Well, it’s the first review of the new year, and we here at Deep Space Spines wish you the best of luck in sticking to your resolutions and working toward being the best “you” that you can be. I may be biased, but if you’re looking for ideals to guide you on your path, you can do a lot worse than to copy Star Trek. I just hope that for you and yours, 2018 turns out to be more Yesterday’s Son and not so much Mutiny on the Enterprise.
Another Star Trek novel opens with yet another fawning introduction by a figure of some import within the community. This time, it’s written by Howard Weinstein, still fairly fresh off his own pretty decent Trek book, The Covenant of the Crown. I’ve previously pontificated on the questionable utility of these obnoxiously obsequious prefaces, but in Ann Crispin, Weinstein is fortunate enough to finally have a subject on whom such words aren’t wasted.
If you were to ask a fan of Star Trek what Star Trek is “about”, there are some standard answers you’d probably get. I personally would say it’s about tackling the Big Questions and solving problems through reason, diplomacy, intellect, and non-violence. Last week’s book, Triangle, certainly checked those boxes. Whatever flaws their stories may possess, no one can accuse Marshak and Culbreath of shying away from the Really Big Questions. But sometimes, Star Trek is about dumb crap like the Enterprise computer falling in love with Captain Kirk, and that’s peachy too.
Ah yes, Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, authors of The Prometheus Design. Man, that was a rough book to get through. Kirk really took a beating in that one. Well, I certainly hope nothing like that happens in this book.
Page 8: The Ambassador smiled ironically. “Have you considered my servant Job?” he quoted.
Welp.
Some of these early Star Trek books have unctuous introductions that tell tall tales about the authors and lavish heaps of sickly-sweet accolades on them. Black Fire is one of those books. Its introduction was written by Theodore Sturgeon, a man of myriad science-fictional accomplishments, the most relevant of which for the purposes of this review are that he wrote the indisputably top-five TOS episode “Amok Time” and that he coined an axiom known as Sturgeon’s Law, which famously states that 90 percent of everything is crap, a figure some might argue is conservative when it comes to Star Trek novels.
Fluff jobs like these are a risky gambit that, to my way of thinking, don’t really have much of an upside. If the book sucks, the intro writer ends up with pie all over his face, and if he talks up the author and the book ends up being all right or good, the net gain is negligible. It’s not like it somehow reaffirms the strength of the mythos.
What I mean by all of this is: for a guy with credentials like Sturgeon’s, he sure picked a heck of a book to stick his neck out for.
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