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Early Star Trek Novels and Comics
Star Trek’s original seventy-nine episodes simply weren’t enough. Although fans gobbled up those shows in weekly—or, in some markets, nightly—reruns, they remained ravenous for new adventures starring their beloved characters. Until the late 1970s, however, such stories remained in short supply. And strangely, considering that the program’s primary audience ranged in age from the late teens to the early thirties, most of the authorized Trek material available was aimed at kids: comics, a children’s “chapter book,” the Saturday morning cartoon series, and book-and-record sets. To sate their gnawing hunger for stories aimed at grown-ups, fans began writing their own Trek tales and publishing them in a multitude of unauthorized, amateur fanzines. The robust black market for these often crude publications indicated a ready audience for official, licensed Star Trek fiction. In the final years of the decade, this audience would be served at last.
Gold Key Comics (1967–79)
The first authorized Star Trek fiction arrived in comic book form from Western Publishing’s Gold Key imprint. It was a rocky start.
The earliest Gold Key comics, from 1967, were illustrated by Italian artist Alberto Giolitti, who had never seen the show and drew the characters, spacecraft, and props based on publicity photos. Predictably, his likenesses of the characters were poor. The title’s first writer, Arnold Drake, had created the offbeat superheroes the Doom Patrol and Deadman for DC Comics. He was talented and imaginative, but his stories often diverged drastically from the tenets of the television show. In the first issue, for instance, Kirk, McCoy, and Yeoman Rand beam down to a world where carnivorous plants are the highest life form; animals of all species are rounded up like cattle to serve as food for the plant beings. After the landing party narrowly escapes, Kirks makes the shocking decision to obliterate all life on the planet before leaving orbit! In addition to this jaw-dropping violation of the Prime Directive (not to mention human decency), the story contains less egregious but still irksome lapses (the characters use improper Treknological jargon, narration states that the Enterprise has a crew of “thousands,” etc.). Also, in this and other early Gold Key yarns, Spock is left in command of the ship while Kirk leads the landing party, rendering the show’s most popular character secondary to the plot.
Fortunately, the quality of the comic books improved dramatically over time, as new writers (including George Kashdan and Len Wein) and a new artist (American Al McWilliams), who were more familiar with the source material, took over. Eventually, the comics began including stories that tied in directly with episodes of the TV series. Issue 49, cover-dated November 1977, included a story called “A Warp in Space.” This sequel to “Metamorphosis,” written by Kashdan and drawn by McWilliams, involved the Companion and a 200-year-old Zefram Cochrane, kept alive by his extraterrestrial lover. Issue 56, dated October 1978, featured a tale titled “No Time Like the Past.” Also by Kashdan and McWilliams, this sequel to “The City on the Edge of Forever” dealt with a deposed twenty-third-century dictator who uses the Guardian of Forever to escape into ancient times and help Hannibal defeat the Roman Empire. Gold Key’s Star Trek series continued for sixty-one issues until Marvel outbid the company for the rights to the property in 1979. The final Gold Key issue, dated March 1979, included a story involving interstellar con man Harry Mudd. Marvel published only eighteen issues of Star Trek before canceling the title in 1981 due to disappointing sales. DC took over the comic book license in 1984, and Trek comics have remained active ever since, licensed to several different publishers over the years.
Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds (1968)
Cover of the 1996 replica edition of Mission to Horatius, the first Star Trek novel ever published.
Despite the fact that this first Star Trek novel targeted young readers, it ranks among the most satisfying of its era, vividly recreating the experience of a classic Trek episode—or, rather, a string of episodes. The book was a spin-off from the Gold Key comic book series, issued by Western Publishing under its Whitman Books imprint. Author Mack Reynolds, either upon instruction from creator-producer Gene Roddenberry or by fortuitous coincidence, delivered a story clearly modeled after Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, one of Roddenberry’s primary inspirations for Star Trek.
The Enterprise travels to the fringes of Federation territory to answer a distress call from the distant Horatius system, home to three Class M (Earthlike) planets settled a century earlier by anti-Federation dissidents. Like Gulliver, Captain Kirk and company visit a series of strange lands that parallel (and parody) various political systems and worldviews. Residents of the first planet, settled by colonists with a Luddite antitechnology bent, live in caves like “savages”; the people of the second world, a religious enclave, have been subjugated by a repressive theocracy (whose leaders pacify the masses with LSD!); citizens of the third planet labor under the boot-heel of a Hitlerlike dictator. Undeterred by the Prime Directive, the Enterprise crew quickly sets about putting things right on all three Horatian worlds. In addition to its Swiftian overtones, Mission to Horatius, the only original Star Trek novel published while the program remained in production, contains story elements found in classic episodes such as “Return of the Archons,” “Bread and Circuses,” “Patterns of Force,” and “The Tholian Web.” It’s a lively pastiche, with characters, settings, and Treknological jargon that ring true to the TV show. Only the book’s poorly rendered illustrations disappoint.
