(listen to episode on Spotify)
(Chrononauts theme music)
a brief overview and recommendations of non-literature SF media before 1965
Good evening, and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and JM, and tonight we're going to be doing something maybe a little bit different than we've done before on the podcast, but before we get into all of that, you can find us on all of the major podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple and Google, and we also post our episodes on to YouTube if that platform is more convenient for you. We also run a blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. Where we post hard-to-find and rare texts, as well as original translations of works that haven't been translated into English before.
JM:
Yeah, we have some cool translations coming up.
Nate:
We do, yeah. There's some interesting stuff on the blog spot that we posted recently, one from Ukrainian, this very anti-capitalist Atlantis story that's short but fun to read, and there's some definitely interesting stuff in the future, so keep an eye out on that.
You can also follow us on Twitter at @ChrononautsSF or on facebook/chrononautspodcast
But for tonight, we are a literature podcast, and we really haven't delved into other forms of science fiction media, aside from a few movies here and there that happen to be adaptations of the works that we're covering in a particular episode.
JM:
We keep bringing in the movie talk and we even snuck in on music episodes once, so...
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We do diverge every now and then.
Nate:
Yeah, but there is certainly a whole other realm of science fiction media that is unrelated, you could say, to the literature that we've been covering. Something that stands alone from literature adaptations, though, as we'll see in a bit. There are quite a bit of those throughout the entire history of where science fiction media starts to diverge from literature. So in the last three episodes we've done on the show, starting with our Astounding: The Early Days episode. We've been taking a look at the rise of science fiction fandom in the United States, mostly through the lens of Astounding magazine. But we also take a look at the rise of fanzine culture, conventions, and fanfiction. And this episode can be seen as both a continuation of our discussion on fanfiction, in that the works we're covering tonight are not self-published stories by amateurs, but rather officially published novels that are commissioned by the intellectual property holders of the franchise. And this can also be seen as a representation of science fiction expanding into other mediums.
So for the first several centuries of science fiction adjacent works, broadly construed, literature was really the only medium for science fiction. I suppose the stage is kind of a slightly different medium than the page, but since a lot of drama does get published in book form, I think it's close enough to count and we've covered a couple plays on the podcast before, though. Certainly not a great deal.
But this all starts to change in several key points. One around the mid to late 1890s with the introduction of film. The next in the late 1920s/early 1930s with the emergence of comics, talkie film serials, and radio series, which also coincides with the launch of Amazing Stories and the American pulp science fiction magazine market. And the next major turning point, which we'll be talking tonight, is the late 1950s/early 1960s, where science fiction for adults comes into the picture on the television market. And I don't want to present a very in depth history of these forms of media, but rather I want to throw out a few book titles for those who are interested in exploring this a little bit more in depth as well as give our own recommendations here for some of these early titles so everybody feel free to chime in for some of the stuff that you enjoy from this time period.
So I think for a general reference work on early science fiction film, Michael Benson's "Vintage Science Fiction Films, 1896-1949" is incredibly comprehensive. It's one of those books that are a chronological description of every movie ever made and should be laid out like the Bleiler books, but instead it's kind of forced into a narrative format which has a little bit of...
JM:
What exactly do you mean by that narrative format? Like it tries to make a case for what exactly?
Nate:
Just how it's like laid out and structured. In the Bleiler book, there's sections cut off for like each individual work where...
Gretchen:
It's more of a linear structure right then like alphabetical.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Exactly. So he tries to do it in chronological order. But it's not like he sections off like each movie like he's talking about that he kind of like tries to weave it into a more paragraph format. I don't know. I guess when you take a look at it you'll see what I mean. It's definitely has a ton of information in there, but it's definitely a little bit dense and for a work that is laid out like it in my opinion should be more of like a reference format doesn't contain like a lot of overarching historical narrative, which is you know I guess what you would expect for a book in a format like that.
But if you're looking to mine for some real obscurities, this book contains again a massive, massive amount of information. And for the early days of science fiction film, that is the silent era, it's probably worthwhile to mention that a good chunk of these films are adaptations of novels. So there's a lot of Jules Verne, especially in composite and parody form in Méliès films.
So some of the titles that find their way into some of these movies are "From the Earth to the Moon" and the "Around the Moon" sequel, "Journey Through the Impossible", "20,000 Leagues Under the Seas", numerous adaptations of that one, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras", "The Sphinx of the Ice Realm", and "Mysterious Island". Some of those we've covered on the podcast, likewise with H.G. Wells, there's adaptations of "First Men on the Moon" and "The Invisible Man", and other novels include "Aelita: Queen of Mars", "Metropolis", "Frankenstein", Doyle's "The Lost World", "Women in the Moon", and probably a couple others that I'm missing.
So we've covered a fair amount of these on the podcast and we'll definitely cover some of the other ones, but interesting to note how early on the two worlds are really linked with one another.
JM:
I haven't read too much about the really old film period and stuff like that, or even the really old science fiction radio series, even though I like radio series. As for the 50s stuff, I do have one, I guess it's also a rough recommendation with a caveat and I guess the caveat is it's not really that well, I don't know, it's just not that well written or put together a book, but it still has a lot of useful information in it and clued me into a couple things that I didn't know about. And it's also from a British perspective, which is cool because usually you see this kind of stuff from the American perspective and this pertains to the 1950s, which we're going to talk about very shortly.
So it's kind of misleadingly called "The Golden Age of Science Fiction" and the subtitle is "A journey into space with 1950s radio, TV, films, comics, and books" and a certain by John Wade and yeah, that's a very inclusive title and I don't think he quite manages to I guess capture everything that he's tried to take up in one fell swoop in this book, but it's still pretty useful, especially it's got a really good chapter on British science fiction radio series. And that's an area that I didn't really know too much about previously.
There's the TV stuff with with Quatermass and all that, but radio is something that I didn't really know if there was science fiction on the radio in Britain earlier or what so talks about Journey to Space, which actually I did know about, but there's also stuff called The Lost Planet and some other cool stuff that was on the radio at the time and unlike the American shows, like the really good American Sci-Fi shows from that time, these were serials.
Nate:
Yeah, I haven't really listened to any of the radio stuff, but it might be something interesting to cover later. Certainly the scene explodes around the 1950s. And before that is definitely an interesting progression of not a whole lot and to just see that kind of exponential growth through the 20s, 30s, 40s and then on to the 50s where...
JM:
In the 50s was already kind of past the golden age of radio, which is interesting because I mean, you had a lot of suspense and thriller shows in the 30s and 40s, but all the science fiction shows seem like they were kind of juvenile.
Nate:
Yeah, like Flash Gordon and the Buck Rogers and stuff like that.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, I would argue that the thrillers and stuff kind of sometimes felt that way too, but I think it was unintentional, you know, just kind of silly dialogue and different things that kind of make you chuckle a little bit. And now listening to them in retrospect, a lot of the time the advertising is actually part of the show itself. So again, here are all the cool, weird advertisements and stuff, which is always fun, just like in our Astounding episode.
Gretchen:
Perhaps the ads are done a little more smoothly than sometimes they were in those pulp magazines.
JM:
Yeah, exactly.
Nate:
Certainly for the early days of science fiction film, there's not a whole lot as far as runtime goes. A lot of the pre-1913 science fiction films are in like the five to ten minute range. So you could pretty much watch all of science fiction film up to that point, I think in like less than two hours that survives.
JM:
That's a lot shorter than our podcast.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Yeah, but I think one difficult thing about talking about early film is that so much of it just does not survive. And even the well-acclaimed films like "Metropolis" and things like that, there have been issues with parts of the reels being missing and several minutes of footage not surviving. So some challenges there. But I think for the very early days of science fiction film from 1897 or 1912 or so, George Méliès is definitely the master of that era. I think all of his work is pretty great. But "A Trip to the Moon", "The Eclipse" and "The Astronomer's Dream" are my personal favorites.
He had a lot of imitators and I think really the only one that is on par with him is the Italian film "Interplanetary Matrimony", which is a really delightful and adorable little film.
JM:
So I can't really comment on any of that, but Gretchen, have you seen any of the Méliès films?
Gretchen:
I've only seen A Trip to the Moon, of course, that being one of the most famous ones. I haven't seen much of the others.
JM:
That sounds like the best one.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's a pretty cool film, but I've not seen any of the other films from him. Even when it comes to silent films in general, I kind of have a gap with like a lot of the sci-fi films. I have seen like "Metropolis", but besides those, I still haven't seen too much.
JM:
Yeah, well, a lot of people nowadays won't watch silent films, so I can't fault you for that.
Nate:
Yeah, I think Metropolis is definitely the best out of the post-1913 era silent film, when film becomes more like feature length and not just like these cute little five minute animations that "A Trip to the Moon" and a lot of the Méliès films are. And I don't know, the early stuff is really, really fun. The animation techniques are really cool, especially for the era, but when the films start to get more in line with what we now think of as a movie, you know, 90 minutes to 120 minutes or so, "Metropolis" is, I think anyway, in a real class of its own. I've seen a fair amount of other silents from that period. "Aelita: Queen of Mars", Fritz Lang's other one, "Women in the Moon", a couple other German ones like "Algol: A Tragedy of Power", and there was this one disaster movie I saw.
JM:
Oh, seems like those were always popular.
Nate:
Oh, yeah, disaster movies. There's tons of those. Yeah. And there's this other one I saw, "Himmelskibbet", which is a, I don't know, they fly to like Mars in a biplane or something like that. And yeah, a lot of that stuff is kind of cool. It's certainly historically interesting and definitely interesting to watch it on a technical filmmaking level, but "Metropolis" as like a film is just leaps and bounds above everything else.
JM:
Yeah, because it actually has a story. So.
Nate:
It does. Yeah. It's based off a novel, which I would like to cover on the podcast at some point.
Gretchen:
I'd be interested in that.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely think that's one we should do for sure.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think for early horror, there's a lot more to say about other directors that really shot at a master level of filmmaking, but for early science fiction, I think Méliès and Fritz Lang are really the two filmmakers to look at from that era. The two books that I could recommend on both of them are the "Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: George Méliès's A Trip to the Moon", and Patrick Milligan's "Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast".
But in the late 1920s, a lot of new changes happen within the science fiction genre, namely Amazing Stories is Launched and publishes the story, Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419 AD", which we've debated covering on the podcast, but I don't know, it's apparently not very good.
JM, I think you said you read it before?
JM:
Yeah, I mean, a long time ago, I read most of it, I kind of skipped over a few pieces here and there. Yeah, it's really not good. We talked about racial stuff on the podcast before, and we usually have to point it out, but we still try to find the good side of the work. I think with something like this, it's a lot harder because it doesn't really have a lot of, it doesn't really have a lot of value in itself, like I guess it could be considered a fun, exciting story from a certain perspective, but there's a lot better examples of that kind of pulpy writing that don't really have to involve extreme racism against Asian people. So I don't know, yeah, it's just kind of funny to think about that Buck Rogers came from that because he's such a well-known character, although I guess after the 1980s he kind of fell out of favor.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't think there's been any kind of Buck Rogers revival since the "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" TV show.
Nate:
No, I don't believe so.
JM:
But that was a pretty, a lot of people really loved and still have fond memories of that show.
Nate:
And I mean, Buck Rogers represents kind of all the big changes that do happen in science fiction media during this time. So we get the story's first appearance in Amazing. Then we get an adaptation as a comic book as well as film and radio serials. I never really got into comics, but a lot of the industry really does get going around this time. As some of the fanzine editors we talked about in our fanzine episode kind of lament about, but a lot of the 30s science fiction film serials like Flash Gordon and the Buck Rogers ones are also mirrored in radio serials. I've seen the Flash Gordon film serials, which is pretty cool, but I've never listened to any of the accompanying radio serials.
JM:
No, I've never heard any either. I did try to watch one of those, the Flash Gordon serial, or was it even that one? Or was it another one of like Radioactive something? No, I can't remember for sure. I think it was Flash Gordon though. Yeah. I think so. And of course, I've seen the 1980s film.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Yeah, that was great. And I guess TV kind of starts to come into the picture in the late 30s, the BBC broadcast an adaptation of RUR in 1938. But I'd say science fiction serialized TV really doesn't get going until the late 1940s in the form of "Captain Video and his Video Rangers" from 1949, which is the start of a number of American juvenile TV series like "Space Patrol". There's another "Flash Gordon series", "Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe". And I don't know, none of that juvenile stuff really had much interest for me.
