[For this first Galactoscope of the month, please enjoy this quartet of diverting reviews…which are probably more entertaining than the books in question!]

by Gideon Marcus

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

Star Trek is dead. Long live Star Trek!

No sooner had Trek left the air at the end of last year's rerun season than it reentered the airwaves in syndication. And not just at home, but abroad: the BBC are playing Trek weekly, exposing yet more potential fans to the first real science fiction show on TV.

While new episodes may not be airing on television, new stories are being created. I am subscribed to a number of fanzines devoted to Trek. There aren't quite so many these days as once there were, but there's also been something of a distillation of quality. For instance, I receive Spockanalia and T-Negative with almost montly regularity. These are quality pubs with some real heavy hitters involved. They are crammed with articles and fiction. As to the latter, a lot of it is proposed fourth season scripts turned into stories—by people who really know the show. The stories by such Big Name Fans as Ruth Berman, Dorothy Jones, and Astrid Anderson (of Karen/Poul Anderson lineage) are always excellent.

There have been few commercial Trek books to date. You had Gene Roddenberry/Stephen Whitfield's indispensible reference, The Making of Star Trek, released between the 2nd and 3rd seasons, and Bantam has published three collections of Trek episodes turned into short stories by James Blish (rather sketchily, and not overly faithfully). There was Mack Reynolds' juvenile Mission to Horatius, which wasn't very good.

Now Bantam has released the first "real" Trek novel, one aimed at adults. It is also by James Blish, who liberally sprinkles footnote references to prior episodes he has novelized. The basic premises are two-fold:

The Enterprise is on a farflung star-charting mission on the backside of the Klingon Empire, which is in a grudging armistice with the Federation enforced by the mind-being Organians (q.v. the excellent episode, Errand of Mercy) . Lieutenant Uhura reports to Captain Kirk that the Klingons have somehow managed to neutralize Organia and launch a surprise attack that knocks the Feds back on their heels.

Chief Engineer "Scotty" bungs together a long-range transporter that will allow Mr. Spock to reconnoiter Organia and report back his findings. However, the journey has an unexpected consequence: the first officer is duplicated—and the replica is irretrievably evil. Can Kirk and his crew resolve the Organia issue before the bad Spock destroys them all?

Put like that, the story seems awfully juvenile, but the slim novel (just 115 pages) is actually quite a good read.

Characterization is weak, relying on the reader's knowledge of the show, but it is rather truer to the cast than prior Trek novelizations. Everyone is a bit more technically savvy and erudite than normal: Star Trek as an Analog hard SF story. Scotty's accent is lovingly, if not quite accurately (to Doohan's variety) transliterated. Uhura and Sulu are given some good "screen time". Spock (both incarnations) are particularly well-rendered. Kirk is a bit of a cipher, and McCoy is more logical than usual. Also, the captain keeps calling him "Doc" rather than "Bones", which is a little jarring (though true to early 1st season Kirk). I did appreciate when Kirk mused, early on, "What was the source of the oddly overt response that women of all ages and degrees of experience seemed to feel toward Spock?" Blish certainly has kept up with the fandom!

As for the plot, well, it's a series of short chapters that read like episode scenes, the novel as a whole divided (informally) into a series of acts. It's a bit overlong for a TV show, but it would make a decent movie. Technical solutions are hatched out of nowhere, implemented, and moved past. One gets the impression that the Enterprise is responsible for half of the Federation's scientific innovations; it's a pity that most are forgotten about after they are developed.

The novel's climax is suitably exciting, and it's quite momentous. The Trek universe is substantially changed as a result…so much so that Blish has probably pinched off his own parallel continuum. Read it, and you'll see why.

I liked it. It's not literature for the ages, but it is at least as good as the best fanfiction (not a slur), and I think it sets a standard going forward.

3.5 stars.

[We were very excited to get this next review from someone who has worked behind the scenes at the Journey for a long time—please welcome Frida Singer to the team!]

by Frida Singer

Starbreed, by MARTHA deMEY CLOW

cover by Steele Savage

Starbreed begins with a port-side interlude when a frustrated Centaurian merchantman (cross-fertile with other hominids, somehow) exercises his resentment by raping a pubescent prostitute. On discovering the consequent pregnancy, the never-named girl seeks refuge in a local convent. There, nuns present us an America where parentage is a licensed privilege (thanks to the problems postulated by that old dastard Malthus), where the 'defects' of crime mandate sterilisation, and where remote towns have euthanasia clinics.  The Soviet Union and China both remain, but the promise of communism has never truly flowered again, while American capital trips gaily forward, with bigotry her bold escort.  Eighteen years have passed since Centaurian traders first made contact, and thus far they have exploited their contracts, plying a colonial trade monopoly across the seas of space.

