Star Trek: CineMcCollough

For the second half of our season 2 third quarter shore leave, we are going to THAT one - yes, that is right, we are going to bite the bullet and set course for the center of the galaxy to encounter God, or whatever else we might find there. Today, we set course for "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier."

Released in 1989, the fifth cinematic movie in the franchise had quite a lot of momentum behind it, having completed its most successful box office movie the last time out, and trading out one series star (Nimoy...

Well, it is time for shore leave again, so we are taking our quick stop at the third Peter Pan Records audio-and-book adventure from the mid-1970s, "The Crier in Emptiness." Once again penned by Alan Dean Foster, this short Trek has the ship encounter an area of space where music pervades the entire ship at all times... what could it be? Enlisting the help of Lt. Connors, and his Edoian Elisiar (some far-our keyboard type thing) they will try to solve the mystery.

This is a nice short story, as are all the Peter...

While we here at CineMcCollough are proud of our strategy of random selection and review of the first fifty Pocket Books novels, it DOES have its drawbacks... take today's adventure, for example, where the dice of destiny selected "Time For Yesterday" by A.C. Crispin... which, while it is a sequel to the TOS third season (underrated) episode All Our Yesterdays, it is not a DIRECT sequel, because Crispin had an EARLIER novel that sets up THIS one, "Yesterday's Son" - which, because of the Dice of Death, we have not yet reviewed.

So, this...

Today's mission takes us to a novel published May 1985 and featuring something that, when I first saw it, I admit I scoffed at the idea. "Ishmael" by Barbara Hambly (who will go on to write two more Trek novels) tells the story of Spock being lost in time as a Klingon ship he has secretly infiltrated suddenly disappears - seemingly from existence - only to have Spock arrive in the Pacific Northwest of Earth in the 19th century frontier era!

It turns out that the Klingons are trying to do here what the Romulans tried...

On today's mission we really DO go where no one has gone before, as we join the crew in progress when they encounter a gravitational anomaly that, seemingly without warning, transports the Enterprise to another galaxy. In "Chain of Attack," prolific Trek author Gene DeWeese (in their first Trek novel) leads the ship to the center of a conflict that is seemingly centuries old, leaving them to try to survive, and also to try to solve the conflict once and for all, and (perhaps most importantly) to figure out how to get back home!

Click...

Our next mission finds Rob and Butch running things back to the good ol' days of the Journey to Bantam, as Bantam Books alums Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreth (of the Phoenix novel fame) try their hand at a Trek story NOT involving the baddest man in the galaxy, Omne. Instead, this March 1982 novel goes metaphysical with us, as our crew meets a group of super-powerful, otherworldly entities that may or may not be responsible for a wave of violence that seems to be threatening the existence of intelligent life in the galaxy.

If that...

Writer John Ford brings us the first of his two Pocket Books Star Trek novels today, "The Final Reflection." First published in May 1984, this is really a book-within-a-book, as it opens and closes with Captain Kirk reading a brand-new novel that is taking his crew by storm... a novel about a mythological Klingon hero, allegedly written by a famous Human ambassador as his firsthand account.

If you are reading that paragraph and wondering what it is like to read a book-within-a-book, well, it is weird. The entire story within has nothing whatsoever to do with...

Back on our "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket" mission for lucky number thirteen... the one where Spock has a great fall and suffers a traumatic brain injury. "Mindshadow" was published on January 1986 and was written by J.M. Dillard, aka Jeanne Kalogridis. It is our first time picking one of her books, but there are three in the first 50 Pocket books... and she wrote the novelizations for the next six movie adaptations following Star Trek IV.

The mystery deepens when our heroes start to wonder whether Spock's injuries are due to an accident...

For our cinematic stop on this shore leave, we go back to when Rob and Butch were high school juniors and living a state apart (after Rob moved to Wenatchee, Washington) - arguably the most successful TOS theatrical release, the 1986 trilogy-ending "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

Once again directed by Leonard Nimoy, this time he has to direct HIMSELF on screen for quite a bit of the action. And action it is, at least in terms of filmmaking, as much of this film was shot on location in and around the city of San...

For our second shore leave during our Season Two "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket" mission, we make another quick stop at the Peter Pan Records-and-Books series for the second short audio adventure "In Vino Veritas." Once again penned by Alan Dean Foster, this short adventure has Captain Kirk in negotiations for planetary mining rights with a Klingon AND a Romulan envoy... but what they did NOT expect is that there is an unexpected EXTRA negotiator for the Federation, who goes by the name of Jack Sprat - who is actually a notorious galactic trouble maker in disguise.<...