Originally published in hardcover, Mission to Horatius went out of print when Star Trek was cancelled in 1969. But in 1996 Pocket Books issued a facsimile edition, billed as “The Lost Star Trek Novel,” which remains easily available. Original Whitman editions of the book are now prized collector’s items.
Spock Must Die! by James Blish (1970)
In 1967, decorated British science fiction author James Blish undertook a long-running series of paperback adaptations of Trek teleplays for Bantam Books. These paperbacks, published under the generic title Star Trek and later reprinted in the four-volume Star Trek Reader, together sold millions of copies. Blish was able to retire from other writing and live off the royalties. The author’s crisply written novelizations remain of interest to diehard fans because they were based on early scripts rather than the finalized versions and often feature subtle (or sometimes significant) deviations from the aired episodes. Nevertheless, by 1970, after adapting three volumes’ worth of Star Trek episodes, Blish was growing restless and wanted to try writing an original Trek story.
The result was Spock Must Die!, the first original Trek novel created for grown-ups. Although Blish’s credentials were impeccable (his novel A Case of Conscience won a 1959 Hugo Award), his results were disappointing. Surprisingly, given his apparent familiarity with the idiom, the author gets a number of things wrong. Some of the discrepancies, like inaccurate Treknospeak, may be considered minor, but others are more troublesome. Blish struggles to find the voices of Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Scotty, who simply do not speak or act like themselves in Spock Must Die! The book is static and talky, full of protracted philosophical discussions, with a plotline mostly rehashed from Richard Matheson’s teleplay “The Enemy Within.” In that episode, a transporter accident produces a duplicate Captain Kirk; in Spock Must Die!, a similar mishap creates an evil twin of Mr. Spock. The story also functions as a sequel to screenwriter Gene Coon’s “Errand of Mercy,” with the Klingons mobilizing for a full-scale war against the Federation.
Even though Spock Must Die! sold well, Blish never attempted another Trek novel. He penned another nine volumes of episode adaptations before dying of throat cancer in 1975. His widow, author Judith Ann Lawrence, completed the final volume in the series and wrote Mudd’s Angels (1978), which featured novelizations of the two Harry Mudd episodes, along with a new Mudd novella written by Lawrence. She captured the voices of the characters more accurately than her husband in her tale about Mudd’s plot to trade android wives for dilithium crystals, cornering the galactic market for this vital commodity. Meanwhile, Alan Dean Foster penned a similar series of adaptations based on animated Star Trek episodes, known as the Star Trek Log series, which was published by Ballantine Books from 1974 to ’78. And in 1977 and ’78, Bantam published twelve “Fotonovels”—picture books that told the story of a classic episode through a series of stills laid out in comic book format with dialogue delivered via word balloons.
Peter Pan Records (1975–79)
Sleeve for the first of Peter Pan Records’ many Star Trek story albums.
Meanwhile, licensees continued to churn out products aimed at kids. Those companies included Peter Pan Records, which specialized in music and spoken-word recordings for children. Peter Pan’s most popular products were book-and-record sets that paired a comic book with a 45 rpm record that “read” the story for youngsters, who were prompted to turn the page at the sound of a bell. Narration and character voices were supplied by the company’s in-house repertory, billed as The Peter Pan Players. During the 1970s, Peter Pan’s Power Records imprint released book-and-record sets, as well as long-playing albums without accompanying storybooks, featuring Marvel and DC Comics super heroes and film and television properties like The Six Million Dollar Man, Planet of the Apes, Space: 1999, and Star Trek.
The Trek tales were written by sci-fi specialist Alan Dean Foster during the same period when he was writing the Star Trek Log novelizations. His audio plays, which ran from twelve to sixteen minutes in length, incorporated elements from both the live-action and animated series. The cast of characters included Ensign Chekov, who had been omitted from the cartoon show. Although Foster’s plots were juvenile, a few included amusing elements: In “In Vino Veritas,” a diplomatic summit between the Federation and the Klingon and Romulan Empires breaks down when someone spikes the ambassadors’ drinks with truth serum; in “Starve a Fleaver,” the crew is paralyzed with giddiness after becoming infested with seemingly indestructible flea-like symbiotes that feed off happiness; and in “Dinosaur Planet,” Kirk and Spock meet a race of intelligent tyrannosauruses.
