Star Trek 4, by James Blish

Star Trek is 60 years-old today, sort of. Over the weekend of 1-5 September 1966, its pilot episode The Menagerie was shown to attendees of the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Ohio — says p. 93 of this book. The series proper began with The Man Trap, broadcast on CTV in Canada on 6 September and on NBC in the US two days later. It wasn’t shown in the UK for almost another three years.

Anyway, this fourth anthology of prose versions of TV episodes was published in the US in July 1971 and issued in the UK in October, price 25p (the first Star Trek book in New Pence). It was the last of five Star Trek books available in the UK prior to 8 March 1972, the date on which Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks wrote to writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, asking (among other things) for the return of the Star Trek books he’d loaned them. So, this is my final post on the subject of the influence of these books on Doctor Who of that period.

(For more of this stuff see my posts on Blish’s Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3 and the original novel Spock Must Die!, plus my article “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49 and my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks...)

The cover of Star Trek 4 looks very different from previous books, with artwork depicting the USS Enterprise in space, between two pale blue worlds. For the first time, there’s no artwork or photograph of the main characters — I wonder if, like with the later Doctor Who novelisations, there were issues over fees owed to actors. As with the previous volume, this is “all new award-winning” Star Trek, though that “new” is a little ingenuous: the adventures here were all broadcast on TV at least three years previously.

The book is dedicated “To Donna Woodman and the other new English Star Trek fans”, the author having now settled in the UK and, through these books, found himself the locus of an active fandom determined to see Star Trek resurrected. In his preface, Blish says he receives a lot of letters from fans and uses them to decide which stories to adapt next — suggesting he had free choice, rather than having it imposed by the publisher or rights-holder. 

He tells us that The Menagerie, adapted in this volume, won the prestigious Hugo award in 1967 and City on the Edge of Forever (adapted in Star Trek 2) won in 1968, but that the subsequent cancellation of the series meant there was nothing to nominate for the award in 1970. This is not entirely honest. For one thing, it misses out the 1969 awards entirely, where no Star Trek episodes were nominated. Technically, Star Trek could have been nominated in 1970 — any of the the 11 new episodes first broadcast in 1969 would have been eligible. But for two years running, it seems, the series was on air but not considered good enough by science-fiction fans.

Production on Star Trek ended in 1969, so Blish was faced with a limited number of episodes to choose from for these books, and an even more limited number of good episodes. But he’d also by this point committed to double the number of these books: 

“As matters stand now, there will be at least four more, all within the next year or so” (p. ix).

That may explain why there are just six episodes in this book, so as not to burn through the fuel. But I think it also explains the peculiar choice of first story.

All Our Yesterdays involves yet another time travel portal, on this occasion dumping our heroes back in a superstitious period. Spock gets emotional and snogs a woman because, we learn, he is 10,000 years back in time and that's what Vulcans were like back then — as if the psychology of his people, even on a far distant world, is contagious. There’s no effort to suggest that the same is true of humans. Anyway, the basic wheeze is that Kirk, with his technological gizmos, is accused of witchcraft. There’s a bit of running about. It’s not very good.

The Devil in the Dark is much better. It’s set on the planet Janus — not Janus VI as on TV — which is rich in the element pergium, atomic number 358. Mining operations for this precious resource are halted by a “big and kind of shaggy monster” (p. 23) that kills an engineer. There are references to new sci-fi material teflon (p. 24 and p. 26), a recent real-life invention of the space age, and Kirk is surprised that people here still use old-fashioned technology like fission (p. 27), because the Enterprise gets its energy from antimatter (p. 25). There’s no mention of teflon, fission or antimatter in the TV episodes, so this sci-fi materials stuff must all come from Blish.

At one heroic moment, Kirk says, “I feel the need for a conference” (p. 29), meaning a planning meeting to decide the next move. I tend to think of sci-fi business meetings round a table, all Walter Citrine in space, as a characteristic of The Next Generation, so this early version caught my attention. But “conference” is also the word Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts used for their meetings with writers to discuss potential storylines, scene breakdowns and scripts. I’ve seen no evidence of the term being used on Doctor Who before this, so the intriguing thought is they took the word from Kirk to make their natters about plot logic sound a bit more dynamic…

If that’s a bit fanciful, elements of this episode were surely a direct influence on them. The plot, involving the last survivor of an intelligent alien species attacking human miners, only for us to realise the alien is quite nice, surely helped to shape The Curse of Peladon (1972). You can almost hear Spock addressing the Third Doctor in one exchange (though he’s really addressing McCoy):

“No creature is monstrous in its own environment, Doctor. And this one appears to be Intelligent, as well.” (p. 29)

I’ve previously argued that the influence of Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror on Doctor Who story Inferno (1970) must have been via the book rather than the TV episode, given relative dates they were available in the UK. Here, the opposite must be true: scripts for The Curse of Peladon were commissioned on 14 May 1971, after a storyline conference between Dicks, Letts and writer Brian Hayles on 1 March — months before this book was issued in the UK. But The Devil in the Dark was broadcast on BBC One at 17.15 on Saturday 6 September 1969 and repeated on 17 March 1971, the latter just as the plot for The Curse of Peladon was being worked out. So, it was the repeat that influenced Doctor Who.

Hayles said himself that he drew on Conan-Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), with attacks by a mythical creature revealed to be a hoax. Yet his Doctor Who story is much closer to what happens with the Horta here. The whole feel of the Doctor Who story, with a sci-fi trip to a civilisation that feels if not ancient than medieval may mean All Our Yesterdays was also an influence.

Both TV episode and book version of The Devil in the Dark reveal the Horta to be a silicon-based life form, which may have influenced Baker and Martin’s later Doctor Who story The Hand of Fear (1976). Blish thought beyond the surface of this creature, and tells us it has teflon-like internal tubing — a stone on the outside but with circulatory system of molten plastic.

Spock sets out his case for not killing the creature even before he’s learned its soft centre:

“If this is the only survivor of a dead race, to kill it would be a crime against science.”

Kirk seems to find this eccentric: 

“Spock in particular was sometimes inclined to hold his fire when his conservation instincts, or his scientific curiosity, were aroused” (p. 34).

He supports his friend, but is bemused by this hippy/ecowarrior/woke sensibility. I would argue thaty this sensibility is very much in line with the Third Doctor — and a new development compared to previous incarnations. I contend that this Star Trek influenced both the character of the Third Doctor and the adventures he had.

Blish describes something quite different to the blobby creature seen on screen:

“It was huge, shaggy, multicolored, and knobbly with objects which might have been heads, sense organs, hands” (p. 37).

The shagginess is much more like Aggedor in The Curse of Peladon, so perhaps the book informed the design of that story — which went into production after this book was available in the UK. 

