Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for this bright, sunny, hot, Friday. I've got a quick post for you today. I'm going over the first Star Trek novels I ever got when I was a kid. There's six in total and all of them are from the mid 80's to early 90's. I also didn't get them in publication order, so the first book that I got was a TOS novel that was published between two other TOS novels. So let's get into it.
The first Star Trek novel I ever got was actually the audiobook on cassette version of the 1989 novel, The Kobayashi Maru by Julia Ecklar, narrated by James Doohan. Of all the books on this list, this is the only one I actually still have today. It's really weird hearing James Doohan voice Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov being that he played Scotty, who he also voices in this audiobook, on TOS, in the original six TOS movies, in an episode of TNG, and the first TNG movie. But, he does a decent enough job of it. I got this book on tape in 1992 as part of a larger collection of Star Trek merchandise from Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura on TOS and the six original TOS movies) when she was in town for a Star Trek convention, and came to visit me in the hospital because I couldn't go to the convention. I've listened to it a few times since then, and I really enjoy it.
The next book was #23 in the TNG book series, War Drums by John Vornholt. Unlike The Kobayashi Maru, I don't actually remember who I got the book from. It may have been among the stuff I got from the cast of TNG when I visited the set in January, 1993, or it may have been one my parents owned, as they also had paperback edition of Imzadi by Peter David, which they eventually gave to me once I began amassing a bigger Star Trek book collection in my teenage years in the early to mid 2000s. I just remember that it sat in the stereo cabinet that my parents had given to me to use for my Star Trek collectibles, including my Star Trek reference books, once we moved to the house they owned from 1997 to 2016. I actually don't remember anything about the plot of this book, I just know that it was a Worf centric one.
Next, I got the 1993 young reader, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Starfleet Academy novel, Worf's First Adventure, the first book in the series, by Peter David. Similar to popular series like Goosebumps, Animorphs, Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear, and The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids, this series was aimed at a younger audience than the regular Star Trek novels were. I'll talk more indepth about this series another time, but I wanted to mention it here, since it was one of my first Star Trek novels.
Next is the 23rd book in the TOS book series published by Pocket Books, Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly and published in 1985. If you're wondering why her name is so familiar, it's because Barbara Hambly wrote two Star Wars novels in the 90's, Children of the Jedi, one of the more infamous books of the Bantam era Star Wars novels, and Planet of Twilight, which is the third and final book in the informal trilogy of novels that also included the aforementioned Children of the Jedi, as well as Darksaber by Kevin J. Anderson. I don't remember much about this book, so I looked it up on Memory Alpha, the Star Trek fandom wiki. Apparently it's a time travel story where, thanks to the Klingons, Spock is sent to another show called Here Come the Brides, which aired for two seasons on ABC from 1968 to 1970, and was set in 1860s Seattle. So Kirk, McCoy, and Maria Kellog, the commanding officer of Starbase 12 (and not from the TV show), have to go back to the 1860s to get Spock back. Yeah, it's books like this that reminds me why it was a good idea to make Star Trek novels non-canon to the movies and TV shows, because crossovers like this are really out of place...of course Worf and the Enterprise-D made an appearance in the 1983 series, Webster, in the 1989 series finale, "Webtrek", so I guess crossovers like the one in this book aren't unprecedented, but it smells of fan fiction because apparently Han Solo from Star Wars, Apollo and Starbuck from the original Battlestar Galactica, two characters from the TV series, Bonanza, a character from the TV series, Maverick, and a character from Have Gun - Will Travel all make appearances throughout the book as well. Paramount was still a bit TOO loose with their rules about Star Trek merchandise, including novels and comics, ESPECIALLY novels and comics. I don't even remember where I got it or who gave it to me. I remember not liking it though and only reading this book once, maybe twice, while I still owned it. I was glad to get rid of it.
These last two I'm putting together because I actually got them at the same time as my grandparents got them for me at a garage sale in either 1997 or 1998. I think it was 1998, because I don't remember having them during the January 1998 ice storm that we got in Ontario, Quebec, and in the northern United States, but I had them by the time I began starting my Star Wars book collection in 2000. While I also don't have these books in my collection anymore, I remember reading both of them multiple times between when I got them to when I got rid of my then gargantuan Star Trek book collection. The books in question are the 61st book in the TOS series, Sanctuary by John Vornholt, and the 24th book in the TNG series, Nightshade, by Laurell K. Hamilton. Sanctuary had Kirk, Spock, and McCoy chase a wanted criminal down to a planet, where nobody is allowed to leave once they're there. Nightshade had Captain Picard, Lieutenant Worf, and Counselor Troi on a diplomatic mission on a planet called Oriana, when Picard is accused of murder, leaving Worf and Troi to discover who was really responsible for the crime that Picard is accused of. And, like with many of these novels, Riker is forced to divert the Enterprise on an urgent mission, so Worf and Troi are on their own in this one.
From 2006 to 2010, Pocket Books reprinted a handful of the more popular Star Trek novels. The reprints were mostly TOS novels that Pocket was reprinting to celebrate Star Trek's 40th Anniversary in 2006, but Nightshade got a new edition on September 28th, 2010, which just happened to be the 23rd Anniversary of the first airing of TNG's pilot episode, "Encounter at Farpoint". While the book is the 24th book in the numbered series of TNG novels, the reprint's cover fits in with the style used for the TNG novels published in 2005, onward, and the numbering isn't mentioned anywhere on the cover. I'll do a blog post about Star Trek novels as a whole some other time.
And that's it for this week here at the Geek Cave. I haven't quite decided what I'm doing for my Star Wars and Star Trek posts for next week yet, but in my more generic My 90's and Early 2000's Experience series that I do on Mondays, I'm going to be talking about TV shows on VHS because I'm joining the awesome hosts of the VHS Club Video Podcast, live, on Thursday night at 9 to talk about the history of VHS and our own personal histories with VHS, and while TV shows on VHS is a topic I'll be mentioning in the episode, I want to go more indepth with it here on the blog prior to my appearance on the podcast. So join me here for that on Monday, and then join me over on the podcast on YouTube on Thursday night at 9, or watch it on YouTube after the fact, or listen to the episode on whatever podcast platform you use, as they drop the audio version on Fridays as well. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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