JM:
Yeah, I can't remember who it was. Not Jack Williamson. I can't remember now. I'll have to look it up. Maybe, maybe put it up in writing somewhere. But one of the writers, pretty famous science fiction writers of the time did write stuff for "Captain Video" on a sort of uncredited, I guess, kind of like one of those things is a check job, which we'll be getting into more of later, I'm sure. But yeah, so he wrote a lot of stuff for "Captain Video", apparently. It seems like the studios and so on, they always thought, oh, this far out space stuff will really get the kids in, right? And even though they may be cared a little less about it than some of the actual writers in the magazine might have at the time, they were able to pay better.
And if that continued on till till the present day, basically, so people getting their commissions to write books and comic strips, for example, just for a property that belongs to somebody else and just kind of do their thing, then that's what we're going to be talking about a little later.
So it's interesting how it all ties together.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly looking at the writing credits for a lot of these early TV shows and radio shows, a lot of very familiar names from the science fiction pulp market also appear in the radio and TV arena. So a fair amount of crossover. And I think both the radio and TV industries start to incorporate more content oriented towards I guess more adults and less juvenile audiences sometime in the mid to late 1950s. So the BBC started doing the Quatermass serials. The first one is from 1953 and mostly lost. But the second and third one, Quatermass 2 and "Quatermass and the Pit" still survive, which are just pretty fascinating historical snapshots, even though I think I prefer the movie versions of both of those.
JM:
Yeah, so a lot of these these old TV shows were done live, so there wasn't really like it's it's not even that they didn't have money for effects. It's like there was no such thing as post production. So you pretty much what you see is what exactly what was happening behind the camera in front of the camera.
Gretchen:
Yeah, isn't there a I believe I remember seeing that during one part of the first Quatermass serial, like there's a fly on the lens or something during like a 10 minutes of it or so.
Nate:
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me. I even I don't know if I've seen the surviving episodes of the first Quatermass serial, but a lot of the Dark Shadows episodes were pretty much shot live, like they would only ever do a second take in extreme circumstances and yeah, flies make their appearance a lot on actors and lenses and various other places when they're shooting some of those.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I haven't seen any of the TV serials for Quatermass, just the films so far.
Nate:
The films are great.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah. I really like them a lot.
JM:
I like the I like the serials to and yeah, there are a couple of cases where the extra like I think is is good like adds a little more to the story and stuff, but it's just yeah, the films actually have a bit of budget behind them. I mean, obviously, it's modest by modern film standards. But yeah, you know, they have a bit of a bit more excitement, I guess that they're able to pull off maybe so yeah.
Nate:
They're definitely a lot of fun. You know, some of the radio shows that move away from juvenile oriented stuff during the 1950s include "Beyond Tomorrow", "2000 Plus" the aforementioned "Journey into Space", "Dimension X", "X Minus One" and "Exploring Tomorrow". I really largely unfamiliar with a lot of these. I think I've only listened to a couple of episodes of "X Minus One".
JM:
So "Dimension X" and "X Minus One" were two American shows and they actually not so much. Well, yeah, a bit "Dimension X," "X Minus One" is kind of the follow up to Dimension X. I don't know if they were both done by Columbia, but they used stories from Galaxy and Astounding that was pretty much their basis so that you get to hear really good dramatizations of stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, you name it. It's pretty cool. You can see how I got introduced to quite a few stories. I mean, I was already reading a lot of the stuff from that time because mostly because of Asimov because that's how I started learning about the magazines and Campbell and all those guys. And so it just kind of grew out from there. But yeah, I mean, even in the early nineties, there was a local radio station broadcasting "X Minus One". So you could you could listen to old-time radio at 11pm on a Sunday night and stay up when I was like 11 or so listening to not just X minus one, but like a lot of people like to do stuff like "Gangbusters" and "Dragnet" and stuff like that. Yeah, all these old radio shows. Yeah, it's pretty good stuff. Pretty exciting. It's interesting hearing the production values on display at that time. Like a lot of it sounds pretty good, but like nowadays there's so much opportunity for a really awesome sound design that you didn't have back then either, right?
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, tape equipment had just come into the picture at that time. So people were just kind of getting the hang of how to do that production effect, whereas now everything is on a computer and it's just so much easier to do from a practical standpoint. But yeah, tons of huge names.
JM:
The thing about the American shows, too, is that they were all very, very set to the format. So like you couldn't break away from that 25 minute episodic format. And that's kind of one thing I noticed about the British shows is that they were more like flexible.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah, we doesn't have to be we can do like a 12 part miniseries of one continuous storyline. Why not?
Nate:
Right. But I think when people think of 50s science fiction visual media, it's really the classic 50s science fiction film that most people think of as this is definitely the golden era of silly B movies and all that stuff.
JM:
Some of them are great.
Nate:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And there's a few legitimately great ones that are, I think, very well critically acclaimed outside of genre and niche circles like "Forbidden Planet" and "The Day The Earth Stood Still". But I don't know. Some of the monster films, especially the British stuff like "Crawling Eye" and "X: The Unknown" and the Quatermass stuff is just a really awesome.
JM:
Yeah. I love "The Crawling Eye".
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's such a cool movie.
Gretchen:
That's a cool film.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. We've all seen this really awesome film. So you guys should watch it too. If you like Quatermass and Doctor Who and мonster мovies, you love this. And it's cool how it throws in so many different things too. Like it's always adding complications as Van Vogt would say.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely a lot of fun. As far as television stuff outside of the US and the UK, it looks like there's some stuff that starts to get produced in Europe and Japan starting from the late 1950s and into the 1960s. But I really haven't seen any of that stuff, though there is an interesting German show called "Space Patrol Orion", which premiered on September 17th of 1966, just nine days after the airing of Star Trek's "The Man Trap". And the show revolves around a starship with an international crew and a womanizing captain, which is a pretty amusing set of coincidences between the two shows, though there are some very obvious differences between the two. "Space Patrol Orion" is much more military focused in the starship's purpose. The series basically is trying to thwart an alien invasion in the solar system. And it's much less focused on the exploration angle. But yeah, it's kind of cool how both the Germans and the Americans arrived at a very similar place in the exact same time. It's something interesting one to check out. I think it's only like seven or eight episodes. It's been a very long time since I've watched it. But yeah, it's cool.
JM:
Yeah, I've heard of it, but I've never been able to check it out.
Nate:
But it's Star Trek that we're here to talk about tonight and Doctor Who, which are by far the biggest franchises to come out of science fiction television, possibly ever. And they've had a profound effect on science fiction fandom and are obviously still major pop culture phenomenon in this present day. And that's kind of my very roundabout way of tying this all together with the last few episodes. So I guess with that stuff out of the way, let's start to take a look at Star Trek and its impact on science fiction.
(music: oscillating springs)
personal backgrounds with Star Trek
JM:
I think we all know that Star Trek debuted in 1966, created by Gene Roddenberry and his wonderful team of televisual experts, and yeah, it's just a show that has had a pretty gigantic and unbelievable impact. I don't think, I mean, I'm sure Roddenberry hoped it would, but I don't think that a lot of the people kind of in the television networks and so forth anticipated just how much of an impact it would have.
Nate:
Yeah, when we were talking about the Star Trek fan fiction stuff in our fanzines episode a couple episodes back. I had mentioned an interview that was posted on YouTube with two of the women that were involved was setting up the first Star Trek convention. And they said that the attendance of that first convention like dwarfed some of the all-purpose general science fiction convention as far as like attendance and people showing up goes, which is absolutely incredible. Their circulation was in huge numbers. So I mean, there was like a much, much greater impact as far as like mainstream culture goes than basically anything else in science fiction I think that had come up to that point.
JM:
And the general science fiction community in the United States was very interested in Star Trek. One of the reasons they were interested was that they knew that it was the way that a lot of people would get into science fiction because they would see this on television. I've been reading in preparation for this because we are going to talk about novels. So I've been reading this book that's basically an account of Star Trek novels and their history. It actually has brief comments about every single book from the author, although some of the authors did not comment for the book, but the ones that did, they all have something to say about their experience writing for Star Trek and a lot of them talk about how they first watched the show in the 60s or when it was on syndication in the 70s, which is actually when it really started to get popular, which is kind of interesting. Most people seem to think when the show got canceled, at least like the non-fans considered the show to be a flop. They didn't really think that it had been successful and I guess the viewing figures were not to their satisfaction considering the money they were spending on it.
So fans did notice and the science fiction community did notice, and even going back to Mr. Campbell there at Astounding, he was pretty keen on Star Trek, even though Gene Roddenberry seems like, it seems like those two guys might not get along so well, and I'm going to get into that because I want to talk about Star Trek as a general concept and how we feel about it. And there's some interesting stuff that comes up when you talk about Star Trek because it is a very optimistic vision of the future, but it's not just a scientifically optimistic view. It's like, hey, we don't need capitalism anymore, and we have a kind of military, but we're not aggressive.
Gretchen:
I mean, it's a post-scarcity society.
JM:
Right, it's a post-scarcity society there that a lot of the time science fiction writes cautionary tales about what will happen in the future if all our needs are met, and we have robots do everything for us and stuff like that and like humans will become fragile and we won't be able to do anything, and if something goes wrong, the whole society is going to break down and stuff like that. And Roddenberry just seems to be saying, no, no, that everybody's needs are accounted for, and people are really into exploring and learning about other cultures and going out into the universe. And it's optimistic in a way that's not necessarily, I mean, it does kind of turn into that anyway, but it seems like not very centered on things like conquest or colonialism or even human-centric worldviews.
So how did you guys get into Star Trek?
Nate:
So I first caught Star Trek through The Next Generation syndicated episodes in the early 90s sometime. It was definitely before Deep Space Nine aired, and I got really into that. That has been pretty much syndicated from the last 30 years onwards. Next Generation has really, really thrived in syndication, I think, possibly more so than any of the other series. But yeah, I really liked Next Generation, and then I got into Deep Space Nine as it aired and kind of fell off of it for a while, but then got really back into it around the time when Season 4 started up.
Never really got into Voyager or Enterprise, the original series I like a fair amount, and certainly a lot of the movies there are a lot of fun. As far as the new shows go, I don't know, I wasn't really into Discovery that much at all. I watched the first four episodes of Strange New Worlds, and I thought that was a really good reboot of the formula, though I didn't really like the whole excessive prequel thing, like we need to tie every minor detail of a previous mention in a show to a whole new thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It's kind of the danger of franchise fiction, and I have a lot to say about this now, especially after reading about some of these writers' experiences, trying to write for Star Trek and Doctor Who. I mean, we'll get to it when we start talking about tie-ins in general in a few minutes, but yeah. Yeah, that happens on TV, too, and I think several generations have gone by, and now the people that are writing it, they've been watching it for two generations, and they're kind of really immersed in this world, and they want to tie everything together but make something new at the same time, and it's like, I personally haven't gone into any of the recast TOS characters, like I don't know, I guess for some reason it's a thing about a lot of television and movies and stuff is that it's not just a character on a page, it's a character portrayed by a specific person, and I mean, yeah, people always point out to me things like, well, you don't complain about that when you go see the six millionth version of "Hamlet" or something like that, oh, somebody else was playing it, but I don't know, I think that there's a difference between classic theater and television, and I just don't, I don't know, it kind of bothers me personally that they just don't create their own characters, like I don't understand why they don't do that.
Gretchen:
I haven't seen any of the new series yet, I should say I got into Star Trek shortly around the same time I got into Doctor Who. I got into Doctor Who around 2012, it was right before the 50th anniversary, which was great because then when the 50th anniversary happened, everyone was talking about it, so it was, it was really nice to have that happen, and I got into Doctor Who then, and then about a few months after I started getting into Doctor Who, I decided to watch Star Trek, and I started with the original series, and have since then, I've seen up until Enterprise, I haven't seen all of Voyager still, because it was taken down on the site, I was watching it on, and then I still have yet to finish it.
I was going to say about the new series is I also am not that big a fan of when they try to expand on the whole, it's prequel fatigue, stuff like that, nostalgia bait, I feel like Enterprise does do a better job at that just because they do have an original crew, even while they do explore certain concepts from TOS, and from things that would be in the future.