The TV episode and the book both reveal the simplistic way in which the Horta communicates with humans: “No Kill” it says (p. 39). Blish suggests in the altar and chamber something of the creature’s culture (p. 40). I think this inspired more than stuff in Doctor Who; amaze amaze, there’s quite a bit of the Horta in Rocky in Project Hail Mary.

In treating the wounded stone creature, McCoy uses thermoconcrete — a fun gag — and gets to use the first iteration of his, “I’m a doctor” catchphrase; in this case, he is not a bricklayer (p. 41). At the end of the story, the Horta and its progeny agree to help the humans with their mining. Spock says the agreement is logical, but I can’t think what’s in it for these indigenous creatures as their world is plundered.

That, I think, is where The Curse of Peladon is notably different from Star Trek. Doctor Who of this period is much more ambivalent about the virtues of the Federation and Earth Empire, which Terrance acknowledged quite openly:

“You can’t just do a kind of old imperial story whereby the galactic federation is coming to Peladon and is bringing the simplistic natives the benefits of civilisation, like Sanders of Africa bringing law and order to Africa. This isn’t how people think any more, even with a family adventure serial. We are all well aware now that what happens when an advanced [people] meet a primitive [one] is not always to the benefit of the primitives.” — Terrance interviewed by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado for Doctor Who — The Unfolding Text (1983), p. 53.

The next story in the book, Journey to Babel, begins with Dr McCoy asking Spock for a demonstration of the Vulcan salute, which we’re told is “complex” and that McCoy cannot reproduce, making it sound more like the flourish of Arnold J Rimmer in Red Dwarf than the familiar split-fingers thing. Again, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen to miss something so well known. 

The concern about such protocol is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy are welcoming aboard a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. Kirk knows this Sarek is 102 years-old, but not that he is Spock’s dad. The awkwardness that follows is surely because Kirk has been badly briefed; I reckon by AI.

There’s some fun stuff about Spock’s people, such as that a Vulcan teddy bear, a sehlat, is alive and has six-inch fangs (p. 51). (No, even I think it’s going too far to suggest that that could have been an influence on the troll doll in Terror of the Autons.)

Sarek is one of a number of delegates squabbling over whether to allow planet Coridan to join the Federation. The issue is that, 

“Coridans have a nearly unlimited wealth of dilithium crystals, but are underpopulated and unprotected. This invites illegal mining operations.” (p. 52)

Of course, the Federation is acting entirely altruistically and it’s just one heck of a coincidence that its fleet of starships run on exactly these crystals. One delegate, a Tellarite, is then murdered and we must work out the culprit. That is all very The Curse of Peladon, though Journey to Babel was first broadcast in the UK on Monday, 22 June 1970, a month after scripts had been commissioned for that Doctor Who story.

There are some notable details here: McCoy can give Kirk orders; Spock trusts McCoy, “to McCoy’s obvious startlement” (p. 58); and Spock insists on observing protocol even if means doing so at the expense of his own father (p. 59). Spock’s relationship with his father doesn’t seem logical in the slightest, but hush, you’re spoiling the story.

At the end, Spock exposes the real villains — smugglers from Orion trying to cause chaos and play off both sides (p. 66). There’s something of that in The Curse of Peladon and another Doctor Who story, Frontier in Space (1973), though I think the latter owes more to the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967). In fact, I wonder if that film inspired elements of this Star Trek.

The Menagerie begins with a 15-line footnote explaining that Blish felt it too confusing to adapt the broadcast version, which added lots of new material involving Kirk etc to the untransmitted pilot episode which had Spock under the command of a different captain. Instead of all the dramatic business of Spock-now facing court martial, Blish simply adapted the script of the pilot, in the process restoring the original ending not seen on broadcast. 

Reading it now, with these episodes readily available to watch or rewatch, that means the adaptation offers intriguing details about the original conception and development of this key story. But I can a Star Trek fan of the time feeling a bit short-changed to lose half the TV story — including all the “proper” bits of Star Trek, such as Kirk, McCoy etc. Our relationship to the book is different when it is the only permanent record of ephemeral TV.

Blish says that The Menagerie was the only two-part Star Trek story of the orignal run because the producers didn’t feel it worked. That is odd because it works very well, I think. Indeed, some of my favourite moments of later iterations of Star Trek are its cliffhangers.

The story begins in the aftermath of the Enterprise’s maiden battle, somewhere around Rigel VIII, with Spock still limping from whatever was involved (p. 69). Blish underlines how remarkable it is that Pike doesn't think twice about leaving the Enterprise in the command of Number One — a woman. She is,

“Slim and dark in a Nile Valley sort of way, she was one of those women who always look the same between the ages of twenty and fifty, but she had a mind like the proverbial steel trap, and Pike have never seen her shaken in any situation” (p. 70).

But Blish doesn’t think — or have the authority — to provide her with a name. (In the TV series Strange New Worlds, the character’s name is Una, which is a nice play on “number one” but also in rightful homage to my pal Una McCormack, and surely the coolest thing ever to happen to a TV tie-in writer.)

Blish refers to the “dematerialization of the Transporter” (p. 72). This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The TARDIS is said to “dematerialise” (or it is “dematerialising” or has “dematerialised”) in dialogue used in TV stories The Time Meddler and The Myth Makers (1965), The Daleks Master Plan (1965-66) and The Smugglers (1966). My guess is that that was the influence of story editor Dennis Spooner, picked up by his immediate successor Donald Tosh. But the word then fell by the wayside.

But then the term was picked up again by Terrance Dicks in exactly the period of Doctor Who that I think was influenced a lot by Star Trek. Not only does the TARDIS dematerialise, it boasts a dematerialisation circuit. In that sense, the word is used in dialogue in Terror of the Autons, The Mind of Evil, The Claws of Axos and Colony In Space (1971), Day of the Daleks and The Time Monster (1972), The Three Doctors (1972-73), The Green Death (1973) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974).

That can’t come from this book, which was published after those 1971 episodes. But perhaps Terrance took the word “dematerialise” from the Star Trek episode Return to Tomorrow, where Scotty uses it to refer to the transporter. That episode was first broadcast in the UK on 17 August 1970, just as scripts for Terror of the Autons were being finalised. Yes, yes, it’s a stretch, but I’m rather delighted by the thought that such a potent word in Doctor Who might have been pinched from the opposition.

Whatever the case, the fantasy realm Captain Pike encounters here is described as, “almost like that of an Oriental potentate” (p. 84); the latest example in these books of Oriental to mean “alien but sexy". There seems a genuine risk that Pike might give up Star Fleet and go with these fantasy slave traders, even before, “Pike saw another girl, nude, her skin green” (p. 85) which tempts him further. This is Vina, her name surely taken from Weena in The Time Machine by HG Wells. Like Pike, she seems quite keen on the fantasy, protesting, “No, let us finish” (p. 86) when it threatens to stop.

