pre-tos – Page 2 – Deep Space Spines

#054: Vulcan’s Glory (TOS #44)

On 26 October 2018

This week, we’re going all the way back to the oldest of the old-school: Captain Pike, sweaters, a number-one named Number One, the whole shebang. It’s Spock’s very first mission aboard the Enterprise, and Starfleet thinks it’s got a lead on the location of one of Vulcan’s most treasured artifacts, the long-missing titular jewel. Like most emeralds, however, where this one goes, chaos follows. Meanwhile, Pike’s reunion with some old road bros gets interrupted by an impromptu production of Romeo and Juliet. What makes Number One number one? How much is T’Pring making off Spock in US dollars? It’s the book that probably could have used a few more gamma rays in its hooch.

#042: Final Frontier (TOS event novel)

By jess

On 3 August 2018

In Event Novels, TOS

This week, the longest Star Trek novel to date takes us once more back to the pre-TOS past to fill in some of the history of Daddy Kirk, a.k.a. George Samuel Kirk. He’s the first first officer of some new high-tech doodad called a … star … ship? But on a goodwill mission to save some families trapped in an ion storm, they overshoot their destination and end up smack dab in the middle of Romulan space. As they try to figure out how to get home without dying, Robert April and George Kirk butt heads over the best approach to commanding a ship. Is April the time of the season, or does father know best? Is it a little weird how many decent Romulans there are in the books? How empty, on a scale from very to extremely, is James Kirk’s threat to quit Starfleet? It’s Final Frontier, or, The Last Book to Have That Ugly Slanted Font Thing Going On on the Cover.

#037: Strangers from the Sky (TOS event novel)

By jess

On 29 June 2018

In Event Novels, TOS

Remember First Contact? Of course you do, it’s great. (At least, I recall that being the case. Not gonna lie, I’ll be kind of shook if it’s not when I revisit it.) Well, this week’s event novel is more like the supermarket tabloid version of that well-known tale. A tell-all book has just been released positing that the series of events generally accepted as Earth’s first exposure to Vulcan were in fact not as such, and that the real first contact happened twenty years prior. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock have dreams, each independently of the other, that they were involved in the whole crazy shebang somehow. Were they? or is the book just that gripping?

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

By jess

On 18 May 2018

In Event Novels, TOS

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.