The USS Enterprise is crippled in orbit around a dangerous, living, breathing planet, and a desperate peace mission to the Orion Arm is stalled. Captain Kirk has never needed his crew more. But a lithe, alien woman is casting a spell of pacifism – and now mutiny – over the crew.

Suddenly Kirk’s journey for peace has turned into a terrifying war – to retake command of his ship!

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a mysterious person boards the Enterprise and soon, things start going haywire and the mission they’ve embarked on is in jeopardy.

This time, it’s different because there’s a girl, though! And Kirk doesn’t try to sleep with her!

Whoa whoa whoa you’re just going to start up and not mention that it’s been six damn months since you’ve updated this site?

Yup. Deal with it. 2020-2021 was wild, my friend. Plus, we’re going to have another gap because we are moving across the country soon.

Good for you. Anyway, is that Robert Vardman’s name I see? He of The Klingon Gambit, a book you lambasted?

It is! But he does a much better job this go-round. The in-universe stuff is handled with a bit more care and he actually works to make the characters seem like the ones on the show. Nobody is going to mistake Vardman for Vonnegut, but the tone in this book is less militaristic, much more human. Like I mentioned in the outset, a plot that seems more evocative of classic TOS episodes instead of setting up a military debacle from the jump.

Can you give me the plot in less than 200 words? Bullet points are acceptable.

An exhausted Enterprise is turned away from shore leave and refit at Starbase One in order to transport a Tellarite ambassador and his aides to some delicate Romulan-adjacent negotiations way the hell out there to Ammdon and Jurnamoria, two planets that hate each others’ guts.. They encounter a disabled ship with a single woman on-board, Lorelei,¹I’ll get to that, I swear. a Speaker from the planet Hyla.²A place nobody’s heard of. The pacifist alien discovers that they’re heading to a region of space on the edge of war and urges Kirk and crew to turn back, insisting that their presence will only exacerbate the situation. On top of everything else, Scotty’s beloved engines are on the verge of failure.

They soon discover that Lorelei’s title is not just an appellation: she uses some unknown ability to persuade others to join her cause and she starts to turn the crew against Kirk and the ambassadorial team’s mission. While the crew deserts their stations and stands around in corridors muttering about our beloved captain’s lust for combat, the warp engines give up the ghost and they find themselves stranded near a strange planet, one that may have the materials they need to fix the warp drive and finish their mission.

It’s not that easy, of course, and the last third of the book features the reveal that the world is actually one giant creature³Shades of Marvel’s Ego, the living planet., the horrific death of the ambassadorial team, Kirk taking back his ship, and a rushed finale in which Lorelei’s abilities are used to calm the situation down and start laying the groundwork for two new worlds to join the Federation.

You went over your assigned wordcount by at least 25%.

You can complain when you’re paying by the word, okay?

As I’ve mentioned twice now, this is a very classic Star Trek sort of setup, but with enough big weird sci-fi stuff that would be hard to capture on-screen in 1967 that it feels just a bit special. I always love it when the pugnacious, outspoken Tellarites make an appearance in Trek, and Zarv is a perfect thorn in the plot’s side. The inclusion of a plant-based sentient named Mek Jakkor as part of the ambassadorial team is a nice touch, too. There’s a human helping out, too, but you know, whatever. Throw in a big, weird alien world and some angry aliens and baby, you’ve got yourself a stew going.

Now, this isn’t to say the book is flawless — far from it, in fact.

Vardman’s got a misogynistic streak that shows up in a few places that I can’t help but being annoyed by. When the admiral in charge of Starbase One comes onto the view screen, Kirk muses to himself that she’d be pretty if she put a little more effort into it. Lorelei is described as being “attractive, but not pretty” in a few places, which is awkward at best and comes off a little judgemental. (She’s also described as wearing diaphanous clothing, something I’d complain about if I wasn’t intimately familiar with the work of William Ware Theiss.)

