M Thomas Apple Author Page

My winter reading!

I finally managed to get 1st edition copies of the famed Star Trek Readers, published in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My mother had copies when I was a kid, and they were among the first fictional stories I ever read.

The content varies slightly from the broadcast episodes, which apparently drew the ire of fans at the time. In defense of the British writer James Blish, he had not seen the episodes at the time of writing and was relying entirely on the scripts. As he himself wrote as an “Afterword” that appears (naturally) in the middle of the Reader II book, adapting script to prose is just as hard as adapting prose to scripts. Some scenes were skipped and dialogue boiled down to help the flow of the narrative, and fans were often upset to discover their favorite lines didn’t appear in the books.

The confusing part is the arrangement of each Reader into “books.” For example, Reader I (which has no label “I,” actually) consists of “Star Trek 2” (called “Book I”), “Star Trek 3” (Book II), and “Star Trek 8” (Book III). That reflects the original paperback publications by Bantam, but just makes things difficult. As a kid, I had no idea which episodes came before which. Not that it mattered! This was the first show I saw “in living color” — in the “TV room” of my grandparents’ house (we had a small black and white TV at home in the mid to late ’70s, so I never saw “The Incredible Hulk” (Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) in color.)

All told, 59 of the original 79 ST: TOS episodes were adapted by Blish. Of the twenty not appearing in the Readers, “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are odd exclusions. “Shore Leave” (the most childish of the first season episodes) is also not there. But there are still plenty to satisfy.

Two episodes were renamed by Blish for some reason; “The Man Trap” — the first episode broadcast but the third episode made — was renamed “The Unreal McCoy” (which gives away the plot), and “Charlie X” was renamed “Charlie’s Law.” The original pilot, “The Cage,” appears under the name “The Menagerie” as it was later broadcast (in two parts as part of the court martial of Spock, in which Star Trek characters watch Star Trek, but the novelized version omits the court martial framework — the “Afterword” comments that this script was covered in handwritten rewrites, making it difficult to work with.)

Most satisfying of all is the snarky dedication of Reader II — “To Harlan Ellison who was right all the time.”

Hah.