VOY: Children of the Storm
Week 15: ENT: A Choice of Futures + Tower of Babel
Week 16: TTN: Taking Wing + Orion's Hounds
Week 17: Destiny: Gods of Night, Mere Mortals, Lost Souls
Week 18: Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night + Raise the Dawn
Week 19: Mirror Universe: The Sorrows of Empire + Rise Like Lions
Week 20: DS9: The Never Ending Sacrifice
Extra Credit: TNG: A Time for War, a Time for Peace; A Singular Destiny; The Crimson Shadow; VAN: Storming Heaven

It was fascinating to see how much tougher the choices became once I hit the 21st century.

I'm interested in what other forum members would've chosen for the curriculum. What on this current list definitely deserves a spot, and why? Which titles would you have included that didn't make this initial list, and why? What would you have hoped would've served as "discussion topics"?

 

[Desert Kris]

I'll comment on the numbered books end of the spectrum, since that's were my reading focus has been for the last couple years.

The Final Reflection definitely deserves it's place. A good book for developing a culture in detail, but organically through the narrative. The Wounded Sky is good to look at elements that are hard to adapt into a movie or television episode (and there's a rough adaptation available that can be compared).

I would actually suggest Dwellers in the Crucible as a novel that aspired to be literary. It deals with very heavy subject matter. It looks at the complexities of characters caught in the wheels of a complicated political situation. The antagonists are characterized well, even though they engage in activities that are hard to read about. There's something of a Pyrrhic victory for a couple of characters, and there isn't a pat answer to the larger political fallout. Also, Dwellers has a scene that the narrative revisits numerous times throughout, and it would be good fodder for literary analysis: what technique does the author use to instantly tell the reader it's that scene again, how do the characters interpret and misinterpret each other in their conversation, how does the author expand the scene each time it is revisited and keep it fresh, and how is each re-visitation connect to the narrative at that moment? Dwellers also deals with racism and prejudice amidst increased political tensions in a thought provoking way, including a look at the crew of the Enterprise.

Prime Directive is good for digging in to philosophical discussions about the non-interference policy (I'm sure there are others). It's non-linear narrative structure would be worthy of examination, too.

A lot of Peter David's work is good fun, I guess it would merit looking into from the standpoint of what I hear many people say about his work, that they can tell he's a comic book writer. I read his novels before I ever read any of his comics, but people talk about the dynamic nature David's prose. Or maybe the tendency of some of the New Frontier characters being very nearly super-heroic, and that the New Frontier characters seem like they might be suited for comics as well as (or better than) in prose form. Vendetta has strong themes. I suppose the first four serialized books of New Frontier that make up the "pilot" storyline for that series would be an examination of how Star Trek publishing intersected with the serialized novel trend.

I'm not sure if this is along the lines of what you're asking? Dweller in the Crucible should be part of the hypothetical curriculum.

 

[historypeats]

That's exactly along the lines of what I was looking for, Desert Kris! I loved everything in your reply.

A couple of things:
* Dwellers was almost my Week 4 pick for a lot of the reasons you mentioned, as well as for my personal fondness for MWB's writing style. I ultimately opted for the Yesterday books because they felt more "important" to the early days of TrekLit, but I'd worked Crispin into the list with Sarek already (as with MWB and Strangers) and could certainly see swapping the duology out.

* It's hard to convey to readers who came to Trek books in the 2000s and beyond just how wild New Frontier was when it first hit shelves. The "comic-bookishness" was, even to my teenaged self, the least appealing thing about it. But I loved its disregard for the limits syndicated/broadcast TV series still placed on themselves, and the fact that the stories had consequences - still a rarity back then - made me feel so much more invested in them. (By "consequences," I mean sustained character development, not character mortality.) It really was the prototype for what would become the dominant TrekLit storytelling mode, and while some of the writing has not aged well, I think it's critical to include at least one week on it for that reason alone. (It was also a proof-of-concept not just for an arc-based line, but for essentially handing a series over to a dominant authorial voice; I don't think we get a Kristen Beyer Voyager line if New Frontier disintegrates upon launch, and I think Beyer's rise is one of the most important and still-underrated developments in modern Trek.)

* PAD is oversampled in my first term, no doubt about it. But - and you can feel free to disagree with me on this - every other TNG author in the numbered era strove to replicate the characters' on-screen personalities as perfectly as possible. David didn't so much discard those characterizations as much as "remix" them; Picard and Riker were still recognizably Picard and Riker, yet in David's hands you could find new depths in them. Just as I argued above that Beyer's books find their antecedents in the New Frontier line, I think David's success with a "stylized" take on Next Gen carved out space for authors like Una McCormack, Keith R.A. DeCandido, and David Mack to flourish - authors whose characters sound like the writers' versions of them, to the readers' benefit. Plus, David was probably the strongest and most inventive plot-builder of the pre-2000 era, and frequently experimented with style (see: Q-Squared) in ways that others either dared not try or weren't allowed to attempt.

If you'd like to see other giants of the era - the L.A. Graf team, for example, or John Vornholt - find their way in, I wouldn't stop you. But that's why so much time is devoted to David: he's not the best writer Trek's seen, but I think his role in making 21st-century TrekLit possible is critically underappreciated.

Thanks for the Dwellers commentary in particular; I now feel a tremendous urge to revisit that one.

 

[KRAD]

I'm flattered to see several of my works up there. I think skipping from A Time to Kill/Heal straight to Articles without ATFW,ATFP in there is a bit odd, but I get that there are only so many weeks in the year.

 

[Kor]

Is that much reading volume typical for college literature courses? I seem to remember novels being broken into sections for detailed discussions, so that the whole book would be covered over a period of a couple weeks to a month.

Kor

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Thinking back on the college lit courses I took, back before Numenor fell, they maxed out at a novel-length work per week (ie., Huckleberry Finn was a week), so this feels a little heavy to me in places, but I also feel that's counterbalanced by the material which is not as elusive or symbolic as, say, Moby-Dick.

 

[Stevil2001]

As an English professor, I would never try to do more than one novel in a week, and of course some novels take even longer than that.

 

[Smiley]

For Term 2, I'd recommend including Summon the Thunder in between the two Mack Vanguard entries. I'm sure Reap the Whirlwind gives you what you need, but the reading experience is better with the whole three-part arc.