The book also suffers from being entirely from Kirk’s point of view. One of the things I like about my favorite Trek novels is that they allow you to get into the heads of multiple characters and offer deeper interactions with the universe. In a story with alien ambassadors, a woman with a passion for peace, and a chief engineer struggling to keep his ship together, it would seem logical to deviate from the limited third person style that Vardman chooses to go with here.

When I wrote about The Klingon Gambit, I mentioned that Scotty had a new, attractive chief assistant helping him out in the engine room. She’s back. Heather McConel may not quite qualify as a Mary Sue, but there’s something about her character⁴ Who gets called by her first name by everyone and who happens to run a still and who is also super-good at engineering and is also Scottish and okay maybe she is a Mary Sue of some kind. that grinds my gears.

Finally, there’s the fact that there’s an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series called “The Lorelei Signal” in which a group of women dominate the minds of the men on board the Enterprise and take over the ship. The plots are different enough (and mind-whammies are common enough in Trek) that I’m not going to quibble over that, but naming the lead character in this after the same mythical woman who lured sailors to their death is just lazy. This is the kind of thing that Pocket’s line editor David Hartwell should have caught, but as I’ve pointed out before, he didn’t seem to enjoy the more particular aspects of his job that much.

Anything else? You should probably get to work.

Yeesh, you’re right. Anyway, two more quick things!

In Ayers’ Voyages Of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion⁵Nobody mention that it’s all fiction, okay?, Vardman recalls: “The genesis from the plot of Mutiny on the Enterprise harkened back to one of my favorite Heinlein books, Starman Jones. The idea of an entire planet being one interlocked intelligence appealed greatly (score one for Heinlein — his idea came long before the conceptualization of Gaia). I tossed in a few other elements to add menace to an orbiting Enterprise and was satisfied with the result.”

Of some interest (and perhaps some relevance as to this book’s relative quality over his first): Vardman had switched agents between The Klingon Gambit and Mutiny On The Enterprise but Hartwell worked with his original representative on his second Trek novel.

Overall, I’d say this is a fine Trek novel. Good if you’re going to burn through it in an afternoon or two, but not worth reading a chapter a night for two weeks and taking obsessive notes over just for a 1200-word blog post.

• Buy Mutiny on the Enterprise in paperback.
• Buy Mutiny on the Enterprise for the Kindle.

Oh, hello there. Anything happening with you? Anyone else make the mistake of adopting a (very cute, very sweet, but very demanding) puppy during the onset of winter during a pandemic in New York City that’s running concurrent to an unprecedented political crisis that leaves you feeling hapless, tense, and drained all at once, thus finding yourself unable to concentrate on reading anything longer than the label on the bottle of whiskey you keep under your desk?

Oh, just me, then?

Well, let’s go to the thing you’re here for: dumb jokes interrupting some quasi-serious commentary about 30-year-old tie-in fiction.

Ravaged by a killer virus, the Romulans enter Canara, where the only antidote can be found. Desperate, they incite a victorious USS Enterprise attack on one of their vessels, but Kirk discovers their ruse.

Meanwhile the central computer has fallen in love with him, severely crippling the Starship Enterprise. Somehow Kirk must overcome the lovesick computer and bring the antidote to the Romulans, before the galaxy crashes over the brink of war.

First of all: What’s up with flipping Boris Vallejo’s cover painting¹Which plainly uses the TMP uniforms despite taking place during the original five year mission., guys? Seriously, what the hell? I’m offended.

Secondly: I have to say that Web of The Romulans (originally titled We Who Are About To Die) has a killer premise. Just look at that back copy. This sounds like it’s going to be great! It’s a real shame that it fails to live up to its potential.

Oh, boy. Another cranky rant.

Hey, hey, hey. There are some serious issues with this book, but I think that discussing them can be illustrative. I actually learned a lot about my own writing faults while reading this and it gave me food for thought.

Okay, tell us how “Web Of The Romulans” stank by using logic and reason.