The child is raised in the shelter of the convent after his mother dies in childbirth. Thanks to his mixed parentage, by the age of 14 he's already a bizarre demigod of self-sufficiency, and so flees across the border of the American trade zone to Guayaquil.  Taking the alias ‘Roger’ after the slur ‘rojo’ which the border guards used, there he and a cohort of other half-Centaurian teens play at larceny, revolution and revenge. He conceives the idea that, through the time dilation of Centaurians superluminal transport (20 years in a few weeks subjective), he may evade the capital crime of being a child of miscegenation—by being older than would allow for his existence. With stolen money, he invests in a new identity and a working berth on a Centaurian trade vessel, burning to discover the secrets of their design.

Not a soul seems happy, and few afford one another grace. The story reads like something written by Ellison were he smidgen less misanthropic.  Imagine, if you will, Vogt's Slan, but the antagonist is our protagonist.  A Khan of the Eugenics Wars, but molded out of the pain of rejection rather than to the designs of some military-industrial complex.  Books, in the end, are Roger’s only solace, and he bitterly resents his social isolation, fixing on attaining power to secure for himself that which he feels he has been denied.  Women all seem to be playing to scripts which evoke John Norman: prizes to be conquered into obedient adoration, mothers to be outgrown, and artifacts of abjection.  Often it feels as though they’re only set-dressing for the quintet of rational, hale, golden-eyed men who scheme to seize the future as continental hegemons.

This is a bitterly comic, almost Wildean novel where every patronizing impulse seems bound to erupt with the pus of profound condescension, framed within a nesting-doll of layered imperialist exploitation, where the genocide of the Watusi is but a historical footnote. It strives to be a warning klaxon against the simmering of the dispossessed, and fails most profoundly where it relies on racial caricature, or lacks follow-through. I don't expect to re-read it, but I might refer it to others with a taste for maror, willing to subject themselves to stories about eugenics for reasons other than enjoyment.

3 out of 5

With the latest Ace Double (or at least the latest one to fall into my hands), we have two original short novels—although one of them is closer to a novella than a true novel. The shorter (and better) piece is by Emil Petaja, a veteran of the field, who seems to be as productive as ever. The other is (I believe) the second novel by a very young Englishman (he's only 21, so let's take it easy on him) named Brian Stableford. Stableford was apparently sending letters to New Worlds and the dearly missed SF Impulse years ago, when he was a snot-nosed teenager; more recently he's tried his hand at writing professionally.

Ace Double 06707

Seed of the Dreamers, by Emil Petaja

Brad Mantee is a tough and hard-nosed enforcer for Star Control, an intergalactic empire which Petaja, in his narration, explicitly calls fascist. Brad is here to take one Dr. Milton Lloyd to prison, for the doctor, while undoubtedly brilliant, is also responsible for an experiment gone wrong, killing over a dozen people. The journey goes wrong, however, when, upon landing, Brad meets a beautiful young woman who, unbeknownst to him, is Dr. Lloyd's daughter. Harriet Lloyd, the heroine of the novella, is bright like her old man, but what makes her different is twofold: that she works for TUFF, a league of what seem to be space-hippies, undermining Star Control's tyranny in subtle ways; and two, she has psi powers, these being more or less responsible for the rest of the plot. While Harriet is distracting Brad, Dr. Lloyd hijacks Brad's ship and takes off for what turns out to be a seemingly uninhabited planet, which Harriet christens as Virgo (she's interested in astrology).

The rest of the novella (it really is a lightning-quick hundred pages) is concerned with Brad and Harriet having to cooperate with each other once it becomes apparent Dr. Lloyd has crash-landed on Virgo, and may or may not be dead. This would all be a pretty derivative planetary adventure, and indeed during the opening stretch I was worried that Petaja had not put any effort into this one; but the good news is that Seed of the Dreamers has a neat little trick up its sleeve. It soon dawns on Brad and Harriet that they are not the only people on this planet—the only problem then being that said people have apparently spawned from the old adventure books Brad is fond of reading (secretly and illegally, since Star Control has long since outlawed fiction books). They meet and nearly get killed by some tribal folks out of the pages of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, and really it's off to the races from there.

