I've also contributed the first of a new series, "Who Connections" (pp. 30-33), this initial one inspired by a the chance discovery of an extraordinary connection between Stooky Bill - the puppet seen in The Giggle (2023) - and a character from a Doctor Who story more than 40 years before. There is also mention of Star Trek and EastEnders.
The back cover then adds a third leading character:
CIRCLING THE SOLAR SPHERE IN SEARCH OF NEW WORLDS AND HIGH ADVENTURE
CAPTAIN JAMES KIRK — Assigned to the top position in Space Service — Starship Command — Kirk alone must make decisions in his contact with other worlds that can affect the future course of civilisation throughout the Universe.
SCIENCE OFFICE SPOCK — Inheriting a precise, logical thinking pattern from his father, a native of the planet Vulcanis, Mr Spock maintains a dangerous Earth trait… an intense curiosity about things of alien origin.
YEOMAN RAND — Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly “out-of-this-world” blonde has drawn the important assignment of secretary to the Captain of her first mission in deep space.
WITH A CREW OF 400 SKILLED SPECIALISTS, THE MAMMOTH SPACE SHIP ENTERPRISE BLASTS OFF FOR INTERGALACTIC INTRIGUE IN THE UNEXPECTED REALMS OF OUTER SPACE.
It’s just possible that this blurb was written by someone not wholly familiar with Star Trek. These three leads — Kirk, Spock and Rand — are aboard the Enterprise when it “blasts off” (like a rocket) to circle the “solar sphere” (surely meaning to orbit the Sun). Kirk has a top job in “Space Service” not Star Fleet; Spock is from “Vulcanis” not Vulcan and his curiosity is dangerous (like a cat); Rand is the most popular member of the crew (because she’s pretty?) and has lucked out in getting a job as Kirk's secretary.
Of course, Star Trek and its iconic crew weren’t so well established when these words were written. James Blish was approached to write this book before the first TV episode had even aired. According to David Ketterer’s Imprisoned in a Tesseract — a biography of Blish quoted in his Memory Beta entry — the opportunity to adapt eight scripts was first mooted on 26 July 1966, while the first TV episode, The Man Trap, aired on 8 September.
In fact, this book adapts seven of the first 14 episodes, all of which had aired in the US by the time this was published in January 1967. Perhaps a story was dropped from the book because of the speed at which it had to be written: mooted in July, it was on shelves six months later. Perhaps it lost a story because Blish wrote longer adaptations than expected and they had a set page count.
But then there’s the intriguing dedication:
“to Harlan Ellison, who was right all the time.”
What is that about, then?
Ellison was, like Blish, an established and well-known science-fiction writer, and he was also engaged on this early run of Star Trek. His story The City on the Edge of Forever was first broadcast on 6 April 1967, after publication. It was and is much acclaimed, winning a prestigious Hugo award in 1968. But as Blish explained in his preface to a later anthology of Star Trek stories:
“This award was given, however, not for the script as it ran on Star Trek [on TV], but for Mr Ellison’s original version, which had to be edited for the show—for one thing, it was too long.” (Blish, “Preface”, Star Trek 3 (Bantam, April 1969), p. viii).
Blish adapted The City on the Edge of Forever in the second anthology, Star Trek 2 (February 1968). According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages — TOS Season One (2013), Ellison sent Blish the draft script hoping it would be used in preference to the rewrite, but Blish, “with all due apologies to Eliison”, based his adaptation on the rewrite while incorporating some elements from the draft (p. 590).
That implies that it was Blish who made the decision to stick largely to what had been seen on screen. But the dedication in this first volume perhaps suggests something different, that Ellison sent the draft script to Blish for inclusion in this volume, and that Blish agreed that it was better than what would make it to the screen.
So, did Blish want to adapt Ellison’s draft script for this first collection, only to be told “no” by the producers? That would explain why eight stories were cut back to seven. Was he then able to adapt the story for the second volume on the basis that he stuck closer to the TV version? I find these mechanics of adaptation intriguing, and really ought to read Ketterer’s biography of Blish. I shall add it to the list.