Some backstory, first, as learning about the book’s origins can help show where the editors and Melinda Murdock went awry from the beginning. According to a fairly long interview that appears in Ayers’ Voyages of Imagination, this was the first piece of professional work that Murdock had published. Prior to this, she had written a story for the Dilithium Crystals zine that centered around the ship’s computer²It falls in love with JTK, following up on the joke from “Tomorrow is Yesterday.” that appears here as a complicating factor in the overall plot. After hearing that that Pocket Books was accepting unsolicited submissions for their licensed books, she sat down and wrote the original novel in six weeks while between jobs.

After it was finished Murdock retyped a clean copy to send to Pocket Books, and sent regular query letters, which got her “polite but evasive” replies from various editors until three years day she was contacted by yet another new editor. This person told her that they liked what they read, but they needed the book to be longer to match their current program. Working with just a typewriter (and without a firm commitment or contract), Murdock spent the next month and change laboriously expanding her work³In the interview with Ayers, she goes into detail about how much work it was to physically do this all in the era before word processing was available for most homes and it sounds agonizing. and was about two-thirds of the way through the rewriting process when she found out (from yet another new editor) that yes, they were going to buy what she was writing.

The slapdash nature of her hiring⁴Seriously, no contract? No deal, no work. and the rotating door for editors shows how disorganized Pocket Books was at the time. Things are going to slip through. the cracks when undermanned department in a niche publisher with high turnover is responsible for what was at the time the biggest science fiction franchise in publishing⁵This was before there were hundreds of Star Wars novels choking the shelves at Barnes and Noble.. If an editor had worked with Murdock, nurtured her story, this could have been one of those novels nerds were talking about decades later.

Let’s look at how it squandered its potential.

Are we getting some bullet points? I love bullet points. Readers love bullet points!

Sorry, not this time. I overuse them as-is!

Do we need to have read the book first?

No, no. I’ll give you context.

Okay, proceed.

Thank you.

The two biggest problems with Web of the Romulans are the book’s structure and balance. The novel opens fairly gracefully, taking time to show the Enterprise’s status quo while letting you know the Romulan cast that our intrepid crew will be encountering and giving you glimpses at life on Romulus. It’s apparent that there’s something wrong, but the plague⁶Really weird reading this in 2020/2021, I tell you what. mentioned on the back cover is just vaguely alluded to (and never named until the last third of the book.)

You’re also given the lay of the land when it comes to the internal politics of the Empire, as the treacherous praetor assigns the noble commander S’Talon and retired Tiercellus their parts to play in his scheme to secure the much-needed treatment.⁷S’talon was to keep Kirk busy because he’s a pain in the ass while Tiercellus held a small, threatening fleet at the border. While the prose could be more robust and engaging — a little pulp flavoring would help here — Murdock uses the opportunity to expand on a (then) underdeveloped antagonist⁸In her interview with Ayers, she specifically mentions that she’s disappointed with how TNG handled them. and give them life beyond what we saw on screen at the time.

This is all good stuff, and it’s a shame that the expansiveness shown early on is stripped away so unceremoniously as the book continues. I’m not one for worldbuilding getting in the way of a good story, but I appreciate when an author gives you a reason to care within the bigger picture. I was more sympathetic for S’Talon and Tiercellus because of the effort taken early on.

This attention to detail doesn’t apply to the book’s real antagonist, Admiral Iota, a distrustful war-hawk who seems to exist just as a plot device, or the keystone planet Canara⁹One letter off from “Canada,” a country that grows a bunch of grain. I should also note that Canara is the source of gran, one letter off from “grain.”, a place and people we see only the slightest glances of before everything starts happening there. (I could also argue that the Romulan Praetor is underwritten, but I’m already pretty familiar with how a short-sighted politician who’s more interested in keeping his power and looking strong than actually solving problems acts and behaves.)

If Murdock had worked with an editor to introduce elements like Iota (who shows up in the middle third and is pretty cranky from the start) and build out their motivations from the beginning, we’d have a book with the right amount of sweep and (dare I say) grandeur that a plot like “a dying Romulan Empire brings the quadrant to the brink of war” demands. However, judging by her comments when talking to Ayers and things that other writers from the period have said, there wasn’t enough bandwidth available to provide the fledgling author with guidance that could have made the book more than just a tick-box in the publishing calendar. That’s a real shame.

