Star Trek: Log Five (1975)
includes three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on
episodes of Star Trek: The Animated
Series: “The Ambergris Element,” “Pirates of Orion,” and “Jihad.” Here, Kirk
and Spock get turned into fish people, Spock contracts a terminal illness, and
an inter-species task force seeks to prevent a war.
Filling this many pages with stories from half-hour
teleplays has been a challenge throughout this series, but here, Foster does a
quality job of expanding and adding to these episodes in interesting ways.
Foster opens, for example, with ten pages of backstory on M’ress; while this
doesn’t make for the most fluid narrative (she doesn’t feature in any of the
stories), it’s interesting enough. And Foster’s detailed descriptions give
these exotic settings far more depth than the Filmation cartoon ever could.
The stories themselves aren’t phenomenal – “The Ambergris
Element” is meandering, yet fairly predictable, and the reveal at the end of “Jihad”
is underdeveloped, but Foster really gets the most out of his material here,
and the pacing never gets too bad.
We also get the usual silliness and un-Trek-isms from
Foster. We’ve got Scotty calling McCoy “Bones,” Spock using contractions and,
more egregiously, such imprecisions as “a minute or so,” Kirk’s got a trash can
built into his chair, and the Enterprise doesn’t
seem to have a second science officer or navigator on board.
In short, it’s nothing wonderful, but Star Trek: Log Five is certainly one of the more readable books in
the Log series.
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