This column is mostly about winter 1999 offerings, though one is a recent discovery of mine. Hey, it was written during rerun season! But for anyone who has been limiting Trek experience to television and the films, you're missing some of the best stuff out there.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Lives of Dax
Star Trek: New Worlds and New Civilizations
Star Trek Voyager Presents Captain Proton
Star Trek: Parallel Narratives
A Place Among the Stars: The Women of Star Trek Voyager
Star Trek Deep Space Nine: The Lives of Dax
I'm only three-fourths of the way through this excellent anthology, but I wanted to include it so people could get it before Christmas; I feel safe in recommending it without hesitation, though as with all anthologies, some of the entries are stronger than others. This volume contains short stories by nine well-known Trek writers, though one is known better for his pseudonymous Paris/Torres stories in the circles where I run, not that you could tell in this collection.
The framing narrative, written by Judy and Gar Reeves-Stevens, posits Ezri telling Vic how she came to host the Dax symbiont. It's a great story explaining something that was lacking on the series, namely how a Trill who didn't want to be a host became one. In the next installment, Kris Rusch's "First Steps," we find Lela Dax fighting with Darzen Odan, presumably a previous host of the Odan with whom Beverly Crusher fell in love in TNG's "The Host." It takes intervention from T'Pau of Vulcan to resolve Lela's internal struggle.
Lots of other familiar Trek names follow. We learn the details of Emony's affair with a very young Leonard McCoy, first mentioned in "Trials and Tribbleations." We hear Audrid Dax describe Christopher Pike's heroics when faced with an alien menace resembling one which would threaten Picard years later. We see Saavik and Chapel at the scene of the transwarp disaster that ended the marriage of Torias Dax and Nilani Kahn, which would inspire subsequent hosts Jadzia and Lenara to contemplate the crime of rejoining.
I haven't yet finished the Curzon chapter, written by Steven Barnes, who wrote the superb novelization of "Far Beyond the Stars." Barnes has a strong sense of Sisko's voice, and in flipping through the story I noticed that Admiral Janeway - Kathryn's father - appears. Frequent Trek Pocket novelist L.A. Graf wrote the Jadzia segment, a story about Jadzia and her sister which involves Verad, the man who tried to steal the Dax symbiont in DS9's "Invasive Procedures." Editor Marco Palmieri is to be commended for putting together such a fantastic backstory; I hope Paramount takes much of this as canon.
Star Trek: New Worlds and New Civilizations
Written by Michael Jan Friedman - a long-time Trek novelist, comic book writer, and author of Voyager scripts - this book contains detailed and intriguing accounts of what it would feel like to be on various planets or within various cultures encountered over the run of Star Trek. Friedman's colorful description of Vulcan caught my attention in the excerpt on Pocket's web site (http://www.simonsays.com/startrek), and it's a good thing it did, because I had already overlooked the book in the bookstore before sitting down to read the online bit.
This large and expensive volume contains impressive but largely irrelevant artwork for TV fans - magnificent artists' interpretations of rural Bajor and the allegorical Q Continuum, for instance, but very few familiar faces. Even taking for granted that there are enough pictures in existence of the main characters, it would have been nice to see depictions of Bajorans we know, like Kira's former Resistance cellmates.
Yet, this book does a far better job reminding us of what is truly alien about the various alien species than have the series of late, where the TV writers almost seem to have a mission statement of converting everyone to human behavior and values. The Klingon warriors avoid rehashes about honor in their post-war celebration, while the Borg ships are really scary - not the tame versions that Janeway keeps boarding on Voyager. Pocket describes this guidebook as a "visual odyssey," but I preferred the written descriptions.
Star Trek Voyager Presents Captain Proton
This book is hysterical, especially for anyone who appreciates fine pulp writing. It contains a short "full-length" novel with chapter titles like, 'Where No Captain Has Gone Before,' plus a 1950s-style guide to our solar system and a feature guessing what cities will look like in the year 2000. Reading this made me want to move to Seattle into my sky-high apartment accessed by air trolley. The photo reproductions (Tom Paris as Captain Proton, plus Harry Kim, the Doctor, etc. as his sidekicks) are pretty dreadful which is in keeping with the genre, though I was devastated not to find an oversized Janeway as Arachnia.
Ironically, some of the best lines in the book sound like parodies of actual Voyager episodes. Whether this is accidental or whether author Dean Wesley "Prof" Smith intended to pick on the TV show, I don't know, but I sure hope Brannon Braga reads this book and realizes what a cliché his show is becoming. The brilliant letters section contains a note from Benny Russell, the science fiction writer whom Sisko hallucinated becoming in a Prophet vision on Deep Space Nine. I do wish someone somewhere would comment on the sexism Trek inherited from serials like Captain Proton and continues to perpetrate; maybe I will write a letter to Captain Proton myself.
Star Trek: Parallel Narratives
This scholarly book bears a 2000 publishing date and I had never heard of it until a friend who reviews books in England sent it to me. A readable poststructuralist analysis of Trek, one nonetheless wishes for a bit more academic detail, particularly footnotes on some of the historical declarations about what Piller contributed versus what Berman contributed, etc. Author Chris Gregory is rather quick to accept the utopianism of Roddenberry's mythology. I don't think he delves nearly deeply enough into the racism and sexism which seem to have worsened in the past decade.
Nonetheless, this book is an interesting read, drawing thematic connections across all four series plus the movies. It is unfortunate that the writer did not wait for DS9 to complete its run, since the wartime episodes challenged and transformed Trek politics. However, I very much appreciated his analysis of the High Romanticism of the first three seasons of Voyager - the destruction of which has paralleled my loss of interest in the series.
A Place Among the Stars: The Women of Star Trek Voyager
This postcard book originally came out late last year, and I avoided it because it had Seven of Nine on the front cover and Seven of Nine on the back cover. But when someone gave it to me as a gift and I finally had a chance to look through it, I realized I had judged the book unfairly.
Yes, there are eleven photos of Seven, which is too darned many, since she has the same unsmiling expression and stiff posture in most of them. But there are also nine shots of Janeway . . .unfortunately far too few with her hair up, but the luscious one of her in a tux from "The Killing Game" makes up for all omissions. Plus there are four photos of Torres, and - best and most surprising of all - three of Kes. So I recommend this book for fans of the OTHER women of Voyager, and apologize for neglecting it for so long.
Click to purchase The Lives of Dax, New Worlds and New Civilizations, The Adventures of Captain Proton, Parallel Narratives or A Place Among the Stars from amazon.com.
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