Last Friday, I wrote—with no small amount of vitriol—about the astonishing mess that is the Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU). Disney is making an effort to cull the enormous, multi-tiered wreck of Star Wars canon and semi-canon, and good on them for it, because it definitely needs taming before The Mouse can wade in and write new adventures (which, if history is any guide, we'll all hate anyway).
But what about the sprawling canon of that other famous Star-prepended franchise? You know, the one that boldly splits infinitives in its title sequences and originated both the terms "slash" and "Mary Sue?" What about all those Star Trek novels and video games—do all of them need to be beamed out into hard vacuum like so much space trash? A few gems exist in the garbage pit of the Star Wars EU—Timothy Zahn's work is almost universally praised, for example—but does Trek's canon feature similar gems?
Article spoiler: yes, it does. The Trek "expanded universe" isn't all silly new Lieutenants falling in love with Vulcans; some stories and characters are incredibly, jaw-droppingly crafted. We're going to talk about five of them—and the Trek that might have been, if they'd only been canon.
On the wings of the great bird
For most of Trek's history, the canonicity of various Trek works lay wholly in the hands of Gene Roddenberry, who could simply decree things to be or not to be. Trek's advantage over Star Wars has always been that fans have a much larger buffet of official properties to sate their appetites. At least until the late 1980s, trekkers—never trekkies, thank you very much—had 79 original series episodes (or 80 or even 80-and-a-half, depending on how you reckon the two pilot episodes), 22 animated episodes (though their canonicity is debatable), and four movies. Then Star Trek: The Next Generation came along with an entire new set of episodes to slurp up and argue over. Meanwhile, for years poor Star Wars fans had three movies, a holiday special filled with wookie-hugging, and some vague mutterings from George Lucas about the Journal of the Whills and prequels and sequels.
Despite all the movies and TV, Star Trek tie-in novels flourished in the 1980s, while the vast majority of Star Wars EU content didn't come into being until the 1990s and 2000s. By the time The Next Generation began airing in 1987, truckloads of Trek tie-in novels had been pumped out, though it was widely understood that their canonicity was essentially nil. Paramount doesn't really need to take a chainsaw to the canon in the same way as Disney does, because Gene Roddenberry passed away in 1991 and these days, the distinction is simple: movies are canon, TV shows are canon, nothing else is (the devil is in the details, though, and the edges of Trek canon are fractal: zoom in, and you actually find many potential exceptions).
The "nothing else" composes a veritable universe of tie-in novels, some excellent computer games (and some terrible ones), and a few other bits and bobs. Most of it, I am sad to say, is as execrable as the worst Kevin J. Anderson trash. Roddenberry was both oddly protective of Trek and also oddly eager to cash in on it (see, for example, the alleged birth of the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC as a way to sell toy IDIC medallions—at least, that's how William Shatner tells the tale). In the 1980s, it didn't take much to write a Trek tie-in novel, and boy, are the majority of them bad. Among the worst offenders is Diane Carey's Fortunes of War duology (Dreadnought! and Battlestations!—yes, with exclamation marks), featuring the newly-minted Lt. Piper, the bestest and smartest and youngest lieutenant in the fleet who beat the Kobayashi Maru test and with whom Vulcans cannot resist falling in love.
The first Final Frontier
I can't hate on Carey too hard, though, because in spite of how awful her Lt. Piper novels are, she more than redeemed herself with her other contributions to Trek lore.
Out of all of her books, far and away the best was the first of our five examples of non-canon excellence: The Final Frontier, a tie-in novel featuring George Kirk, Robert April, and the very first mission of the unchristened Enterprise.
Trekkers with more than a passing knowledge of the universe of course will recognize Robert April as the semi-canonical first commander of the Enterprise, and George Kirk is Jim Kirk's daddy. April's first appearance was as an elderly man in the animated series episode "The Counter-Clock Incident," which featured that standby Trek plot device: reverse aging.
There's none of that silliness in The Final Frontier, though. In this novel, April recruits the elder Kirk to help rescue a doomed colony ship. The mission is considered impossible as the colonists are four months away from Earth at the best possible speed.
Fortunately, April has a secret weapon:
"Think of it, George," April murmured. "An impossible rescue. A way to turn a four-month journey into a three-week epic triumph in the name of life. Think of it."
Now George moved around to face him, and to force April to look at him. In the upper edge of the view screen, unnoticed, the spacedock moved closer.
