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igenlodeI picked this up out of the box of junk books for old times' sake, as I did attempt to track down and read all the 'Star Trek' novels at one point -- weirdly, since I don't believe I'd ever seen any of the TV episodes at that stage! (I did spot a few repeats flying past in the schedules later on and watched some of them, but frankly they really didn't make much of an impression, while the earlier films confused me horribly owing to not having seen the TV: my 'Star Trek' fandom, such as it was, proved to be an almost entirely literary experience, and was just enough to enable me to appreciate "Galaxy Quest" as a spoof as well as the excellent SF story it is in its own right.)
I can only assume that I took up reading 'Star Trek' because at one point these tie-in novels constituted a good half of the somewhat meagre science-fiction offerings at the local library; anyway, I did read them, and actually drew up a list to record which ones I'd tracked down and which hadn't turned up yet† -- complicated by the fact that they apparently renumbered the series at some point, so that Book 17 in one listing might be Book 2 in the original order. I never did get all of them despite peregrinations around various libraries, but I enjoyed most of them well enough as a standalone SF series, and got to know the regular characters quite well. (My favourite was Spock -- of course. But what that unfortunate man had to put up with... not least from some of the authors!)
There were a few ex-library paperbacks in the box, and I picked out "The Entropy Effect" because the blurb sounded the most promising and because I recognised the author, Vonda N. McIntyre: various leading SF novelists either started out writing Star Trek novels or moonlighted in that universe, and I thought she was one of them.
So I was extremely taken aback to find out that large chunks of this book are in fact howlingly bad. The author creates not one but two Original Female Characters who are a mass of cliché: the dashing fighter captain who is a legend throughout the fleet, saviour of Sulu's planet, boasts an edgy 'alternative' lifestyle (eagle-feather braided in her hair, group marriage) and appears to be filling the 'noble savage'/Red Indian slot, and the new female Security commander who has a stunning mane of red hair and flame-green(?!) eyes, chip on her shoulder, poor-girl-made-good, great improvement on her predecessor on the 'Enterprise' (we are told), tells Kirk she dreams of getting his job... and both of them have weird names (Mandala, Hunter) and 'regular' characters already in love with them! The Mary Sue buttons are getting pushed right, left and centre: it wouldn't be all that bad if this stuff was better written, but all the love-interest material falls as flat as a pancake. What's more, this edition at least is absolutely riddled with misprints, to a degree that is almost outside my experience in commercial published fiction.
So far, so much bad fan-fic (in fact, it's interesting to note with hindsight that this appears to be one of the very first Trek tie-in novels); and if there were nothing more to the book than 'self-insertion heroine pulls rank and saves the day', it wouldn't be worth a moment's puzzlement -- save to wonder how on earth it made it into print. But the odd thing is that there is also a lot of potentially good material: perhaps the most frustrating is that the author manages to create two interesting minor female characters amongst her Security staff who have concerns and relationships that don't include prominent crew members falling in love with them. There is also a challenging twisty time-paradox plot in which Spock takes a major role, and significant roles for a couple of characters who are neither self-evidently 'good' nor 'bad' (and since they do not form part of the regular series, there is real question in the plot as to which way they are going to turn out.)
It is an interesting twist to introduce the major antagonist as apparently someone for whom Spock holds considerable prior personal and professional respect... followed by the strong counter-suggestion that from everybody else's point of view, the man may possibly be a dangerous lunatic! On the other hand the precise nature of young Braithwaite's suspicions and assumptions about the regulars, however, is kept a bit too obscure: probably in a deliberate move to cloud the reader's perceptions about whose side he is on, but the hints dropped in the scenes written from his point of view left this reader at least with the feeling that this train of thought was intended to be clearer than it proved in fact to be (it wasn't at all clear that he thought he had witnessed McCoy and Spock killing off Kirk in cold blood, for example!) Braithwaite is a potentially fascinating character whose elements in the story get rather skimped in favour of a side-plot -- and love-interest -- for Mr Sulu that doesn't really go anywhere.
The author has a believable grasp of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic, and shorn of the Mary Sues (and proof-read a bit more thoroughly) this actually might have been a good novel :-( She manages to play the hoary old 'death of a major character' card without over-milking it, and she has demonstrated that she can write nuanced non-canon individuals: it's just unfortunate that the two who are apparently closest to her heart grated on me so much!