Illustrators Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, and Russ Heath drew the accompanying comics. For the most part, the likenesses of the characters were very good, but there were some egregious lapses. In the first four releases, Sulu is depicted as an African American man in a blue tunic and Uhura as a blond Caucasian woman. In a later comic, the Romulans look like green-skinned wood sprites. In all, Peter Pan produced eleven original Star Trek audio plays, some of those featured in 45 rpm book-and-record sets, and others available only via the company’s LPs, which collected the book-and-record stories and featured additional original content. The company recycled these eleven stories many times in various combinations, issuing a total of twenty-three separate Star Trek records.
Star Trek: The New Voyages Edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (1976)
Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s Star Trek: The New Voyages marked a turning point in the emerging literary franchise.
After Spock Must Die!, no new Trek novels appeared for six years, but nonfiction books about Star Trek proliferated. Ballantine Books published David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek (1973), the first serious evaluation of “The Show the Network Could Not Kill!,” along with Gerrold’s The Trouble with Tribbles (also 1973), a behind-the-scenes account of the making of the classic episode. Other Ballantine books included The Star Trek Blueprints and The Starfleet Technical Manual (both 1975), and The Starfleet Medical Reference (1977), presenting schematics for the Enterprise and an “instruction manual” for phasers, tricorders, twenty-third-century medical equipment, and other gadgets; Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance (1976), which reprinted the original show “Bible” and offered the first official episode guide; and Trek or Treat (1977), which reprinted stills from the TV show with humorous captions and word balloons. The Making of Star Trek, written by Stephen E. Whitfield (cocredited with Roddenberry), first published in 1968 while the show was still on the air, also remained in print. And Anima Press published Karen Blair’s Meaning in Star Trek, the first book to explore the show’s philosophical elements. The mania for printable Trek material reached a kind of zenith in 1977 with Ballantine’s publication of Letters to Star Trek. This book was just what it sounds like, a collection of creator-producer Gene Roddenberry’s fan mail, assembled by his secretary, Susan Sackett, with commentary (ranging from patient explanations to sarcastic wisecracks) by Sackett and a brief introduction from Roddenberry.
Meanwhile, Bantam kept churning out the Blish episode novelizations and published a nonfiction entry of its own, Star Trek Lives! by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, the first book to try to explain the cult appeal of the series. Acclaimed science fiction author Frederik Pohl, who would publish his Hugo-winning novel Gateway in 1977, was overseeing Bantam’s Star Trek line. In 1976, Marshak (who knew Pohl from her coauthorship of Star Trek Lives!) and friend Myrna Culbreath approached the editor to lobby for the publication of more original Trek fiction. To test the waters, they proposed what must have seemed like a radical idea: an authorized, professionally published collection of fan-written Trek stories. After careful consideration, Pohl gave Marshak and Culbreath the go-ahead to assemble the collection and talked Roddenberry into writing a forward. Marshak and Culbreath’s resulting compilation featured stories that focused on individual members of the Enterprise crew—Spock, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, and Chapel—with introductions to their character’s story from Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. A story featuring Chekov, with an intro by Walter Koenig, was cut when the manuscript ran long.
The stories do not read like the work of unpublished amateurs; the best of them are superior to some later Trek tales penned by professional authors. This is a tribute to the judicious work of editors Marshak and Culbreath. “We were collecting, editing, and sometimes, at the author’s requests, extensively cutting or partly rewriting some stories,” the editors told Jeff Ayers in his book Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion. “Our judgment was vindicated when Star Trek: The New Voyages became one of the most beloved books of Trek fiction.” Released in March 1976, it also became a mass market best-seller and proved definitively that readers craved new Trek fiction. A sequel, Star Trek: The New Voyages 2, followed in 1978. The fan-created Internet series Star Trek: New Voyages was named in honor of Marshak and Culbreath’s groundbreaking collection, the first ever professional publication of fan-written fiction.