Hey, guess who's back - yep... it is the Romulans, once again. Continuing their heavy presence in our mix of "Is That a Trek in Your Pocket?" so far, this novel is brought to us by Della Van Hise, in her only Star Trek novel (though she had published under other titles) and yet blends fairly seamlessly into the other Romulan adventures we have seen thus far.

Van Hise creates a time-travel story in which the Romulan Empire has come up with a ploy to weaken the Federation sufficient to make them susceptible to invasion...

We at CineMcCollough are off on another Pocket Trek adventure, this one from February of 1988 - "The IDIC Epidemic" by Jean Lorrah. We are off to a planet where countless races work side-by-side, including Humans and Klingons. Except something is terribly wrong - a new disease is taking down the population, AND it seems to be driven by EXACTLY the same concept of 'infinite diversity in infinite combination' that the planet is built upon.

This is the first Jean Lorrah novel our Trek has taken us on, but there is one more, earlier one, awaiting...

Today's mission is a novel by one of Star Trek's most prolific novelists - Michael Jan Friedman, who has penned EIGHT TOS novels, and over 20 novels for other series (including an inexplicable TNG-X-Men crossover), all starting with this one, published April 1989.

The one thing we have REALLY been missing (while not really missing it) since the end of our Journey to Bantam has been the propensity for novelists to employ body doubles of our main heroes - recall the first THREE Bantam books, and four overall, played with the idea of duplicates. This week's mission...

Having already delved quite deeply into Romulan stories so far in the Pocket Books mission (recall that all our selections are randomly chosen from the first 50 Pocket Books novels), we once again draw a Romulan mission, and once again one written by Diane Duane, our THIRD novel so far by that author.

Today's mission is "The Romulan Way," (published August 1987) co-authored by both Diane Duane and her husband, fellow author Peter Morwood (who himself will write one of our fifty destinations on our Pocket Books mission). This book makes the fascinating decision to focus on...

From the frying pan into the ocean for this mission, as Enterprise is deployed to a diplomatic mission to Akkala - a world nearly entirely covered by oceans. Sent to help a struggling government protect itself from dissidents, our heroes uncover evidence that something might be rotten in Denmark, as it were.

Written by Howard Weinstein, who, years earlier, had become the youngest writer ever to sell a story to Star Trek (the Animated series episode "The Pirates of Orion" in 1974 at age 19). Clearly a writer with an affinity for ocean life, he even received...

Things are heating up in the galaxy in today's Pocket Books Star Trek novel, Barbara Paul's "The Three-Minute Universe" == her only Star Trek writing credit. It seems that there are inexplicable incursions of 'early universe' type space into regular space - you know, the kind just minutes after the Big Bang? Our good ship and crew are going to need to figure out what is going on and how to stop it... or, more accurately, who is behind it.

Join Lord Rob and Butch as they investigate by downloading and listening to our podcast!

Looks like this is going to be an extended shore leave from the Pocket Books missions, as Rob and Butch take CineMcCollough to the middle of the franchise's movie trilogy - Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

Released in 1984, the third cinematic adventure in the Star Trek universe was a direct sequel to the wildly popular Wrath of Khan two years earlier... in fact, we pick up literally days after the events of that movie. Spock is dead, left on the Genesis planet unbeknownst to Kirk and the surviving crew. But part of Spock...

For our first bonus episode of Season 2, we take some shore leave from our Pocket Treks to make a quick side trip to an almost-forgotten corner of 1970s Star Trek... the Peter Pan Records book-and-record adventures. There were eleven such adventures produced between 1975 and 1979 that were targeted toward young readers, featuring unknown voice actors filling in for the regular cast and producing a dramatic reading of short (10-20 minute) adventures in the Star Trek universe.

We here at CineMcCollough (Lord Rob and Butch) were each given a record album containing three such adventures, of which...

Having just posted the movie review for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan just a few days ago, today we roll and read and review the novelization of that movie, as written by Vonda N. McIntyre, who would go on to write the novelizations of Star Trek III (which will be on this list) and Star Trek IV (which will not, as it was inexplicably not assigned a number but given a separate 'bonus novel' status).

The fun thing about the novelizations of the cinematic adventures (the TMP novelization was written by the Great...