The book we end up with feels weirdly truncated and I suspect that the majority of the rewriting took place in the first act. As it is, the entire plot of the book as outlined on the back cover takes place in the last half, if not the last third.

What did you like? Give us those sweet bullet points this time!

Okay, but just two. Deal with it.

• What I got of the Romulans, I really enjoyed. It’s different than my preferred non-canonical version from Diane Duane, but much like Marshak and Culbreath’s version of Vulcans from the otherwise excruciating The Prometheus Design, it’s apparent that some thought was applied. S’talon and his loyal centurion were particularly interesting and could have had greater impact if better developed.
• What works reminds me of what I like the most about Star Trek, and while less action-packed, serves as a bit of a precursor to The Undiscovered Country. Despite Iota taking over the Potemkin and going a bit crazy at the Romulan border, cooler heads with a sincere desire to save lives by reaching across astropolitical lines prevail.

Okay, dingus. You’ve got to walk the new puppy soon. Wrap it up.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I actually learned a lot while reading and notating this book for this blog. I’ve been working on a (non SF) genre novel for a while I kept coming back with how I’m working to introduce plot elements and supporting characters organically, giving them their own arc that our lead characters intersect with and change. The first chunk of Web of the Romulans makes it feel like it’s going to do just that, but drops that ball quickly when it’s apparent that they’ve hit the editorially-mandated page count.

Final verdict: A disappointment, to be sure, but an illustrative and educational one.

Buy Web Of The Romulans:

• Paperback.
• Kindle.

Hey, guys. Don’t even bother reading this blog post. It’s bad. I said everything I need to say about Marshak and Culbreath when reviewing The Prometheus Design and this is just me flailing around to reach a word count with nothing new to say.

KIRK’S SOUL…SPOCK’S LIFE

A dark plan has been unleashed in the galaxy, a design so vast, only a collective – and ruthless – mind like the Totality could have conceived it. Now Captain Kirk must battle the seductive force of the Totality’s will…

It was reasonable that Captain Kirk and Federation Free Agent Sola Thane would fall in love. But no reasoning in the universe could have foreseen the tragedy of Spock’s own passion for the same woman.

Now this unimaginable conflict could cost Captain Kirk his very soul, and bring death to the proud Vulcan. But in the unimaginable, lies their only chance, and the freedom of the galaxy depends on the outcome of the…

TRIANGLE.

So, that’s it? No cute intro or anything?

After reading The Prometheus Design and the first half of this book, I’ve come to a conclusion.

Marshak and Culbreath hate the Star Trek that was written, produced, and broadcast in the 1960s and there’s no point in trying to read their books if you enjoyed it.

You had my curiosity…now you have my attention.

As I mentioned in my overview of their previous Pocket novel, Marshak and Culbreath were titans in the early Star Trek fan scene, running zines, organizing events, writing reams of fan fiction, etc. The thing is, you never see any of this adoration for the property in their licensed writing.¹The one-and-a-half novels I’ve read of it, anyway.

With The Prometheus Design and Triangle, the authors seem to have gotten paid for some sort of AU version of the property, one in which all of the charm and humanity of our favorite characters was replaced with aggressive, unpleasant sexual tension.

I’ll put it simply: these women are horny. In fact, they may have been hornier than Gene Roddenberry, who, as you know, was horny to the detriment of his work, his relationships, and his health. It’s not a fun horniness that permeates their work, though. It’s a cruel take on sexuality that just doesn’t fit in with Star Trek. ²And yes, I know about the Mirror Universe Kira.

Maybe you’re just a prude?

That’s a fair point.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Trek is that (until the All-Access series started, at least) is that it was all-ages friendly. I’m pretty sure that my parents let me buy whatever Trek novel I wanted as a kid in the ’80s because they knew that I wasn’t going to be dealing with the sort of things that Stephen King or V.C. Andrews were peddling.