One other thing cited in the Memory Beta entry on Blish, also sourced from Ketterer, is that the experienced, accomplished science-fiction writer was unsure whether to take on the Star Trek anthology at all as the deal was a buy-out rather than royalties. In 1966, the flat fee was $2,000. Today, that’s about $20,000. I am available for writing on similar terms, please and thank you.
According to the indicia, Star Trek was first published by Bantam in the United States and Canada in January 1967. My edition is a 6th printing, the cover and spine printed with the US price of 50 cents. A sticker has been added to this for sale in the UK at three shillings and sixpence, or 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in the UK on 21 April 1967 and then again on 18 July 1969, the latter to tie in with the first broadcast of episodes on British television, which began six days previously.
The cover says this is “a chilling journey through worlds beyond imagination … adapted by James Blish.” That got me thinking about what to call this kind of book. It’s not, I think, a “novelisation”, which would imply the different episodes relayed here told a single story. It’s quite common in science-fiction to collect stories originally published separately and, with judicious editing and perhaps some extra scenes, reform them into the chapters of a single narrative.
There are also collections, such as Stalky & Co by Rudyard Kipling — which I shall blog more about in due course — where what seem to be separate stories involving the same characters are revealed, in the closing instalments, to be thematically connected, the sum of parts having Things To Say. This Star Trek book isn’t doing anything of that sort: it’s an anthology of adaptations of TV episodes.
Fitting seven of them into a slim paperback means they are very breezily told, which makes them quick and engaging — this is a book to hare through. It’s all largely action and dialogue, with little of the inner thoughts of characters or the narrator interposing their view. This is the “Detached Author” as defined by Ursula le Guin in Steering the Craft (p. 58), but it’s also the information you get from a script: what people say, what people do, not what they might be thinking.
The Memory Beta entry speculates on how much, if any, Star Trek Blish might have seen when he wrote this, given that he offers next-to-no description of the regular cast or their ship. Even if he didn’t know the series well, reference photographs could have been provided and the cover art was already available. Rather, I think, this is another sign that Blish worked chiefly from the scripts — which would describe guest characters but not the regulars. In the book, we get a whole paragraph describing Dr Tristan Adams in Dagger of the Mind (p. 28) but Spock’s ears get mentioned once and relatively late, when we’re told a Romulan has ears of the “same shape and cant” (p. 66).
The only regular to get more description than this is Uhura. Her physical features are often described as “Bantu”, for example:”
“her Bantu face intent as a tribal statue’s” (p. 6).
But, as I noted in my post on Blish’s (later) original Star Trek novel Spock Must Die!, “Bantu” is the name of a group of languages spoken in central and southern African, and used of the people who speak them. Blish uses it as a label for racial characteristics. Later in the same book we’re told that “Uhura has the impassivity of most Bantu women” (p. 56) and also has “large hands” (p. 64).
There’s something a bit more liberated and interesting later on, when a possessed Sulu refers to Uhura as “Fair maiden” and she responds, “Sorry, neither”. But this excellent reply is in the TV version, too.
There are clearly some differences between events depicted here and as seen on screen, which seems to be because Blish worked from draft scripts not the final episodes. But my nerdy interest is less in how the adaptations differ from the TV versions as the things Blish adds to the lore himself.
The first story in the book, Charlie’s Law — the working title of the TV episode Charlie X— says Kirk has spent “more than twenty years in space” (p. 1). This comes up again in the final story in the book, The Conscience of a King, where we’re told that Kirk was on the planet Tarsus IV 20 years previously (p. 118), when he was a midshipman (p. 128). You currently need to be 17 to join the US Navy; if that still holds whenever these Star Trek adventures are set — see Miri below — Kirk must be about 40, a decade older than actor William Shatner in 1966.
We don’t learn much about Kirk here. In the first story, when he advises precocious, all-powerful teenager Charlie that exercise will keep his mind off girls, Blish adds that this idea was introduced in Victorian England (p. 9), as if Kirk knows all about efforts by 19th century public schools to tackle masturbation by codifying the rules of football.