JM:
Yeah, so for me, I remember some TOS episodes when I was a kid, like really small, my dad would sometimes go over to his friend's places and take me with him, and you know, my dad was never a really big TV watcher, not really a big science fiction fan, he got into, he pretty much supported my interested Doctor Who, which definitely came first, we'll get into that, but so we would go over there and sometimes they'd watch Star Trek and stuff like that, and I remember when Next Generation started, I had two older cousins who were really into Star Wars, and they liked Star Trek, but I only really heard them start talking about it when TNG started, and especially the one older cousin, he was really, really excited about it, and he loved the new ship, and because he was really into military stuff and airplanes. Like he was kind of the guy who had like, model airplanes all over, like strung up from the ceiling and on his walls and stuff like that, so he was like really excited by the ship design, and he was, I remember specifically him telling me about how the saucer section could separate from the drive and do something, and he thought that was just the coolest thing in the world.
So this new Star Trek show, and I guess in the end, I didn't 100% register, but one day we were watching TV, and it was episode of season one of TNG, it was called "The Battle", it's an episode where Captain Picard gets, meets up with this Ferengi, and gets this weird mysterious orb, and links him to something that happened in the past on his old ship, when he destroyed, supposedly destroyed this Ferengi vessel or something like that, and this is during the time when the Ferengi were quite different than what they would eventually be.
Nate:
Yeah, they tried to make them the series of villains, but it didn't really work out.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the evolution of the Ferengi in Star Trek is pretty interesting from that to the comic relief for a long time, to finally getting a more nuanced perspective in DS9.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, and then this Ferengi in the episode was comically evil, and like, mua-ha-ha, you know, I've enslaved Captain Picard's mind, and it was pretty fun though, but I was very confused because I knew it was Star Trek, but I thought Star Trek was supposed to have Captain Kirk and Spock and stuff, so I was like, where are those guys, those don't sound like, that's not them, so I was very confused, and in the years after that, I didn't really become a fan, I guess, till, again, like the early 90s.
I think probably a little bit before Nate did, I would say, I remember the 25th anniversary, and I think that was actually kind of how I started really getting interested, because I remember there was a program on television, as you know, a celebration of Star Trek, and I had all these clips from the original series, and from TNG, which had been going for a few years then, but it was mostly about the original series, but I remember that kind of got me interested in watching more Star Trek, and I guess just before that, we had borrowed a VCR, because we didn't have one in the house, and my mom rented "Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock", which is forever screwed me up in my head, because when people talk about how emotional the end of "Wrath of Khan" is, I'm like, but don't you, like, he came back in the next film, and that was the one I saw first, so I was like, by the time I saw "Wrath of Khan", it was like, stop trying to manipulate me, I know he's coming back, like, it was really funny. To this day, I'm still like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gretchen:
I do remember watching "Wrath of Khan" for the first time and thinking, well, now on to "Search for Spock", I wonder what's going to happen in this one.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, and I mean, it should be fair they did it to themselves, because like when the movie came out, and it was called "The Search for Spock", it's like, you knew they were saying, all right, we brought Spock back, but at the same time, they also like made it so that any fans who came to the show and the movies late would like never be surprised because they'd always know that Spock came back after the emotional, devastating end of that damn second movie.
So yeah, I watched a bunch of the movies I had "Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home" on VHS.
Gretchen:
My favorite of the Star Trek films.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
JM:
Yeah, that one was really, yeah, that one was really popular. So I got really into TNG too and DS9 started. I just loved it. I thought it was pretty much the greatest thing. But then Voyager happened and when Voyager happened, at first I was all into it, but the more I watched it, the less I liked it. And I don't know if it was just that and it was just me getting interested in other things. I don't know. I completely lost the affinity for Star Trek around 1996, maybe or something. And I would say I didn't come back to it till around 2013. So I just, yeah, I just pretty much stopped completely. I'd never watched Enterprise. Now I've watched a few episodes of the first season of Enterprise and I've been really enjoying it. I like it a lot. I kind of wish I had watched it then because maybe it would have made me like Star Trek again sooner.
But I would say the height of my interest in Star Trek was around, yeah, like 1992 to 1995, roughly. Pretty much reading books, watching all the stories. I watched all of TOS. My first watching of TOS, I thought it wasn't as good as The Next Generation. And I was, I often was like kind of ridiculing it a little bit. But as time has gone on, I started to actually like it more than The Next Generation, which is kind of funny. But it's the way it goes sometimes.
Nate:
They both had different atmospheres though. I think at the start, TNG doesn't really know what it's trying to do. And a lot of it feels like kind of like inferior retreads of TOS. But the, I guess, acting and the whole production values and things like that, it's definitely different with TOS. I mean, Shatner is a classic great overactor and he just brings a completely different mood to the show than somebody who's like a trained Shakespearean actor like Patrick Stewart is.
JM:
Yeah, although to be fair, Shatner also did some, did Shakespeare, but not for the Royal Shakespeare Company, that's for sure. But yeah, I mean, I think I was talking about this with my friend. We did a couple of Star Trek streams on his YouTube channel, John Gill. And we were talking about this and I think The Next Generation is just really comfortable to watch. Like it just has this thing about it where you, you never really, sometimes you don't feel that much from it, but you never really feel that upset by it that you want to turn it off. You know, it's just like, it's really comforting to experience and it's like, not, not turn your brain off necessarily, but it just feels like, oh, the ship is so comfortable and it's got that constant background noise of the ship and all the fun characters.
I mean, I've said this before, maybe even on this podcast, but I actually like the early days of Next Generation. I have a lot of fondness for that. I think it's the end of the show where things kind of, I don't know, it just starts to feel too rote and like kind of boring, like just not really, I don't know, they keep trying to introduce all these things that feel like they should be important, but they can't really do anything with them because it's the end of the show and it's just, I don't know, yeah.
I'm like, I often say I like the beginning stuff. So I like, like, I like the fact that they haven't figured out all the characters yet. I think it's fun, it's fun that Worf just makes stupid comments all the time, like for no reason other than he's clinging on and it's fun that Geordi LaForge just acts really out of character sometimes because they haven't figured out his character yet.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know. I enjoy that. I like the fact that there are many different music composers too, so it has like a difference out to it where like they kind of settled on one composer for the last few seasons. So the episodes all kind of have the same style of music to them and everything and that it's uniformity. But anyway, yeah, so I like Star Trek too, we're all fans. The concept of Star Trek, like I was saying, is interesting because it is so positive and I don't know how I feel about the post-scarcity thing, you know, I mean, I want to really embrace it. A part of me can't help but feel like it's too nice, I guess sometimes.
Nate:
And they try to tone it back a bit in DS9, I think, when they introduce like Latinum as a currency and other supply issues with, I don't know, the whole occupation and various other things related to the...
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean like Deep Space Nine in general kind of acts as just a deconstruction of the things that happened before. So I feel like Deep Space Nine retains the optimism of the previous series but also challenges it at the same time.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it's why I feel it's a much more rewarding show overall than Next Generation even though there's like some really brutally bad stuff in Deep Space Nine that you just never get in Next Generation. But at the same time, it's easy to just skip those episodes оф Deep Space Nine and no problem.
JM:
But as for the concept though, again, I think the new series also definitely take the Federation down a peg, but I also kind of, I'm not sure, you know, this is why I'm so conflicted because yeah, I was going to say, I mean, yeah, some part of me thinks it's too nice and I want to be like, the Federation can't possibly be like that, like, you know, nobody needs any money, everybody, even though they have replicators that can make any food stuff for them they want, they still like doing things like cooking just because it's fun and they'll do it anyway.
So where does all the stuff they cook come from? Like, there's one episode that I watched recently where O'Brien is hanging out with his wife and they're eating some food that he made with the replicators and he's apologizing to her because he made this like, thick Irish stew and he wasn't able to use real beef or something like that because it's the replicator and like, of course she's disgusted by this food but she's trying to be polite and eating it and stuff and meanwhile he's reminiscing about how he grew up and how his mom made all this food and stuff and I'm like, where did she get all that? It didn't come from the replicator so there must be people growing all this stuff and like slaughtering animals just because they, just because people like to cook, like there's all these things that I wonder about and the fact that everybody seems to love 20th century art. Why is that? Like, you know, an older stuff that doesn't seem to be a lot of, like the cynical side of me wonders, oh, you know, did they make art in the 24th century then and like, what is it?
Gretchen:
There is this one comment, I don't remember what episode it's in, it's like a kind of just momentary conversation between Bashir and Garak during one of their lunches where I think Bashir is talking about like how a lot of human art at that time is like made, it's like adaptations of other cultures' art, like they haven't made anything really original in a while, nothing of note that's like their own original works.
JM:
That's really interesting. I've watched most of that show but I still need to do a complete rewatch sometime because it's been a long time, I just watch random episodes here and there and I sometimes miss out on some of the good ones but, but see again, like that's, yeah, the piercing of the Star Trek bubble which is important but I am conflicted because a part of me is like that's really nice. I mean, I, not, not maybe not so much the lack of original art but like the fact that so much time and effort is put into exploration, people don't seem to need things that they can't have at least on earth at this time in the Federation inner circle I guess. They don't require for anything and I guess they just, you know, they work because they like it and a lot of them do cool things like join Starfleet and hang out on Starships. So it feels good, you know, it feels like a part of me is like yeah, I don't mind seeing the bubble burst but I don't know if I want to see it burst that far because I do kind of appreciate that vision of the future. It feels, yeah, again, it is kind of comforting.
You can see why some creators in the 60s were like, yeah, that, that really seems like the world's going to go through hell because it's starting to go through hell right now. It's going to go through hell but eventually we're going to come out of it and we're going to be better and then we're going to contact aliens and the aliens are going to show us all this cool technology and we're going to all exchange ideas and help each other and it's going to be space utopia and that's kind of what our book today is about.
It's an original series novel and Gretchen, you've chosen it and it was the "star trekiest of the Star Trek".
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Very nice way to describe it. Yeah, so why don't we get into that? So yeah, Gretchen, why don't you tell us about Diane Duane and "The Wounded Sky"?
(music: wavy shimmering)
Diane Duane background, Star Trek novel history, non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
During her attendance at Roosevelt Senior High School, which she graduated from in 1970, she received a region science and nursing scholarship from 1970 to 1971. She studied astronomy and astrophysics at Dowling College in Oakdale, New York. After admitted difficulties with calculus and other high mathematics, which I completely understand, she transferred to Pilgrim State Hospital School of Nursing in Long Island and graduated in 1974 with a specialty in psychiatry.
For two years after receiving her degree, she worked at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital, highly respected psychiatric clinic in the US. While working at this clinic, she received encouragement from friends who had read her work to pursue writing as a career. After a year of working as an assistant for writer David Gerald, she started this pursuit and her first book, "The Door Into Fire", was published by Dell Books soon after in 1979. This book got her nominated for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award two years in a row. She has since written two other books in the same universe as this novel.
Besides these, she has written various other novels, notably those forming the Young Wizard series, which seems to be her most popular collection of original works.
JM:
Yeah, it's quite a lot of those that I noticed.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I believe it's about 11 books, I think, is how many are in that series. And like, I think she's done like a couple of spin-off series as well.
JM:
Wow, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. So she's got quite a few.
JM:
And that's pretty cool. I mean, it does seem like a lot of these authors, as I've been reading through, it is pretty much a who's who of contemporary American science fiction literature authors even. Like, not everybody, but for sure, a lot of familiar names pop up.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Star Trek was always good with that, too. The TV show had stuff from Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch.
Gretchen:
Sort of from Harlan Ellison, even though he was very altered since then.
JM:
Right. Which is, which is cool because it's like The Next Generation. By the time they got to TNG, it was like they were all TV authors, so they didn't really use, I mean, and it's not to say they were being snobbish, it's just that, as is often pointed out in the book about the novels, writing prose and writing for television is very different.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So, yeah. It's not necessarily, I mean, the writers for television kind of stick to their thing and the writers for prose often stick to their thing, but Roddenberry seemed to want to solicit the real science fiction writers, so he was able to to an extent. Actually, there were a lot more writers who were solicited who failed to contribute Star Trek scripts that they used like A.E. Van Vogt, for example. So.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Just a note also is that they did have a couple of unsolicited scripts by fans, specifically "The Empath" in TOS, which is Joyce Muskat, which is one of my favorite episodes of the series, actually. And that one was, I don't believe she has any other television credits or even other writing credits, except that episode.
JM:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Gretchen:
But, yes, Diane Duane, of course, is also known for her work for multiple franchises. She has a number of television writing credits under her belt, with her initial credits mostly for animated series working on scripts for Hanna-Barbera back in the early 1980s. And like things like Scooby-Doo and also, apparently, Laverne and Shirley had an animated series, which I did not know about until looking through her Wikipedia page.
