Today, Spock sings “Where Is My Mind?” while Kirk and Bones butt heads as they vie for the privilege of paging Doctor Love. Meanwhile, Kirk’s desire to help people in need proves at odds with the Aritanians’ desire for everyone to go away and leave them alone. Will Spock’s mental faculties come back in time to fill in the blanks for his befuddled, love-addled captain, or will he live out the rest of his days as a vegetable in his parents’ basement? This week, we shine a light on Mindshadow, or, How to Win Friends and Influence High-Ranking Starfleet Officers.
Normally, I insert a “read more” tag after the intro paragraph of a review to generate some suspense and keep from filling the main page with walls of text, but this is the first time it’s actually serving a third purpose of hiding some most likely NSFW material. Buckle up, banditos, because we’re about to go behind the velvet curtain in the back of the video store, and you’re going to find out what happens when an author commits the 80s literary equivalent of 
When you consider how protective (some might say possessive) today’s entertainment companies get regarding their intellectual properties, decades that can be at least semi-reasonably described as “recent” may start to look like an untamed hinterland. For instance, part of me often looks back with fondness on that roughly 15-year window where no one gave two figs about anything anyone did with Star Wars. As more and more properties come under the purview of fewer and fewer owners, it seems decreasingly likely that we will see cross-media appearances that are not planned down to the minutest legal, financial, and social media details, much less the reckless abandon of a product like Ishmael, a novel that so gleefully mixes in cameos and references from other properties that any legal team today would tear it to shreds before the first copy came off the presses.