Seed of the Dreamers reads as a sort of reversal of L. Ron Hubbard's Typewriter in the Sky, since whereas that novel involves a real person getting thrown into a world of fiction, in Petaja's novella the fictitious characters have decided to bring the party to the real world. Virgo is thus strangely populated with characters from different real-world books, including but not limited to King Solomon's Mines, The Time Machine, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and more. There's even a Tarzan lookalike named Zartan (I assume for legal reasons Petaja cannot use "Tarzan" as a name), who appears in one scene. These characters from books all live by what they call "the Word," which is clearly a joke about the Bible, but it's also in reference to each character's programming, or rather their characterization according to each's source material.

Petaja has a lot of fun with his premise, although Seed of the Dreamers is, if anything, too short. Brad and Harriet coming across one fictitious character after another makes the adventure feel almost like a theme park ride, and most of the supporting cast (excepting Tsung, a Chinese mythological figure) only get a chapter or two before Petaja quickly becomes bored of them, like a bratty child throwing away his toys. It's also mind-numbingly stupid, between the planetary adventure aspect, Brad and Harriet's fast-moving (and thoroughly unconvincing) romance, and Petaja's attempts at explaining scientifically a world that seems more aligned with fantasy. But most of it is good fun.

A hearty three stars.

The Blind Worm, by Brian Stableford

Stableford's novel is much longer than Petaja's, and unfortunately much worse. Indeed, this might be the first time I've reviewed a book for the Journey where I've loathed it simply due to how poorly it's written. The Blind Worm is a far-future science-fantasy action romp, in which humanity has all but died out, with only a tiny number of people living in Ylle, "the City of Sorrow," surrounded by the Wildland, a vast forest front that for humans is almost impossible to traverse. John Tamerlane is known as the black king, being black of both skin and clothing. He seeks to solve the Quadrilateral, a puzzle that seems to connect parallel universes, and which could provide a new beginning for mankind. Unfortunately, the black king and his cohorts must contend with Sum, an alien hive-mind with godlike powers, and a synthetic humanoid cyclops called the Blind Worm. Both the black king and Sum want to solve the Quadrilateral, but only the black king has the "key," in the form of Swallow, one of his aforementioned cohorts.

I would describe this novel, which mercifully clocks in at just under 150 pages, as like a more SFnal take on The Lord of the Rings, but only a fraction of that trilogy in both quantity and quality (I say this already not being terribly fond of Professor Tolkien's magnum opus). There is a big existential battle between good and evil, in a landscape that feels somehow both desolate and overgrown with vegetation; and then there's the Blind Worm, who acts as a third party and a sort of walking plot device. The Blind Worm is the invention of one Jose Dragon (yes, that is his name), a nigh-immortal human who had created the Blind Worm as a way to combat Sum and the Wildland. This is all conveyed in some of the clunkiest and most pseudo-philosophical dialogue I've ever had to read in an SF novel, which does make me wonder if Stableford had intended his characters to talk this way. It doesn't help that he mostly gives these characters, who are generally lacking in life and individual personality, some of the worst-sounding names you can imagine.

Given Stableford's age, I was inclined to grade The Blind Worm on a curve—but it took me four days to get through when it really should have only taken two. The dialogue and attempts at describing action scenes border on the embarrassing. Of the strangely large cast of characters, maybe the most conspicuously lacking is Zea, the single woman of the bunch. Clearly Stableford has certain ideas as to what to do with Zea, as a symbol with arms and legs, but as a character she does and says next to nothing. This is not active woman-hating like one would see in a Harlan Ellison or Robert Silverberg story, but rather it descends from a long literary tradition of contextualizing women as ways for the (presumably male) writer to work in some symbolism, as opposed to giving them Shakespearean humanity. The issues I have with Zea, more specifically with her emptiness as a character, feel like a microcosm for this novel's apparent deficiencies.

The shame of all this is that I would recommend Seed of the Dreamers, albeit tepidly, but it's conjoined to a much longer and much less entertaining piece of work.

One star.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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