At the end of the story, Pike escapes the fantasy world and Vina, but his experience affects how this captain, in charge of a crew of competent people not judged by their sex, now views some members of his crew:

“Pike could not resist stealing a quick look from Number One to [Yeoman] Colt, wondering which of them, in other circumstances, he might have picked.”

Nicely, Blish ends with a twist on this, empowering the two women:

“When he found them both looking at him as if with the same speculation, he turned his eyes determinedly to the viewscreen and banished the thought” (p. 93).

In his afterword, Blish notes that it was decided that this dynamic of captain and two potential love interests would not sustain many episodes of the TV show so it was abandoned. In other changes, he says, Number One was demoted and became Lt Uhura, Colt became Janice Rand, medical officer Boyce becames McCoy, and Tyler became Sulu.

“The net effect was to make the new officers more interracial than before” (p. 94).

He concludes that he sometimes gets letters criticising his adaptations for being different to those as broadcast — presumably from fans with audio recordings of the episodes. He says, “I had to make my own judgment of what would best serve the authors’ intents”, showing fidelity to what was in their heads, if not what they typed.

Next up is The Enterprise Incident, the first adaptation in these books of a third season episode, in which Kirk is working under sealed orders that seem irrational. To keep the secret, he plays up to being “irritable and snappish” as if fatigued (p. 95), to the extent that when Spock questions his behaviour, Kirk responds, “you pointy-eared turncoat” (p. 104).

All of this is because the Federation are sending Kirk on a secret mission to meet a Romulan Commander, an otherwise unnamed woman Kirk thinks, “beautiful, aristocratic, compelling” (p. 99). Like Vina, she soon slips out of her clothes:

“Compared to her appearance in uniform, she seemed now to be wearing hardly anything, although this was in part an illusion of contrast” (p. 109).

We’re also told that, “Vulcans were cyclical in their mating customs, and immune to sexual attraction at all times” (p. 115). That’s clearly not true of the half-human Spock here, who is interested in the Commander.

We learn Spock has been in Starfleet for 18 years (p. 104). He kills Kirk again (p. 107) — a fact spoiled by the Radio Times listing for this episode: Spock “is eventually forced to eliminate his commander with the Vulcan death grip!” (Radio Times #2498, 25 September 1971). I can see why that description would make the casual viewer want to tune in.

The Enterprise achieves Warp Nine while shrouded by the Romulan cloaking device (p. 114), a piece of technology that seems to work very well and is extremely useful; the Enterprise never uses it again. Likewise, the Romulan Commander is a striking woman with a connection to Spock — just the sort of character deserving of a rematch. We don’t see her again, either.

Finally, there’s A Piece of the Action, involving a cargo cult based on Chicago gangsters — and on a particular book, Mobs of the Twenties published in New York in 1993 (p. 121). It’s a fun idea for a story from the 1960s adapted for prose in the early 70s to hinge on a text from the near future but about the past, seized upon by an even more distant future.

In the TV episode, Kirk makes up a card game he says is played on Beta Antares IV. Blish adds that Antares is, in fact, not a double star — so this is Kirk being clever (and certainly not wrong about basic astronomy), saying something his friends will know to be false as a kind of signal to them (p. 124).

Blish also adds a reference to “klee-et”, which he explains is a Vulcan word meaning “prepare to engage”, and refers us in a footnote to the episode Amok Time in Star Trek Three (p. 124, yes spelling out the ordinal) — the first time a footnote appears in these books of adaptations of episodes, having been used a lot in original novel Spock Must Die!

Again, the morality here is a bit suss, Kirk using a show of force from the Enterprise to put down the gangsters. Basically, the Federation is a bigger hoodlum than they are. But I’m struck by a notable absence in these four books: apart from Errand of Mercy in Star Trek 2, they’ve avoided all the TV episodes that work as analogies for the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. At university 30 years ago, I read with great interest H Bruce Franklin’s “Star Trek in the Vietnam Era” in Science-Fiction Studies vol 21, no 1 (March 1994), pp. 24-34, which demonstrates how select episodes of Star Trek reveal changing attitudes to the real-life conflict. Was there an active choice made not to adapt the stories that touched on contemporary geo-politics? Again, I’m curious who decided or imposed the episodes to be adapted.

As a permanent record of the TV episodes, these books must have had a formative influence on early Star Trek fandom in the US and the UK. I wonder how much they influenced a sense of the “best” episodes, or most worthy ones, filtered by the selection process and Blish’s own prejudice as an active member of the community at the World Science Fiction Convention. How much did he impose on fans?

I think this stuff was hugely influential on Doctor Who — both on TV and and on its own nascent fandom. Doctor Who surely took the idea of the Doctor as diplomat from Star Trek. He’s got his own elegant way of fighting — CTRL+F “Vulcan neck-pinch”, CTRL+R “Venusian aikido”. But the Doctor doesn’t kill his best friend the Brigadier, let alone kill him twice. And there’s nothing about the Doctor having alien hormones or a previously unmentioned wife. At least not for the time being.

My abiding thought is how much these breezy adaptations of TV episodes must have influenced Terrance Dicks’s approach to the novelisations of Doctor Who, and even the fact that such books existed at all. Star Trek 5 by James Blish was published in the US in February 1972 and issued in the UK in June that year. Thereafter, Corgi published UK editions of the Star Trek books by Blish. That was surely a vote of confidence in a market for such titles, even with no new Star Trek being made on TV. That must have helped support the case for a new line of Doctor Who novelisations launched by Target in 1973.

I shall return to those Doctor Who novelisations in due course, with a long post picking up where I left off. Coming soon: Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters…

Star Trek 3, by James Blish

This third volume of breezy adaptations in prose of Star Trek episodes was first published in the US in April 1969, by which point the TV series had been cancelled. It was issued in the UK in August of that year, with a sticker saying “3/6”, just weeks after the series began broadcast on Saturday teatimes in what was usually the Doctor Who slot. I read it, along with Star Trek, Star Trek 2 and the original novel Spock Must Die! earlier this year as research for my forthcoming biography Written by Terrance Dicks, and I’ve also written a piece on the cross-pollination of these two series, “Who Connections — Star Trek”, for Doctor Who Magazine #632 (August 2026), pp. 44-49.

The cover takes the same format as Star Trek 2, though with a black background rather than white. Whereas that previous book featured a photo of two leading members of the cast, this has three — presumably to match the title. The three leads of the series here are Kirk, Spock and Uhura, making the latter a selling point. Indeed, the first interior page lists the main characters as Kirk, Uhura and Spock, in that order, and describes her thus:

“Lt. Uhura—Unbelievably beautiful, she is the most popular member of the Enterprise crew and also one of the most brilliant scan engineers around.”

The front cover notes Star Trek is now “award-winning” and promises “mind-reeling” and “eerie excursions into galaxies of probability”, and the back cover promises journeys into “the supernatural”. I’m not sure there are galaxies, plural, or forays into the supernatural. There’s a lot of cod psychology of various kinds, including Spock getting horny.