This is the first Star Trek novel I ever remember seeing in a bookstore, way back in 1981 in a new and used bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan. I was totally hooked by the Klingon battlecruiser on the cover, but, alas, I didn't have any money of my own and my parents would not buy it for me then... I eventually collected it a couple years later after moving to Idaho Falls and getting a job to pay for my own books.

Written by Robert E. Vardamann, one of two he wrote in the first two...

Happenstance has us reading the second of Diane Duane's four novels in the Pocket Books series in our first three dice-selected random choice - this time we are going full Romulan with her July 1984 novel "My Enemy, My Ally" -- a novel that finally, after almost zero signs of Romulans in the Bantam novels, our first view of the OTHER primary enemy of the Federation.

This novel finds a Romulan commander (no the other one) bucking the Empire and her duty to follow her conscience and work with arch-enemy James Kirk to stop some very...

Stop two of fifty on our quest to determine Is That a Trek in Your Pocket? (as selected by the dice of destiny) was "Corona" by Greg Bear. A 'hard science' fiction writer, this is Bear's only Star Trek novel, though he published fairly prolifically through his career, even writing a novel within Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe. Corona was first published in April 1984.

So, what kind of story does a 'hard science fiction' author to go for their one and only shot at a Star Trek novel? How about a group of protostars that have...

Now that we have completed the Journey through Bantam's 13 novels (and one non-Bantam novel) it is time to move on to our wheelhouse... the Pocket Books Star Trek novels! Rob and Butch used to ride their 10-speeds to the local mall to buy the new novel that came out every few months (there was always a little display, as Star Trek novels were big sellers with regard to paperbacks). Collecting them for all those years left us with closets and boxes and shelves FULL of them, though we've not read them for decades, in some cases.

Our second bonus episode fits perfectly with the ending of the Bantam Books and the beginning of the Pocket Books novels, as we completed our episode recordings for Bantam Books in 2022, then recorded our 40th Anniversary review of the second cinematic Star Trek adventure.

It goes without saying that "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" is a beloved movie by Star Trek fans, and is often referred to as the Star Trek movie that broke out of the Star Trek fandom to a wider audience. While the first film was a remake of a...

One last mission on our Journey to Bantam before we bring the podcast into drydock for a refit to the Pocket Books novels - and it is our second and final book by Kathleen Sky, the April 1981 release entitled "Death's Angel."

The obvious benefit of writing Star Trek stories as novels, rather than TV shows or movies, is that the author can really let their imagination run wild when it comes to settings, special effects, and especially non-human characters. This novel is a feast for the eyes, in a literary sense, in terms of the...

As we set sail for the penultimate mission on our Journey to Bantam, we come across a novel written by perhaps one of the best-known authors of early Star Trek. "The Galactic Whirlpool" was published in October of 1980, and was penned by David Gerrold, a relative unknown until he wrote the TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" - which instantly catapulted him into a select group of writers inextricably linked with Star Trek, as he went on to pen other episodes of TOS and the Animated Series.

"The Galactic Whirlpool" is Gerrold's first Star Trek...

Closing in on the end of our 14-novel Bantam Books mission, tonight's journey takes us to "Perry's Planet" - a novel written by the OTHER Haldeman, Joe's older brother Jack Haldemann II. Primarily a published author of short stories, this is the elder Haldemann's only published novel.

Published in February 1980, "Perry's Planet" uses several different story beats that will seem familiar to fans of the original Star Trek. A human colony formed by a man much too old to still be alive, an impossibly peaceful society seemingly threatened by the bloodthirsty Klingons, and a ship...

Next Bantam mission is to "Devil World," our second selection authored by Gordon Eklund, though not a sequel to his earlier work The Starless World. This volume was released in November 1979, just one month before the eagerly awaited release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Rob and Butch were unable to find any information as to whether this novel was as eagerly awaited.

The book takes our crew to the planet Heartland, where Kirk will fall in love (typical), the natives are hostile and terrifying (natch), and behind it all looms a massive, unknown intelligence...

Our next Bantam Books Star Trek novel is our first sequel novel, as the writing team of Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreth literally bring Omne back from the dead to once again challenge Kirk and Spock in their follow-up novel, "The Fate of the Phoenix," published in May of 1979.

When last we checked in with our heroes in the earlier novel (The Price of the Phoenix, Bantam Book #3, for those playing at home), they believed they had finally defeated the dangerous madman, and also had figured out what to do with a spare James Kirk...

The ninth Bantam novel excursion will take us to yet another "world" in the title, and brings us the second of two novels by Joe Haldeman (the first having been Planet of Judgment) -- but don't fear, because while this is Joe's last Bantam novel, his older brother Jack Haldeman II will bringing us another one not too long from now!

