When we first saw them on TV in the fall of 1966, the starship Enterprise, Capt. James T. Kirk commanding, was already well into its five-year mission. The officers and crew had already been through several assignments and worked well as a team....and the exploits of Capt. Kirk and his starship were already reaching near-legendary status in the Federation.

But how did Kirk, one of the youngest men ever to attain the rank of Captain, become skipper of the already legendary starship? How did the crew come together to become the finest crew in Starfleet?

Vonda McIntyre (The Entropy Effect, the novelizations for Star Trek II-IV, plus the Star Wars novel The Crystal Star) delves into the unknown beginning of the Star Trek saga in her novel Enterprise: The First Adventure.

The novel begins as the newly promoted Captain James Tiberius Kirk, 28 years old and decorated hero -- he barely survived a disastrous mission at Ghioge -- is given his new assignment: command of the Constitution-class starship Enterprise. Her former skipper, Capt. Chris Pike, has been given a promotion to commodore, and Kirk has been chosen as his replacement.

Although Kirk is happy about his new rank and his first starship command, he is disappointed when his friend Gary Mitchell (still recovering from his wounds received at Ghioge) is not assigned to the Enterprise as his first officer. Instead, he inherits Pike's half-Vulcan science officer, Mr. Spock. Kirk thinks Spock is too cold and analytical, while the logic-minded first officer believes the new captain might be too reckless for his own -- and the ship's -- good. To make matters worse, Kirk's veteran chief engineer, Montgomery Scott, is not happy about Starfleet's decision to turn Enterprise over to an "untried tyro."

The novel works best when it describes the uneasy first days of Kirk's command. It's interesting to know that it took a challenging "first contact" mission and a confrontation with a renegade Klingon captain to start molding the Enterprise crew into the team we saw on both the small and silver screens, not to mention all the novels and comic book series that continue to sell briskly nearly 40 years after Star Trek premiered on NBC-TV.

McIntyre is a good wordsmith and captures the spirit of the Star Trek characters vividly. She has a fondness for Sulu and gives his character more depth than he often was given by the series' scriptwriters. Kirk, too, is very interesting in this novel; he exhibits a streak of rebelliousness that several years as captain will tame just a bit. His relationship with Carol Marcus (who is the mother of his son David) and his mom and brother are also explored in some detail.

The mission itself and some of the other characters were a bit uninteresting, but Enterprise: The First Adventure still held my attention, even in some of the less exciting chapters.