Blish’s preface, written in 1968, addresses the “award-winning” claim on the cover. First, he explains for the lay reader the annual “World Convention” of science-fiction fans — admitting that, at the time he wrote this, it had only been held outside the US on one occasion — and Worldcon’s Hugo awards for best sci-fi of the previous year. The Star Trek episode The Menagerie was nominated for “best dramatic presentation” in 1967, and in 1968 all four of nominees were from Star Trek; City on the Edge of Forever won. However, Blish adapted that story in Star Trek 2 (using elements from the draft script that didn’t make it to the screen), so this new volume presents the three other nominees — The Trouble with Tribbles, The Doomsday Machine and Amok Time. 

Oddly, he doesn’t include The Menagerie here (it’s in Star Trek 4, about which more anon). And though Blish notes that City on the Edge of Forever also won an award voted for by TV writers (a Writers Guild of America award for “best episodic drama on television; the episode The Return of the Archons was also nominated), it’s the accolade from the science-fiction fans that he clearly thinks most worthy of note. That’s despite feeling that, “s-f fandom and Star Trek fandom do not seem to overlap very much, certainly by no more than 10 per cent” (p. viii).

Blish goes on to say that he’d received more mail about his two Star Trek books than for the rest of his writing career (27 novels over 20 years, including a Hugo award winner), and then answers a number of frequently asked questions — no, he can’t supply photographs of or access to the actors; yes, there is a book about The Making of Star Trek and yes, he is writing an original Star Trek novel. From this, we get a nebulous sense of early Star Trek fandom, casual viewers hungry for information and communion.

The first story in the book is The Trouble with Tribbles from the script by David Gerrold, which got its own book in 1973. Blish starts by telling us that we don’t know where tribbles originate from, describing what they look like — “a cross between an Angora cat and a beanbag” (p. 1) — and that they are harmless. He underlines that point, setting up the harm to come.

The story twice mentions the Organian treaty with the Klingons from a previous on-screen adventure, Errand of Mercy, which is as per the TV episode. That episode was included in Star Trek 2 but there’s no footnote back to it as there would be from Spock Must Die! onwards. Indeed, I think Blish introduced footnotes with that novel to give his own, original story a sense of authenticity. Perhaps the references to the treaty here prompted him to revisit it in the novel. 

Then there’s stuff not in the TV episode. On screen, early on, Kirk asks under what authority Nilz Baris has put a whole quadrant on defence alert, and is told Baris is Federation Undersecretary in Charge of Agricultural Affairs. “That gives him the authority,” says Spock, on screen. But in the book, Kirk counters that it is, “A position with no military standing of which I am aware” (p. 3) — suggesting that Kirk and the Enterprise are part of the military. As per the original version of the script, the book version features Koloth, the Klingon from Errand of Mercy. That may mean Blish was working from draft scripts.

Other than that, the adaptation has Spock remark on an unusual monicker — “His name is Cyrano Jones, of all things” (p. 9) — which seems oddly out of character (who is he to judge?). And there’s an odd bit of character work:

“Uhura had never shown the faintest sign of sentimentality before, but [with the pet tribble] she seemed to be far gone in gooiness” (p. 7).

Not for the first time, I wonder how much Star Trek Blish had actually seen when he wrote this.

Next up is The Last Gunfight, the TV episode Spectre of the Gun, in which our heroes find themselves in Tombstone on 26 October 1881, taking the place of the real-life notorious gunfighters — by coincidence, something that also happens in the Doctor Who story The Gunfighters (1966). 

Perhaps there is some direct crossover between this episode of Star Trek and Doctor Who. I wonder if the idea here, of god-like beings who intend to execute a person by putting them in a fantasy world drawn from their own memories, influenced Bob Baker and Dave Martin when they conceived Deathworld, the initial idea that became The Three Doctors (1972-73). Blish says the events are drawn from Kirk’s “ancestral memories—archetypes drawn from the collective unconscious” (p. 25), a concept not used on screen (but an element in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970)). He also adds a reference to the events of City on the Edge of Forever (p. 26), again without a footnote, and tells us McCoy hails from Atlanta (p. 28).

When Chekov is apparently killed, Kirk finds his science officer’s cold response hard to take, thinking that he’ll “never get used to Spock’s hidden emotional life” (p. 31). Spock, out of character, refers to McCoy as “Bones” (p. 34), and adopts a Scottish accent to achieve rapport with Scott, “his voice suddenly taking on a dark, Caledonian color, as deep as that of a prophet’s” (p. 35). (Do prophets have dark, deep voices?) It’s an example of Spock’s psychological knowledge of, and love for, his various human shipmates, which earns the following response from Kirk — again not heard on screen:

“Privately, and for no other ears than yours, I think you are a sentimental bag of mush” (p. 37).

The Doomsday Machine features Brand, not Matt, Decker — I assume some relative of the Will Decker in the first Star Trek movie. The story involves an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy whole planets, but we’ve already had a story, Operation — Annihilate! in Star Trek 2, in which the Enterprise could itself do that. I think this story must have influenced the Doctor Who adventure Colony in Space (1971), about an ancient, alien weapon able to destroy a whole star, not least because it was novelised as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon.

Scotty’s fluctuating accent is acknowledged here; we’re told he gets more Scottish when things are serious (p. 50) — in Spock Must Die! it is a sign of him being under stress. It’s also interesting that when Kirk is teleported, the room he was in, “faded around him” (p. 51) — we see it from his perspective, something rarely done on screen.

Assignment Earth begins with references to Kirk’s two previous experiences of time travel (in City on the Edge of Forever and Tomorrow is Yesterday, both in Star Trek 2). The plot involves the Enterprise travelling back from the 23rd century to Earth in 1969 to prevent Gary Seven and his cat from sending a rocket off course — the implication being to start a war. That was surely an influence on what became Day of the Daleks (1972), in which guerrillas from the 22nd century travel back to c. 1980 to blow up a man they think responsible for starting a war. In both cases, the action taken to prevent catastrophe is what causes it. I wonder, too, if the description here of the incongruous Gary — “a man impeccably dressed in a twentieth-century business suit” had an influence on the appearance of the Time Lord at the beginning of Terror of the Autons (1971).

On the same lines, I wonder if Mirror Mirror inspired some of The Curse of Peladon (1972), as it involves a storm stranding the Enterprise landing party on a planet that has firmly declined an invitation to join the Federation. The storm affects the teleport, sending Kirk to “another dimensional plane” (p. 71), where he meets alternative versions of his friends, including a bearded Spock, living in a tyrannical regime. As I argue in my piece for DWM, this was surely an influence on the Doctor Who story Inferno (1970), and script editor Terrance Dicks must have taken the idea from this prose adaptation because the TV episode Mirror Mirror wasn’t broadcast in the UK until the summer of 1970, when Inferno was in the midst of being shown.

