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09/07/2001 Archived Entry: "Star Trek"

Some of the first science fiction that I read was made up by those Star Trek fiction books that you can see neatly lined up in any large bookstore. I probably read them mostly when I was 11-14, back when I didn't know Asimov from Clarke and Star Trek was the only real point of reference I had for, what seemed to me at the time, good science fiction.

For the most part, Star Trek fiction is pretty bland derivative stuff, limited by the fact that it features all of the same characters on the same few ships with the same reset button that occurs at the end of each novel. See, the authors aren't allowed to kill off any main characters or else it wouldn't agree with the rest of the Star Trek universe. They aren't stopped from giving their starships magical powers - as long as they disappear in an equally magical way before the end of the novel.

I did read quite an interesting Star Trek novel once involving time travel which I thought had some clever ideas. Imagine my annoyance when I read the exact same ideas in an Isaac Asimov novel a couple of years later (The End of Eternity). Talk about derivative.

I suppose I should have listened to my friend Colin - "Any book with a number on its spine should be avoided at all costs. The higher the number, the further away you should be." By that rationale, I should have a 100m exclusion zone around any Star Trek book, but to be entirely fair there are some exceptions to this. I have, on occasion, read some adequate and even innovative Star Trek novels which generally excel by dint of their skirting the edge of the 'Star Trek book rules'. They are unfortunately few and far between, and really not worth looking out for when there are so many other decent novels out there.

The reason I bring all of this up is because I've been following the Virtual Voyager Season 8 project recently. I feel like I should be ashamed of saying that I'm reading Voyager-based fanfic, when the TV series itself was so utterly disappointing, but VVS8 does a better than average job of writing an intelligent and coherent series of stories set after then end of Voyager on TV (no, it's not about when they get home to Earth. There is, of course, a twist.) Probably the reason I like it is because the entire premise of VVS8 is based on the fact that Voyager Season 7 was a complete piece of crap and in the eyes of the VVS8 authors, deserved to be undone to the fullest extent.