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Star Trek: The Animated Series Logs One And Two
01/02/2007 . Source: Eamonn Murphy 
Alan Dean Foster has written a book that will change your life. Nah! Only kidding. Buy Star Trek: The Animated Series Logs One And Two in the USA - or Buy Star Trek: The Animated Series Logs One And Two in the UK  check out website: www.delreybooks.com and www.startrek.com
Alan Dean Foster has written a book that will change your life. Nah! Only kidding. What he's really done, back in 1974, is pad twenty page, twenty minute animated 'Star Trek' scripts into novellas of about sixty pages each. Hackwork, you say? Well, a fellow has to earn a crust and Foster plies his hack with enough skill to produce readable light entertainment. Mind you, James Blish compressed the original forty minute live action 'Star Trek' scripts into twenty or thirty pages. Blish might have scorned this padding and he certainly wouldn't have liked Foster's use of facial expressions as 'said' substitutes eg 'Ladies and gentlemen,' Kirk smiled, 'are you ready?' As a critic it was one of his pet hates. However it has become acceptable in popular fiction so we'll let it go. As for the padding, Foster does it well, showing the thoughts and motivations of characters that you wouldn't get from the bare action on the silver screen.
Unable to make a novel from each teleplay, as the editor originally wanted, Foster has made a unified sort of book by loosely linking three stories together so that one takes place after another. Kirk burns his hands in 'Beyond The Farthest Star' by Samuel A. Peebles, a passably good yarn about an encounter with an energy-based intelligence on the edge of the galaxy. Kirk's hands are still itchy at the start of 'Yesteryear' by D.C. Fontana, a time paradox story about our favourite First Officer Spock pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Bob Heinlein did it first but Fontana knows the Trek characters well and weaves an enjoyable tale featuring present day Spock, young Spock, his father, his mother and the always jolly planet Vulcan. 'One of Our Planets Is Missing' by Marc Daniels takes place two days after that. The linkage is not really necessary and as this edition combines two Logs in one it doesn't work anyway. Oh well. Daniels' story is about a sentient planet munching cloud thingy, a sort of gaseous Galactus. It's quite good.
Log Two features another three stories. 'The Survivor', adapted from a script by James Schermer, has a shape-changer loose aboard the Enterprise, one not to be taken with a pinch of salt. Complications with Romulans ensue to make a good story. I enjoyed it.
'The Lorelei Signal' by Margaret Armen has all the Enterprise men, even Spock, behaving like fools under a siren song. Led by Uhura, the wonderful women of the Enterprise save the day. I wasn't greatly enamoured of this one, partly because being stuck in a giant vase is a bit of a silly crisis. A twenty-five foot tall Spock, featured in 'The Infinite Vulcan' by Walter Koenig is also a bit silly but probably thrilled the kids on screen. The story was okay. It reminded me that these are adapted from an animated series mostly aimed at children. For better, this means less solemn philosophising. For worse, there is more 'amusing' dialogue.
Most of these writers are well known in Trekdom. D.C. Fontana was not only script editor on the live series but also wrote several good episodes. Marc Daniels directed many and Walter Koening played Chekhov the loveable Russian. Alan Dean Foster is credited with the story for 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture'. We'll forgive him that. It's worth bearing in mind that it might be cheaper to buy the whole series on DVD than to buy all the printed adaptations. It's quicker to view the episodes than to read the books but to do so would be to miss out on Foster's contribution. Anyway, some of us like reading.
Eamonn Murphy
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