However, she eventually expanded to work on live action series as well. Alongside these works, she also wrote for franchises through the publishing of tie-in novels, most notably, obviously, for Star Trek. Though she does claim to have written Star Trek fan fiction before this point, which she is thankful hasn't survived, or is very popular, her decision to write an official novel came a few years after the publishing of her first book. The desire came about, she says, through her annoyance after reading another book for the franchise. She believed that she could write something better than that, so she called her agent and told him she'd resolved to create a Star Trek novel.
This first novel, published in 1983, is the one we're covering tonight, "The Wounded Sky". But she also has written several others, including "The Romulan Way", co-written by her husband and fellow sci-fi and fantasy author, Peter Morwood, and one of a handful of her books about The Romulans, her ideas about whom many fans regard as canonical.
I believe you said you'd read this one, JM?
JM:
Yeah, so I've actually read quite a few of her books, I realize. I kind of knew the name was familiar, and getting back to, I guess, Star Trek novels in general, I do want to talk about the history of that just a little bit, because it is kind of interesting, and it does tie in with a lot of our authors too, but yes, from Duane I've also read, yeah, "Doctor's Orders", "The Romulan Way", and something else. I wrote it down somewhere. There was another name that I recognized from my big phase of Star Trek reading.
Gretchen:
One of her other really popular ones is "Spock's World".
JM:
Oh yes, that was it. Yeah, yes, I've read that as well, so that's actually the book that comes right after this one. I mean, not in the series, but by her. This was her next Star Trek book, and I think that that book probably contributed more to the Vulcans and the Vulcan culture than anything else that I can think of. I don't know if the show ended up using all that in the future, but definitely all their history and a lot of this stuff that's not really mentioned on T.O.S., for the most part that I know of, comes up in this book, and I feel like it's pretty widely acknowledged as canon to use that dreaded word that I hope not to use too much during this episode.
Star Trek novels in general, though, pretty much the first things that you see are novelizations, and this is the case with Doctor Who as well. Our first Star Trek novelizations are actually several logbook series written by James Blish, writer who we came across before in our fandom episode, and essentially, Blish's job was to novelize every single episode of the original series, and pretty much he did that, although he ended up having a lot of health concerns by the mid-70s.
So he started doing this in 1967 when the show was still being made, and he didn't have any experience with the show itself when he started the novelizations. He was working from scripts and notes only, so it's an interesting thing to fans to spot all the things that he did differently from the episodes, because, I don't know, I've only read one of these logbooks in my younger years, so I can't say I remember. I mean, I had some classic episodes in it, but I don't even know if I had watched them all at a time, so I don't know that the differences were that apparent to me, and there's like 12 of these things.
The last two or three were completed mostly by his wife, Judith, because he was too ill to finish them, and a lot of people read these. When the animated series started in the 70s, Alan Dean Foster started doing novelizations of that as well, and he's pretty much the TV tie-in and movie tie-in novel guy is Alan Dean Foster. He's all over the place.
So much so that books get attributed to him that he didn't actually write, like the novelization to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which some people think he ghost wrote for Roddenberry, but apparently Gene actually did write the whole thing, but the first original Star Trek novel, though, was "Mission to Horatius". Mack Reynolds was the writer of "Mission to Horatius", and he was also a published science fiction author for many decades by that point. Probably a friend of Frederik Pohl's, and yeah, his stories are interesting. They definitely have a bit of a left-wing slant to them, so he seems like the right kind of guy to write for Star Trek, but "Mission to Horatius" was meant to as a sort of a young adult novel, and it was published in 1968, and now, if you get it, it's a reprint made by Pocket, most likely, because it went out of print as the publisher went bankrupt. So original copies probably now run a couple of hundred dollars if you wanted to get one.
Gretchen:
I do have a reprint of it myself, but I have seen an original copy of it, in Ticonderoga, the recreation of the TOS set, and they have that in one of their museum parts of it with all of the displays.
JM:
That's pretty neat. Yeah, so Frederik Pohl was the editor at Bantam at that time, and he kind of acquired the Star Trek line, and he says, "I acquired the line in 1972. James Blish told me that the biggest checks he had ever seen came from these Star Trek novels. A number of Star Trek fans wanted to do their own stories, and that's why we did The New Voyages, which was a series of anthologies that were published in the early 70s, and since the truth is I never paid much attention to Star Trek, but obviously he was right in on it, doing a lot of the editorial work in those early days."
Blish also wrote an original novel called "Spock Must Die" that was published in 1970, but the Bantam line of Star Trek novels went away with the anthologies pretty much in the 70s, and it was then that the Star Trek license was sold to Pocket Books, which is a division of Simon and Schuster, and they started with "The Entropy Effect" in 1981, was the first original Star Trek novel out of that line, so it was two years before this one, and before that they did, of course, one of the motion picture, which had already come out by then.
So we're looking at the period of Star Trek when it wasn't on television, and this is an interesting period because, so I discovered in reading "Voyages of Imagination", which is the Star Trek novel guide, I discovered, because I didn't really know a lot about the novels and what fans thought of the original novels, but I had noticed, and this is not to, I guess, put down one over the other or anything like that, but I had noticed that a lot of the Star Trek novels that I had read were very safe, like they didn't really seem to want to rock the boat very much, and they really didn't want to suggest anything that might contradict something that was on television, and sometimes it seemed obvious that they were holding back, and I since discovered that this time when I was reading Star Trek novels it is actually considered a bit of a dark time in Star Trek fiction, and the reason for that is that in 1985 they started to concoct a plan, that is Paramount and Gene Roddenberry, to bring Star Trek back, and indeed they did with The Next Generation, which is a show we've already spoken of a bit, but this also meant that Gene and his assistants had a very firm hand on everything Star Trek at that time, because it was a publicity thing, and it was really important, and then by the time Next Generation came on, it was like, well now we're invested in this again.
I guess this brings me to something that I did want to talk about, and that is tie-in novels in general, so, I mean, how much of this stuff have you guys read, like basically people writing other people's scripts into prose for, you know, movies, TV shows, using other people's intellectual property, like, is that something you guys do on a regular basis?
Gretchen:
Before I get into that, I did just also want to mention that it was 1985, the year "Killing Time" by Della Van Hise came out, which is a novel that originally had, like, implications of a romantic relationship between Spock and Kirk, and they had told Van Hise to take those sections out, and she didn't by the time they had published, and like, I think it was 250 copies out on the shelves, and they had to pull all of them before they made the corrections, and I do think that might have contributed to why they had been so strict on future novels after that whole incident.
JM:
Yeah, so during this period is exactly when Doctor Who was in the opposite position, so I think that's worth remembering at this time, so basically, the more the production company of the property has an interest in that property, the less freedom you're going to have as a prose writer, and that makes perfect sense if you think about it, and that gets to the core of the reason why so many people think that novels of this nature are inherently trashy, because there's, you know, I mean, you can break away from this, obviously, and some writers do, and make really good books, but obviously the less oversight they have to deal with, probably the better the book's going to be, I mean, I think that's just, even for an amateur writer sometimes, that can be the case, because, you know, I mean, in this case, we have an intellectual property, Star Trek, that belongs to a whole group of people, some of whom might not really be fans, right?
So I don't know, Roddenberry had his assistant, Richard Arnold, and they were, I guess, Roddenberry was mostly looking at the stuff in the beginning, and it seems like more and more he handed control over to this Arnold guy, and he was probably considered, like, the bane of Pocket books or something, like, I'm sure he was, remember when we were talking about those guys getting together in that office in New York, not office, in that restaurant, sorry, New York, these old science fiction writers who didn't so much write for John Campbell, and they would sit there and complain about him and make fun of him and stuff like that. I picture this being like that kind of situation, with all these Star Trek writers going like, oh yeah, he rejected my manuscript, because apparently I don't know how warp drive works, or something like that, and here's a really interesting double, I guess, double-think comment from Gene Roddenberry, but I thought was really interesting. So people were really down on this Arnold guy, and they basically, there were so many complaints about how, like, meticulous he was right now to, like, I mentioned warp drive earlier, and sure, that's funny, but, like, characters, like, you can't write a character like this, he would not do this, he does not strike me as that kind of person, so therefore, that's not how you're supposed to write him.
I guess some of the writers were complaining that he was being very harsh and restrictive, and somehow this got back to Roddenberry, and Roddenberry is supposed to have said to Arnold, now this is Arnold's account, don't forget, but it's supposed to have said to him, "it's my sandbox, if you want to come in and play with my kids, you have to treat them with respect". So he's talking about the writers, you know, he's saying like, yeah, don't be mean to my writers, right, but at the same time, it's my sandbox, and I don't know if it's sad or poignant or what, but when people talk about the early days of TNG being not that great, a lot of the time, they blame Roddenberry because they say he was too pushy with his personal agendas, we'll get to something about that in a little bit when we talk about an episode that's been sort of inspired by the book we're about to read, so with all those comments out of the way, this is before that period, now after that, things loosened up a bit, and as you might predict, the things that loosened it up were pretty much the end of DS9, and it was decided that there was a desire to complete right more in the series, basically, so they did books that took place after the last Deep Space Nine episode and pretty much continued on the series with a free reign to do whatever they wanted, and that had never happened before in Star Trek prose fiction.
As well as that, they put out a new series called New Frontiers in, I believe, 1997 is when it started, and New Frontiers is basically a brand new ship, a new crew, completely new characters, no ties to any Star Trek show except, yeah, occasionally they'll bring in somebody like a minor character on TNG or whatever, but it's essentially a whole new thing.
So basically by the time, I guess, Enterprise was on, it seemed like the fiction area of Star Trek had loosened up a bit, and they were able to do a little bit more stuff. To do that, they kind of had to test the waters of is this going to sell, if people don't see the familiar characters, are they still going to buy the books, and well, they did, so it's very different than Doctor Who, because with the show we're about to talk about next, you could never do anything like this, I mean, like the whole point is that it's Doctor Who, if you take the Doctor away, yeah, you can set cool things in the universe of Doctor Who, I guess, but like, it's something else, it can't really be Doctor Who, and because of a connection to Doctor Who, it's probably always going to be labeled like very nerdy fan stuff, even if it's really good. Examples would be like the faction paradox stuff that started coming out, people really really like that, and they think it should be recognized by the mainstream because it really doesn't have that much tie to Doctor Who, but it has just enough where people will be like, oh, that's a Doctor Who thing.
So yeah, with Star Trek, you can kind of set all different things in this world, and I know Gretchen and I have had a lot of conversations about that, about how we kind of want to see that on television, and like different kinds of shows and whatnot, but I think they've been experimenting with Star Trek quite a bit lately, and it hasn't been all successful, but there's no reason why it couldn't be.
Gretchen:
Nate, did you want to talk about your experiences with Star Trek tie and novels or tie and novels?
Nate:
I really haven't read too much, honestly, these are really the only, I think, tie and novels I've read in their entirety. In the 90s, I did play a couple of the Star Wars video games, namely X-Wing and Tie Fighter, which I believe take elements from some of the Star Wars novels at the time, like the Admiral Thrawn stuff, but I've never really read any of those books, but I know that was a big thing, and again, it kind of ties into weird times for the various big franchises, because at the time there were no Star Wars movies in the early 90s, and it was basically just the video games and the novels, and that allowed something like a Wing Commander franchise.
JM:
I have one Star Wars period novel from that period as well.
Nate:
I mean, the novels were big at that time, but yeah, at that time Star Wars was not really a thing in the theaters, and Doctor Who was off the air, and Star Trek was going strong, but yeah, kind of an interesting time for the big franchises, but you haven't really done too much tie-in stuff, and I have to say, I really did like these two selections for tonight. I wouldn't be able to choose a clear favorite from either of the two. I think they both do very different things, but I certainly enjoyed them, and this one in particular has a really cool concept that that Next Generation episode is enjoyable in some ways, but deviates from that quite significantly, and I think Duane does a really cool job of evoking some atmosphere and strange imagery and, I don't know, bizarre mental stuff.
In a way, it kind of reminded me of, you know, what if C.L. Moore were to write a Star Trek novel? It might look something like this, but yeah, I thought it was a lot of fun.
JM:
Yeah, I liked the book a lot. It did kind of feel like sometimes, I guess, occasionally I was a little bit like, oh, it's too, you know, hand-waving away all this weird magical stuff, and it feels very cozy, but every time I tried to be cynical about it, I was kind of like swayed over the other way again, so I don't know. It's like, it ended up working for me the ending maybe a little less than the rest of it, but I think that's common. I mean, that might be true of the other book too, so I don't know, it just seems like there was a lot of really loving descriptions of the ship and the people on it, and it just felt so... I love Star Trek so much, and I'm going to tell you why, and she did a pretty good job convincing you of why.
