In today’s episode, notorious con man Harry Mudd adds an unlikely line item to his résumé: diplomat. But when the peace he forged falters and he and the Enterprise crew are caught in the fallout, they learn that death is only the beginning in the Nevis system. How did Mudd manage to escape the android planet? How do you keep a war going for that long? Can transporter accidents be harnessed for fashionable body modification? All this and more in Mudd in Your Eye, the book that gives Star Trek fans what they really want: hardcore nudity!

Mudd in Your Eye
Author: Jerry Oltion
Pages: 280
Published: January 1997
Timeline: Between “That Which Survives” (3×17) and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (3×15)1I’m aware how weird that looks. “That” precedes “Let” in both chronological and production order, but not in airing order, which is the way I choose to render episode numbers, which ordinarily does not create these kinds of problems except when it comes to TOS and its wackadoodle scheduling and production order.
Prerequisites: General familiarity with the character of Harry Mudd and the events of “I, Mudd” (2×08)

It’s tempting to feel slightly shocked that we’re over eighty TOS books deep (and over two hundred Star Trek novels overall) and we are only now getting a story about Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the con man so mesmerizing and disarmingly unctuous that it’s occasionally easy to forget he was pretty much a sex trafficker in his introductory appearance. And although “I, Mudd”, the episode on which this novel builds, improves by orders of magnitude by having a more compelling story idea and ditching the unsavory pimping aspect, it’s still got a lot of the sort of “WIFE BAD” riffs that were losing their flavor at Fruit Stripe speed even while Henny Youngman was still alive. So maybe it’s not so surprising that Mudd might perhaps have felt harder to approach by the comparatively more sensitive 90s—nor to learn that then-editor John Ordover had turned down scads of bad proposals for Mudd stories before entrusting it to Jerry Oltion, whose sense of humor he vibed with. I thought Oltion’s first Trek novel, Twilight’s End (which kicked off 1996 as this one does 1997), had a weak premise but a winning charm and felt more like a TOS episode than most TOS novels. Does that equip him to handle such a difficult character?

The Enterprise is summoned to the Nevis system to double-check the legitimacy of the newfound peace accord between planets Prastor and Distrel. The duration of their fighting prior to laying down arms (twelve thousand years) is mind-boggling, yet, incredibly, less so than the identity of the man who engineered the truce: Harry Mudd. Naturally, this raises a whole host of questions, such as: How did Harry Mudd finagle his way off the planet of the android Stellas? What conflict is so bitter and unresolvable that it could last that long? And how do two populations sustain that conflict for that long without killing each other off? These are fun questions with fun answers, though I did feel the en masse riddle dump induced a touch of sensory overload. But the most important of them is that last one.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in the early portions of the book as Mudd scores a few early social advantages over Kirk, who can’t seem to stop blundering and committing taboos that give Mudd an enormous opening to look good in front of the Distrellians. He also somehow knows about the Enterprise’s teeny-tiny little massive Prime Directive violation at Eminiar VII, and cleverly uses it as blackmail to keep Kirk on a short leash. It isn’t long before Mudd’s truce crumbles almost as quickly as it came into being, however, as the Prastorians and Distrellians both decide he’s a traitor for convincing them to turn their backs on their fighting traditions and revert to their old ways. Amid the resumed fracas, Mudd and several members of the landing party, including Captain Kirk, actually get killed—and that’s where things get interesting.

As it turns out, you never really die in the Nevis system. Assuming you die a heroic death in battle, you get transported to the bathhouses to enjoy some first-rate naked pampering before getting some new clothes and taking an aptitude test for job placement. You reenter society in your new job, and when you die the second time, you go to Arnhall, which is more or less Nevisian Valhalla. Again, lots of questions bubble up: how does this work, what do they get out of it, who and what technology are behind all this, etc. But something happens and suddenly, people stop getting revived. The Nevisians don’t know what’s caused the interruption of resurrection service, except that it didn’t start happening until the Starfleet people showed up. So if the people who broke it don’t fix it, the Nevisians will expand the number of peoples participating in their never-ending skirmish—and there’s going to be significantly less coming back to life when they do.

Mudd in Your Eye is a lot of fun when it isn’t trying to see how many unanswered questions it can pile on your plate simultaneously. Oltion perfectly nails Mudd’s oily con man nature, and as previously mentioned, it’s a lot of fun seeing him briefly take a few points’ lead ahead of Kirk before the universe reorders itself. He also gets the tone of the best TOS episodes just right, where there’s plenty of genuine laughs and nuggets of characters bouncing off each other alongside a delectable science-fiction premised. I’ve opined many times that Star Trek falls flat when it does broad tryhard comedy, but this is that more effortless sense of humor that all the various arms of the franchise do very well from time to time, and it really goes great with Mudd in the spotlight. Had Harry Mudd returned in the third season, I imagine the resulting episode would have been a lot like this book.