Now, one could argue that they were working with the framework presented in The Motion Picture³The book is explicitly set in that period. where Kirk and Spock are both a bit more remote, but at the end of that movie, it’s plain that things are going to be pretty normal for our space pals after this.

If they’d done any of the work to get to the point we see the characters at in the beginning of Triangle, I might well have given them more leeway. With their earlier Pocket novel, they at least established that things in the galaxy were getting weird and that our characters were undergoing a mental assault that led to some odd behavior. Here, it seems like Culbreath and Marshak simply chose to ignore what’s canonically presented on-screen so they could explore their kinks and proclivities. Ignoring the characters and tone of the franchise you are writing for defeats the point of writing for that franchise.

Anyway, you didn’t finish the book and are instead going to complain here.

Short version: bad novel, bad writers, glad to have written this so I can close the book on them forever.

Oh, hey there. Can you believe it’s been over a month since I wrote one of these? I know, I know. I’m just not delivering the value you expect from a blog about Star Trek novels that are old enough to be on their second mortgage, but what can I say? It’s been a rough few weeks for me, everyone I know, the nation at large, and the entirety of planet Earth.

Astute readers are going to wonder why I’m not covering the novelization of Star Trek II, since it was next in the publication order. That’s because if things align correctly, I’m going to get a nice collaboration in with Mike Duquette over at Hollywood and Spine.¹ I can’t say enough good things about this newsletter. It’s a great look at an art that most people just don’t know about in the modern era.

Okay, fanboy. Get to it.

Here’s my favorite part of these posts, because I don’t have to do any thinking, the back cover copy:

SPOCK A TRAITOR?

There is sabotage aboard the Enterprise, and Spock’s investigation leads him into defiance of the Federation and a bizarre alliance with the Romulan and Klingon Empires against the bloodthirsty Tomarii—a savage race for whom war and battle are life itself.

Now Spock has been declared a traitor and condemned to the shame of the Federation’s highest security prison. And now Captain James Kirk must face the toughest decision of his command, while a lifelong friendship and the destiny of the free universe hang in the balance!

If you can’t tell already, this book is a lot.

As the introduction by Theodore Sturgeon² Sonni Cooper actually handed him an early version of this novel at a Star Trek convention years before. notes, it starts with a literal bang, with a devastated bridge and the ship spiraling out of control. Kirk’s near death, Spock has a sliver of metal embedded near his spine and Scotty and the rest of the crew have to scramble to save everyone they can before ordering the separation of the saucer section. Over just ten pages, Sonni Cooper gives us a setup, offers up some plot complications, and introduces a mystery, and I can’t help but admire that.

Hot damn, I’m into this so far!

In fact, the first third of this book is really engaging, even if there are the sections where clumsy, too-thick exposition is used instead of actually writing out a scene or two. It rockets through the plot³ I refuse to use any warp speed puns here. with an indefatigable eagerness, and you can tell that Cooper is really excited about what comes next. It seems like every five pages or so, a new plot twist is introduced, and for a while there’s some real tension about what might happen, but it hits the wall that a lot of thrillers hit: so many big moments and revelations coming one after the other becomes dull without some masterful storytelling backing it up.

Okay, give me the big bits of the plot, preferably delivered in easily-digestible bullet points.

What about a numbered list here and some bullet points later?

Fine, that’s…fine.

Now hang on there, Spock stole a spaceship, escaped Space Alcatraz, became a space pirate, and joined the Romulan military. Surely there are consequences!

Nope. The last two pages are like the last minute of almost every episode of Star Trek: everyone is gathered on the bridge, some jokes are made, and they all have a laugh as the ship goes off to its next adventure.

I last read this book in 1987, so I had no idea if this was all going to be somebody (probably Kirk’s) wild-ass coma dream or if Spock was going to turn out to be running some kind of deep-cover spy game.

I’ll let you guess what happens.

Fine.

We’re at the part of this where I list some random notes about this book.