"Why all the cloak and dagger?" George pressed. "Why didn’t you just ask me?"
"Couldn’t take the chance, old boy."
"Why?"
April stepped closer to the helm, placed his hands on the console, and looked out, upward, at the looming spacedock. He nodded out, up. "That’s why."
Soft lights from the spacedock played in his eyes.
George stepped closer, leaned over the console, and looked out. The lights bathed his ruddy cheeks and drew him onward, into astonishment.
"My God ..." he whispered. "What is that?"
"That," April breathed, "is a starship."
Why it's so damn good
The story unfolds beautifully, and the as-yet-unnamed Enterprise is as much a character as Kirk and April. Her uprated warp drive should enable her to reach the colonists within days rather than months, and much to-do is made over her new duotronic computers. The story also heavily focuses on the Romulans—more specifically, on the Rihannsu, the apocryphal version of the Romulans created by Diane Duane.
The novel uses George Kirk as a stand-in for the audience, allowing April and his shakedown crew to explain the workings of the new ship. But the culmination of the story is when the Romulan officer T'Cael—one of the book's major point-of-view characters—finds himself aboard the Enterprise and we get to see the true power and grace of the Federation's first starship through his eyes. She is, as Scotty would eventually come to say, a bonnie ship.
Why it could never be official
The Rihannsu-flavored Romulans alone are enough to push the book forever onto dusty forgotten shelves. The canonical fleshing-out of the Romulans eventually wound up giving us Star Trek: Nemesis—and I think it's best we don't talk about Nemesis.
A ship named Kobayashi
The fabled Kobayashi Maru test pops up multiple times in canon because it's a beautiful (if somewhat impractical) way to capture a command-candidate officer's character: when faced with an unwinnable situation, how does the candidate react?
Jim Kirk's famous solution—to reprogram the test so that it is in fact possible to win—won him a commendation for "original thinking," along with almost getting him kicked out of Starfleet Academy.
But Julia Ecklar's The Kobayashi Maru tie-in novel digs deep into the test itself, using a frame story—as many Trek books do—to allow some of the Enterprise bridge crew to describe how they faced the test. Stranded aboard a heavily damaged shuttlecraft, the novel spins out tales of how Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, and Kirk all reacted when confronted by the proverbial no-win scenario.
Why it's so damn good
Kirk's story is dealt with first, and it is everything that fans could have hoped for—far better than the on-screen version we saw in J. J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek.
Jerking about in his chair, Kirk endeavored to assume what he hoped was an expression of cultured confidence (the Klingons might not be able to see him, but the monitoring officers certainly could). "This is Captain James T. Kirk, of the USS Potemkin." It was the first time he'd ever said his name that way; the sheer excitement of it made him short of breath. "We are on a rescue mission in search of a civilian freighter registered with the United Federation of Planets. We mean no harm, but we will defend ourselves if necessary."
"Captain Kirk?" the Klingon commander parroted. "The Captain Kirk?"
Kirk fought a smile as his bridge crew exclaimed in a single voice, "The Captain Kirk?" The "dead" navigator began to laugh.
Kirk cleared his throat and went on. "I'll prove it, if you force me."
The Klingon commander barked to the others in gruff Klingonese. "That will not be necessary," he said in a more subdued tone. "Report coordinates of freighter, and Kh'yem will offer all assistance, Captain Kirk."
Kirk's story, though, isn't anywhere near the highlight of the book. Scotty's story involves the young command candidate proving that he's more suited for engineering than for the center seat; Sulu's features a diplomatic role-playing exercise that goes hilariously wrong, woven in with the story of his dying grandfather and one thousand origami cranes.
Chekov, though, takes the cake. After spectacularly failing the Kobayashi Maru test, his academy class takes part in a survival exercise on an abandoned space station. The class is told that an assassin is loose in the station and that they must all survive. Of course, there is no actual assassin and the cadets quickly turn on each other, with Chekov booby-trapping huge swaths of the station to "kill" the "assassin"—and actually managing to kill the vast majority of his fellow cadets.
Eventually, the four Enterprise officers are rescued, but not before they've all told their tales—and, because in Star Trek our heroes never die, Kirk once again proves that there's no such thing as a no-win scenario.
Why it could never be official
As wonderful as the stories are, too much back story is later contradicted by movies and TV. About the only canonical thing in the novel is the fact that Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco (which is only possible because in the future money doesn't exist and property in the Bay Area is affordable).
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