Star Trek Log One

Alan Dean Foster Star Trek Log One (1974)
While I've never been a massive unreserved fan of Trek, I've enjoyed some of it, and some of it I've enjoyed a lot. I watched the animated version at the time - around four-ish on a Saturday afternoon as I recall - but have never had any burning desire to revisit the thing beyond vague curiosity about the guy with the three arms who made the cut because they couldn't afford Walter Koenig. Naturally I had no idea anyone had novelised the series in those days before VHS, but they did and so my curiosity achieved the necessary critical mass because it's Alan Dean Foster - who can generally be relied upon to do a decent job in cases such as we have here.

This one rather tidily adapts the first three episodes of the first series, the first of which is oddly familiar, so I guess I must have revisited that debut episode at some point fairly recently, unless they recycled the story for Enterprise or one of the other variations. On the subject of recycling, Beyond the Farthest Star has our cartoon Kirk and pals investigating an alien derelict of several million years vintage, formerly inhabited by massive aliens who were seemingly killed off by the thing which duly wakes up and tries to knacker the Enterprise. It's probably a coincidence that it so strongly foreshadows the half of Ridley Scott's Alien which didn't so strongly resemble A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle that the father of the iconic Hovis advert ended up settling out of court.

Yes, a coincidence. That'll be it. I'm sure of it.

Still talking of recycling, a fair chunk of One of Our Planets is Missing later turned up in the 1979 movie, it could be argued.

Anyway, Log One comprises three decent and generally engaging stories, all with the inevitably modular quality of Trek episodes, but which nevertheless manage to work some pleasing flashes of imagination into the formula. Alan Dean Foster has the reputation of being something of a hack, having written about a million of these things; but you can't really tell from this one which reads more like kin to the aforementioned Voyage of the Space Beagle - itself an obvious precursor to Star Trek - than words copied from a screen with linking material. Indeed, Foster's retelling crackles with character and jazzy asides and observations, possibly more so than most of what we saw on the telly. This isn't Terrance bleeding Dicks rearranging the usual phrases and expressions in a slightly different order to the last one.

I'm probably not massively likely to start hunting down the other nine volumes, but neither am I averse to the idea. Being what amounts to apple-polishing boy scouts having wholesome adventures in space, Star Trek succeeds mainly when it does something weird or spontaneous, and Alan Dean Foster really brings out the best in the mythology*.

*: I refuse point fucking blank to refer to it, or indeed to anything as a franchise.

Amazing Stories February 1980

Omar Gohagen (editor)
Amazing Stories February 1980 (1980)
I picked this up from eBay a while back for the Simak interview but never quite got around to reading the rest, for some reason. For what it may be worth, the Simak interview is great and leaves one wishing that it were possible to go back in time and hang out with the guy; and on the subject of the direct testimony of science-fiction authors, we also get observations from Asimov, Silverberg, and Alan Dean Foster of which the latter - often unfairly criticised as a hack for churning out all those movie tie-ins - is particularly enlightening.

Amazing Stories went through a number of significant changes during its lengthy publishing history - cancellation, relocation then revival without much duplication of the success of the Gernsback years, depending upon how one defines success. The sixties version seems to have been remembered as the era of crowd-pleasing big name reprints from which original authors received nary a red cent. I'm guessing the eighties incarnation continued the tradition of great editorial savings with, in this issue, big name interviews - which presumably qualified as promotional for those interviewed - and original stories by people you've never heard of, and possibly won't hear of ever again and who were most likely glad just to be in print.

Hal Hill's Chimera is accordingly underwhelming, despite being the main feature of this issue at thirty or so pages, nearly half of which constitute the biggest extended info-dump I've read in a long time. The story itself isn't actually bad, and I'd hesitantly hail it as a prescient foreshadowing of all that cyberpunk stuff which followed soon after were it not for the fact of it reading like the tie-in to a Quinn Martin telly adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Wayne Wightman's Do Unto Others, if harmless and mercifully short, reads somewhat like the response to a high school English assignment on the theme of just deserts. Michael P. Kube-McDowell - who apparently later co-wrote something with Arthur C. Clarke - continues the scholastic theme with Antithesis, wherein the black sheep of the college physics class writes a paper proving Einstein wrong; which would be okay in itself but for the slightly depressing two page supporting essay describing what we've just read as though we hadn't understood it, delivered in the tone of Leonard Nimoy emerging from the side of the screen to explain how not everything is as it seems; or like an episode of Catfish wherein Trayvon's dilemma with the elusive Tamiqua is reiterated over and over as though we hadn't understood it the first four fucking thousand times; or like me rephrasing the same complaint in three different ways right here.

Talking of repetition, this issue embellishes each tale with a few paragraphs under the heading Why We Chose This Story attempting to reinforce the proposed excellence of each tale but mostly just delivering a redundant summary.

When you are allowed to realise what really is happening, the surprise is as incredible as it must have been for Troy Haver, who then figures how to make the mental leap to liberation after all.

We know. We've just read it.

