{2\/5} “Perhaps you can learn to live with two Spocks, but it would be somewhat painful for me. If you would imagine what it would be like to have a second James T. Kirk abroad in the universe, you will readily understand why.”<\/p>\n
Star Trek: Spock Must Die!<\/strong> by James Blish, published in 1970<\/p>\n The Klingons have declared war on the Federation. Captain James T. Kirk decides to head to Organia to see what has happened to the energy beings who previously stopped a war. Scotty comes up with a modification to the transporter that will duplicate the person and transport the duplicate. Spock enters the transporter, and two Spocks emerge.<\/p>\n This is probably the worst Star Trek<\/strong> novel I’ve read — certainly the worst in decades. It’s one of the earliest TOS<\/strong> novels. It wouldn’t have been this bad in the 1980s, as they had better editors (although I haven’t read the everyone-knows-it’s-bad Shadow Lord<\/strong>).<\/p>\n The premise is worthy of an episode, but I have come to expect better from a novel. The characters don’t always sound like themselves. Some paragraphs here and there are jarring, and almost take you right out of the story.<\/p>\n There are mistakes in logic, science, and consistency. For example, Kirk references Abbott and Costello in the middle of a serious conversation. Kirk keeps calling McCoy “Doc.” Even more seriously, they’re much too happy to kill Klingons.<\/p>\n I was disappointed that the replicate was a “mirror image.” It would have been more interesting if he’d been the same.<\/p>\n It’s a short novel — I wouldn’t have finished it if it were longer. But there are dozens of better TOS<\/strong> novels than this one. If someone on the internet tells you this is one of the best TOS<\/strong> novels, don’t trust their judgement.<\/p>\n This is the 2nd novel I’ve read by Blish. I read A Case of Conscience<\/strong> many years ago. He also wrote the novelizations of the TOS<\/strong> episodes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {2\/5} “Perhaps you can learn to live with two Spocks, but it would be somewhat painful for me. If you would imagine what it would be like to have a second James T. Kirk abroad in the universe, you will readily understand why.” Star Trek: Spock Must Die! by James Blish, published in 1970 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8,59],"class_list":["post-17976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17976"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17978,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976\/revisions\/17978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}