Introduction

Star Trek turns 40 years old this very day, and in total we have seen over 700 episodes and 10 movies. Star Trek was born on the television and thrived on the big screen, but as we speak there are no Star Trek TV episodes in production after a straight run of nearly 20 years, and the only movie in production is in its earliest stages. Star Trek is not dormant, however - far from it. In fact, between now and the end of 2007 we are due to receive over 50 adventures, spanning the Star Trek universe. Books... fiction... that is where the heart of Star Trek currently beats.

The Original Series episodes were all novelized, a process which continued well after the cancellation of the series. The really groundbreaking original work, however, began with the perhaps awkwardly-named "Spock Must Die!", written by James Blish and published in 1970. The story was true Original Series stuff, featuring two Mr. Spocks, one of whom was evil. Cue some difficult decision making...

The original books were published by Bantam Books from the late 1960s until 1979, when the rights to publish Star Trek fiction were given to Pocket Books. Since the first Star Trek novels began to appear there have been scores upon scores of Star Trek novels, some good, some not quite so good, but all contributing to expand the universe created by Gene Roddenberry that is now entering its fifth decade.

The Early Years

The first Star Trek novels, mostly published by Bantam until 1979, existed in a completely different era from that in which Star Trek fans are currently enmeshed. All there was until late in the Bantam run was 79 episodes of the original Star Trek, an ambitious but ultimately failed show (or so it would have appeared), cancelled after only three seasons on the air. Thanks to budget cuts and constraints, the third season of The Original Series (TOS) wasn't all that much to shout about, for the most part, and so all Star Trek authors really had to go by was a slither of campy 1960s storylines and a lot of idealism.

James Blish, as well as writing the first original Star Trek novel, took on the task of adapting TOS episodes in a series of eleven collections; his wife finished the twelfth and completed a thirteenth, "Mudd's Women", after Blish died of lung cancer in 1975. His adaptations of the original episodes took the form of novellas of around 20 pages each. There were around eight stories to each volume in the early books, and in the later books he extended the stories to closer to 30 pages while offering fewer in each collection.

The adaptations sometimes differed slightly from the episodes, either using alternate script versions or with Blish offering a different fact or figure. For example, while Roddenberry and Company correctly predicted that man would make a successful landing on the moon in 1969 during the episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday", Blish offered the more conservative 1970 as the date in his adaptation of the episode.

Between 1967 and 1978 Blish (and later his wife) completed 13 books, the last of which, "Mudd's Angels", concentrated on the charismatic rogue Harry Mudd, who had featured twice in TOS and once again in the animated version of Star Trek. The story contained adaptations of the two TOS episodes to feature Mudd, as well as an original novella, "The Business, As Usual, During Altercations", which stretched to 98 pages.

The original stories, which began with Blish's own "Spock Must Die!" in 1970, were very much Star Trek: TOS in their nature. The aforementioned was a sequel to the episode "Errand of Mercy", and later books such as "Spock, Messiah", "Planet of Judgement" and "The Starless World" centered around familiar Star Trek motifs. Mind control, stranded landing parties and a hijacked USS Enterprise were all featured prominently.

Running parallel to Bantam's Star Trek books, Ballentine Books also had the right to publish Star Trek related novels - in this case, the adaptations of The Animated Series, which took the form of 10 "Star Trek Logs" published between 1974 and 1978.

These early books were all pure TOS, and so have become somewhat lost in the later, more complex and cerebral, eras of Star Trek. However, we owe these authors and their books their due in keeping the air in Star Trek's lungs between the cancellation of the TV series and the production of "The Motion Picture".

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