I subsequently made an offer on a property up here, on the street where I lived until the autumn of 2016. I got a good mortgage deal and I will be a little better off although I'm downsizing. The flat I'm currently renting is beautiful and has a terrific view. It's by far the nicest place I've ever lived (including my parental home) but it's always been a stretch, financially. I couldn't afford to buy anything like it, on my salary.
The most immediately pressing issue of new accommodation- beyond the legal ones- is how much space I can utilise for my substantial collection of books, comics and cds. The Doctor Who novels alone- currently in storage in Glasgow, mostly- number nearly 300. The next largest number of books that I own from a tv/film franchise would be Star Trek, but that's a significantly smaller amount; a couple of shelves worth.
I've read a lot of Trek books since I moved back to Elgin last August; actually, it was triggered in the early summer of 2018 by finding a classroom copy of Star Trek 6 by James Blish when I was helping Barrhead High School move to their new premises.
That spurred me on to bid on ebay for a set of Blish adaptations. These were among the first adult books I had ever read (although Trek was first broadcast in my childhood as a summer replacement for Dr. Who in the wake of Troughton's departure.)
The first Blish book I got was number 10, in Safeway in East Kilbride ( where I glimpsed other Marvel tie-in treasures, like Lin Carter's Thongor or Battle for the Planet of the Apes) sometime in 1973, probably. I quickly snapped up more and I was still reading this range well into the end of the decade and even into my final years at secondary school.
Although Blish made some baffling changes to episode titles ("Charlie X" to "Charlie's Law" for example or "the Man Trap" into "The Unreal McCoy"), his ability to crisply adapt a tv script into a punchy short story is superb. The episodes aren't novelised in transmission sequence but then the BBC didn't broadcast them that way either, during my childhood and adolescence. In fact, I think that didn't happen 'til the 90s, although they're currently on teatime rotation on the Horror Channel.
Alternating with our staff book group choices, new school texts or school library recommendations and the likes of Pat Kane's 90s essay collection, Tinsel Show, the wheen o' Trek books from the public library and charity shops included:
Spock Must Die!
Spock Messiah
New Voyages 1 & 2 ( torrid 70s fanfic)
The Price of the Phoenix
The Entropy Effect
Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock novelizations
Star Trek New Frontier 1-4; Captain's Table: Once Burned; Excalibur: Requiem; Being Human
DS9 Mission Gamma: Twilight
Vulcan's Soul II: Exiles
Star Trek Titan: Sword of Damocles
Errand of Fury
Captain's Glory
The Brave and The Bold : book II
Enterprise: Broken Bow adaptation
Alan Dean Foster's adaptation of the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot movie.
Why have one title when you could have more, eh? Apart from the "Hurt/Comfort" Vonda McIntyre books from the 80s, the only ones that have stayed in my memory are the Mackenzie Calhoun Captain's Table and Exiles. And the only one I really enjoyed was Star Trek Vanguard: Harbinger, which is set on a space station and depicts an extra-marital affair very believably. The others tended to be verbose, arid and predictable.
And waiting to be read, I still have Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Logs 6-10, Star Trek Discovery: Desperate Hours and a second copy of Star Fleet Year One ( which I first bought in 2001, going to Ayr for the day)
The Logs- adaptations of the 70s animated series- were a huge part of my school days, beginning with a sweltering pre-punk, pre-puberty holiday in Rothesay. I'm looking forward enormously to reading the stories I've never read before but Desperate Hours will be my holiday read, if I can afford a trip to D&G in July.
It's interesting for me that, despite the militarism, no other spin-off series or cast has quite the same appeal as Kirk, Spock and McCoy, except perhaps the Lost In Space saga of Voyager. The initially conflict-free negotiations of the Next Generation in particular leave me fairly cold and I was never really engaged by either DS9 or Enterprise.
Star Trek scripts from the Original Series (TOS) preach a worldly tolerance through philosophy and allegory. But they're also space adventure stories, of alien horrors and, especially in the first season, of dead, lost civilizations. Like Anderson's Space: 1999, the galaxy is inimical to human life, unknowable and inexplicable; abandoned and appallingly lonely.
The alternate universe of Xmas Star Trek annuals was originally depicted in U.S, Gold Key comics. Some of the most memorable stories for me were of the horrific vegetation on "The Planet of No Return"; the sinister blackmailing "Voodoo Planet"; Arnold Drake's uncredited and bizarre gem-like beings in "The Psychocrystals"; and the ancient living goddess, reminiscent of Burroughs' decrepit Issus, in "Death of a Star".
These often-psychedelic stories have been collected in the Checker Books Key Collection trade paperbacks, beginning in 2004. They were often written with no knowledge (or interest?) in the canon of the tv series but early work by the late Len Wein is very readable and energetic. I have also read a number of 80s and Noughties Trek comics from Marvel, DC and IDW which I plan to review eventually.
In the meantime, there is one more week of term and I have come home this weekend with a hefty pile of S3 creative writing to grade. Tomorrow, excitingly, sees the first ever Elgin comic convention, so my next post will probably make some reference to it.
Coming this summer: Barsoom, Conan, Ant-Man, Tom Baker, 100-page Super-Specs and Horror Double Bills
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