Cracks about Mudd’s henpecking android wife aren’t much of an improvement over pumping young women full of drugs and pimping them out to lonely miners, but Mudd in Your Eye aims to keep moving in a more positive direction still. For most of the book, Mudd is paired with a redshirt named Leslie Lebrun, who at the beginning marries Simon Nordell, an engineering officer, in a ceremony no one expects to last very long due to how intense their disagreements get. Before Lebrun goes down with the landing party, she and her new husband have a huge blow-up in their quarters, and Lebrun “dies” with the matter unresolved, leaving both wracked with guilt. As you read, you get the sense that Oltion is tracing a light connection between Lebrun/Nordell and Harry/Stella, offering one suggestion for how relationships like the former start out with good intentions but eventually evolve to be more like the latter, but he doesn’t force it or try to do anything clumsy with it. The two ideas briefly dovetail, lightly touching, and then go their separate ways. Mudd gets a nice vulnerable moment where he tells Lebrun not to make the same mistakes with Simon that he did with Stella. Obviously you’ve got to get Mudd away from that initial settler-wiving awfulness, but you don’t want him to start approaching something resembling redemption either, and I think Oltion walks that tightrope very well.

As for other qualities that deserve complimenting, Oltion is also good at inhabiting characters’ minds, a quality I noticed in Twilight’s End as well but didn’t really have much space or opportunity to talk about there. He has a knack for easing you into a scene by choosing a character and offering a longish paragraph on what’s going through their head as they take in new surroundings, in the process making the reader comfortable doing the same. Ultimately, “comfortable” is probably the best word I can imagine using to describe this book. It’s in no hurry, and neither am I. It can be dangerous to get too cozy with a character like Mudd, and a lesser story might have gotten fooled by his charisma into forgetting he’s bad news. Thinking on it, it’s no wonder it took so long for a story featuring him to show up: because it had to be done exactly right to work. Thankfully, Jerry Oltion nailed it.

MVP & LVP

• For MVP in this one, my pick goes to Spock. He gets to do some good captaining while Kirk is missing and presumed dead, and though he struggles with logical decision-making in the role, I generally really liked his approach and his whole vibe here. I want to say there were more facets of his character I liked, but it’s been a few weeks since I finished reading the book and my notes aren’t proving quite as helpful for filling in memory gaps as they usually are.
• My LVP for this one is Simon Nordell. He’s more of a lunkhead than his sharp-cookie wife. He also doesn’t get the full journey of growth and realization that Lebrun does, and consequently, doesn’t come off as sympathetic at the end. If he and Lebrun had been forced by duty assignments into both being part of the landing party somehow, that bit might have worked out a little better, but I’m far from good enough a plot doctor to suggest how that would have worked out, so it’s fine.

Stray Bits

• The Palko fruit, the thing that the Prastorians and Distrellians have been fighting over forever,2The Palko fruit has purple and white pieces, which when consumed together synthesize into a deadly nerve toxin, but individually are safe to eat. Where the Nevisians’ conflict comes in is that the white pieces are yucky, and neither side wants to be the one to eat them, so they get thrown away while the Nevisians fight over the purple bits. Mudd’s solution, which brought about the initial peace, was to sell the white bits to other worlds and cut the Nevisians in on half the profits. works very much like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, one of my absolute favorite seasonal treats. Slam it down on a hard surface, and it cleanly splits into even slices. Bon appétit!
• If you thought the Naked Time simulation in Lower Decks was out of pocket, wait till you get to chapters 14 and 15. Rowr!
• Mudd in Your Eye is, so far as I can tell, the first Star Trek novel to offer a preview of a forthcoming one at the end (in this case, VOY #11, The Garden, by Melissa Scott). I read it, though it remained vague enough that it didn’t really get me excited for it.
• Spock prepares to send a Code 47 transmission to Starfleet Command. Nice bit of backwards flexing by Oltion, working something originally introduced in TNG into a TOS story. (p. 143)
• Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch make a cameo as security officers, and David Bischoff shows up late in the book. All three also previously got name-dropped by Jerry Oltion in Twilight’s End, though it was Smith and Rusch’s pseudonym Sandy Schofield that appeared there. It’s weird how big a part of the Star Trek author in-crowd Bischoff seemed to be at the time, despite thinking he was better than literally all Trek fiction yet totally faceplanting in his lone attempt at one. (pp. 186, 249)
• “It gave McCoy the creeping jeebies just thinking about it. Stuck in a transporter buffer, not even as a beam of elemental particles, but just as information in storage. A cosmic ray could flip a bit somewhere and he could emerge with purple eyes and an extra nose—or far more likely as a blob of unrecognizable gray goo.” — It really does hammer home how lucky Scotty was to survive that long when you get down to it, but I think we may be missing the potential of purposely tweaking transporter malfunctions to create unusual body modifications. We’ll have to wait until Bones is dead though, otherwise learning about it will be the thing that kills him. (p. 247)
• An administrator puts the Enterprise on hold, p. 253: “Instead of the usual still picture of most hold screens, his was a running ad for the Hoffman system, showing barely clothed people strolling a beach, dining by candlelight, shopping in a busy market filled with goods and alien proprietors from all throughout the Federation, all over a caption reading ‘Business as usual on York III.'” Star Trek is of course noncapitalistic by default, but it’s always important to have a reminder that not everyone has put that kind of thinking by the wayside. (p. 253)

Final Assessment

Excellent. Mudd in Your Eye is a great kickoff to 1997—a standalone story that brings back a character who is possibly more beloved than reason might suggest he ought to be, packed to the hilt with tons of fun, an engaging premise, and lots of rankling questions that get answered to satisfaction in the fullness of time. It nails the tone of the original series, doesn’t try to give Mudd a patina of heroism or redemption that he can’t earn, and is chock full of genuine laughs, and I can’t express enough how good a time I had with it. Especially pick it up if you’re a fan of Mudd’s singular unctuousness, but really even if you just like Star Trek novels at all.

NEXT TIME: Splitting up the gang for The Death of Princes