Tag: vonda mcintyre

#033: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (TOS)

After bearing the brunt of Khan’s wrath and then searching for Spock, the Enterprise crew must now face the music and begin the voyage home for their inevitable court martial. Unlike the last two films, however, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is very much a comedy, and this week we’re going to see how that affects the normally unflappable Vonda McIntyre’s approach to movie novelizations. So let’s make like the Enterprise and slingshot ourselves backwards through time to 1986, a world of heavy pollution, hard currency, and double dumbasses…

#031: Enterprise: The First Adventure (TOS event novel)

Part of what we love so much about Star Trek, and the original series in particular, is the lived-in camaraderie between the senior officers. But it’s rarely considered by fans and authors alike that those relationships took time to develop and endured a heap of growing pains in the process. Enterprise: The First Adventure, the first instance of what we will come to know and recognize as the “event novel”, takes us back to a time before that rapport was locked in, when the crew we know as legendary were almost torn apart by the vagaries of the rumor mill and each other’s baggage before ever having a chance to become the chums we know and love, and imagines that ragtag bunch thrown together for the first time. Published exactly twenty years after Star Trek made its television debut, let’s join Kirk as he learns on a particularly stressful first outing that heavy lies the wrist that wears the command stripes.

#017: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (TOS #17)

For the sake of best practice, I make a policy of watching a movie immediately prior to reading its respective novelization. Naturally, this causes me to feel an acute apprehension about redundancy. I just watched the movie, I think. Is this really necessary? One of the more surprising benefits and pleasures of running this little website has been not only realizing that that worry is misplaced, but seeing it gleefully dashed against the rocks, and The Search for Spock represents the most thorough obliteration yet.

#007: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (TOS #7)

This week, dear readers, we arrive, at last, at what is unarguably the apotheosis of original-recipe Star Trek: the second film, The Wrath of Khan. To quote Hugh Laurie at the end of Blackadder Goes Forth, “This is, as they say, it.” It is as thrilling as The Motion Picture is boring. It is an ingenious work of deconstruction, the first to upend many deeply entrenched series tropes that were (to that point) taken for granted. Its greatness does not depend to any extent on your opinion of Star Trek, which is the only work under the TOS banner I would make that claim about other than possibly “City on the Edge of Forever”. It is the ne plus ultra of Trek movies, and it is highly unlikely that any that currently exist nor any that may be made in the future will ever surpass it.

I considered beginning the above paragraph with “Pardon the hyperbole”, except I’m not so sure any of it actually is.

#002: The Entropy Effect (TOS #2)

There are some episodes of Star Trek where Kirk rekindles a relationship with an old flame. There are other episodes where the crew meets a once-respected hero or mentor figure, only to realize that person has gone completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And there are still other episodes where they’re burdened with a civilian who snoops around and asks too many questions and throws their weight around and is totally overwhelming and annoying and in the way all the time.

The Entropy Effect contains all of those tropes, plus time travel.

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