A second book of new voyages, December 22, 2002

The first story is written by Nichelle Nichols, better known as Uhura. Titled "Surprise," the story is minor trifle about Uhura and other crew members attempting to throw Captain Kirk a surprise birthday party. The characters are not well portrayed here, although a certain camaraderie among the crew is observed.

The second story is "Snake Pit!" by Connie Faddis, and focuses on Christine Chapel being thrown into a situation (involving a snake pit, of course) where she must rescue an unconcious Captain Kirk from poisonous snakes on a hostile planet. The story itself is interesting, but involves Chapel acting significantly out of character. Another character acting in this position would have made for a more believable story.

"The Patient Parasites" by Russell Bates, who wrote on of the animated episodes, is a script that was turned down for that series, but makes for an interesting study on what a TV script looks like. The story itself works as well, involving an encounter with a machine built by an alien race, with a technology far beyond our own. It is unfortunate that the story echoes many similar ones in the original TV show, but there is some new ground here.

"In the Maze" by Jennifer Guttridge (also represented in the first collection) involves a sighting of a castle on a world where such technology should not exist. While investigating, Kirk, Spock and McCoy enter the door only to be transported to another place entirely, where Kirk is held captive and Spock and McCoy undergo a series of trials that seem designed to ellicit a response. The resolution, as with Guttridge's story in the first book, involves contact with a very alien species.

"Cave-In" by Jane Peyton is an interesting prose piece of dialogue between Spock and another character (McCoy?) while trapped together after a cave-in (of course). The piece is short, and not particularly shocking, but the form is an interesting departure for Star Trek and may interest readers on that count.

"Marginal Existence" by Connie Faddis is a quite short story about a planet where the Enterprise crew find a number of "sleepers," hooked up to large numbers of IV tubes (a bit outdated there) which continually pump drugs into them. The real science here is very lacking, but the idea proposed is an interesting one, about a society that becomes dependent on such injections.

"The Procrustean Petard" by Marshak and Culbreath is another of their riffs on the "alpha male" theme, this time as the Enterprise comes into contact with a society where the dominant (alpha) male is given an extra male chromosome, and the other crew members are sex-changed. So, Kirk and McCoy become women, while Uhura becomes a man, for instance. This story takes a look at male and female roles in a way that often seemed important in the 1970s, but seems awfully dated now. Like much of these authors' work.

"The Sleeping God" by Jesco von Puttkamer is an interesting story by an actual NASA rocket scientist, and onetime German science fiction writer, his first fiction work in English. The plot involves a mutant, with vast mental powers, revived from suspended animation to tackle a problem far too big for a normal starship, and thus quite a problem indeed, involving a sentient computer from another plane of existence, attempting to take over this plane. Again, this may be Star Trek's (or at least Gene Roddenberry's) favorite plot, but it is handled well here, and this is certainly the volume's best story, even if it actually uses the Enterprise crew only in a limited way.

Also included are two poems, "Elegy for Charlie" and "Soliloquy." The book is interesting, but again, not as good as the first.

 Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to yo