Second story, Dagger of the Mind, includes Kirk swearing: “Forget the Enterprise [?] Not bloody likely!” (p. 35). His other swears include “Great Galaxy” (p. 89), “Damnation” (p. 103), “Baloney” (p. 105) and “damn well” (p. 123). But there are no bollixes, as in Spock Must Die!
There’s an odd moment where a kind of faucet touches Kirk’s head (p. 35). The word Blish uses instead of faucet is “petcock”, but it’s right at the end of a line and is split on to the next one, with the hyphen after the “t”. That leaves Kirk with a,
“cock on his skull”.
More troubling is how Blish envisions the implanted memory of Kirk’s relationship with Dr Helen Noel. On screen, she says she wishes he cared for her, he says he won’t lie, she says she prefers honesty; then they kiss. In the book,
“all he had was the memory of having carried her to her cabin that Christmas, of her protests, of his lies that had turned into truth” (p. 33).
Yes, the point is that it’s a false, implanted memory — a violation in itself — but it’s all a lot grubbier and nastier than the fun flirtation on screen.
Third story The Unreal McCoy, the working title of The Man Trap, reveals — I think for the first time — that Spock’s homeworld of Vulcan is in orbit round the (real-life) star 40-Eridani, something I’ve since cited in my own books. Odder is the claim that,
“neither Scotty nor McCoy liked the Vulcanite [ie Spock ... and even Kirk was] not entirely comfortable in his presence” (p. 62).
Also, most of the crew of the Enterprise “had never heard a shot fired in anger” (p. 59).
In the adaptation The Naked Time, which is not nearly so exciting a story as the title suggests, we get our only reference to what the crew of Enterprise wear, as Sulu’s usual,
“velour shirt was off, revealing a black tee-shirt” (p. 80).
This and a towel round his neck leads Kirk to conclude that Sulu is just back from the gym, suggesting that all the crew do to work out is take off their uniform jumpers. That ship mustn’t half pong.
In Miri, we learn that “the fourth planet of 70 Ophiucus, the computer said, had been the first extrasolar planet ever colonised by man… more than five hundred years ago” p. 92. This was in “the early 2100s” (p. 93), so events of this story take place in the 2600s, some 300 years later than the series on screen.
A conversation also takes place between Kirk and another character that doesn’t happen on screen. I will have more to say about that elsewhere.
Finally, there is The Conscience of the King, where 19 year-old Lenore’s interest in Kirk and his kissing her is a bit less ick on screen with 30 year-old Shatner than the older c. 40 year-old Kirk here. But what also really strikes me is that the book ends without a coda promising more adventures.
But the story will continue in Star Trek 2…
And they fall in love.
This rich, compelling novella won a bunch of awards, including a Hugo and BSFA. I'd been meaning to get to it for ages having heard good things. By chance, some last-minute work stuff has meant I'm dashing about this week and could listen to the audiobook on the way. I felt rather in synch with the dashing about of the plot.
Cynthia Farrell and Emily Woo Zeller are good readers, and provide suitable heft and gravitas for such an epic story. Even so, I suspect I might have preferred the experience in print, as several times I wanted to skip back to a previous letter or incident. There are interesting things going on with the way the protagonists are described, their pronouns, their very modes of being, which I may have absorbed better from the printed page. I followed and enjoyed it, but think I may have missed some of the richness.
That's certainly not a complaint. My first thought on finishing the book was that I wanted to read it again, to pick over the nuance and detail. How very time war to want to run events again and see if they are different.
“If we want to capture something of the essence of working-class life … we must say that it is the ‘dense and concrete life’, a life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the detailed, and the personal” (p. 87).
This ur-text of what’s now called cultural studies is divided into two parts. First, we get 140 pages on the working-class Leeds where Hoggart grew up before the war, and the attitudes and outlooks of his people. This covers everything from the expected roles of mothers and fathers respectively to the focus on what he calls “the personal and the concrete” in the little pleasures taken wherever possible. Hoggart paints a vivid, tactile portrait of a place and time. But there’s a sense of loss, too: it’s a world of which he is no longer part, because of where reading has taken him.
