In today’s episode, when Jake and Nog go to Starfleet Academy Teaser Week, they both get struck by the same arrow of love. But when Nog’s spycam triggers an ancient bomb, they’ll have to put their enmity aside to keep the camp from becoming a crater. Is Jake cut out for Starfleet? Is it worse to be slightly capable than not at all? And does anyone read character names out loud before these things go to press? All this and more in Space Camp, the book that isn’t all that spacey or campy.

Space Camp
Author: Ted Pedersen
Pages: 116
Published: June 1997
Timeline: Near the end of season 2
Prerequisites: None

Although it began in 1982 and is still going today, Space Camp has always felt like a quintessentially 90s thing to me. It’s probably just the fact that it was the decade where I spent the overwhelming majority of my memory-making childhood talking, but there’s some of the feeling of the time in there too. Edutainment as a concept and as a buzzword was certainly at its peak in the 90s, and though I’m tempted to claim there was more of a push in those days to get kids to take an interest in a cause outside their own self-interest than in other decades and/or cultural moments, I can’t do so with confidence. Maybe it’s that nagging sensation I get sometimes that we shouldn’t have laughed off Captain Planet so casually. Who knows. Of course, Space Camp isn’t so much NASA-ganda as it is a camp of sorts that happens to be in space, and any connection to that phrase is purely denotative.

Anyway, Benjamin signs Jake up for Starfleet Junior Academy on the planet Rijar, a world abandoned by the two civilizations that once waged war on it, but Jake’s only interested if Nog can go too. This is a bizarre gambit, partly because it feels like Jake ought to be able to go more than a week without having Nog around, and partly because if he had just gone by himself, he might have had more of a shot with Dyan, the Betazoid girl they both end up having the hots for. But as we will see, this book is not really in the business of making sense. Also, it’s just occurring to me that none of these books have ever separated them. That might have made for more interesting stories, had they ever pursued it.

Their cadet squad leader, Wingate, intends to run them ragged, which he does for a little bit before vanishing from the story entirely. There are also occasional light tremors that no one can pinpoint the reason for, which you know are going to be a thing. But none of that is especially important, because the main conflict of Space Camp is over a girl, i.e., the aforementioned Betazoid Dyan.

I hate—hate hate hate—contrived baloney like this. I’m not asking for the impossible Roddenberrian ideal of no interpersonal conflicts ever, but petty squabbles like this reflect poorly on all involved, author and characters. Watching Jake and Nog throw away a couple of years of budding friendship and bridging the understanding gap between species over a girl neither of them will ever see again is about as fun as letting a train run over your foot (and painful). I generally have pretty limited expectations for these books in general, but this falls well below even that minimal threshold.

What’s even worse is that given its alleged premise, it would have been a great opportunity to model problem-solving in science for teens and tweens. Instead, all that happens is Nog’s camera (given to him by Quark to record the environs for conversion to holosuite adventures) triggers a much bigger tremor than previous ones and activates a bomb situated right underneath the camp, and they have to unplug a semi-sentient AI in just such a way as to not clue it in to what they’re doing, all while being telepathically walked through it by Dyan. There’s no time for the ethical and philosophical ramifications of forcibly terminating something that’s somewhat more than a machine, and some of Dyan’s moves are literal guesswork—again, mind you, in a book ostensibly inspired by a camp that emphasizes scientific solutions. What an enormous waste.

And on top of all that, this dopey book also has the temerity to suggest that the events within are what planted in Nog the first seed of maybe wanting to pursue Starfleet Academy. No. No. Absolutely not, Space Camp. You did not earn that. Get the entire way out of here with that.

MVP & LVP

• This week, the MVP goes to Missy, a girl from Sri Lanka with a keen interest in engineering. She’s a way better match for Jake than Dyan. She and Jake have a beautiful conversation that’s more interesting than anything Dyan ever says or does, and which Jake can’t appreciate because he’s too busy trying to get into Dyan’s pants. Missy is as cool as she underused, and anyone in this book who doesn’t suck deserves some recognition. Runner-up to K’am, a level-headed Klingon with a steady conversational tone. Fun character, and ends up with Dyan in the end, to boot.
• The LVP is Jake. Some of his verbal jabs at Nog are really nasty! What has gotten into you, Jake. Your father would be very disappointed to hear you insult your friend like this. Jake and Nog are so rotten in this book that they’re the only ones at the end of the book who don’t end up coupling off with someone (except each other, if that’s how you want to look at it). They can’t even get a standard Shakespearean comedy ending right.

Stray Bits

• Ted Pedersen thinks (or at least did as of Voyages of Imagination) that Space Camp is in Houston. That is a reasonable assumption, but it’s actually in Huntsville, Alabama.
• There is a minor character in this book named Twhat. Take a second to read that out loud. [waits for your reaction] RIGHT?? Either no one at any point in the editing process did, or they all did and thought it was funny and left it in. No in-between.
• “Commander Benjamin Sisko was in charge of Deep Space Nine, the former Cardassian space station that guarded the entrance to the Bajoran wormhole, gateway to the uncharted Gamma Quadrant. It was an important post that the elder Sisko had worked hard to achieve.” — Okay, an important post, definitely, I will grant that. But as I recall, Sisko did not work all that hard to get the position and didn’t really want it. Wasn’t he shoved into it as kind of a last-chance thing because he was moping around Utopia Planitia after Wolf 359 not making anything of himself? Am I misremembering this? (p. 2)
• “Jake could tell from his father’s glazed-over look that he was recalling his own summer at an Academy Space Camp. Jake never understood why adults held such fond memories of past events that they probably hated at the time.” — This resonated with me a little, because I definitely had that look on my face a lot in the months leading up to my son being in marching band for the first time. The difference was, I liked it. (p. 3)
• A ship called the Enya approaches. What is its sister ship? The Bjork? (p. 31)
• I do not usually talk about the Todd Cameron Hamilton artwork, because most of it is terrible and looks like it was crapped out in less than five minutes. But then out of nowhere, on page 77, we get this:
  
  Where did this come from? This is incredible! Todd’s been holding out on us this whole time. Of course, a few pages later, it’s right back to hot garbage like this:
  
  Did he spend like 98 percent of the time he had for the illustrations on that one portrait? I wish I had never seen it. Now I know he can actually do good art, and it’s going to make all the other slapdash crap feel that much worse.

Final Assessment

Terrible. Space Camp takes no real inspiration whatsoever from the long-running, venerable summer activity that gave it its title. Instead, it pits Jake and Nog against each other in an execrable fighting-over-a-girl plot that throws away years of friendship and basic human decency. There’s nothing scientific or even campy about it. One of the worst books in the DS9 YA line to date.

NEXT TIME: Exploring a new frontier in House of Cards