McCoy refers here to Spock as “Spocko” (p. 82) and Kirk says of Uhura “Good girl” (p. 76) — neither of them in the TV episode. I was taken by Kirk referring to one of his alternative counterparts as “Mr Pseudo-Sulu”, and describing Pseudo-Chekov’s “lubricious expression” on seeing Uhura (both p. 79) — a rare bit of Blish enjoying the kind of well-chosen words that feature in novelisations by Terrance Dicks. He tells us the Enterprise is a “fifty billion credit starship” (p. 75) and adds some psychology:

“Evidently this universe had never discovered that men pay more attention to a machine when its voice is feminine” (p. 74). 

Friday’s Child is another story about a planet with valuable mineral deposits the Federation is keen to get its mitts on for the indigenous people’s own good. Blish gives us a history of Ceres, then explains that it’s not the dwarf planet (he calls it an asteroid) of the same name in the Solar System. The people of Ceres seem primitive but are descendants of space-travelling humans from Earth, so must have regressed in just a few generations.

There’s a fair bit of male gaze here — a meal is “served by a most scantily clad Cerean girl of whom it was impossible not to be aware” (pp. 87-88). McCoy also refers to “basic humanoid stock” and “genetic drift" (p. 95), what with being an old racist. As well as English, he speaks Vulcan, Old High Martian, medical Latin, Greek, Fortran and Vegan (p. 91). 

The story here is all about a woman, Eleen, who doesn’t want to care for her new baby, due to various things that have been going on. The Enterprise crew are surprisingly judgmental and unsympathetic. “We intend to keep both you and your baby alive, whether you want it or not,” McCoy tells her (p. 94). Kirk tells her, just as sternly, that she is required to look after the child because of her traditions, which he’ll “enforce … if I have to” (p. 99). Ick.

The book concludes with Amok Time, which begins with Spock throwing soup at Nurse Chapel (in the TV episode he just declines it). His quarters are, says Blish, “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental”, while his reading screen shows an image of “the head of a very young girl, no more than a child” (p. 106) — who turns out, thankfully, to be a grown-up he’s known since childhood. As per the TV episode, his request for shore leave has been declined, but he’s not revealed the medical condition that would surely justify his workplace making reasonable adjustments. This sort of thing wouldn’t happen in the Next Generation, where the Enterprise has office managers.

Blish tells us that Spock’s normal pulse rate is 240 bpm and he has non-existent blood pressure and green blood (p. 107), information not featured in this TV episode but taken from The Naked Time. As I say in my DWM piece, I think the first UK broadcast of that episode, on 19 July 1969, inspired the lines in Spearhead from Space about the Doctor’s own pulse rate, though it may have been taken from this book. Kirk assumes that Vulcans breed “eugenically” (p. 106), and I realise that Pon-farr, as described (p. 109) is basically periods for men. 

The arena on Vulcan is described as being like Stonehenge (p. 110); I wonder if that’s the result of Blish having recently moved to the UK. As per the TV episode, we’re told T’Pau is the only person ever to turn down a seat on the Federation Council, though it’s not clear why. Spock’s childhood pal T’Pring, “no child now”, is still referred to as a “girl” (p. 111). T’Pau sets out the stakes of the duel to follow in much more on-the-nose language than broadcast:

“Are you prepared to become the property of the victor? Not merely his wife, but his chattel, with no other rights or status?” (p. 112)

McCoy refers to this as “hanky-panky”.

Then Kirk and Spock fight to the death. Oddly, Blish chooses to narrate this from Kirk’s perspective, which undercuts the tension — and the “death” of Kirk on screen. Instead, we have Kirk listening to Spock’s remorse at having killed him.

Still, killing Kirk seems to end Spock’s manic sex drive, like some kind of sexual release. I also wonder how the Vulcans will react when they learn Kirk has survived the ordeal: wouldn’t they demand a rematch? It all ends happily and a cured, unsexed-up Spock praises Nurse Chapel’s “very good plomik soup” (p. 117), providing closure. The Enterprise heads off to further adventures…

Doctor Who Magazine #633

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine boasts some exciting news: my novelisation Doctor Who - The Six Doctors will be published on 21 January, followed by Steve Cole's novelisation Doctor Who - The Vampire Mutation on 4 March. Both are based on newly discovered paperwork in the archives of the late Terrance Dicks, which I worked my way through last year. I say a little about that in the news story, and will have more to share in due course.

I've also written another Who Connections feature for the mag, this time using the song "As Time Goes By" as my starting point, inspired by something my friend Matthew Sweet told me. And Paul Cornell has kindly written in to add some extra facts to my previous Who Connections piece, on Star Trek.

Here is some publicity bits related to The Six Doctors and The Vampire Mutation:

Doctor Who Magazine #632

The new issue of Doctor Who Magazine is out today, and features another Who Connections piece by me, this time on Star Trek (pp. 44-49), examining how and when it first influenced Doctor Who and when, exactly, Doctor Who then influenced Star Trek. For this, I spoke to Star Trek books writers Diane Duane and Barbara Hambly, and to Jean-Marc Lofficier.

If this is of interest, you might like to read my posts on the anthologies Star Trek by James Blish, Star Trek 2 by Blish, the original novel Spock Must Die! by Blish, and also The Disappearing Future edited by George Hay.

The new issue of DWM also includes a glowing review by Jamie Lenman of Space Security Service - Bret Vyon Lives, the audio set on which I am producer and co-writer, which is released by Big Finish next week.

I took pictures of the Star Trek and early Doctor Who novelisations to illustrate my article, and here are some of them for those that like that sort of thing.

Star Trek 2, by James Blish

This second volume of prose adaptations of TV episodes was first published a year after the first, in February 1968. So says the indicia of my 3rd printing of the US edition, which is marked 50 cents on the spine but bears a sticker giving the UK price of 3/6. According to trade paper the Bookseller, it was issued in this form in the UK in August 1969, a month after Star Trek starting airing on the BBC — and three years before Corgi printed the first UK-specific editions of these Star Trek anthologies.

It looks quite different from the first Star Trek anthology, which boasted artwork by James Bama which had been commissioned to promote the TV show. Rather than commission — and have to pay for — new artwork, this volume features a photograph of what were surely considered the two leads of the series: Mr Spock and Captain Kirk (in that order). The photo is small, contained within a vertical strip of black down the centre of the otherwise white frame. The black strip includes the title “ALL NEW STAR TREK 2 adapted by James Blish”, the photo, and then the boast, 

“THE ULTIMATE TRIP! WORLDS BEYOND TIME! WORLDS BEYOND KEN! BASED ON THE EXCITING NBC-TV SERIES CREATED BY GENE RODDENBERRY”.

