I was recommended this book – the only Star Trek novelisation in my collection, honest! – by a friend who told me that it was a fine comic novel that just happened to be set in the Star Trek universe. And she was right! From the opening, where the chief Trek characters are summarised by their breakfast habits (“Bones McCoy was NOT a morning person.”), through encounters with Klingons who are not, for a change, cardboard cut-outs, the whole thing rewards the reader with a sense that this is what the Star Trek universe would probably be like to live in – about as daft under the surface as our own.
The ending is perhaps the weakest part of the novel, with a sequence of increasing silliness which British readers of A Certain Age will immediately recognise as a Brian Rix farce (a species of innocuous sex comedy which inevitably ends with various characters rushing from room to room in a house or hotel without any trousers on).
This novel must have been sufficiently liked by those writing for Trek as one incident in it appears in an episode of Next Generation – I’ll leave it to dedicated Trekkers to decide what and where (clue – it’s not one of the funny bits). The late John M Ford was one of America’s less-recognised sf and fantasy authors. On the strength of this book, he merits further examination.
Deep Waters Reading 