Then there’s more than 160 pages on how things are changing post-war, which he links directly to what working-class people are reading. There’s lots here on magazines, newspapers and what he thinks of as trashy literature — he does not hide his distaste for the lurid covers and cheap newsprint of crime, sci-fi and sex pulp fiction that offers “sensation-without-commitment” (p. 242). He dismisses this as read by adolescents and those on National Service, and is especially disparaging of,
“American or American-type serial books of comics, where for page after page big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space machines, and gangsters’ molls scream away in high-powered sedans [which is] bad mass-art geared to a very low mental age” (p. 177).
He’s just as withering about the kind of airbrushed, big-bosomed covers of pulp fiction, often illustrated by or in the style of Alberto Vargas (who Hoggart refers to throughout as “Varga”, for example on p. 227). But he fails, I think, to adequately explain why this kind of stuff might appeal to particular readers, in the way we find in George Orwell’s famous essay. “Good Bad Books” (1945). Hoggart dismisses it all as masturbatorial — and feels the need to explain the service term “wank” on p. 220.
I think we can understand the attraction of cheap, convenient sensation to teens and servicemen with limited money. If you’re stuck in school or National Service, bored, trapped and frustrated, how thrilling to read of people who take action, break rules and escape. It satisfies in a way that perhaps “good” or canonical literature does not. (I wonder if the illicit thrill of rule-breaking in fiction can also serve a social purpose, shoring up those rules in real life.)
Hoggart is more nuanced when it comes to popular songs, admitting that old tunes and lyrics have an effect on him that makes it hard to be objective (p. 199), and that,
“we remember the best songs from a large number of weak ones” (p. 200).
He can see the stuff is not very rich or good or worthy (in his terms), but it conjures something for him, writ through with keenly felt memory and association. My suspicion is that he found it easier to scorn pulp fiction and comics because he’d not grown up on them. They were not of the world he knew, so they are invaders.
His argument is that improvements in education, literacy and welfare haven’t necessarily seen improvements in reading. Indeed, he thinks reading rates are high, quoting sales figures for magazines and newspapers that seem incredible now. He also cites a Gallup poll from 1950, in which 55% of respondents said they were currently reading a book (p. 301), but slightly spoils this high figure by muttering that it gives no sense of the quality of the books being read.
This is all part of his thesis that culture is becoming more homogenous and less granular and specific; we are reading more of fewer titles, pitched to a mass-market audience, an identikit culture. He puts particular blame on advertising for this effect, but does not, as he surely would had this book been written just a few years later, cite television as a factor. There is little sense, either, of this being part of a wider social or political development, or even construction of power, though he does mention Alex Comfort on p. 172 — presumably in reference to his book Authority and Delinquency (1950).
As Hoggart admits, his observations and conclusions are drawn mostly from his own experience as a grammar school boy rather than on broader empirical evidence such as a survey or wider study. But the book chimed with a generation of readers who saw themselves in what he described. I think that rather proves his thesis: his personal, concrete experience had wide-reaching appeal to readers.
Perhaps the most haunting passages are where, towards the end, he describes “the Uprooted and the Anxious” (p. 262) population, largely comprising grammar-school pupils, whose cleverness and reading severed them from their working-class communities. Hoggart describes them — himself — as prone to insecurity and being alone (pp. 264-5). He explains, convincingly, how a bookish boy would grow up studying diligently in the home, so largely in the company of his mother and other women of the family, while the menfolk would go out to work or the pub, and other boys would be out playing (pp. 266-67). This, he argues, shapes a whole outlook for life: what we read shapes who we are.
Given this and his argument that our reading is getting worse, we are left on a pessimistic note. It’s interesting to read, in the interview from 1990 included at the end of the book, that Hoggart thought things improved in the 1960s with a flowering of rich culture, but saw further stagnation in the 1980s.
