Trek Novels into Episodes
 

This is (I hope) a new game. We talk about what Trek novel we think could've been turned into an awesome episode (or two). I realize that I'll have to set some ground rules:

1. No New Frontier, Excelsior/Lost Years, Stargazer, yada yada. Only novels based on mainstream Trek crews. Any number of cameos are allowed, but the main characters must be senior officers.
2. Only "regular" i.e. numbered novels. Now, I happen to love the meganovels of Peter David and Jeri Taylor as much as anyone, but those could never fit into two televised hours. This rule extends to the Shatnerverse as well. You'd need an entire SERIES to do the Shatnerverse justice.
3. "Official" Paramount-sanctioned Pocket Books only, unless a compelling reason can be offered.

As a concession for afficianados of the Strange New Worlds anthologies, those stories can be nominated as a secondary category. This second category includes Strange New Worlds, the comic books, the older no-longer-remotely-capable-of-being-canon books like Spock's World (a fav of mine) and so on.

To start the ball rolling, I'd like to put forward an old TOS novel called How Much For Just the Planet?

Millenium. Always, forever and totally...Millenium. I would love to see it. The Starships...the future parts....everything...

Yeah, Millennium is great, but I think that that falls into the "meganovels too big to fit into episodes." You'd need at least two for each book, unless you chopped out most of the lesser plotlines. I'd hate to do that. Minor plotlines are my cup of tea.

Second recommendation: Star Trek TNG: Dragon's Honor. If you haven't read this one, all you need to know is that Picard eats the most vile stuff imaginable, Riker wins an entire planet in a poker game, and Troi comes within half an inch of being abducted and made part of an emperor's harem! Who can't love that?

None. I've read them. They're terrible. Diane Carey did a good job with Prove, and AC Crispin did an excellent job with Sarek, but I read an atrocious numbered AC Crispin book (or it might have been the Star Wars Han Solo Trilogy from back in the 80s) that makes me think it's a shared pseudonym.

Michael Jan Friedman is awful. His dialogue is wooden, his prose is stilted, and he's got a strange obsession with referring to every character by their full name, rank and title all at once every chance he gets.

Don't get me started on The Laertian Gamble...

<-- Cranky Old Man

I think 'Vanguard' might be interesting, but it's atrociously written...

Which ones are terrible, Sa'ar?

How about Rogue Saucer? It's one of the more obscure ones. Ro Laren arranges the theft of the Enterprise, Admiral Necheyev crashes and almost dies of hypothermia!

*All* of them. They seemed readable when I was 15, but when I go back and reread them, I cringe.

In fairness, the meganovels are readable, although Vendetta, which I really liked ten years ago, doesn't seem to have aged very well. Q-Squared is the same way. Devil's Due was poignant, though, and I recall Imzadi choking me up at the end (in a good way).

The Garak novel that Andy Robinson wrote is pretty good (who better to write Garak than Garak?), and there was a NexGen Q-trilogy that I enjoyed, but they seem to be exceptions. The Dyson Sphere Revisited book featured a starship full of Bible-thumping Horta (buh?!)

I also prefer meganovels. They tend to be written by major Trek authors that know the universe and the fans inside out. They have the time and space to do a Trek story right and indulge the fan both inside themselves and in us. It's just that every single one would take umpteen episodes. Every single one. Take Mosaic. Now whatever your feelings on its canon status, you'd have to agree that it'd be at least five episodes: child/preteen Janeway, teenager Janeway, Cadet Janeway, Lieutenant Janeway (the deaths of her father and fiancee along with the subsequent mourning), and early Captain Janeway (meeting Tuvok and so on). There's just too much. All of the other meganovels are the same.

Okay, fine, so the Q Continuum trilogy paints a more canon-friendly version of Q that fits in better with the rest of the Expanded Universe, but I still like Q-Squared. I also like Federation, which has been so completely debunked by later series (including First Contact) that it's not even remotely applicable anymore.