The Bantam Novels (1976–81)
Even before the breakout success of The New Voyages, Pohl was making tentative plans to launch the Star Trek literary franchise in earnest with a series of six original novels. For the most part, Pohl commissioned manuscripts from experienced, bankable sci-fi authors such as Joe Haldeman, whose 1974 novel The Forever War won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and Gordon Eklund, a Nebula laureate in 1975 for his novella “If the Stars Are Gods.” But he also purchased a novel by Marshak and Culbreath, who were rapidly becoming fan favorites themselves. The initial wave of six paperbacks—Spock, Messiah! (September 1976) by Theodore Cogswell and Charles A. Spano Jr., Marshak and Culbreath’s The Price of the Phoenix (July 1977), Haldeman’s Planet of Judgment (August 1977), Vulcan! (September 1977) by Kathleen Sky, Eklund’s The Starless World (November 1978), and Stephen Goldin’s Trek to Madworld (January 1979)—sold out their initial print runs of up to a quarter-million copies and went into second printings almost immediately.
The quality of these novels varied considerably. The best of the lot was Planet of Judgment, which found an Enterprise away team trapped on a hostile world where Starfleet technology doesn’t work. Haldeman’s no-nonsense brand of character-driven military SF perfectly suited Star Trek. The Price of the Phoenix, in which a shadowy alien offers to return the deceased Captain Kirk to life in exchange for Spock’s soul, was an intriguing entry, despite Marshak and Culbreath’s tendency to interrupt the narrative for philosophical debates. Cogswell and Spano’s Spock, Messiah!, on the other hand, seemed like a random science fiction novel with Trek characters shoehorned in. Notably, however, this book featured a story element that figured prominently in James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar. Eklund’s The Starless World begins well, with the Enterprise trapped in a “Dyson sphere” (a giant artificial construct that surrounds a star), but suffers from a groan-inducing, literal deus ex machina finale.
Based on the strong sales of these titles, Bantam released seven more Star Trek novels over the next three years, including second efforts from Haldeman (World Without End, 1979), Marshak and Culbreath (The Fate of the Phoenix, 1979), and Sky (Death’s Angel, 1981). The later Bantam releases also included The Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold. Sky’s first Trek novel, Vulcan!, was adapted from a scenario the author had created for the show’s never-realized fourth season. The Bantam novels proved so popular—and so profitable—that when the company’s license ran out in the early 1980s, Pocket Books (a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures) assumed control of the literary franchise and has published nearly every authorized work of Star Trek fiction in the decades since.
Throughout the 1970s and early ’80s Roddenberry, preoccupied with numerous other projects, was dismissive of the Star Trek comic books and paid little attention to the proliferation of Trek novels. That changed in 1985 when Pocket Books published Della Van Hise’s novel Killing Time, which suggested a homoerotic undercurrent in the relationship between Kirk and Spock. (Stories depicting this idea in a far more graphic manner comprise an entire subgenre of fan fiction.) Roddenberry, tipped off by irate letters from fans, went ballistic (or perhaps went photon?). Killing Time was recalled, and a new edition was subsequently printed that contained more than fifty alterations from the original version. From that point on, the Great Bird of the Galaxy (and ultimate arbiter of what was and wasn’t Trek) began to personally review every new Star Trek story, a task he despised. Eventually he hired an assistant, Richard Arnold, to help monitor the novels (which Roddenberry habitually referred to as “the damn books”) and other licensed Trek tie-ins to make sure they conformed to the established format, characterizations, historical “facts,” and guiding philosophy of the franchise. After Roddenberry’s death in 1991, final editorial decisions regarding all Star Trek literature reverted to executives at Paramount Pictures and Pocket Books.
Since the humble origins of the Star Trek literary franchise in the late 1960s, nearly 600 original Trek novels and short story collections have been published. These include lines based on all the subsequent sequel and prequel TV series, as well as newly created lines featuring original characters and delving into previously unexplored aspects of the Trek universe, such as the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series. Additionally, more than 400 issues of Star Trek comic books have seen print, as well two as newspaper strips (a British series that ran weekly from 1969 to 1973 and an American strip that ran daily from December 2, 1979, until December 3, 1983). Given the spotty nature of much Trek literature, especially during its early years, the canon-worthiness of story elements originating from the novels and comics remains dubious. Occasionally, however, some “facts” established in these stories—such as Lieutenant Sulu’s first name, Hikaru, revealed in Vonda McIntyre’s 1981 novel The Entropy Effect—have been “canonized” by their use in later films and TV shows. In terms of sheer volume, however, the amount of printed Star Trek material now outweighs the 725 television episodes and eleven feature films so far produced.