Weirdest Trek novel

[Christopher]

IIRC, they couldn’t see red because they were one color shift over from the color spectrum, which meant that while they couldn’t see red, they could see ultraviolet.

Not exactly. It's that the human eye has three color pigments whose peak sensitivities are red, green, and blue respectively (which is why those are the primary colors), and the Klingons only had the green and blue pigments and had a different, UV-sensitive one in place of the red one.

As far as the topic is concerned, the one thing that always annoyed me was when an established science fiction novelist was given the opportunity to write a Trek novel, and they inevitably created a story where the cast acts completely out of character in order to serve the plot that has nothing to do with Star Trek, but rather whatever trope that writer is known for. It’s almost as if they never actually saw the show and were just given character bios to work with in an effort to just ‘write what they know’ instead of an actual Star Trek story. Jeter’s Warped and Zebrowski & Pellegrino’s Dyson Sphere immediately come to mind.

I found the scientific essay at the end of Dyson Sphere more intriguing than the novel itself.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

In my own headcanon, what we see as red lighting, red on-screen graphics, and red physical indicator lights on Klingon ships could have other spectral lines.

Then again, in The Final Reflection, JMF portrays Klingons as liking to immerse themselves in water, which is at odds with Worf's "too much like bathing" line in I forget which early TNG episode. But that, too, can be explained as Worf's personal aversion to bathing. (And I will note that I am the only able-bodied Fountain Valley High School alum I'm aware of who got through Freshman PE completely unable to swim (primarily because of a total lack of inclination to do so -- but then again, my father served a tour in the USMC, honorably discharged as a corporal, and never learned to swim).

 

[korblborp]

Yeah, most of their displays and things like that are red and orange.

maybe they glow because they are actually some kind of heat filament display. the klingons can't see the red as a color, but the heat.

 

[FredH]

(And I will note that I am the only able-bodied Fountain Valley High School alum I'm aware of who got through Freshman PE completely unable to swim (primarily because of a total lack of inclination to do so -- but then again, my father served a tour in the USMC, honorably discharged as a corporal, and never learned to swim).

Interesting — I would have assumed Marine trainers would have forced him to learn to swim, or flunk out. (Then again, I didn’t learn how to swim until my own father left me the hell alone and stopped trying to force me to.)

 

[Timewalker]

Sometimes it takes bribery to convince someone to learn to swim. We used to have a cabin on Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. It was a 2-room A-frame, reasonably okay beach, and a pier for my grandfather's motorboat. My grandfather told me that every time I swam out to the end of the pier and back, he would give me a quarter. This was back in the days when you could actually get quite a few things for 25 cents.

In my case, comics. We'd go shopping in Vernon, and 25 cents would get me a nice haul of second-hand comics at the used book store. The ones without covers were 2 1/2 cents, and the others were either 10 or 12 cents. If I wanted new comics, they were 25 cents.

So all that swimming (dog-paddling, really; I never did get good at swimming, but it was enough to please my grandfather) kept me in comics that summer.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Well, given that I'm 63, and my father is 90, and neither one of us has had any reason to learn to swim. . . .

But what does this have to do with weird ST novels, other than that JMF's Klingons like immersing themselves in water, while Worf evidently does not?

 

[Timewalker]

Well, given that I'm 63, and my father is 90, and neither one of us has had any reason to learn to swim. . . .

But what does this have to do with weird ST novels, other than that JMF's Klingons like immersing themselves in water, while Worf evidently does not?

Maybe Worf's parents should have bribed him to learn. It worked on me.

 

[ClayinCA]

Maybe Worf's parents should have bribed him to learn. It worked on me.

Or they could have filled the pool with prune juice....

 

[ozzfloyd]

My nomination for weirdest Trek novel goes to:

Windows on a Lost World by V.E. Mitchell
Pocketbooks #65 1993

Kirk and Chekov go thru a "Guardian of Forever" type frame on a now uninhabited planet. This transforms them into crab-like crustaceans on the other side of said planet. Most of the book is the Enterprise crew slowly figuring out these crabs are our missing crew on the one hand, on the other we see things from the POV of Kirk and Chekov as they inhabit these crab bodies and try to figure out how to operate their bodies and get rescued. WTF?