• This is the greatest number of times you’ll encounter the world “depilatory” in any kind of non-fetish fiction.
• At one point, it’s mentioned that one-eighth of the galaxy is under Tomarii control; this is never brought up again.
• I liked how committed Spock was to his vegetarianism, even under life-threatening circumstances. This stood out to me because his ethics through the rest of the story are dubious, to say the least.⁶Cut to me saying “The Spock I know wouldn’t…”
• During his time on the Tomarii homeworld, Scotty manages to distill some whiskey from mold and scrub grass because he is the hero we deserve.
• There’s a really decent subplot with Kirk learning to work with his new first officer and engineer. One goes pretty well, the other doesn’t.
• Cooper has a keen ear for dialogue; you can easily imagine this being adapted as an audio drama featuring the original crew.
• The Romulan commander from “The Enterprise Incident” has one of those cameos that must have seemed achingly clever at the time. I adore it for trying so hard.
• There’s some neat in-universe filigree that helps place this firmly after the TV series and before Star Trek: The Motion Picture. As part of the repair efforts on the Enterprise, the bridge is refitted a bit; the uniforms are changed; and for some reason, Cooper decided Chekov should be a lieutenant.⁷No, I won’t stop making fun of Chekov, ever.

So, did you enjoy this or what? Should I read it?

I’m not going to say this is a masterwork. It is, after all, Sonni Cooper’s first (and only Trek) novel and Hartwell and company’s dubious editorial standards have been noted here before, but her long association with the franchise⁸She was William Shatner’s personal manager for years and helped organize a number of conventions and zines and passion for the world is obvious.

If you see a cheap copy of Black Fire and want a deeply silly, fun Trek adventure that you can devour over the course of a lazy Sunday afternoon, then go for it. It’s definitely bigger and weirder than most of the licensed material being put out right now.

Buy Black Fire:

• Paperback.
• Kindle.

Hey, we’re back again. Strange times happening, my friends, and how better to deal with a pandemic that’s killing thousands, a President who refuses to do the most basic functions of his job, and weeks of at-home isolation than to read and then write about the next in the Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels of the 1980s, Lee Corey’s The Abode Of Life?

Have you tried alcohol as a coping mechanism instead?

More than you know.

So, here’s the back cover copy:

The citizens of Mercan cannot conceive of worlds beyond their own. Their sun, Mercaniad, is prone to deadly, radioactive flare-ups, and the Mercans have organized their life around the need to survive the Ordeal — until a strange visitor appears from out of nowhere…

The Enterprise, badly crippled and in desperate need of repairs, must seek help from a people who cannot believe in its existence. Mercaniad is about to blow, and James Kirk faces an impossible choice: to attack the sun itself and save his ship and crew — or let a people live in peace, in the only world they know…

The Abode of Life.

It just now strikes me that I should have read this summary before writing up one of my own, because it’s succinct and to-the-point.

Admit it, you did no such thing.

I will not admit it, because it’s not true! I actually sit with a real damn notepad and take notes with a pen like a damn animal as I write these, just in case I need to go into detail with these blog posts.

Uh-huh.

Sigh. I don’t need this. Not right now.

Anyway, while doing some science out in the unknown regions of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, the Enterprise encounters a monstrous gravitic flux and is hurled across the depths of space and finds itself in a situation strikingly similar to that of the USS Voyager almost a century later¹Of course, “the voyage and return” is one of the seven basic plots, sitting neatly between “a six hour phone call where you try to help your mom set up her new computer” and Barry Bostwick’s storyline in Topless Island 4 .

They discover the planet Mercan not by its radio or subspace transmissions; it has none. Instead, they follow a radiation source — the planet’s transporters. They soon discover that Mercan’s isolated position (it’s the sole planet in a system from which the Milky Way is a thin band of light an unimaginable distance away) has caused the culture to evolve in such a way that there are no transportation or communication technologies in use, just teleportation.

That’s a pretty heavy sci-fi setup, and to talk about that, we’re going to have to go back to Lee Corey for a minute.

I just Googled him and…he’s not real?

