Many of the early Star Trek novels, especially a few of the
1970s Bantam line, where generally written by fans of TOS. Authors like Sandra
Marshak and Myrna Culbreath were huge proponents of the Kirk and Spock relationship,
and more so it seemed a lot of the time, just Spock himself. Many of those
Bantam titles and the early ones by Simon and Schuster’s Pocket Book line after
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, were heavily Kirk, Spock and McCoy centric and a
good percentage were written by women.
Which was not bad, just a rather interesting statistic. Back
in 1985, author Barbara Hambly released her first Star Trek novel, Ishmael. And
for the last 26 years, it has sat in either a bookshelf or in a box, unread.
When I started collecting the Star Trek novels back in the 1980s, I had a lot
of good intentions of reading them. But somewhere along the line, I sort just
bought them and knew I would probably never read them. It just became, in my
new addiction of books, a habit to buy them. While I gave up buying them years
and years ago, I still have most of the Bantam Trek’s and most of the Pocket
Book editions released in the 1980’s and 90s –with 99.9% of them never read.
Anyways, I had read Hambly before, having enjoyed her
Darwarth Trilogy and eventually her Windrose Chronicles. But like so many
authors during the 80s, I eventually stopped reading them. Mostly, I guess,
because I loved something they wrote before, and was usually disappointed with
their later stuff. Not that it was bad, but that was how it worked.
(Side note: I met Hambly once, back in the mid-1980s a
Doctor Who convention in San Jose. Decades later, while working at my Borders
in Rancho Cucamonga, I would get a chance to meet her mother from time to time,
who apparently lives nearby).
So about a week ago, bored or what not, I was on Youtube and
was watching opening titles to various TV shows that I grew up with in the 60s,
70s and 80s. Somehow I chanced upon the opening credits to Here Come the Brides,
a western/dramedy that ran for two seasons on ABC. I remember the show for one reason,
that it co-starred Bobby Sherman, who was a teen heartthrob both my sisters
loved –though until I watched those credits again, I did not know future Starsky &
Hutch actor David Soul was also on the show. It also starred Mark Lenard,
known to us Star Trek fans as Spock’s father.
So, I went over to Wikipedia and hunted down the show to
find out what information was on it. Now Here Come the Brides was inspired by
the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It was also loosely based on the
Mercer Girls, a 1860s project of Asa Shinn Mercer, an American who lived in
Seattle, who decided to "import" women to the Pacific Northwest to
balance the gender ratio. The show starred Robert Brown, who also, ironically, guested in a
Star Trek episode, The Alternative Factor.
So what is this all leading to?
Well, further down the page on Wikipedia, it told of a
crossover of Here Come the Brides and the Star Trek novel Ishmael. So coming back
to my main point about fans writing the early Star Trek novels, this one is
pretty much an ultimate fan book. So I went out into the garage, found my copy
and decided to finally read it.
After 26 years.
The plot concerns the Enterprise arriving at Starbase 12
when a bizarre cosmic phenomenon causes a Klingon ship to suddenly vanish --
with Spock aboard for the ride. Spock's last message from the Klingon ship is
cryptic. The Klingons, it is soon realized, are traveling into the past,
searching for the one man who holds the key to the future.
Meanwhile, in the past, 1867 in fact, a man named Aaron Stemple recuses a
mysterious man with pointy ears. Fearing that if he takes this injured man into
town, he’ll be killed, Stemple secrets him away at his cabin, nursing him back
to health. But the injured man has no memory of who he is, and once he is well,
introduces the mysterious man in Seattle as his nephew Ishmael. Hijinks insure, of course.
Not an original idea by far, but I do commend Hambly for
crossing over the huge Star Trek universe into a little seen TV series that
premiered the year the TOS was cancelled. But I’m also sure, as a fan of Star
Trek –and obviously Here Come the Brides- it was a cool idea to have Spock
interact with the characters of that show, some who also acted on TOS. And i as noted, there is a wink, wink for long-time fans: Aaron Stemple, the man who saved Spock in the book, was played by Mark
Lenard, Spock’s TV and movie father, Sarek.
The joke goes on way too long, though, and while it was fun,
this could have been a short story more than a full-length novel. But that was
the status of those early Trek novels.
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