The Price of the Phoenix, 1977, Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
I have never actually read a Star Trek novel in my entire life. Truth.
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8 Responses to “Paperback Book Club”
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I don’t know what Sondra and Myra’s deal was exactly, but they were obsessed with scenes of Kirk and Spock being tortured. I love this period of tie-in novels, and the bizarre experiments they would conduct on Trek characters. No “canon”–Trek belonged to everyone…
Me, neither. I owned one or two (Mutiny on the Enterprise comes to mind, if only because I remember being intrigued by the title as a middle schooler, having just read Mutiny on the Bounty), but I never got around to reading them. I did read a couple of Choose Your Own Adventure-type Trek books, though (part of either the Find Your Fate or Doorway to Adventure series, I can’t remember which), and those were alright, IIRC.
I got most of the way through one of the Next Generation novels. I can’t remember the title, and I’m too lazy to look it up, but if I remember right it was a murder mystery, with some sort of romantic subplot between Worf and Troi.
Two-thirds of the way in it just dawned on me that there were so many other better things I might be doing with my life.
Well, I loved the TOS novels when I was an adolescent (or do they call it being a “tweenager” now?). I can’t really remember any of their plots (except maybe one that involved Dr. McCoy taking command. . .).
I’ve only read a couple, but Diane Duane’s “Wounded Sky” is pretty good. Feels like TREK while also doing some things that you can only do in prose.
I remember reading this, when I was about 10 yrs old! I had that very paperback edition. Down the line I also bought a couple of the other Marshak/Culbreath Star Trek collabs. I have to say I found them somewhat difficult reading; a little inaccessible for a kid. I was never quite sure exactly what was supposed to be happening. Thinking back to them, now, I have to wonder if maybe Christopher Priest was influenced by them for his novel, The Prestige. Some similarities there with the major plot device. And the authors did seem to delight in stripping Kirk and Spock down and getting them tied up.
Oh Elvis help us, not this novel and there’s another one. They’re like bad slash.
Right on. Duane’s first four or five Star Trek novels — THE WOUNDED SKY; MY ENEMY, MY ALLY; SPOCK’S WORLD; THE ROMULAN WAY and DOCTOR’S ORDERS (probably the one you’re thinking of, Prof!) — are excellent works of science fiction in their own right, and probably the best Trek novels ever written…though her attempts to link them thematically with her Wizard books feel a bit odd at times.