Sa'ar: I've liked some of Friedman's work. He had a long run on the TNG comic series -- my favourite is #46, a terrific standalone story. My main beef with him is that he wrote the same book twice! Reunion was a murder mystery involving Picard and his former crewmates from the Stargazer; Saratoga took Sisko and his old crew and did exactly the same thing. In both cases, a secret involving the death of someone close to Picard/Sisko came out. It was pretty blatant. (You're in good company, though, as Tim Lynch hates Friedman's work too.)

The Trek books as a whole are definitely not up to the shows' standards. They're not much more than licensed fanfic. If you think Wesley is a Mary Sue, you need to read J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years -- the two original female characters will teach you what Mary Sues REALLY are. The worst of a bad lot is, in my opinion, Here There Be Dragons. I'm not a John Vornholt fan either, but he may have improved since the ones I've read, as he seems popular now.

There are exceptions to the general mediocrity. My love of Carmen Carter's The Devil's Heart is on record. The two Dianes (Carey and Duane) don't rock my socks off, but they're always good reading. Dafydd ab Hugh's books are standouts. And the Reeves-Stevens write fanfic, but very, very GOOD fanfic -- the kind that's a great story and a love letter to the show at the same time. (Yahtzee does this with Angel.)

I can go either way on Peter David. Comics are his home, and he's a champion there, with countless Marvel and DC titles under his belt. I like his lighthearted stories best (his current Spider-Man title is a desperately-needed breath of fresh air for that character), but almost anything with his name on it is worth checking out. Sci-fi, on the other hand... PAD clearly loves Trek, but he fits it like a bikini fits a sumo wrestler. His books are always funny and often cool (Vendetta's a classic), but they're not Star Trek books, they're Peter David books. So while I like his writing, I hope he never writes for canon Trek. He serves his own characters much better.

(By the way, I suspect that if I ever wrote Trek books, they'd turn out like that too. I did some stuff in VVS that went way out of character for comedy's sake. It's so tempting to give characters cool or funny lines whose only flaw is that the characters would never say them.)

I've read The Lost Years, but it's been awhile. I thought that it was okay, but I also think that the whole post-TOS pre-TMP era really needs to be set in stone in actual canon as to what went on with Kirk and company. Actually, the whole 2270-2290 era needs to be established. When was everyone promoted? Why the heck did Chekov, Uhura, and Sulu stick around so long, hurting their career track (I agreed with Mr. Adventure on that one). At least they've established that Spock, McCoy, and Scott had no further ambitions, but the younger guys should've been gunning for commands of their own.

I liked Here There Be Dragons.

Cool or funny lines are why we write fivers. It's why I write them, anyway.

So you're not one of those gunning for official canonical inclusion of New Frontier. I'm not either, by the way. New Frontier is okay, but it reminds me of Jack Kirby's New Gods. It COULD be Trek, but change a few names and technologies and New Frontier could be set in almost any scifi universe.

As a complete aside, given that I've never read a Trek novel in my life, didn't James Blish write some back in the day? What are they like, and are they worth picking up at all?

What Blish wrote (or, at least, what the ones by him that I read in the late 60s/early 70s were) were collections of stories that were taken from the televised Trek episodes. Not exactly the ones we saw on TV -- he was clearly working from earlier versions of the script at least some of the time -- but recognizably the same stories.

Any Trek fiction past those, I don't know -- haven't read any of them (except the novelization of First Contact, for some reason or other.)

Oh, and not only that, way back someone novelized the Animated Series. I read them before I even knew that there HAD been an Animated Series. I thought that they were just (this is from a juvenile perspective) fairly badly-written fanfic (or whatever word I used back in the days when Apple IIe's were considered hightech).

As an aside, what's with this "Animated Adventures" nonsense? Is it just Paramount AGAIN spitting in the face of what the fans thought was real about Trek?