Atabis, a planet in the Klingon Neutral Zone, sends out a distress signal: a sleeper ship, the Compassion, is headed their way and prepared to land right smack on top of the capital city. The Enterprise, being the nearest Federation vessel, is dispatched to investigate, and the Klingons also send a ship of their own, the Pao Yar, helmed by the magnanimous Captain Klarr.
This week, three children from a previous episode contend with the most dangerous alien force of all: puberty. But their joyride in a stolen starship takes an alarming turn when the Federation realizes there’s also an experimental cloaking device prototype on board. It’s bad enough for Kirk to have to cancel a meeting with a council of Contra-teens (which isn’t going so hot anyway) and call in some favors from an old friend—and I do mean old. Are the kids in fact alright? Is Kirk still carrying a gross torch for Miri? Wouldn’t you have an itchy trigger finger if you were a redshirt? It’s the book that, sadly, isn’t just 300 pages of Dr. McCoy dunking on basic white people.
This week, we meet the Kreel, who have spent over a century being the Klingons’ punching bags. But when the Kreel find an abandoned stash of powerful weapons on a backwater planet, the tables turn, and shockingly, the Klingons start to feel like maybe peace, love, and understanding aren’t such bad ideas after all. Meanwhile, Wesley Crusher has a burdensome boy-genius reputation to live up to, and he intends to maintain it by singlehandedly attempting to cure a friend’s terminal illness. How much does Riker’s beard annoy Picard? Did Worf just decide to leave all pretense of professionalism at home today? Do some people deserve to be bullied? And perhaps the most important question of all: does this book have The Knack, or The Rot?
This week, Kirk disappears while helping a Klingon ship stuck in a storm and wakes up 100 years in the future, where it would seem the Klingons have turned over a new leaf. While they prepare to return him to his own time and groom him for his role in ushering in the Great Peace, Spock calls in all his favors to get to the bottom of what’s really going on. Does Kirk listen to himself when he talks? What does Spock have to do to get some respect around here? How can you make up something called “The Hole” and then not devote fifty pages to it? It’s Timetrap, the book that’s not-so-subtly trying to tell you “drugs are bad, m’kay.”
How Much for Just the Planet? serves up blue orange juice and inflatable rubber starships straight out the gate and only gets weirder from there. If you’re looking for the wackiest, goofiest, zaniest, most out-there Star Trek there is to be had, then you can stop drillin’, ’cause you struck oil. The only previous novel it has anything even remotely in common with is Ishmael, and even then, that’s only in the sense that there is absolutely no way, in this day and age when publishers are supremely and exclusively concerned with The Brand, that it would ever get published today. John M. Ford’s second and final Trek book is daring, clever, silly, wildly original, and like no Star Trek adventure before it or since.
I also do not like it very much.
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