The back-cover blurb of the first book focused on three leading characters (Kirk, Spock and Rand), but the back cover here doesn’t name anyone:

“A GALACTIC TICKET TO INFINITE ADVENTURE! Eight journeys into the unexpected with the crew of the starship Enterprise. Travel to the unexplored reaches of outer space, to worlds where Humans are an alien race and the unusual is routine. Astonishing new worlds of strange beings, bizarre customs, unknown dangers and awesome excitement. * A world where war is fought by computers! * A world inhabited by great lizard-like creatures of conquest! * A world ravaged by a relentless plague of madness and death! * A world where life has developed beyond the need for physical bodies! * TRAVEL NOW TO THE BOLD NEW WORLDS OF TOMORROW.”

There’s a second blurb, inside the front page, largely cribbed from the first volume, but now the three leads are Kirk, Spock and Lt Uhura. The latter has usurped Yeoman Janice Rand in her shipmates’ affections but is described in almost all the same words:

“Easily the most popular member of the crew, the truly ‘out-of-this-world’ female has drawn the important assignment of scan engineer on her first mission in deep space.”

There’s no mention that she’s black, or Bantu (the word used repeatedly about her in the first book). Did the publishers fear that mentioning this, or showing the third-lead on the cover, might affect their sales?

The book is dedicated,

“To my new-found relative BARBARA BESADNY and all the other Star Trek fans who wrote to me about the first book”

In later books, Blish referred to extensive correspondence he received about Star Trek, not least once the TV series was cancelled. The first book had been dedicated to Harlan Ellison, a writer on the series, but from now on when Blish dedicated a book it was to female fans. Spock Must Die! (1970) is dedicated “to Kay Anderson”, Star Trek 4 (first published in the US in July 1971) is dedicated.

“To DONNA WOODMAN and the the other new English Star Trek fans”,

Star Trek 9 (1973) is dedicated “To Maire Steele” and Star Trek 10 (1974) “to KARIN who also wanted to set Spock to music”. It gives the impression, at least, of an active, engaged and female-led fandom.

Star Trek 2 boasts the same page count as the first volume (128pp including unnumbered pages), but comprises eight stories rather than seven. They are: Arena (12pp); A Taste of Armageddon (13pp); Tomorrow is Yesterday (15pp); Errand of Mercy (15pp); Court Martial (16pp); Operation — Annihilate! (18pp); The City on the Edge of Forever (17pp); and Space Seed (17pp). 

The original plan had been to pack eighth stories into the first volume, too, and I wonder if Blish and the publishers felt it represented better value to feature more stories. The result, of course, is that the adaptations here are even breezier than before.

The running order seems determined by ascending page count rather than broadcast order or the continuity of the TV series, such as in the use of star dates. Even so, Blish includes a few references in later stories to earlier ones (and to events in the first volume), so there’s a sense of a continuing saga. 

We gain some new information, and some corrections to statements in the first volume. We’re in the 23rd century (p. 114) not the 27th and we’re told more than once that the Enterprise can’t land on planets (not the implication in the first book). Blish also moves events of Tomorrow is Yesterday from the 1960s, as on screen, to 1970 — which he gives as the year of the first Moon landing (p. 28). The same story, but the setting bumped along so it is / was still in the near future.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (p. 1), where before the figure was a vague 400+. A quarter of the crew are female, and there are 12 ships like Enterprise in the fleet (both facts from p. 30). Warp Four is 64 times the speeds of light, or “64c” (p. 26), while,

“Warp Eight [is] two factors above maximum safe speed” and “over a hundred times the speed of light” (p. 2).

However, Warp Eight is used only in emergencies and not for long, as it would damage the ship (p. 38).

In one story, Scotty refers to the Enterprise’s protective “screens” (p. 22), but in the next story it’s the more familiar “deflector shields” (p. 31). A single star date is given in the whole book: Lt Col Ben Finney “died” in 2947.3 (p. 59).

Not everything is taken from the TV episodes, or from draft scripts containing extra or contrary details. It’s been fun to spot things that are surely all from Blish. Tomorrow is Yesterday features a character called John Christopher; here, Spock refers to the “popular author” or the same name (p. 33), whom Blish surely knew in person.

Later, in Space Seed, Kirk is annoyed at being asphyxiated twice in the same hour (p. 120), Blish rather hanging a lantern on the repetition in the TV story. He also gives Kirk’s perspective a wry humour, such as his response — in the narration but from his point of view, when Spock tries to use telepathy on a guard holding them both prisoner:

“Nothing seemed to happen for at least five centuries, or maybe six” (p. 16).

I’m sure that scholars before me have dissected these anthologies by what’s in the TV episode, what in a draft script and what Blish threw in for his own amusement. He opens City on the Edge of Forever with a seven-line footnote explaining that it draws from both TV version and draft script (p. 89), apparently the only example where he consciously mashed up the sources. 

My suspicion is that the TV episodes are riddled with continuity errors, where a fact given in one episode doesn’t quite match a fact given in another. We might not notice on first viewing, not least with a week between each episodes. But the brevity of the adaptations here, the speed we can hare through several episodes at once, means we’re more likely to pick up on this stuff. 

The most striking bits of continuity, for me, are those that overlap with the later Star Trek movies of the 1980s — the bits of Trek with which I’m most familiar. In Tomorrow is Yesterday, the suggestion that a pilot from 1970 could travel with the the Enterprise into the future is quickly dismissed as he would be,

“archaic, useless, a curiosity” (p. 35).

But that’s in no way the fate of cetologist Dr Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), who finds a useful role in the future. That’s all the more striking because that film clearly drew directly from this episode in its method of time travel by flying the Enterprise close to the Sun (p. 36).

Likewise, in Operation — Annihilate!, the Enterprise fires “two fully armed planet-wreckers” that explode with “atomic fire” and destroy a whole plant, leaving behind a nebula (p. 87). This seems to be standard if rarely used artillery on board but in another episode, The Doomsday Machine (adapted in Star Trek 3) and the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the very idea of a planet-destroying weapon is a new, horrific kind of menace.

The final story here is Space Seed, which ends with Kirk sending a gang of villains to settle a new world. He worries that this crop from this seed (his words) might one day come looking for him again, which is exactly what happens in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But in that, the villains are found dwelling on the planet’s surface in their old ship Botany Bay. Here, Kirk sends them down to the planet without their ship, and keeps Botany Bay in tow, thinking it might be of interest to historians. 

Space Seed, of course, involves villainous eugenicist megalomaniac who hails from the 1990s, here called Sibyl Khan Noonien— Blish working from draft scripts — and “dictator of his own breed” (p. 116). Our first sight of him presents an exotic mix of different racial characteristics:

“bathed in a gentle violet glow was a motionless, naked man. He was extremely handsome, and magnificently built. His face reflected the sun-ripened Aryan blood of the Northern Indian Sikhs, with just an additional suggestion on the oriental. Even in repose, his features suggested strength, intelligence, even arrogance.” (p. 108)

Here and elsewhere, what a person looks like is an indicator of their character and inner thoughts, which is all a bit racist for a story about eugenicists being bad. Blish also uses “oriental” as a synonym for “alien”:

“The Klingons were hard-faced, hard-muscled men, originally of Oriental stock” (p. 44). 

