Beach Reading IV

[daddytodd]

Finished Kirsten Beyer's "Full Circle" in about 3 days. As you probably know, it was originally plotted as 2 separate novels, but they were combined and truncated as a single thick novel.

Well, it still reads like 2 novels under a single cover. The second, shorter, novel is by far the more interesting of the two (at least for me.) The first "book" was a somewhat "by-the-numbers" attempt to clean up plot threads left dangling by Christie Golden, former writer of the Voyager post-finale novels. That takes 313 pages.

Once the preliminaries were out of the way, the book really picks up for the remaining 248 pages. I read this section in a single sitting (well, I might've gotten up a time or two to take a dip in the emerald waters of Cupecoy beach, but you get the idea.)

There was some technobabble science in the book that made my eyes bug out -- pg 172-173 were egregious enough to mark. Beyer doesn't seem to have a firm grasp of how evolution works -- "The bottom line is," Kaz went on, "this isn't a mutation at all." "It's evolution," Cambridge said softly.

Uh, yeah, OK. But "evolution" is nothing more than a long series of MUTATIONS passed down from parent to child. Hitting that particular exchange made me put the book away in disgust for the rest of the day. I don't expect scientific rigor -- this is STAR TREK, after all. But that was pretty embarrassing. Even to a non-scientist like myself.

I was expecting to like this book more than I did. Frankly, it felt like lots of foreplay, without ever getting to the meat of the story. I suppose that's coming on the next book -- in October!

On Sunday I read the Harlan Ellison teleplay "Phoenix Without Ashes." It's the pilot for the short-lived Canadian series "The Starlost," from 1973-74. The script was extensively rewritten by the show's producers before it was shot. I watched the episode when it was first aired. I was only 13, but even at that tender age I knew shit when I saw it. It was abysmal. I thought I'd give Ellison's version a try, so I picked up a copy of an anthology from 1976 ("Faster Than Light," edited by Dann & Zebrowski) that contained the original version of the teleplay.

Well, I have to say that Harlan's version doesn't strike me as being any kind of lost gem. It was undeniably better than what was shot and aired (as "Voyage of Discovery.") But it's still pretty dire. Very old fashioned, full of impossible coincidences and multiple deuses ex machina to propel the plot. Still, it might be fun for someone to make a "fan film" of this script -- except Ellison would sue the pants off anybody that tried. Oh, and it's not particularly original. A reasonable case could be made that Ellison copped the basic idea from "For the World is Hollow..."

And speaking of Ellison and allegations of plagiarism... I've been reading Crucible: McCoy: Provenance of Shadows for the past two days. This is brilliant work, and I'm only a little past the halfway point. David R. George III has really captured a vibe. I'm still wondering what the hell is happening to the Bones stuck in the 1930's, but dammit, I really care about him and what's happening around him. The scene where McCoy realizes he's been stuck for a year was almost breathtakingly sad. I've been tempted to look ahead and see how it ends, but I've been restraining myself.

George used the episode "City on the Edge of Forever" as a point of departure, but has created a thrilling novel that weaves a story touching on "canonical" Trek events from at least a half-dozen episodes -- and I'm only halfway through. I can't wait to see what he does with the rest of the book.

Comments

[urbear]

Harlan wasn't the only pro who was burned by that miserable piece of crap (and I can say "crap" with some authority; I grew up in Canada, and watched in disbelief as this mess limped across my TV screen). Ben Bova was hired as a science advisor for the series, but quit in frustration after the first episode aired. He later published a very thinly disguised roman à clef called The Starcrossed, dedicated to "Cordwainer Bird" (Harlan Ellison's well known this-is-a-piece-of-crap pseudonym, which he insisted on using in the show's credits).

[2ndbanana.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'm glad I'm not the only one who was underwhelmed by "Phoenix Without Ashes." For all the bitching Mr. Ellison has done, I was expecting some sort of masterpiece. It was okay. I do still think that a GREAT tv show could be made with the concept. But that piece of crap from the 70's certainly wasn't it. There's a rumor that some of the scripts were written by Canadian High School students. I don't believe it's true, but after watching the series again, it's not all that far-fetched. I wish someone would do a "Battlestar Galactica" type update of the show. I actually own three different sets of the series on DVD. A couple of years ago, the only official DVD's you could get were a set of "movies" they made by sticking pairs of episodes together. The set only covered ten of the original sixteen episodes, and they were cut up a bit. So I bought a poor quality bootleg set online so I could see the remaining six episodes. A few months ago, I ran across an official release of the ENTIRE series. I actually did a little dance in Fry's. Sure, the show was awful. But it was a big part of my childhood. It seemed much cooler when I was eight years old. That and Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's "UFO" were my introduction to Science Fiction.