Linda Grossman's Black Hole, may or may not be science-fiction depending upon how you interpret the story. The editor reckons it is, which feels somewhat like a clandestine attempt to smuggle literature into the magazine of robots and bug-eyed monsters. I personally don't think it is, but it doesn't matter because it's about the only thing here that's worth reading apart from the interviews.

Normal service is resumed in Flight Over XP-637 by Craig Sayre in which the twist ending is that the shape changing alien visitors are disguising themselves as ducks, which is funny because we are led to believe that they are attempting to pass themselves off as human, but they aren't! They're changing themselves into ducks, like I said! Brilliant! Hope I haven't spoiled it for anyone.

Kurt von Stuckrad's Mushroom Farmers, is one of those cold war things featuring silos full of missiles which is, as such, okay in context of its type, I suppose, providing you don't mind that one of the nuclear button pushers had also been the class stud and no woman known had ever turned him down. It didn't bother me personally, although I'm confused by the idea of there being such a thing as a class stud. I don't even know if we had those in schools back in England, although if we did I'm fairly sure it wasn't me.

Finally, and mercifully, and mercifully short too, we end with Steve Miller's, Time Cycle, which is about a bloke who travels through time on a time cycle - which is like a motorbike - hence the title. I doubt it's the same bloke, but if it is, I definitely preferred Abracadabra and the song about people calling him the space cowboy, and I didn't like those at all.

I also have to wonder if people really called him the space cowboy, because it's interesting that he doesn't seem to remember the names of any of these people in the song. Perhaps he just wanted us to believe that people called him the space cowboy.

Alien

Alan Dean Foster Alien (1979)
Supposedly one of the best novelisations of a film, and I've been warming to Alan Dean Foster of late, and Alien is a great film so here I am. This one certainly reads more like a novel than Foster's somewhat clunky Star Wars tie-in Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Reviews promised some elaboration and expansion on the original story, but aside from reinstating a scene near the end in which Ripley encounters a cocooned Dallas, Foster thankfully stuck to the script for the most part. That deleted final scene in which Ripley realises it was all a dream and then goes out to post a letter without noticing that she is being followed by three sinister figures in a transit van, her xenomorphic nemesis having teamed up with Dracula and Adolf Hitler - well, you won't find that one here either.

Alien was never what you would call a deep film but it was done exceptionally well, which was sort of the point, playing to director Ridley Scott's strengths, none of which were really in the thinky-brain-stuff department - and I've just noticed that not only is he the man who brought us the Hovis advert, but he almost designed the Daleks. Anyway, Foster's adaptation doesn't really add much in the way of depth, but nevertheless achieves an approximation of the suspense, despite it seeming quite a slow read in places. I suspect the pace is something to do with the grammar which alternates unpredictably between flourishes of poetry and weird patches of word not quite all good or to add up, such as are when Ripley for to confront Ash of the science officer, like thus:

But she couldn't still the suspicions. She almost wished Ash would get mad at her.

'You also managed to forget the science division's own basic quarantine law, something that's drilled into every ship's officer early in flight school.'

'No.' At last, she thought. A statement she could believe. 'That I didn't forget.'

'I see. You didn't forget.' She paused for emphasis. 'You just went ahead and broke it.'

I mean it's not terrible, but you really have to keep your eye on the ball in order to keep track of who is saying what, and as for:

A statement she could believe.

Just how did that get to be its own sentence? This sort of thing reoccurs throughout, so maybe that's just how Alan Dean Foster writes, but reading it can be a little like walking with your shoes on the wrong feet in places. Still, it's not a great book but is at least a decent book which is more than I expected, although I suppose there's a limit to how good an adaptation such as this can be given that it made me want to watch the film again. I can't tell if that's a recommendation or not.

With Friends Like These...

Alan Dean Foster With Friends Like These... (1977)
My recent reading of Splinter of the Mind's Eye didn't exactly get me foaming at the mouth for more Alan Dean Foster, but as soon as I saw this collection I recalled its cover as having been endlessly reproduced in a thousand books of my childhood as representative of either science-fiction novels or the aliens which tend to populate them. I'm pretty sure the same Michael Whelan painting turned up in the book of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a few of those history of science-fiction type affairs which were always otherwise full of Amazing Stories cover art. Anyway, intrigued by the realisation of Alan Dean Foster once having written fiction which wasn't tied into some film or television show, I coughed up the readies and here we are.

It seemed logical to assume that Alan Dean Foster's writing must have once been of a higher standard than is found in the aforementioned Star Wars novel, otherwise he would never have been asked to hack out the more generic stuff in the first place; and thankfully my assumption is borne out by at least half of the material here. What is surprising is how good the early Alan Dean Foster genuinely was, and how closely his writing represented a slightly more acerbic version of Clifford Simak. The themes were often pastoral, or spun upon significantly pastoral details - note the rustic folks on the cover sharing chocolate ice-cream cones with their extraterrestrial visitors - although lacking quite the same ecological angle. Oddly, these stories seem, if anything, politically a little rightwards leaning compared to those of Simak, although thankfully not so much so as to present significant appeal to assholes, I wouldn't have thought.