The Uses of Literacy was first published in January 1957 and widely reviewed and debated in the following months. I wonder if and when it was read by Terrance Dicks, about whom I'm writing a biography. At the time of publication, Terrance — a working-class grammar school boy from East Ham in London — was just coming to the end of his three-year degree in English on a scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge. There, he was taught by FR Leavis, whose close scrutiny of literature for clues about wider social and economic life was surely a big influence on Hoggart’s approach here. Surely his book was discussed at Downing by the final-year students. As I read it, I wondered to what extend Terrance would recognise himself and his world in these pages?
But Terrance didn’t like that kind of abstract analysis. He preferred things to be more concrete.
“Every time we put a man through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder” (p. 6).
The adventure that follows seems to suggest he is right. The crew of Enterprise is alerted to an emergency on the planet Organia (previously seen in the TV episode Errand of Mercy, the first to feature Klingons). Our heroes are keen to investigate but even when travelling at a breathless Warp 6, Organia is six months’ flight time away.
Scotty and Spock plan to get round this by extending the range of the transporter using tachyons and hand-waving. If things go to plan, the person who steps into the transporter will remain on Enterprise but a perfect duplicate will be created on Organia, able to carry out reconnaissance and report back. They will then remerge with the tachyon universe for reasons of plot convenience — we wouldn’t want two versions of the same person, would we?
However, something goes wrong and there ends up being two identical Spocks on Enterprise. Captain Kirk names them “Spock One” and “Spock Two” and determines that one must be destroyed. That decision is made before we realise that one of the Spocks is evil and working with the Klingons, but we don’t know which. Both Spocks behave in ways that seem out of character, so how can Kirk deduce who to kill?
This is a fun, fast-moving and exciting adventure. For all it is told on an epic scale over a six-month period (from star date 4011.9 to 4205.5), it feels like a TV episode of Star Trek from the original series. The high-concept idea at the heart of it, the high-emotion stakes and the, ahem, questionable science and ethics all feel authentic. It presumes we are familiar with the TV show, too, as there are no descriptions of characters — not even mentioning Spock’s ears.
This may have been in response to the first original Star Trek novel, Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968), which was written expressly for children and is generally considered to be not very good. More than that, the then producers of Star Trek complained about the racially coded ways in which Sulu and Uhura were described. I wonder if in writing Spock Must Die!, the second original novel, James Blish was instructed not to describe them at all.
Referring to Uhura as “the Bantu girl” (p. 9) conveys something of her ethnic background, though it’s not very specific — Bantu languages are spoken over a very wide area. It’s not a connection gleaned from TV episodes, either, but lore surely added by Blish based on “uhura” being a Bantu word (for “freedom”). Yet the same reasoning would make Kirk and McCoy both Scottish. Even so, other writers seem to have picked up on this and referred to Uhura as Bantu in later novels etc.
That’s also true of another bit of lore here. On p. 2, Kirk recalls McCoy’s reasons for joining Star Fleet (a divorce) and the name of his daughter, Joanna. This isn’t from a TV episode; the character Joanna McCoy was devised for TV and then not used, yet she was added to the series “bible” issued to writers and is mentioned on p. 124 of The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968). Blish must have drawn from one of these sources and decided to make Joanna canonical. She has since appeared or been referenced in various novels and other media. Spock Must Die! might not be the first original novel of Star Trek but it is the first that other writers then built on.
Then there’s stuff where Blish applies fixes to things seen and heard on screen. For example, he tells us that Montgomery Scott’s Scottish accent, “came out only under stress” (p. 3). On another occasion we’re told that Scotty’s,
“English [accent] was as high, white and cold as his terminology” (p. 71).
I’m not sure Scotty ever sounded English on TV. Besides, Blish pointing out the inconsistency made me spot when he is inconsistent himself, such as when Scotty starts all Brigadoon and then trails off:
“An’ it’s oft before lang an’ lang that I’ve cursed the designer who thought it’d be cute to put no pockets in these uniforms” (p. 99).
