Advance Booking

SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER

This is the novelization of the first Star Trek movie, and the only one written by the series’ creator Gene Roddenberry. I don’t think I will have the opportunity to watch the movie anytime in the near future, so I thought, why not read the book?

After the series’ five-year mission came to an end, Kirk was made an Admiral and Spock returned to Vulcan to erase his human self. But when a strange cloud with a consciousness appears to be headed towards Earth, Kirk assumes command of the spaceship and is joined by the whole team: Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov and Uhura. They race against time to find how to destroy the cloud and save Earth in the process.

This book would be a little pointless to read if you don’t have any idea of the Star Trek Universe, so I suggest you either watch the series or the latest movie before reading this. I'll anyways tell you the basic background. Enterprise is a ship whose mission is "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations, to boldly go where no-one has gone before". Its crew comprises Captain James T. Kirk, his half-Vulcan half-human first officer Mr Spock, chief medical officer Leonard McCoy, chief engineer Montgomery Scott, weapons officer Pavel Chekov, helmsman Hikaru Sulu and communications officer Uhura. There is a lot of techno-babble in the book, all warp speeds and thrusters and controls and all, a little disconcerting to non-geeks. But it didn’t hinder my reading, but that could probably because I’ve been watching random episodes of Star Trek. I was a little worried that the book would read like an extended script, but it didn’t. In a movie, we see more action, but in the novel you see what the people undergo, their hopes and fears, and how they react to the hostile conditions. The book concentrates more on Kirk, while Spock is my favorite character and I wanted to know more about him. But there was something superficial about the book I couldn’t really put my finger on, something that kept me from being absorbed in the story completely. An interesting book, nevertheless.