That surely implies they originated on Earth. In the next book Spock’s quarters are “simple, sparse and vaguely Oriental” (Star Trek 3, p. 106) and here, at the end of Tomorrow is Yesterday, in a sequence not in the TV version, he quotes from “Omar” (Star Trek 2, p. 39); Spock is not only familiar with the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, but on first-name terms with its author.

Dr McCoy refers to “basic humanoid stock” and to the “genetic drift” of a population of colonists who left Earth centuries previously (p. 95). He’s not exactly tactful in his choice of words: elsewhere, he refers to people afflicted by alien parasites as “vegetables” (p. 74). 

The same page features oddly vernacular phrasing from Spock, when he refers to the alien parasites:

"they wanted to brain us” (p. 74).

I also thought Kirk saying “Blooey” and referring to “Miss Uhura” (both p. 27) oddly out of character. It’s from Kirk’s perspective that we first see Edith Keeler in The City at the Edge of Forever. 

“The girl … was simply dressed and not very pretty” (p. 96)

That’s extraordinary for a character played by Joan Collins and with whom Kirk is about to fall in love. Indeed, “No woman was ever loved as much”, we’re told at the end of the story. There’s a tender moment between Spock and Kirk, when the former offers to take his grieving friend to Vulcan, where the nights are long and restful. Kirk responds that they have “all the time in the world” (p. 105).

This isn’t in the broadcast version so must come from Harlan Ellison’s original draft. (I thought, initially, that “all the time in the world” might be Blish linking these tragic events to another grieving hero, but the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was released in 1969, a year after this book. ETA Steven Flanagan points out that it is the last line of the novel, published in 1963, so perhaps Blish did have that in mind...)

Blish also says that these closing moments are the first time Spock calls Kirk “Jim” (p. 105), a key moment. It’s all a much more emotional scene between the two men than the TV version. I wonder: was Blish responding to those active female fans and what they saw — and wanted to see — in the relationship?

The adventure will continue in Star Trek 3...

Doctor Who Magazine #628

The new issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out today, featuring an exclusive extra comic and a  preview of the two episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan thought lost since 1965 which will be up on iPlayer from tomorrow. Exciting.

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.

Star Trek (1), by James Blish

Who are the leading characters in the original Star Trek? The front cover of this breezy paperback adaptation of seven early TV adventures boasts artwork showing good likenesses of two leads, Captain James Kirk and Science Officer Spock, plus four generic officers from Star Fleet. 

This is repurposed publicity art apparently by James Bama, commissioned by TV network NBC to help sell the series. (Thanks to Adam at Withnail Books for this fact!)

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 continues in Star Trek 2…

Spock Must Die!, by James Blish

A matter transporter in Star Trek works like a fax machine that destroys the original. That, effectively, is the case put by Dr Leonard McCoy at the start of this original Star Trek novel:

“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)

I don’t think Corgi published new versions of the book at this stage; instead, they seem to have distributed Bantam-published US stock with a sticker added giving a price in shillings and pence. I’ve got a copy of the first novelisation, with 50¢ printed on the cover and a sticker for 3/6 to one side (see image, right). 

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

• Published in the US by Bantam tab 50¢, January 1967
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3 shillings and sixpence, 21 April 1967 (source: Bookseller, 15 April 1967, p. 1,938).
• Issued again in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, 18 July 1969 (source: Bookseller, 12 July 1969, p. 134), to coincide with Star Trek first being aired in the UK for the first time, from Saturday 12 July.

Star Trek 2 by James Blish, comprising 8 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, February 1968
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 3.

Star Trek 3 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 50¢, April 1969
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 3/6, August 1969 (source: Bookseller, 16 August 1969, p. 1,384), alongside Star Trek 2.

Spock Must Die! by James Blish, an original novel

• Published in the UK by Bantam at 60¢, February 1970
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 4 shillings, April 1970 (source: Bookseller, 25 April 1970, p. 2,174).

Star Trek 4 by James Blish, comprising 6 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, July 1971
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, October 1971 (source: Bookseller, 23 October 1971, p. 2,076).

Star Trek 5 by James Blish, comprising 7 stories

• Published in the US by Bantam at 75¢, February 1972
• Issued in the UK by Bantam at 25p, June 1972 (source: Bookseller, 24 June 1972, p. 2,696).

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.

• See also: me on Doctor Mirabilis by James Blish (1964)

The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke — I

The Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks — their names in that order — was published in paperback by Piccolo on 20 April 1972. It was the first book with Terrance’s name on the cover, but I decided not to begin this series of posts on his 236 books with it because it’s not really his “first book”. 

Terrance certainly didn’t think so:

“The Auton Invasion [published in January 1974] was the first book of any kind I’d written, and I worked very hard on it.” TD interviewed by Peter Griffiths, “Author! Author!”, Doctor Who Magazine #273, cover date 12 January 1999, p. 46.

In April 1976, Terrance mentioned in a letter to Harvey Unna — the agent he shared with Hulke — that royalties on The Making of Doctor Who had always been split 3:1 in Hulke’s favour. But that doesn’t mean Terrance did 25% of the writing. So what did he do on this book?

Hulke mentioned in a letter while working on The Making of Doctor Who in September 1971, that Terrance was due to interview the show’s original producer, Verity Lambert, about the early days of the series. Hulke, meanwhile, interviewed Donald Wilson and corresponded with Sydney Newman and David Whitaker. (The correspondence with Newman survives, and includes a transcript of the interview with Wilson.) 

That suggests that the bulk but not all of the material here on the origins of Doctor Who was researched and compiled by Hulke. In the process, Newman’s account of first conceiving the Doctor as, “a senile old man 745 years old from an un-named planet” (Newman to Hulke, 28 September 1971) was changed to the kinder, more heroic, “Let’s make him a crotchety old man … at least 745 years old” (p. 3). We don’t know if it was Hulke or Terrance who made the substitution, but Terrance used “crotchety” again in both The Doctor Who Monster Book (1975) and the revised version of The Making of Doctor Who (1976).

I suspect that Terrance also conducted the interviews with then-current cast members Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Roger Delgado, Nicholas Courtney, Richard Franklin and John Levene, as well as with former Doctors Who William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, and with Jack Kine of BBC Visual Effects. Their contact details would have been kept on file by the Doctor Who production office, where Terrance worked as script editor, so it would have been relatively quick and easy for him to ring round — perhaps a morning’s work.

(Hulke interviewed Donald Wilson and made contact with Newman in September 1971, so Terrance probably rang Hartnell and Troughton around this time, too. One of them, surely, mooted the idea that perhaps the actors might like to reappear in the series. Then, at the end of February 1972, writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin attended studio recording of their Doctor Who story The Mutants and Terrance must have raised with them the prospect of a new adventure involving all three Doctors. On 3 March, they duly sent Terrance an outline for Deathworld, eventually made as The Three Doctors.)