The plot of Spock Must Die! is woven from the established lore of the TV series, so that there are frequent footnotes telling us to refer to specific novelisations (also written by Blish). He shares a number of facts about the operations of Star Fleet, such as that there are 17 Federation starbases (p. 8), the Enterprise has a crew of more than 430 (p. 22) and that more than a third of them are female (p. 109).
We learn that Uhura is fluent in Eurish, the language of James Joyce (pp. 48-49), that Kirk practices his quick draw in the mirror (p. 61) and that, according to McCoy,
“The retraining of left-handed children to become right-handed — in complete contradiction to the orders the poor kids’ brains are issuing to their muscles — badly bollixes up their central nervous systems, and, among other bad outcome, is the direct and only cause of habitual stuttering” (p. 64).
Scotty also uses the term “bollixed”, on p. 99 and p. 103, a term never used on screen (until Miles O'Brien says “bollocks” in an episode of Deep Space Nine). Spock has a a gift for “telempathy” (p. 115), i.e. picking up on someone else’s feelings from a distance, predating Counsellor Troi’s own similar gifts in Star Trek: The Next Generation. At the end of the book, the Klingons and their worlds are banned from spaceflight for a thousand years (p. 112), and Uhura learns that a lieutenant at Star Fleet wants her to teach him Eurish. Her response is:
“I hope he’s cute” (p. 117).
It’s a cheery note on which to close this perilous adventure, and we leave the Enterprise to continue its voyages. The irony is that on screen these had already ended; the last episode of Star Trek was filmed in January 1969 and the series was formally cancelled the following month. The indicia of this battered paperback says it was first published in the USA and Canada in February 1970, and that this is a second printing. Mine is a US edition, with the price of 60¢ printed on the spine. Yet I think it may be a UK-issued edition.
I’ve seen some accounts say that this novel and Blish’s novelisations of multiple TV scripts of Star Trek were not available in the UK until the Corgi editions first published in 1972. So I was a bit surprised by the author’s note at the start of Spock Must Die! First, he suggests that this original novel,
“might make a television episode, or several, some day. Although the American network (bemused, as usual, by a rating service of highly dubious statistical validity) has canceled the series, it began to run in Great Britain in mid-June 1969 [actually, 12 July], and the first set of adaptations was published concurrently in London by Corgi Books. If the show is given a new lead on [sic] life through the popularity of British reruns, it would not be the first such instance in television history.” (p. -1)
So, when were Star Trek books available in the UK, exactly? I looked up the details in trade magazine the Bookseller:
Star Trek (aka Star Trek 1) by James Blish, comprising 7 TV stories
Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories
Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories
Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel
Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories
Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories
New, Corgi-editions of these books were then published in the UK 1972, with Corgi editions of Star Trek 6-11 to follow.
We know Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks — about whom I'm writing a biography — had a collection of Star Trek books which he loaned to his writers. For example, on 8 March 1972, he wrote to Bob Baker and Dave Martin with notes on a storyline and added, “Where are my Star Trek books?” (source: p. 102 of the “09-04 The Mutants Production Documentation” PDF included on the Doctor Who Season 9 Blu-ray box-set).
Now I know what books those were, I can better trace the influence of Star Trek on Doctor Who in the early 1970s. More on this to follow.
In December, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph on episode 7 of the same story on its 60th anniversary. An age ago, when the last discoveries of lost Doctor Who were made, I wrote a blog post about why finding missing episodes is such a thing.
See the Film is Fabulous website for more details about the new discovery, and to donate to their valiant work. They have also posted an interview with Peter Purves about the find. It is rather moving to see Peter's delight.
I also enjoyed the special episode of the Doctor Who Missing Episodes Podcast about these finds. You might also like the special episodes from Dalek 63•88, one on The Nightmare Returns and one on Devil's Planet.
Oh, and these newly discovered episodes include the first appearance of Bret Vyon as played by Nicholas Courtney. Later this year, thanks to Big Finish, Bret Vyon lives.