It didn't come across too, I guess, fan-wanky, is the word that gets sometimes thrown around?
Nate:
Yeah, I didn't get that sense at all, no.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's very appreciative of the universe and its characters, but never to an obnoxious extent.
Nate:
And the character she introduces here, I think, is a really cool character that you wouldn't be able to see on the show due to the limitations of production, especially in the 1960s when the TV show was initially on the air. I mean, you could probably do something that wouldn't look that great with CGI now, but something like this character really, I think, works a lot better in a prose format sometimes than you'd be able to convincingly make it on TV.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think that that character is great, and she also introduces, even though he's not a major part of it, another character that's from a culture that has pretty interesting ideas with time. And I like the exploration of what could possibly be different in other alien cultures. She really has a great lock on that.
Nate:
Yeah, and that's one really cool thing about Star Trek is how would evolution progress if given these environments on other planets and other worlds? How would the species biology incorporate that to survive and turn into a sentient, technologically advanced civilization? And her exploration of that here, I think, is really well done.
JM:
Yeah, I think the novel's definitely, I have noticed that too, not that Duane, like, I mean, she might be particularly good at this because she did a special, that book, "The Romulan Way", is actually one of several books all about the Romulans, where she really, really explores their culture and like, pretty much everything about them and really immerses you in Romulans, which is something that that TV show didn't really do, like, not even on that one DS9 episode that is on their planet. But you finally got to get to see a little bit of that around then. But certainly with TOS, they were kept mysterious. And that was cool. I mean, that's like, they're always this mysterious presence.
And she did the same for the Vulcans where she wrote "Spock's World", and she's like really went into their history and everything. So this is something she likes to do. But in general, I do think that when the novels, especially when they had all these weird rules to follow, like they couldn't bring back their own supporting characters, they could only bring back supporting characters from the show. They had all these weird rules to follow. Even then, what they could always focus on is the aliens and how like, okay, the Federation's supposed to be, it's supposed to have a lot more alien stuff in it than what you see on the show for the most part. Right. And I think they've started to explore that a little now with like some of the new series, like that show, it's one of the new cartoon shows, Prodigy. Yeah, like it has features very, very non human characters. And because it's a cartoon, it's like, well, that's okay, right? They don't have to. And it makes sense that they would do that. And like, I don't know, I mean, even with like Star Trek, the Animated Series, right, which, which, I don't know, this book actually reminded me a little bit of that. Have other of you watched any of that?
Nate:
I haven't, no.
Gretchen:
I have watched, I think, a handful of episodes, like, really early on around the same time I watched TOS, but I don't remember them too well.
JM:
Yeah, it's weird. Like, I don't know, I can't really comment on the animation style. I think it might be quite simplistic, because I don't really think that it's considered like, some of the best animation around.
Nate:
Yeah, it looks like the cartoons of its era, for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I know that there's a recurring sort of joke about they always have these like extreme close ups of the character's faces, because they didn't want to design any details behind them. I do know about that.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess I just think it's really interesting because it's like, stories that are generally a bit smaller scale than the TOS ones because they're like half the length. But at the same time, it's like they go trippy a lot, and they may make it weird. And it is kind of a weird series. And it's like, if you like Star Trek, it's worth watching because it's like, it's kind of a different take on Star Trek. And there were times when the book did remind me of that a little bit. But I think the Animated Series maybe is, I don't know, like, it's perceived as being a more juvenile thing. But I don't think it's necessarily that much more so than TOS, maybe the way it looks, I can't say, but like, I don't, I don't necessarily get that vibe, like it's just kind of shorter. And it is weirder sometimes because of that, like, there's episodes where they miniaturize and episodes where they, you know, of course, they encounter all kinds of weird beings, like, that generally are pretty minimalistically shown on TOS, like just an alien face or something like that.
And I think with that, with the animation, maybe they thought they could go a little more trippy. And this book does that too. And it definitely has like the alien characters are really cool. I like the way she does them. They have personalities and especially, oh, that name K't'lk, is it?
Nate:
I wasn't going to try to pronounce it.
Gretchen:
I was going to say Ka-Tilk, but I don't know, it could be anyway.
JM:
The alien glass spider thing.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Yeah, she's really cool.
Gretchen:
By the way, on the back cover calls her a pretty alien scientist on some versions apparently, which Diane Duane wrote to subvert, because everyone obviously would expect a sexy alien woman. And it's a spider.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, going back to what we were talking about earlier. I don't know what Diane Duane's social political position is. And I don't pretend to guess because as well as writing this pretty, like, feely kind of book, she also wrote Tom Clancy tie ins. So I'm not really, I don't want to guess that maybe she talks about her politics on her website somewhere, but I don't know, it doesn't matter.
But a funny comment that I noticed in the book, and I'm trying to decide whether she was been like goofing off about it. And I remember, I noticed it and I commented on it in the server right away because it's like, is she trying to kill Star Trek like with one, one big swoop? Because it's Captain Kirk is talking to K't'lk. And he says something like, Oh, you know, you're not supposed to talk about death and taxes in public. And K't'lk says something like, Well, I don't talk about I don't have to worry about either of those things. So then she goes on to say, Oh, yeah, well, everybody in Starfleet is exempt from paying taxes, but everybody else has to. Apparently.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
No wonder everybody wants to join Starfleet. And that also reminds me of Robert Heinlein in "Starship Troopers". Because in that society, pretty much only people who have been in the military, like they get all kinds of perks in society, and they're respected and like, you don't have to join the military. But if you don't, there will be like not penalties, but social costs...
Nate:
You can't vote or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, like social consequence, basically for not signing up. And you don't get to vote in elections. If you're if you're not. And you know, sometimes I get the idea that yeah, that's how the Federation works, because it seems like Starfleet is like, really, really special. And that's just kind of food for thought. Like it's it's we think of Star Trek as being and and you know, how we were talking earlier about Roddenberry's vision and stuff. It seems like people think of that stuff as being very, I guess, I don't know, like people who don't get it like to say it's communist. I don't definitely don't think it's going for that. And I think that like, yeah, she's kind of, I don't know, maybe maybe taking a little bit of it to get it in that part. But a good natured one, because obviously, we're talking about how much she loves Star Trek. And that's how she does.
But it was just a really funny thing that made me laugh. It's like, is that confirmed then? All the Starfleet personnel, they don't have to pay taxes, because they're out there in space exploring for the father, I mean, Federation.
So yeah, I don't know. This is funny. It's funny, because, again, like the same thing with Doctor Who. I feel really weird about this intellectual property business. Like I feel weird about the whole idea of people writing for other people's stuff and then being judged on that ground, rather than for the quality of their actual work, you know, and it's like, you know, I'm thinking, okay, there are people of probably all kinds of different political persuasions who write for things like Doctor Who and Star Trek. And yet, so many of the fans think it's one thing and one thing only. And that's the only thing that can represent ever. And so there are people who will spend their dying days saying that Star Trek is not this or Doctor Who is that but not this. And unfortunately, when you are writing, you're writing a book along these lines, you have to adhere to whatever the vision of the day of that property is.
So I don't know. But she did a really good job, like, I kind of think of this as I would think of the so-called wilderness years for Doctor Who, which again, we're going to talk about shortly. And she, it seems like the fans are very comfortable with it now and they want to explore the background because, yeah, I mean, it's not on television anymore. Even the Animated Series is wrapped up. So this is the new Star Trek, pretty much.
Nate:
And it's definitely the star trekiest of Star Trek. So why don't we take a look at what actually happens in the novel.
Gretchen:
Yes.
(music: rising hum and radiance)
spoiler summary and spoiler discussion
"The Wounded Sky" starts with the Enterprise crew receiving a new invention called the inversion drive, created by a species of transparent spiders known as the Hamalki, who practice a science known as creative physics. Which basically seems like magic to other species. A Hamalki scientist involved in the drive's creation, K't'lk, boards the Enterprise for its first use. She also explains the principle of the drive. It can allow the drive to use the drive for its first use. She also explains the principle of the drive. It can allow a ship to access an alternate universe or universes known as the de Sitter space, which is infinitely hot and infinitely massful. It possesses infinite vector and acceleration qualities stored holographically in every part of it. The overall effect of de Sitter space is as if you had a whole universe crammed full of black holes, compressing themselves to the ultimate limits of compression and beyond.
A ship can travel to another part of the universe in zero time through its inversion into this space where the laws of time and space don't exist. However, right before the Enterprise can try out the new drive, they are attacked by a fleet of Klingon ships. During this battle sequence, a really gripping one, by the way, the warp drive is activated near a sun which causes it to go nova and destroy the Klingon fleet as the Enterprise then implements the inversion drive to escape the effects themselves.
Nate:
Yeah, I always really like those clever maneuvers that the captains pull aside from just, you know, going in with phasers and photons firing.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Use a star or do a gravity run around a planet or whatever.
JM:
It was really crazy and fun that whole part.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I really like, I like seeing, and that's another thing, is every character, even like the main characters, obviously it's the triumvirate, you get to see them have like moments to shine. So like Sulu is, gets to be really cool in this moment. I like that a lot.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was still pretty much the triumvirate, but yeah, then you got Scotty who had quite a few cool moments and then Uhura had a little bit of cool stuff and Sulu and mostly Chekhov. So yeah, I mean, it did feel comparable to the way the series was in the sense that you could tell who the main characters were. But yeah, everybody got their moment, you're right. Yeah, that was pretty cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah, because like, I mean, of course, in the series, you sometimes get like moments that aren't, you know, Kirk and Spock and McCoy, the others do things, but it's nice to see them all having a chance through the novel to do that in like one piece of media. I just, I really like that a lot, but while the drive is in use, even though time has ceased to exist, the crew undergo experiences that are not their own, vividly remembering places and things they have never actually witnessed or felt themselves.
They emerge at a location that doesn't align with their original coordinates and Kirk realizes it wasn't just him that had that experience during the jump, but most of the crew. Two of the only exceptions are K't'lk and a crewman by the name of D'Hennish. The latter is a part of a species known as the Sadr, who don't experience time like most other species, lacking past and future tenses in their language. The former, Kirk has a discussion with in his cabin after the jump, where she discusses more of her culture, the Hamalki mating rituals and religion and why building is so important for them. She gifts Kirk a structure weaved from her own material for webs.
Soon though, the Enterprise prepares to use the drive again to get to the correct coordinates this time. The crew, K't'lk and D'Hennish included this time, experience others memories again, but not of strangers. Instead, they receive memories from fellow crew members. It unnerves the crew, but also works to bring them closer together. There is a meeting of the senior crew Kirk waits for, before it happens he encounters Scotty and K't'lk bonding over the inversion drive in its physics, as well as Uhura, McCoy and Spock on the observation deck. Spock is called away though and Kirk soon finds out why. Entropy has stopped working in an area of space they're near in the Lesser Magellanic, which they decide to head towards and investigate.
JM:
There's basically this section that I wanted to read because it seems to epitomize what's I guess really cool about like the concept of Star Trek and why she likes Star Trek so much. So this is from chapter 10 of the book and it's a section where Kirk is outside the ship actually and he's pretty much just decided he wants to go and look at space which is which is pretty cool.
She says:
"There it hung above him. A galaxy, the Galaxy, not shut safely outside a clearsteel window, not even nearby any longer, but more distant than the Magellanic; a bright-shored island hanging grand and silent in the airless wastes, displaying all of its starry majesty at once. Jim just drifted there, letting himself see. Sol was lost in the sweep of stars in the leftward arm, an utterly insignificant 24th-magnitude spark that not even the great ten-meter Artemis/Luna reflector could have made out at this range. The whole Federation, from the Ononis worlds to the Vela Congeries, was a patch of sparkle that an upraised finger could cover. The Klingon and Romulan empires were lost entirely -
"Awe grew in him again, and a muted joy; but also an increasingly powerful disquiet, so strong that inside the suit Jim simply shook for a moment. The world that all his life had been around him, was suddenly outside him—and he was outside it, way out in the coldest deeps where no star shone. Jim gazed in uneasy wonder at the little spiral-shaped home of life, with all its lights left burning in the dark. It finally sank in, as it hadn't even after the first jump, what he'd done to himself and the people he commanded. He'd gone too far, this time. He and four hundred thirty-eight souls were truly where no man had gone before, alone as no one in history had ever been. It delighted him. It terrified him. His voice sounded loud in the helm as, meaning it, he whispered that old phrase he'd read first in Anglish: 'O Lord, Thy sea is so great, and my vessel so small. ...'