As well as conducting a share of the interviews, Terrance facilitated some of Hulke’s research, such as loaning him the production office’s scripts of all previous Doctor Who stories — Terrance wrote to ask for them back on 23 November 1971, in a letter included among the PDFs on the Season 9 box-set (10-03 — Frontier in Space production documentation, p. 2). Hulke’s sometime partner Lauraine Palmeri worked through these scripts, making summaries of plots from which Hulke then wrote his in-universe narrative of all of Doctor Who so far, as recounted by the Time Lords and by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the 24-page chapter “The Travels of Doctor Who”. 

This is by far the biggest chapter in the book, accounting for just over 20% of the 115 pages. Add to that the in-universe chapters on everything we’ve learned about the Doctor (13pp), an account of his trial (4pp) and a doctor’s report on his physiology (3pp), and just over 38% of this non-fiction guide to the making of Doctor Who is, er, fiction. 

What’s more, this stuff is riddled with small errors. The first chapter quotes a line of dialogue written by David Whitaker that was never used in a broadcast episode (p. 8). The book claims that the Cybermen originate from Telos and “first appeared on television on February 11th, 1967 in a Doctor Who story set on the moon” (p. 14), entirely ignoring the existence of and events depicted in The Tenth Planet (1986). The “Travels of the TARDIS” section correctly says Cybermen feature in The Tenth Planet, but adds that events take place in the year 2000, not 1986 (p. 49). 

On 30 May 1972, fan Richard Landen wrote to Hulke and Dicks listing such errors over two pages, in the hope they could be corrected in the next edition. Terrance kept a copy of this letter and, indeed, corrections were made to the manuscript of the 1976 version. This is the first example I’ve found of fans advising Terrance on Doctor Who history and lore.

Hulke was on steadier ground writing the 19-page chapter “Diary of a Production”, since its about the making of his own story, The Sea Devils, which was in production at the time he wrote this book. He provides information not found in other sources — exactly what he was briefed to write by Terrance and producer Barry Letts, the changes made at different stages of commissioning, details of elements that were lost such as the Doctor waterskiing. He also shares passages from otherwise now-lost original storyline and scene breakdown for the story. 

It’s a shame there isn’t more of this — longer excerpts from paperwork, more detail on exactly what happened and when, with dates. There’s an interview with Jack Kine about making monsters (4pp), but it might have been nice to hear, directly, from director Michael E Briant and other members of the cast and crew about what was involved day-to-day, in the thick of production.

Instead, we get a chapter exploring some real science and philosophy suggested by Doctor Who, entitled “Could It All Be True?” (9pp), in which Hulke — an atheist — cites the books of Joshua and Ezekiel. This is followed by what’s basically a sermon, contributed by the Rev John D Beckwith AKC, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton. This has caused me a bit of a headache.

The see of Edmonton was new, having been created in 1970, with Alan Rogers appointed as first bishop. Prior to his appointment as chaplain, the Rev Beckwith, born c. 1933, had been senior tutor of Ijebu-Igbo Great School and Molusi College in Nigeria (1960-62), assistant curate of Bedale (1962-63), Mottingham (1965-69), house tutor at Eltham College (1964-69), and chaplain of St Andrew’s Gothenburg, with Halmstad and Jönköping, Sweden (1969-70) — source. 

He had worked in schools, so had some qualification for contributing to a book aimed at children. But he doesn’t seem to have made a habit of this sort of thing, such as writing for other publications or appearing in the media. Sadly, the current Bishop of Edmonton doesn’t hold records going back to 1971 (I did ask!), so I’m a bit stumped as to how Hulke might have known the Rev Beckwith. Do please write in if you know.

(I’d also be grateful for any information about Charles Bowman and Catherine Dale, who are named at the top of the page of Thanks.)

While I don’t know the connected between Hulke and Beckwith, I can guess why Hulke might have wanted a closing word from such a figure. In early 1971, Doctor Who had been widely criticised for being too scary and unsuitable for children. Then, as Barry Letts detailed in his memoir, his boss Ronnie Marsh, Head of Serials at the BBC, objected to the “blasphemous” use of a church in The Daemons, requiring last-minute rewrites to a story already in production. I think Hulke effectively tried to head off this kind of criticism by obtaining the church’s blessing for Doctor Who.

I also think he was keen to show the scientific and social value of the series because The Making of Doctor Who had originally been conceived by science-fiction writer George Hay in light of the success of two books published in the US: The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry (1968), and The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 by Jerome Agel (1970). These were both aimed at adults. Subsequent editions of the Star Trek book sought to reach more widely than fans of science-fiction by claiming to be,  

“The book on how to write for TV! … The only book of its kind! The complete history of a top TV series — how a television show is conceived, written, sold and produced.”

The book on 2001 also took a broad view, digging into the ideas in and related to the film — at once making-of and quest for meaning. Jerome Agel had form in this, having previously worked with Marshall McLuhan on both The Medium is the Message and War and Peace in the Global Village, as well as cowriting I Seem to Be a Verb with Buckminster Fuller. 

Hulke, I think, fancied some of this chin-stroking stuff. His final, short chapter, “The Shape of Things to Come”, shares some hints about that might be coming up in future stories, hinting that the Doctor might recover the use of his TARDIS. But the title of the chapter is from HG Wells, a 1933 novel — then a film — that laid out a future history spanning hundreds of years, in some ways a kind of fictional sequel to his non-fiction A Short History of the World. 

There’s something of this long view of history in Hulke’s approach to “The Travels of Doctor Who”, which is largely related by the Time Lords — who are very like the super-elites favoured by Wells.

George Hay was, like Wells, interested in the idea of using fiction as a kind of blueprint for the future. I recently wrote about the book he edited, The Disappearing Future (1970).

So all of this stuff went into the mix, and I think helps explain the structure. But the result is not very much about the actual making-of Doctor Who. The cover, showing a photo of Jon Pertwee and a Sea Devil, is from a TV story that had only finished being shown on TV on 1 April 1972; the book was published just over two weeks later. It promises Doctor Who of the immediate now but that isn’t what this book is.

It also isn’t exactly a how-to guide for wannabe writers or crew. There’s no tacit encouragement to readers to try and get into the industry, no tips for young readers who might write their own adventures. That’s notable given Hulke ran a course for writers, had edited two editions of the Writers’ Guide for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and would go on to write the hugely influential guide Writing for Television in the Seventies. 

But I’ve spoken to a whole load of people who now work in TV and publishing for whom this book lit a spark. For them, it was a blueprint for the future. Job done.

And then Terrance rewrote it, without Hulke, for Target. We’ll get into that in Part II — but maybe not for a few days as I’m off doing things this weekend.