Rindis.com

There’s a lot of different things to go into here.

First, this is a novelization of the first Star Trek movie. I do generally enjoy the film, but I’m certainly nowhere near agreeing with the people who celebrate it. It looks great, it sounds great, and we really need more stories the philosophical side of the franchise. But, it is a two-hour version of a plot used in TOS, and production was troubled.

It is interesting to see how work on the proposed Phase II series influenced this. For the series, they were not going to get Leonard Nimoy, and William Shatner was asking for more money. So, there was going to be a new Vulcan science officer, who, not being half-human, would not be struggling to reconcile his divided nature, but would honestly struggle to understand humans. But they did get Leonard Nimoy for the film, Spock was back, and the new character, Sonak, is killed in a transporter accident. A new first officer, William Decker, would be in the first season of Phase II, and take over as Captain of the Enterprise if they couldn’t afford Shatner after that. He doesn’t survive the movie either. The Phase II cast would be rounded out by returning characters plus a new sexy alien (because Roddenberry never saw sexy shenanigans he didn’t like). Lieutenant Ilia also doesn’t survive, returning us to the original series cast.

All three new character concepts are revived and show up in The Next Generation a decade later as Data, Riker, and Troi.

Naturally, the novelization does go into more details than even a relatively long movie can. Most notably, we get internal thoughts and feelings of various characters, mostly Kirk, who is the the usual viewpoint character of the novel. This does help a lot, as much of the story is more ‘thinky’, and the script just doesn’t find good ways to externalize a lot of feelings in dialogue.

There are two other Enterprise casualties in the novel: Security Officer Phillips is killed/imaged by Vejur during the initial encounters, and apparently this was cut in the movie. Much more notably, there’s the unnamed woman who also dies in the early transporter accident. In the novel, this is filled out, and she is Vice Admiral Lori Ciana, aid to Admiral Nogura (who stays off-screen in the movie and the novel). It’s nice to fill that out a bit, give a more personal cast to the tragedy, but the motivation for why she was there is briefly wondered about and then tossed aside without answer.

So: okay plot, with some good, and needed, fleshing out.

Writing-wise, the novel is good. Mostly because of the inherent shortcomings of the plot, this will never be a high recommendation from me. I also haven’t seen the later versions of the film, but the novel is an improvement over the original cut. (Other than missing out on Goldsmith’s score, and the lingering beauty shots of the USS Enterprise. No matter what you think of that last—and I enjoy it—it sure beats coming out of First Contact and not being sure what the Enterprise-E even looks like.)

There have been suspicions that the novel was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster. This would be logical: He did work on a treatment of the movie, has written a number of movie adaptations, and ghost wrote the novelization of the original Star Wars movie for Lucas. But, people have looked at the prose and determined that is not true, and it is written by Roddenberry himself. I’m not nearly good enough to have an independent opinion, but it does feel like it matches what Roddenberry would consider important. Considering that this is his only long prose work, it might well have been polished by Foster with Roddenberry as the main author.

A final small warning: The 40th Anniversary ebook edition has a complete (and not well formatted) listing of all the various Star Trek books from Pocket, and this takes up the last quarter of the book. I was starting to think the last few chapters must be really long, but it’s just that so much space is taken by advertising everything else.