{"id":30151,"date":"2022-07-26T12:57:30","date_gmt":"2022-07-26T17:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=30151"},"modified":"2022-07-25T17:58:10","modified_gmt":"2022-07-25T22:58:10","slug":"book-report-star-trek-6-by-james-blish-1972-1975","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/26\/book-report-star-trek-6-by-james-blish-1972-1975\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Star Trek 6<\/i> by James Blish (1972, 1975)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/startrek6.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">You know, I had almost forgotten that I was working my way through these books earlier this year.  So when I was looking at the to-read books in the hallway, I thought, <em>Oh, yeah<\/em>, and this book provided just what I was looking for: A quick and pleasant read.  I mean, I have to get my stats up.  I&#8217;m only in the 40s in the books read in 2022 list, and it&#8217;s almost August.  And I&#8217;m not sure we&#8217;ll have the football package this year for me to browse monographs and chapbooks.<\/p>\n<p>So we&#8217;re about half way through the book series which ultimately will include most, if not all, of the episodes of the original <em>Star Trek<\/em> series turned into short stories by a British author who has presumably seen <em>some<\/em> of the series even though he had not when he began writing the books&#8211;which was about the time the show was on, but this book first appeared in 1972, when the show had been off the air for a couple of years.  One has to wonder if the popularity of these books (this 1975 edition was the 10th printing already).<\/p>\n<p>But because we&#8217;re halfway through the series, we&#8217;re starting to get to the more obscure episodes.  This one includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;The Savage Curtain&#8221;, wherein an alien race, hoping to learn more about good and evil, pits crewmembers from the Enterprise, Abraham Lincoln, and other notables against Ghengis Khan and some other violent people.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Lights of Zetar&#8221;, wherein an interstellar brain containing the minds of the survivors of a long-dead alien race seek a human host to live in the real world again.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Apple&#8221;, wherein a paradise-like planet is run by a giant computer whom the child-like natives think is a god.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;By Any Other Name&#8221;, wherein aliens from a distant galaxy lure the Enterprise to their rescue; they hope to take over the Enterprise and to use it to return home in several hundred years&#8217; travel, but they find that their presence in humanoid bodies gives them humanoid appetites and emotions.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Cloud Minders&#8221;, wherein the Enterprise is sent on an emergency run to a planet that is the sole source for a needed material, only to find that the society is bifurcated between the people who live in the cloud city and the miners who do the work.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Mark of Gideon&#8221;, wherein the Enterprise visits a planet that had avoided contact.  Kirk apparently beams to an empty Enterprise that only contains one of the natives, and she&#8217;s trying to get infected with a disease that almost killed Kirk in the past because her planet has no germs and the population has remarkable healing powers&#8211;so that overpopulation has overcrowded the place, and Kirk&#8217;s infected blood can help people die.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I only kind of remembered &#8220;The Apple&#8221; from my viewing days.  Still, a quick, pleasant read with characters I know.<\/p>\n<p>But more interesting is that I am this book&#8217;s second owner.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>And the original owner did not finish it, as the bookmark was not far into the book.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/waldenbooksfliers.jpg\"><br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/waldenbooksreceipt.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>A couple of order forms for <em>The Peoples Almanac<\/em>, a book by the authors of <em>The Book of Lists<\/em> and the original sales receipt.<\/p>\n<p>Given their placement in the book together, it&#8217;s entirely possible that they were not book marks at all, but rather were tucked in there by the bookseller at the purchase.<\/p>\n<p>Which was when I was three years old.<\/p>\n<p>Amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know, I had almost forgotten that I was working my way through these books earlier this year. So when I was looking at the to-read books in the hallway, I thought, Oh, yeah, and this book provided just what I was looking for: A quick and pleasant read. I mean, I have to get [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30151"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30152,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30151\/revisions\/30152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}