"And the shaking and the awe went away, for that brought him to the matter he had come out here to resolve.
"It wasn't his crew's feelings about the danger of this situation that concerned Jim. The great starships' crews were selected with the danger of their missions in mind. No one made it onto a starship who didn't have one very important trait—an insatiable hunger and love for strange new worlds and 'impossible' occurrences; a hunger so powerful that even the fear of death could be set aside for its sake when necessary. Enterprise and her sister starships were crewed by raving xenophiles."
That's cool man, that's why we're here.
Gretchen:
That is a good part.
Nate:
She's a good writer.
Gretchen:
Yeah, she's really good at just capturing like those thoughts and those moments from the crew.
The use of the drive the third time is more catastrophic as the crew collectively experience a chaotic attack of the Enterprise, the wounds from which remain once the jump concludes. As Kirk is being treated for his own injury, he learns that another universe without entropy is leaking that non-entropy. or anentropia. into theirs through a breach caused by the inversion drive.
The spread of this anentropia to the rest of the universe will eventually cause any existence as they know it to cease. To prevent this, Spock suggests breaching the anomaly at the heart of it and fixing the rift possible through K't'lk weaving an entropy shield around the crew through creative physics. Making the decision to go through with this course of action, Kirk has the crew prepare for another jump and the inversion drive is in use once again.
During this sleep, as the crew head towards the anomaly, they are not experiencing memories but instead granted things they want and hope for. Kirk gradually encounters all of the crew and they make their way through a space that appears uphill. The closer they get, the more they begin to feel each other's thoughts and presences. After a struggle to reach the fringes of the anomaly, the crew start to be perceived as their true selves which results in a passage I'd like to read out. It is pretty long but I think it does a great job both capturing how effective Diane Duane is at characterizing TOS characters and presenting why people admire those characters so much. Also, I've got a soft spot for McCoy and I love when the dynamic between him, Spock, and Kirk are explored.
"The doctor saw Jim's stunned look, spoke a word or two to a couple of the people who were keeping him company, and left them behind to see to Kirk. Jim literally had to squeeze his eyes shut as Bones approached. McCoy blazed, not with light, but with an intense compassion that could be felt on the skin, even from a distance, like sun in a desert. Jim had always known Bones cared deeply about people, but he was unprepared for the full truth of the matter— this passionate allegiance to life, this fierce charity that wished health and joy to everything that lived. Jim felt all the death in him, all the entropy, screaming and cowering away; it knew its enemy. It tried to drag Jim away with it, but he stood his ground, wondering whether he would survive McCoy's touch, or be able to stand the burning life it promised if he did. "Jim? You all right?" the familiar voice said, as a hand took him by the arm—the fingers surreptitiously on the inside of the arm, to find the brachial artery for the pulse.
"Never better," Jim said, and gasped, too shocked to say anything else for a moment or open his eyes. Strangely, it was true. The casual touch of McCoy's hand had staggered him like a graze from a phaser set on kill, but now he was feeling almost more alive than he could bear—and moment by moment the aliveness became more bearable. He tried to hide his need to gulp for air, then gave it up and just gulped, hoping his friend would simply think he was winded from the long walk. Hidden natures are getting loose, Jim thought. What we conceal doesn't stay that way, here. It may be this isn't going to be a good place to stay for very long. Or, well, good, but not safe-
"Just let yourself breathe, it'll pass," McCoy said, sounding slightly abashed. "Sorry. I keep forgetting, and that keeps happening." Jim opened his eyes and found McCoy easier to look at, though no less bright with compassion. Bones let Jim go, then glanced down with wry amusement at the hand that had both steadied and unsteadied his Captain. "I want people to be better," he said with some wonder, "and they get that way, Dangerous stuff. — That armor getting heavy?" Bones said, sounding a bit tentative now. Jim shook his head, thinking What armor, what's he seeing? . . . "No problem," he said. "Bones, have you been noticing people?"
McCoy looked away, nodding. "More than people," he said. "If this crew wasn't comfortable with itself before, it will be now! But Jim, have you seen—"
"Captain," the other familiar voice said on his other side, "are you well?" And Jim turned to look at Spock, and was dazzled again, but this time he couldn't look away. Spock hadn't changed; but here his spirit showed as it never had before, even in the harrowing intimacy of mindmeld. From the meld, Jim was already familiar with the incessant activity of that cool, curious mind as it tirelessly hunted answers. But now he saw where the activity came from—Spock's utter certainty that there was no higher purpose for his life than to burn it away in search of truth, and to give that truth away when he found it. More, Jim saw what fueled and underlay the certainty: a profound vulnerability paired with a great, unreasonable joy—the deepest-hidden parts of Spock's Earth-human heritage, both of them sheer terror to a Vulcan mind. Even when Spock had been trying to suppress or deny those hidden legacies, they had managed again and again to escape and express themselves as valor, and wry humor, and the endless good-natured fencing with McCoy. But Spock wasn't denying the inheritance so vehemently any more, and the power of the older, wiser man was a joy to behold, and a terror. This great mind has been standing behind me and quietly obeying my orders for all these years? Why?? He could be so much more—But in this place, the answer was plain to read. Loyalty was frequently unreasonable and illogical— and Spock had long since decided that this one aspect of his life could do without logic."
I really like that part.
I just really love the characterization there.
JM:
Yeah, it's really good emotional stuff and I can't say that I didn't feel it. You know, I did. It's good. I mean, again, you know, I do kind of feel like like a part of me was wanting to rebel against the book a little bit sometimes because it was very like, it's very cozy and sweet and nice and I kept kind of thinking like all the trippiness was going to turn into like something horrible and never really does. I mean, a little bit towards one point there. But like because it's the Enterprise crew, they can handle it and they do, and they band together and it's through their compassion and understanding and love of one another. And they all have, especially Jim, he has so many epiphanies and realizations because it's mostly his perspective that we see. Although I mean, there's a little bit of others, but like he is kind of the focus. He's the character that's wandering around, talking to everybody. He's the one hanging out outside the ship, looking into space and just like confronting it head on. He's the one making realizations about people like Spock and McCoy and like thinking to himself, Spock doesn't have to be here. He could be do something. He could be, he's writing papers on the most forward thinking area of physics. Like he doesn't have to be my first officer, but he chooses to be. And it's not even necessarily the logical thing to do.
So that it's cool that he realizes that. And you know, it's like it's like the kind of thing where you, you feel like, I don't know, not, not to say that it's like the show suffers for not having that kind of thing. But I guess it is the kind of thing that you feel like it's best to explore in a novel because you're probably not going to see it on TOS because it's just, this show tends to be pretty plot focused. And this book is not that necessarily.
Nate:
No, it definitely isn't.
JM:
I say plot focused by like, I mean, with within what you could fit in a 45 minute time slot, obviously. And it's very episodic. So although the characters have really, really great moments together, there's never a point where like they have massive deep epiphanies about one another that change everything. And you do get the feeling that this is late in the Star Trek years, like late in the original series years, I should say.
Gretchen:
I feel like it's more around like the Motion Picture like era, because it feels like they're all older, you know, like they, it's like after they've returned and like reunited with each other.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, although this isn't something that I like to think about too much, because like, I get annoyed when people get too focused on this stuff. I did find myself trying to place this a little bit in the Star Trek timeline. And yeah, I had put it around then too. But then I read a comment in "Voyages of Imagination", where she had said that now it's supposed to be during the five year mission. And so I don't know, like, I'm a bit confused about that too, because I do feel there are some other things that kind of point it later to like, Christine Chappell's, like, she's not really just a nurse anymore, she's actually got her, or she's working towards her doctorate, and I guess she's almost got it. And so it's like, she's not really like around anymore when McCoy wants her, and he's getting frustrated and like, but that might also be a reference to her not being in the third season of the show very much. I don't know.
Was she, I don't remember her being in too many of those episodes?
Nate:
Yeah, I'm not sure. But I didn't really try to tie it to any continuity with this one.
JM:
Yeah, I know. It's a silly thing to worry about that only fans really care about anyway. But I just like, I did find myself going when is this after it feels like little later, but he's not an admiral yet.
Gretchen:
Like, yeah, yeah, it was just like a few comments from it made me think like, oh, this is like later than, like later than the series, maybe after the mission or I don't know, it was just something I was trying to think of. But I mean, it doesn't really matter, I guess, that much was just a question that I was thinking about.
JM:
Yeah. So when did they bring in the second Enterprise exactly? Was it the was the ship in the Motion Picture supposed to be the original ship? I think it was, right? Still? Or was it the next Enterprise, the enterprise? Because they really showed off that ship.
Gretchen:
It's been a while since I've seen the original motion picture.
JM:
Yeah. So I can't remember. It's been only a couple years for me. So I should remember this. And I'm sure we'll get a comment that I'll say. Yeah, I just can't remember now. I feel like it was another ship because they really wanted to show it off a lot. But then they destroyed it in "The Search for Spock". And it was ready to be decommissioned by then anyway. So that makes me think, no, it's still the old ship. Right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Anyway, that's your starship ship debate. I don't think we'll get into that again.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, Star Trek is a little bit better, I think, sometimes at keeping the continuity straight than some other science fiction franchise, at least Doctor Who has the excuse of being able to go back in time and like chane stuff.
JM:
But yeah, but Star Trek has been doing that lately too.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
That's like, that's the whole thing about these new series, right?
Nate:
Parallel universes and all that stuff. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. They felt the need to clear up the whole thing about the eugenics war is not happening in the 1990s because people were like actually wondering about that. So yeah, I think it's more complicated than that. I think that people, people say what they did isn't bad, but I still haven't seen that. It's in the Strange New World series. So yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes. Soon they are at the breach and find an entity there, a life source they want to reach and prevent from harming with the fixing of the rift. Finding themselves unable to communicate with it, Uhura realizes why the being may not be able to communicate or have any grasp on language because it has never had anyone else to communicate with. She, with her linguistic abilities, spot with his mind melding abilities and D'Hennish with the Sadr perception of time, tried to bring the entity to an awareness and interact with it. The attempt results in the entity lashing out causing the crew pain and distress, but Kirk, Scotty, and Chekhov are able to hit back.
Realizing it was merely trying to defend itself and that they frightened it, the crew want to draw it back out and Uhura, Spock and D'Hennish try again. The being, now taking on the label of the others, responds, but ready to attack once more when they realize the crew must seal them alone in their own lifeless universe again. Ripped from the awareness, just granted them.
McCoy is able to talk them down, however, and they begin to mournfully accept their fate. When Kirk and the crew realize, K't'lk could help the others create life in the latter's universe. After a discussion of how this new universe should work to fend off the boredom of the others for almost eternity, chief of recreation, Harb Tanzer, suggests it be structured like a game, each round a lifetime where the others take on mortality to play the role of singular lifeforms in the universe. K't'lk structures this, but then reveals that she can't complete the universe and close the breach without staying behind sacrificing herself.
The crew, especially Scotty, who had grown very close to her and Kirk, are distraught, but she knows she must do this to set her mistakes with the drive right. Her course of action taken, the rest of the people from the Enterprise find themselves back on the ship and their universe back to normal. They can use the drive only to get back to their own galaxy where they are met with hundreds of Federation ships awaiting them with honors.
Despite Scotty's grief over K't'lk, he becomes excited to find ways to improve the inversion drive so it can function properly. Kirk hears this message from Scotty while holding the web structure K't'lk gave him and drops it, but from it emerges a young Hamalki who holds the memories of K't'lk as it's capable with their offspring. And that's the end of The Wounded Sky.
JM:
Yeah, so, I mean, like I said, most of my thoughts about the book are quite positive. I do think, like, as great as the emotional stuff that the character is, and I really liked all of that, I don't necessarily think the trippiness and surreality really worked for me as much as I would have hoped. I generally like that stuff. And so, I'm not sure what it is exactly. I think sometimes maybe just like wasn't enough interaction with the environment. Like it just seemed like they were going from one thing to another. And then Jim saw this, and then the other thing, and then Uhura was in a nightclub singing a song. And then, and then, you know, you get like, the descriptions of their minds all melded together and like, all these jumbled words and everything. And like, it was cool. But I'm not sure. It just didn't feel almost like it wasn't, it didn't go far enough or something. I'm not, I'm not really sure. But I guess I was hoping that stuff would work a little better because like the idea of a really trippy exploration of like, another universe and stuff like that. And being in this anentropic zone where there is no time. And I don't know, I kind of felt like it needed more something.