This is undeniably the sort of thing people mean when they talk about the pulps, particularly with the pacing, the inevitable twist endings, and the Gernsback-style futurism, and I say that mostly as a good thing; and it should probably be noted that the writing is poetic and quite lovely, abrim with pleasing images without quite tipping over into self-conscious parody; or at least it is up until about 1974 at which point I gather Foster began turning his hand to tie-in novelisation with greater frequency. That said, it should probably be noted that his taking to churning out adaptations of Star Wars, Dark Star, Star Trek and others didn't seem to mark any noticeable reduction in the copious output of his own original material. Nevertheless for some reason I just found those short stories written after 1974 mostly unengaging, not bad but lacking the sparky invention of Why Johnny Can't Speed or The Emoman or even the somewhat creaky Space Opera, a story which makes even Tharg's Future Shocks seem refined and ingenious. Still, there's nothing terrible here, and some potential clunkers which may conceivably improve with a second reading; and for a book I picked up with no expectation towards any of it being any good, I've been very pleasantly surprised.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Alan Dean Foster Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978)
Yes, I know, but I used to gaze at this as it sat on the shelf amongst all those other lurid science-fiction titles in the little room with the books at the rear of Martins newsagent, from which I dispensed my paper round. This was the pre-VHS age, back when it was only really possible to relive the moving image by reading the book. I was twelve or thirteen and my mind boggled at the possibility of there being a book comprising an as yet untold tale of Luke and Leia and the rest, something which wasn't a film but seemed more legitimate than a comic strip, particularly when that comic strip involved a giant green rabbit; but being a novel and therefore short on pictures, it was War and Peace so far as I was concerned, as were most books not featuring the adventures of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor. Splinter of the Mind's Eye was for bigger boys, and so I never bought it or read it; and found it difficult to resist when I saw this copy more recently, seeing as how I am now myself a big boy.

Rummaging around in the February 1980 issue of Amazing Stories, as you do, I find an article on Alan Dean Foster in which Tom Staicar writes:

George Lucas contacted Foster to work with him on the story to be used as the sequel film. At that time, Lucas had to be cost-conscious about special effects requirements as it was not yet known whether Star Wars would break even or not. The writer was told to keep expensive starships and planetary vistas to a minimum and, with this in mind, Foster and Lucas developed the story.

So this would have been the second film had the first one gone tits up. I read The Empire Strikes Back as a comic book adaptation, and I'm almost certain that I've seen the film several times, but I still can't remember a fucking thing about it beyond lots of snow and freeze-dried Han Solo, so I'm not sure this wouldn't have been the better film; although of course all of this is predicated upon one regarding Star Wars as something other than a steaming pile of horse shit in the first place, and I go back and forth on that one.

One consideration which becomes apparent whilst reading Splinter of the Mind's Eye is that Star Wars is fine as a film, and it really doesn't need to be a book. I still think it's a shame how its arrival more or less killed off the thoughtful, largely dystopian science-fiction movie of the seventies, replacing it with a Dorito-chugging blockbuster narrative amounting to Flash Gordon with knobs on, condemning us all to forever experience mainstream culture as something aimed at a twelve-year old; which was never really the fault of Star Wars itself which, as a film, promised only certain specific things and did them extremely well. It was Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon treated as a biblical epic of the fifties or sixties. As such, it never really needed to be deep or meaningful with well-rounded characters, because epic was the whole point.

This, I would suggest, is why it doesn't quite work on the printed page, or at least doesn't for me. Splinter of the Mind's Eye is pretty much a sword and sorcery quest narrative, much like Star Wars itself, in which Luke and Leia hear about a powerful gemstone which amplifies the Force, and set out to obtain the gemstone only to be thrown in prison by the local big imperial cheese on this swampy, jungle planet, but he throws them in the same cell as these big, hairy monsters, hoping the big, hairy monsters will either eat or shag them, but Luke used to read about big, hairy monsters when he was growing up on Tatooine and so he knows their language and so they team up and the big hairy monsters bend the bars of the cell and they get away and go to look for the gem, and they have roughly the sort of adventures which befell Frodo Baggins before locating the gem, but someone has grassed them up to Darth Vader who decides that he also wants the gem, and some other stuff happens. Luke occasionally looks at Leia's bum as she's bending over to pick something up and thinks Cor! I wouldn't half like to have a snog with her because he doesn't yet know she is his sister, and Leia occasionally complains about getting her princess clothes all muddy, and the little, fat robot makes an electronic farting noise and the English robot says that he shouldn't have to put up with it, and I realise I probably should have read the thing when I was twelve and better able to appreciate it.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye isn't bad, although it may be significant that I'm left without any real idea of why it should be called Splinter of the Mind's Eye. By the time he came into the orbit of George Lucas, Alan Dean Foster had acquired a reputation as someone who wrote fast and who understood the moving image. I suspect it would be unfair to call him a hack, just as it would be unfair to term Star Wars mass-produced generic science-fiction landfill, given that both date from an era in which some level of craft was still required. The narrative of the book was familiar even back in 1978, and as a novel it attempts to squeeze characterisation from characters with no real depth, but at the same time it's tightly written and efficient if lacking in surprises. Strangest of all, Splinter of the Mind's Eye has made me want to watch Star Wars again, which I suppose must count for something or other.