Well, he was as real as “Richard Bachman” or “Wiz Khalifa.” It’s the pen name for G. Harry Stine, a scientist, author, and leading light in the world of model rocketry. Like The Klingon Gambit‘s Robert E. Vardman, he was part of the nascent aerospace scene in New Mexico²Which it appears he left abruptly after being fired by Martin for quoting from his own book when a reporter asked him about the Sputnik launch. before starting a career as a full-time nonfiction writer and public expert in spaceflight. He become a consultant to Rich Sternbach and Michael Okuda on Star Trek: The Next Generation in his later years, earning a “thank you” in the hugely popular Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

It’s easy to see the parallels between Stine and Arthur C. Clarke, a similarly intelligent individual who wrote non-fiction alongside “harder” science fiction with ease.

The problem with this, of course, is that Star Trek isn’t hard science fiction, and that friction shows.

First of all, I want to say there are some big ideas that I really liked :

• An entire society goes into “keeps” built deep under their oceans to flee outbursts of Berthold rays.
• There’s a cohesive creation myth on Mercan that is completely believable. My notes (see, I do write them) actually state how in-depth they are.
• The commonplace use of the transporters meant things like communicators were completely foreign to the Mercans. Why call someone when you can just beam over?³I’ve often thought that the transporter would be the best thing ever to happen to the extramarital affairs industry.

But all of these ideas (which would fit very well in something like Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama series or Greg Bear’s Eon and its sequels) are kind of awkwardly folded and glued onto a very traditional four-act Star Trek episode structure in which:

• The disabled and storm-tossed Enterprise finds themselves orbiting a strange new world.
• A landing party beams down and discovers that there are three parties in control, each representing either keeping the status quo on Mercan (the Proctors and Guardians) or discovering the truth about the universe (the Technic).
• Kirk and the landing party try to find a way to get the Enterprise the resources the ship needs without badly violating the prime directive, even as an upcoming solar flare threatens the crew.
• Everything works out in the end thanks to the Enterprise Crew Being Very Clever.

I dunno, sounds just fine to me.

That’s the thing. With a novel, you get to do more, and it’s obvious that Stine wanted to. His style of science fiction just doesn’t work for Star Trek.

He stops the action dead in a few places to exposit quite heavily on his Very Cool Ideas while the rest of the text feels like a novelization of an unshot episode that used a lot of pre-existing sets and one new hallway, lit and photographed in different ways to try to make it look like it’s more than just a t-junction with a camera rig set in the middle.

When you compare The Abode of Life to efforts by later writers like Diane Duane’s excellent The Wounded Sky (which features a hyperintelligent glass spider bending the rules of physics to propel the Enterprise into the great unknown), Stine’s shortcomings as a Trek writer become more apparent. There’s also this overwhelming simplicity when it comes to the alien culture itself, which seems to stem from the writer’s deep belief in the free market of ideas and that laissez-faire capitalism was going to work out just fine.

Hang on, are you getting political again?

It’s not me getting political. Everything is political in some way; Star Trek even more so. Combining Roddenberry’s vision of humanity’s future with a writer who believes that the cream rises to the top leads to passages like this, which stung more than I can say with America in its present situation:

It was obvious to Kirk that Pallar was slowly beginning to open his mind. One thing for certain: Pallar was at least as intelligent as Prime Proctor Lenos. Leaders don’t rise to the top without a considerable amount of intelligence and wisdom, regardless of the culture in which they live.

My reaction:

Nobody is truly wrong in Stine’s work; they just need to be exposed to the truth, which they will quickly accept as being the right thing. It’s lazy and hackneyed and something I’ve always reacted poorly to whenever it showed up on any of the Trek series.

With a novel, you get room to explore these things a bit more and work towards an organic conclusion; this book doesn’t do that.

Okay, so give us the TL;DR conclusion.

The Abode of Life is thoroughly mediocre.

That’s what you said in the title. You could have saved yourself a lot of time here.

I know, but if I suffered, you have to as well.

Buy The Abode of Life. Maybe you’ll like it?

• Paperback.
• Kindle.