But there were some parts that were really cool, like the description of the first jump, when Jim is like having this weird experience where suddenly he feels like the ship is sentient. I like that a lot. And I just, I just, and I liked many of the realizations that the characters had because of the otherworldly trippy experiences. But I guess the descriptions themselves, for me, sometimes left a little bit to be desired. But I don't know, it was still good though. And I enjoyed the emotional reactions they all had to it and stuff, especially Jim, obviously, because yeah, he's like, he is the focus.
Sometimes, sometimes it like, it was hard to picture William Shatner actually saying and doing some of these things. But at other times, it was kind of funny and appropriate. Like at one point in the book, K't'lk is doing all this crazy stuff with her mind and basically shaping the universe. And again, it's very hand wavy, like there's the, you don't really know what she's doing. She's just doing the thing, right? And Jim all of a sudden out of nowhere, like he's been very attuned to the whole thing by that and very like, in connection with it. And it's beautiful. But all of a sudden he's like, that's very nice. Can we go now?
This is funny. This is kind of, yeah, I mean, I kind of get it because like at that, I don't know, I think at that point, like, I really liked the first half of this book. And I really liked the idea of the surreal universe. But I guess it just didn't really connect with me as much as I was hoping it would.
Otherwise, I really have no complaints about this book. Like it was as good a Star Trek novel as I've read. And I've read, I don't know how many I was trying to count earlier when I was going through that book. And I certainly knew a lot of titles, but there are some I thought that I had read that I could not remember a thing about. So I just can't really, that's not normal for me, usually remember at least something. And I think, again, it's just maybe the time period of Star Trek fiction, I was reading at that time, like it just didn't seem like they were really pushing out that much. This is from before that time. And you can kind of tell because yeah, it says a lot about the characters in a way that you feel like after this adventure, they might look at each other pretty differently. You don't quite know how, but you know that like that stated several times in the book is like, it's almost like, yes, being close like this is wonderful. It's really, really intimate, though. And so you're vulnerable, or if you're like, that's going to show and you have to be ready to open yourself up to that.
And yeah, in her book, the Enterprise crew is ready because they're all really special people. And they can handle this. And I think that's the, the ultimate positivity that it kind of made me feel pretty good, even when I was trying to be a little bit like, oh, that's too, you know, that's too nice. That wouldn't like it. There should be more chaos or something like that. But a part of me was like that. And then the rest of me was going, yeah, but it's them. They're the people that can do this, because it's Jim and Spock and McCoy and Scotty. And we love these characters. So that's why we go along with it. And I don't know, she convinced me.
So at the end of the day, my minor criticisms are not really that significant, because I think that her love of the characters always shines through. And her putting them in this situation is like the dream of Star Trek. It's like the dream you have of being inside all the heads of the Star Trek characters at once. And they all get to experience that together.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. I like the serialistic scenes a fair amount. I think I think it was actually my favorite part of the novel. Another thing I liked about the second half is the whole debate of the ethics of playing God and introducing concepts of like death and pain to this other universe that has never really experienced any kind of existence before. And what is the moral position on doing that?
JM:
And Spock jokes about it. He's like, we're committing a violation of the Prime Directive as not even the Enterprise has previously accomplished.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
At least they're aware.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I did like that too. And I was going to say like the whole synergistic kind of melding of beings into this gestalt creature, like it kind of reminded me of some of Theodore Sturgeon stuff. And I don't know if anybody ever asked her if she's read some like I'm sure she knows about him as a Star Trek writer himself. He wrote two scripts. So and a third one that was actually made into a novel, I believe it was based on notes from him because I don't think he completed it. But somebody else completed it's called the, oh, what is it? "The Joy Machine". And it was apparently a script for TOS that got quite far along but never got produced.
Gretchen:
So his episodes, it's "Amok Time", right? And what was the second one?
JM:
Yeah, "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time".
Gretchen:
Yeah. Okay, "Shore Leave". That's right. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that's right. I was reminded of that as well. Because in that episode, they're on this planet. And they're like, they've been in space for a really long time. And it's like, it's, you know, we have to hang out on this nice looking planet and take a bit of a holiday. And it turns out that whatever they're thinking about in their heads manifests in reality. And that's exactly what happens in the barrier universe there, like the pre created universe.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
It's a little different. But pretty much yeah, whatever they're thinking comes to pass. And in the episode, it's like basis for conflict. And at one point, like, McCoy is thinking about a tiger or something like that. And Jim's like, Bones, don't think it, don't think it. Of course, that makes it even worse. And so this like massive...
Gretchen:
And Bones dies, McCoy dies because of the knight, like, stabbing him through the chest. Yeah, it's very, it's more related to that third inversion jump when everything kind of goes to chaos. That's more along the lines of what happens in "Shore Leave".
JM:
Yeah, you know, obviously, there are a few episodes, the other one was "Where No Man Has Gone Before" episode, which obviously, the episode that she co wrote of Next Generation, which we're going to talk about a little, yeah, was kind of based on a similar model. And some of the season one TNG episodes are like that, like there's "The Naked Now" versus "The Naked Time". And "Where No One Has Gone Before" versus "Where No Man Has Gone Before", which is where they penetrate this barrier on the edge of the galaxy or something and get to this area where these two psychics of the ship start to have an inordinate amount of power, because it resonates with whatever area of space they're in.
So again, you can you can kind of see the similarities in all these concepts, but it's all very Star Trek, right? So some fun anachronisms, like weird anachronisms in the book, like at one point, McCoy mentions telling somebody the riot act, which I thought was pretty funny. It's like, did they they still know what that is? I guess so. I mean, it seems like it's a funny thing to say. And at another point, they mentioned Lloyds of London, apparently that's still around in the 23th. I guess they might not have said that if the book had been written 10 or 15 years later, because although I think it is still around, it went through a whole lot of litigation trouble in the 1990s and almost disappeared for good, I believe.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So but yeah, in the 23rd century, they're giving out prize to aliens, which is pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Anybody catch the Doctor Who reference?
Gretchen:
Which one?
JM:
Towards the end of the book, Jim is looking for the Sonic screwdriver.
Gretchen:
Oh, oh, yeah. No, I do remember that because it's Tanzer. Tanzer is trying to use it. I wasn't sure if that was I assume it is intentional because I have to I do know, and especially Duane that has talked about Doctor Who before, and actually on her blog has like written some like fun, silly like fan fiction for it.
JM:
Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, often science fiction and genre fans, you know, they like a lot of that stuff. And sure, we see that in and a lot of the writers of this kind of stuff is they do move around between the different properties and they the things that they like and they write stuff for them. It doesn't always get published. But if it doesn't, it can go up on the fan fiction sphere.
Nate:
I mean, it's always been super active with Star Trek. That's that's for sure. I mean, as we saw in our last episode, since pretty much the beginning in the 1960s, as people were writing this stuff.
Gretchen:
The references I had caught is at one point they mentioned, when talking about what to do for recreation, they mentioned Fizbin, the fake card game that Kirk creates in "A Piece of the Action". I guess that is a real game, perhaps, which is very funny to think about.
JM:
It is. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of cute things like that in this book. And again, like a part of me gets cynical about that sometimes. But I don't know, she was always able to win me over in the end. Like, you know, in the end, too, they come back to our galaxy. And like, there's all these the whole fleets out there. And like, at first, I thought something sinister was going to happen. Yeah, this is the end getting towards the very end of the book. So it didn't seem likely. But I was like, are they in the deepest trouble imaginable now? But no, they're all just, they're all just come to say hi. They're all happy for them. Even though they don't really know that they destroyed two or three stars.
Nate:
I think they corrected that so that I don't think happened in?
JM:
Oh, yeah, I guess. Or did they? That was in our universe.
Nate:
Yeah, I think that K't'lk used creative physics to repair the nova or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, very creative physics.
Nate:
Yeah, it's an appropriate name for it, for sure.
JM:
It's so creative physics that nobody understands it, not even the person who made it, let alone the writer or us.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I don't know, like, I have no room to complain because I'm not like a science person. So even if this could be explained fully in an entire giant supplemental volume, it's not like I would understand it anyway. But it just didn't seem kind of hand wavy. It's this magical thing that can basically do anything you want it to. And I don't know, sometimes that doesn't really I just it feels too convenient. But again, plots not really the point of this book. So I don't really feel like even though I yeah, like I exist for conflict. So when I when I have these conflicting viewpoints in my head, I'm like, I'm not really sure which one's on top. But generally, yeah, I think it's positive. And in this case, I don't I like the way that she handled all of that stuff. But it's just yeah, like it is it is very magical. And it's not even like nowadays, when people say magical, they think of these epic fantasy things that yeah, there's magic, but it has to follow all these rules. There's it's meticulously laid out by the author. So if he does magic, it can't contradict any of the rules in the system. And Diane Duane is basically like, I don't know how she is in the Young Wizards, but here she's basically like screw all that. My sorcery is omnipotent. So that's the way it is.
Gretchen:
As someone who doesn't really get regular science quite often, I don't have as much of a problem with it myself. It definitely seems to do a lot of work that maybe it does have a hand wavy feeling to it, but not in a way that I really mind that much. And the conversations that come out of it, this more like philosophical sort of fantastic conversations, I think are pretty fun. So I enjoy it. I don't really have an issue with that as much.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it works here.
JM:
Yeah, that's cool. I don't have that much of an issue. And it was nice to read a Star Trek book again.
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is definitely a good choice.
JM:
I think I read my last Star Trek book in like 1995 or something. So it's been a while. Yeah, Nate, you've never read one before Gretchen, you've read a fair number at this point, right?
Gretchen:
I've read about a dozen. More or less, it's been mostly TOS and Deep Space Nine, but I have a couple of Enterprise novels under my belt as well. I own quite a few just because my cousin, who was a big Star Trek fan, gifted me a whole bunch of extras that he had. So I do want to get around to most of those at some point. I have yet to read a number of TNG and a few Voyager that I have as well. I have not read any from those two series yet.
JM:
I've only read TOS and TNG books so far. So like I said, it's been a while. It seems like just when I was started to get out of it is when I started to get more like the books started to push a little harder. There wasn't one or two TNG books in particular, I think written by Peter David, who's a pretty prominent Star Trek author. And I felt like he was trying to be a little more like a little more than the other Star Trek novels I'd read at that time. There were a lot of novels that they seem to exist mostly to fill in gaps like what's Jim Kirk's father, what was his first mission on his because he apparently served on the Enterprise too. That's the one thing that always made me laugh about Star Trek is that when somebody's in Starfleet, usually their kids want to join Starfleet too. That's just the way it goes. The best job in town, right?
But Deep Space Nine again, shook up that formula a little bit with Jake, definitely not wanting to be a part of it. So that was cool.
Gretchen:
He wanted to be a writer.
Nate:
Yeah, a pretty good one too.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I want to check out maybe some of the DS9 ones. One I want to check out is the one by Andrew Robinson, which is all about Cardassia. So yeah, sometimes you get weird things like that in the TV tie and stuff too, where actors write their own books. And sometimes they're actually good.
Nate:
Yeah, I know Dark Shadows. That's definitely the case there where the actress that plays Angelique wrote a whole bunch of Dark Shadows novels.
JM:
Oh nice, cool. I wonder if Baranbas Collins wrote something.
Nate:
I don't believe he did, but yeah, there's a fair amount of those novels out there.
JM:
That's cool. I've never actually watched Dark Shadows, but I know a little bit about it. I've listened to some Dark Shadows audios and yeah, which of the movie versions is is it...
Nate:
"House of Dark Shadows" is the one that's worth watching.
JM:
Yeah, cool. Yeah, I know that series has a lot of novels too.
Nate:
Oh, tons. Yeah. Yeah, definitely a lot.
JM:
Yeah. And it seems like that's that's usually the pattern is like while the show's on TV. Yeah, maybe not much. But afterwards, people want more. So it's a perfect opportunity to spread the license around and have a little fun with it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
So that's what was happening in Star Trek in the early 80s until the dark time of 1985. Yeah, I don't know. It's just obviously it comes across in that book like it is pretty universally like thought of that way. But there's still some good books from that time period, obviously. But you know, the writers, it seemed like they were using the same staple of writers a lot of the time. And every so often there'd be a new person. But generally, yeah, there's a lot of names that I recognize, but not all of them from sci fi writing, some of them just they probably came out of the fan fiction community. So as with the Doctor Who stuff, it does seem like a good opportunity for writers to get their foot in the door.