† In fact I found this list and verified that I have read "The Entropy Effect" before: I have no memory of it, either good or bad. On the other hand, a little Web research tracks down the authors of some memorably bad novels in this series as Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, and the memorably good one as Diane Duane...
I can only assume that I took up reading 'Star Trek' because at one point these tie-in novels constituted a good half of the somewhat meagre science-fiction offerings at the local library; anyway, I did read them, and actually drew up a list to record which ones I'd tracked down and which hadn't turned up yet† -- complicated by the fact that they apparently renumbered the series at some point, so that Book 17 in one listing might be Book 2 in the original order. I never did get all of them despite peregrinations around various libraries, but I enjoyed most of them well enough as a standalone SF series, and got to know the regular characters quite well. (My favourite was Spock -- of course. But what that unfortunate man had to put up with... not least from some of the authors!)
There were a few ex-library paperbacks in the box, and I picked out "The Entropy Effect" because the blurb sounded the most promising and because I recognised the author, Vonda N. McIntyre: various leading SF novelists either started out writing Star Trek novels or moonlighted in that universe, and I thought she was one of them.
So I was extremely taken aback to find out that large chunks of this book are in fact howlingly bad. The author creates not one but two Original Female Characters who are a mass of cliché: the dashing fighter captain who is a legend throughout the fleet, saviour of Sulu's planet, boasts an edgy 'alternative' lifestyle (eagle-feather braided in her hair, group marriage) and appears to be filling the 'noble savage'/Red Indian slot, and the new female Security commander who has a stunning mane of red hair and flame-green(?!) eyes, chip on her shoulder, poor-girl-made-good, great improvement on her predecessor on the 'Enterprise' (we are told), tells Kirk she dreams of getting his job... and both of them have weird names (Mandala, Hunter) and 'regular' characters already in love with them! The Mary Sue buttons are getting pushed right, left and centre: it wouldn't be all that bad if this stuff was better written, but all the love-interest material falls as flat as a pancake. What's more, this edition at least is absolutely riddled with misprints, to a degree that is almost outside my experience in commercial published fiction.
So far, so much bad fan-fic (in fact, it's interesting to note with hindsight that this appears to be one of the very first Trek tie-in novels); and if there were nothing more to the book than 'self-insertion heroine pulls rank and saves the day', it wouldn't be worth a moment's puzzlement -- save to wonder how on earth it made it into print. But the odd thing is that there is also a lot of potentially good material: perhaps the most frustrating is that the author manages to create two interesting minor female characters amongst her Security staff who have concerns and relationships that don't include prominent crew members falling in love with them. There is also a challenging twisty time-paradox plot in which Spock takes a major role, and significant roles for a couple of characters who are neither self-evidently 'good' nor 'bad' (and since they do not form part of the regular series, there is real question in the plot as to which way they are going to turn out.)
It is an interesting twist to introduce the major antagonist as apparently someone for whom Spock holds considerable prior personal and professional respect... followed by the strong counter-suggestion that from everybody else's point of view, the man may possibly be a dangerous lunatic! On the other hand the precise nature of young Braithwaite's suspicions and assumptions about the regulars, however, is kept a bit too obscure: probably in a deliberate move to cloud the reader's perceptions about whose side he is on, but the hints dropped in the scenes written from his point of view left this reader at least with the feeling that this train of thought was intended to be clearer than it proved in fact to be (it wasn't at all clear that he thought he had witnessed McCoy and Spock killing off Kirk in cold blood, for example!) Braithwaite is a potentially fascinating character whose elements in the story get rather skimped in favour of a side-plot -- and love-interest -- for Mr Sulu that doesn't really go anywhere.
The author has a believable grasp of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic, and shorn of the Mary Sues (and proof-read a bit more thoroughly) this actually might have been a good novel :-( She manages to play the hoary old 'death of a major character' card without over-milking it, and she has demonstrated that she can write nuanced non-canon individuals: it's just unfortunate that the two who are apparently closest to her heart grated on me so much!
† In fact I found this list and verified that I have read "The Entropy Effect" before: I have no memory of it, either good or bad. On the other hand, a little Web research tracks down the authors of some memorably bad novels in this series as Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, and the memorably good one as Diane Duane...