"World Without End" was published in January 1979 and takes us to something that will feel familiar to TOS fans - an artificial planet that sort of resembles a starship in some ways. However, what...

For our eighth Bantam mission, we get even more evidence about just how small and insulated the Star Trek novelist community was in the early years. "Trek to Madworld" was published January 1979, and is author Stephen Goldin's only Trek adventure for Bantam books, though years later he would write the TNG novel A Final Unity. However, Goldin is ALSO connected to Bantam through his wife, Kathleen Sky, who wrote Vulcan! and one we will see later, Death's Angel.

Trek to Madworld is a novel that introduces a concept that was at least passingly familiar to...

Just to spice things up a bit, for our first bonus episode we bring you our movie review and retrospective of what we collectively consider the most underappreciated of the Star Trek movies, the original - Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Released on December 7, 1979 (a release date it shared with another unfairly dismissed sci-fi movie, "The Black Hole", a coincidence of some scale as they are the last two big-budget movies ever to open with an overture), TMP was one of the most expensive movies ever made when it debuted, as the show was going to be brought back...

For our seventh Bantam adventure, we join the Enterprise as it explores one of science fiction's most interesting concepts - one that on-screen Star Trek would eventually bring out during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, ironically in an episode featuring a TOS character. It also introduces another author who will pen a pair of the Bantam novels.

"The Starless World" was penned by Gordon Eklund, and published in November 1978. Eklund will write one more Trek novel, also in the Bantam series, "Devil World" - yes, in addition to exclamation points, the Bantam...

If we here at CineMcCollough have learned one thing about the Bantam Books Star Trek novels so far, they really, really like their exclamation points in book titles.

Published in September 1978, Kathleen Sky's first Trek novel continues the OTHER strong theme of Bantam Books Trek novels by focusing on our favorite Vulcan... but this time is going to take us TO Vulcan. Give the people what they want, of course! We will see her again once more in the Bantam collection with "Death's Angel."

Fun note, the author actually appears on-screen...

OK - truth in advertising time. Today's Star Trek novel is NOT a "Bantam Books" novel per se - nor is it the fifth novel in the line of Star Trek novels in history... in that, today's book "Mission to Horatius" is, by most reckonings, the FIRST Star Trek novel, except that it is ostensibly a children's novel.

Published while the original Star Trek series was still on the air in 1968 (!!!), Mission to Horatius was written by Mack Reynolds and put out by Whitman Publishing before being re-released decades later in 1996 by Pocket Books.
<...

Published just a month after its predecessor novel, "Planet of Judgment" is the first of two novels within the Bantam series by established sci-fi writer Joe Haldeman, best known for his Forever War series for which he won both a Nebula and a Hugo award. As such, the Bantam publishers approached him for a two-novel deal, with the second coming two years later.

In this book our good ship and crew encounter an 'anomaly' - a rogue planet that is orbited by a miniature black hole that is either a trap, or a first strike...

Our third mission among the Bantam Books Star Trek novels is brought to us by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreth, their first of two efforts for Bantam, AND they will be back for Three Pocket Books novels. It is a book that is far more complex, dense, and finely written than the two we have done so far, and also is the one that has a direct sequel within the Bantam Books line - "The Price of the Phoenix" published in July 1977.

This novel once again is going to focus heavily upon Spock - only...

The second Star Trek novel for an adult audience was, not surprisingly, also a Spock-centric story entitled "Spock, Messiah!" Co-authored by Theodore R. Cogswell and Charles A. Spano, Jr, the book was once again capitalizing off of Star Trek's iconic alien first officer. It was published over SIX YEARS after the first Bantam novel, so the fandom had only continued to grow and was eagerly awaiting more stories. Is Spock leading a double life as a planetary despot? Join Rob and Butch as they investigate.

The first "official" Star Trek novel ever published was "Spock Must Die!" in February 1970. Written by author James Blish, who had already begun the process of novelizing and publishing volumes of Star Trek Original Series episodes, this was Blish's first published Star Trek story not based on broadcasted material, but developed and written by Blish himself. It is often a feature of many "best-of" lists of Star Trek novels, but what do Butch and Rob think? Take a listen and find out, but SPOILERS if you have not read the novel.

Hosts "Lord" Rob McCollough and Patrick "Butch" Brennan give an introduction to Treks Through TOS - their background as Star Trek fans, and what to expect from the movie, novel, and (eventually) TOS episode reviews.