Nate:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the author we talked about last time turned her fan fiction into a published novel and did a couple official Star Trek works. Yeah, definitely a strong bridge there between the two. And I guess in Duane's case, that also led to a TV co writing credit in a somewhat adaptation of this novel and a season one Next Generation episode.
JM:
Yeah. Well, why don't we talk about that a bit? We've all seen it, right? Yeah, at one point at least.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I just watched it recently.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I just watched it earlier today to refresh my memory of it.
JM:
Yeah. So pretty good episode. I definitely think that it made me laugh a few times like it was, I don't know, that just sometimes unintentional comedy a little bit in like the way certain things are portrayed. And yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that Gene Roddenberry introduced on the show that everybody seems to hate is Wesley Crusher. And I never thought that was entirely fair. But I get how especially in the first season, he seems kind of annoying as generally the children on the ship do. I'm afraid.
Nate:
Yeah. I never really liked Wesley as a character. But this is definitely a big Wesley episode.
JM:
ell, I mean, I certainly don't mind the character later on, but here it's like, he's like pretty much Gene Roddenberry's stand in as a young kid. So. Yeah.
Gretchen:
And he's chosen. He's the one. He's the genius.
JM:
Yes, exactly. So Roddenberry's real name is Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, by the way.
Gretchen:
Right.
JM:
So it's very, very deliberate. And he and Wil Wheaton had many talks together. So the whole idea of playing the character. So yeah, like that whole thing was really funny. And yeah, that whole like alien. So they replaced a lot of the alien stuff with somewhat less alien seeming stuff in the TV version. And the traveler who's the stand in for K't'lk is, well, pretty much takes Captain Picard aside. And it's like, this boy Wesley is going to be the greatest thing to the future of your civilization. You must nurture him.
Gretchen:
It's like he's he's going to be for science what Beethoven was for music.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. And you can't tell him, by the way, you can't tell him about all this because it'll give him a big head that which they they undid that later because Wesley obviously knows about it at some point on my show. So I guess his mom probably told him. Yeah. I have news for you, Wesley. I'll never tell you to shut up again.
But why don't we talk about the germination a little bit?
Gretchen:
At the time when TNG was first starting, I think it was only writers that were in the Writers Guild and like had some credits under their belt that could actually write for the series.
JM:
So they had to have live TV experience.
Gretchen:
Yes, that's right. Yes, she had like Animated Series done, but no live action experience at that time. But Michael Reeves, who wrote it with her, he had experience and actually wanted to do an episode, but it was very similar to "Wounded Sky" and asked if she would go write it with him and like help him pitch it to the TNG crew. And they sent in, I believe it was two drafts. And then after the second draft, they heard nothing from the studio and found out they had just been barred from working on it after that point. And most of the things that were in their original scripts were changed. They did not have, as Diane Duane likes to call him, "the alien in the pajamas". She would not have someone dressed in pajamas.
But the only two things that remained, I think she said it was the scene with Picard and his mother, which was Michael Reeves' contribution. And the scene when the turbolift doors open and it's just the void outside of it. That was what Duane wrote as sort of a reference to like her own work. And it was nominated for an Emmy, which meant that they had to be nominated along for it, which they were very happy about. But, you know, it wasn't nominated, it was suggested to be a nomination, but it did not end up getting nominated.
JM:
Still cool though.
Nate:
The turbolift in the void scene is really cool and really well done. The traveler is very silly compared to K't'lk, even though it's obvious they couldn't depict something like a translucent spider alien with the Next Generation budget. Just, I don't know, some of the forehead aliens in Next Generation look better than the others. And the traveler just isn't one of their better makeup creations.
JM:
Yeah, you don't really have much of a personality either. It's just kind of like meek and sort of weirdly apparently the actor was in the running to play Data originally. So that could have been different.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah. You know, he reminds me a lot of, I can't think of the name of the alien, but the one that's like the servant of Troi, Lwaxanna Troi. That's what he reminds me of quite a bit.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, I see what I'm, okay. Yeah, I guess he talked kind of similar too. It's cool that you bring that up about the void thing, because I mean, although I do remember that, it was pretty quick scene. And in general, I do think like, as much as I criticize the surreal stuff in the book, in the episode, it's just kind of silly. Like, it's not really...
Nate:
I don't know, the sense of like, mystical strangeness is really absent from the episode. They play it much more literal and like less kind of dreamlike, like a lot of the book scenes play out to be. And again, there's probably practical reasons for doing so. But I think it does lessen it a bit. And the one character they introduce who I guess is supposed to be the traveler's boss, but it's really the other way around. It's just kind of insufferable.
JM:
Oh, he's totally insufferable.
Gretchen:
Yeah, who was, as Duane said, was not what they had intended. I believe he was supposed to be Picard's like, former college friend or like, academy friend or something. I think she said along the lines of that. And then he was changed to be just an insufferable jerk of a man.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, I know they wrote him that way, but it just like, it makes the episode hard to watch sometimes. Like some of those scenes, it's like, man, I just wish this guy wasn't here.
JM:
Yeah, I call that kind of character a boo hiss character. And it's sometimes they can be kind of fun. And I definitely think like, those kind of characters, TNG has a lot of them. Yeah. TOS does too. You know, like that Colonel guy in "The Doomsday Machine". He's the perfect example of a boo hiss character, like everything he says is wrong. And it's like the actor knows it, because he talks in this way. And it's like, I don't think you should be commanding this ship. And like, that kind of voice.
Gretchen:
I feel like it in Star Trek, whenever there's any person who's like, of a higher rank than the captain that is like, whether it's Kirk or Picard, they're usually supposed to be a boo hiss character, most often at the time.
JM:
And Doctor Who had these kind of characters too, especially in the Pertwee era, they're usually these either military guys who like, try and go over, like don't like Lethbridge-Stewart, or they're like, official political guys who are just like, "jolly-o, England for the English." And, you know, like making fun of those kind of people, they're not supposed to like them or even feel. But I don't know, I think by the end, you do kind of feel bad for this guy a little bit. But it's not like, it's just personal, like it's not really, I don't know, the show doesn't really convey anything about him. Like, he just pretty much falls from grace and admits very quietly. "Oh, I guess it was him all along. And I was just in denial." Yeah. Yeah. And it was interesting that Duane and so, I guess Duane and Reeve knew that they would have to not have the alien spider. So their solution to that was that they actually made him, that guy, Kosinski, do all the stuff. So they had originally planned for him to be a very sympathetic character, that for some reason afterwards, they introduced this other alien, who just complicated things pretty much. It's like, yeah, it would have been cool if Picard's friend was responsible for all that stuff. Right. So at the end of the episode tpp, I think they're supposed to, in their original script, they were supposed to actually create a new universe. So it's supposed to be part of the thing. So again, that's much closer to the book.
Nate:
Yeah, that's all dropped from the TNG episode, the whole other life form universe type thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And all because of office politics, basically.
Nate:
Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I imagine there's a lot of that. And especially during the early days of the show, when they were just kind of figuring out what they want to do and getting the whole thing off the ground.
JM:
Yeah. And then you had the Roddenberry camp was trying to push things and like keep things a certain way and like make it his show again, you know, kind of thing. And then you had the people on the other side were, I guess, wanting to do their own thing more. And obviously, I don't know, it sounds a little bit stressful. And I can see why even the actors don't really look fondly upon that time.
Nate:
Right. Right.
JM:
So I think that colors how the audience thinks of it, too. Like, I always defend it, but I get it. You know, it's a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, at times. And yeah, this is the most Wesley of all Wesley episodes, pretty much, like just that last scene. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. It's really something.
Yeah. I know, I don't, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't like really piss me off. But it's just, it's just kind of funny, right? But I just, you know, I kind of don't really, I don't really believe in putting something down for not like, not always being ideal. So it's just, yeah, doing the Wesley Crusher, Mary Sue and all that, it's okay. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, I know that a lot of people hate Wesley, but I mean, I'm just, I've never felt that much dislike towards him, just yeah, I'm pretty indifferent towards him most of the time. But this is the episode where if you don't like him, you absolutely will hate him.
JM:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. He is obviously like Gene's attempt specifically to appeal to the young boys in the audience who, I don't mean I say boys exclusively, but I guess I don't necessarily just mean that. I mean, I don't know that that's necessarily what he was thinking, but to appeal to them and make them see that, yeah, you know, if you study math, if you study physics and stuff like that, you could be as cool as this guy. But I don't know, I guess I kind of backfired a little bit, but got to hand him the attempt at least. It was pretty good.
Nate:
So the updated version of Hugo Gernsback's view of the world.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. So among the scary stuff that happens, Captain Picard sees an orchestra. There's some ballerina dancing. Oh, no. And a guy randomly catches fire. Yeah. That's pretty bad.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
He's not an important character.
Gretchen:
There is a Targ there that Worf sees.
Nate:
The Targ is pretty cute.
Gretchen:
It is cute. And he is okay with Tasha calling it like a kitty cat, which is kind of nice. Duane actually said in one of her posts that she wished that she had thought of the Targ. She did like that.
Nate:
Yeah. It's a nice addition.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, that would be pretty cool. I'm scary, actually. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't be cool if you were in the elevator, but yeah, I guess it's not, it doesn't quite measure up to Jim standing on the outside of his ship, staring out at a space, and musing on how basically the enterprises occurred by, what is it, raving xenophiles. But but that scene definitely wasn't going for a little percent of chills and horror. So I don't know. Yeah. So it's not bad, though. I mean, I enjoyed the episode somewhat like I just the fact that it made me laugh was kind of cool.
Nate:
It's definitely one of the better season one TNG episodes. But I think definitely overall, the book was far better than certainly I like the book a lot.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
One of the first tie novels I read for Star Trek was "Doctors Orders" by Duane. And I really loved that one as well, which is why I wanted to cover this one because, you know, I wanted to read more of Duane and why not start with the first one that she did. And I'm really glad this is the one I chose because I really enjoyed it. Yeah, definitely a good choice.
Nate:
Yeah, great choice.
JM:
Definitely. If it had been just me and Nate doing this episode, I really would have been in the dark about what to choose because I when it comes to Star Trek novels, I guess none of my I guess maybe I would choose one or two TNG books that I remember quite liking. But I don't know. Yeah, it's definitely and I mean, we'll get to that when we talk about Doctor Who in a moment. But it's definitely hard to pick out because I mean, we are a literature podcast. And I want to I think it's much better if we enjoy stuff, right?
And we are in an area where yeah, I mean, there's a lot of prose fiction that's maybe not, I don't know, it doesn't really really work as well as standalone fiction as some of the other stuff we've done on the podcast does. So just picking something that stands out on its own merits is is a bit of a challenge. Sometimes if you don't know your way around, I don't know what the right term is, the landscape, I guess.
This is definitely the best, I don't know, I'm going to say it's one of the best Star Trek novels that I've read, but it's been so long that I probably can't categorically say anything like that. But I definitely recommend it if you're a Star Trek fan. If you're not a Star Trek fan, you might not get that much from it. I don't know. That's that's the other thing with these kind of books, right?
I actually do think that is not a bad evaluation in a way is I mean, it's kind of it's kind of cool, because you have to look at it from a non fan perspective. And I think that I like Star Trek enough to say that yeah, I'm probably a fan. I mean, I know a fair bit about it and I like talking about it and it makes me want to watch it. But you're going to look at something like if I just gave if somebody just like found this book in a box somewhere and they picked it up and read it, would they like it? Assuming they not really they weren't familiar with the show. And I do think like striving for that makes sense in a way, right? Because then you know, you know that the book can stand on its own merits. But I think a lot of authors of tie in fiction, maybe aren't that interested in that. I mean, especially maybe I mean, it sounds kind of snobbish, but especially if they come from the fan fiction background, like, you know, they love the world that they're in so much. And that's just what they want to talk about.
Nate:
Yeah, I think that's fine. You know, yeah, I mean, for a novel like this, it's really the fans are going to be reading it anyway. So yeah, I don't really have a problem with that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, me neither. I mean, any sort of extended universe stuff like that. I mean, it is for the fans that's who they expect they're writing for that's the audience they're intending. So as long as the fans enjoy it, and that's sort of what I think matters to them and what should matter really. So yeah, I think as far as, you know, a fan of Star Trek, I think this is a great book to read.
Nate:
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, likewise. So I guess, unless you guys have anything else, shall we take a quick break and move on to our next major science fiction franchise?
JM:
So let's switch gears and talk about something with a very different set of, I guess, restrictions that are based a lot less on the world that you happen to be in, and more on a very specific character and their specific modus operandi, if you want to call it that.
We're going to talk about Doctor Who.
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