I’m going to level with you: I’m not very good at crime procedurals. Ask my wife. We can be sitting watching an episode of Law & Order: SVU or what have you and she’ll have the killer figured out before the theme song. I’m not nearly as sharp as she is, so I sort of let events wash over me, and then at the big reveal I’m usually just like, “Oh, okay.” So the fact that I solved the central mystery of The Vulcan Academy Murders with nearly 200 pages still left to read does not reflect well upon it.
Tag: spock Page 7 of 8
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.
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.
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.