Star Trek: Logs One and Two

Star Trek: Logs #1-2

by Alan Dean Foster

SPACE. THE FINAL FRONTIER . . . These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Celebrate Star Trek's thirtieth anniversary with the original mission logs chronicling some of the crew's most bizarre missions and strangest encounters with alien races across the galaxy . . . where no man has gone before.
BEYOND THE FARTHEST STAR
Behind a negative star, the Enterprise finds some malevolent company. For a green evil alien of unimaginable power beams aboard--to destroy the crew and hijack the ship for its own deadly purposes.
YESTERYEAR
Spock returns from a time-travel research project to find that no one on the Enterprise recognizes him. Now he must go back through the Time Gate to his Vulcan childhood--to save the life of the child he was.
ONE OF OUR PLANETS IS MISSING
A huge cosmic cloud that "eats" celestial objects has already consumed one planet and is on its way to another, where 82 million people will die. And Kirk and his crew find themselves in its voracious path.
THE SURVIVOR
The crew rejoices when a drifting, damaged spaceship yields Carter Winston, the famous philanthropist missing and presumed dead. But Carter is not all that he seems.
THE LORELEI SIGNAL
When Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a mysterious planet, they discover an exotic race of enchantingly beautiful women who seem ready to fulfill every fantasy--but a far deadlier fate awaits them.
THE INFINITE VULCAN
Keniclius 5, a 24-foot-tall clone of a demented scientist, kidnaps Spock to clone him into immortality. Unfortunately, to achieve this transformation, the real Spock must die . . .

Genres: Star Trek, Science Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Bestselling science fiction writer Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946, but raised mainly in California. He received a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA in 1968, and a M.F.A. in 1969. Foster lives in Arizona with his wife, but he enjoys traveling because it gives him opportunities to meet new people and explore new places and cultures. This interest is carried over to his writing, but with a twist: the new places encountered in his books are likely to be on another planet, and the people may belong to an alien race.

Foster began his career as an author when a letter he sent to Arkham Collection was purchased by the editor and published in the magazine in 1968. His first novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, introduced the Humanx Commonwealth, a galactic alliance between humans and an insectlike race called Thranx. Several other novels, including the Icerigger trilogy, are also set in the world of the Commonwealth. The Tar-Aiym Krang also marked the first appearance of Flinx, a young man with paranormal abilities, who reappears in other books, including Orphan Star, For Love of Mother-Not, and Flinx in Flux.

Foster has also written The Damned series and the Spellsinger series, which includes The Hour of the Gate, The Moment of the Magician, The Paths of the Perambulator, and Son of Spellsinger, among others. Other books include novelizations of science fiction movies and television shows such as Star Trek, The Black Hole, Starman, Star Wars, and the Alien movies. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, a bestselling novel based on the Star Wars movies, received the Galaxy Award in 1979. The book Cyber Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990. His novel Our Lady of the Machine won him the UPC Award (Spain) in 1993. He also won the Ignotus Award (Spain) in 1994 and the Stannik Award (Russia) in 2000.

Reviews

[Karen Cowgill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Star Trek! I actually remember the original, as well as the animated series! FUN! FUN!

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the humor that was missing in other Star Trek books. It is basically A collection of stories based on the Animated series of Star Trek. If you have seen those episodes, I am told that the book is still fun to read, as it has more feel than the Series does.

[Terence · Rating 2 out of 5]

An addendum to this review that I forgot to include:

For sheer sexism, I was shocked to read this on page 81: "Uhura replied while taking the opportunity - now that the commanding officers were absent - to touch up her makeup." WTF!!!! (Though this would explain the presence of a mirror at her station in "And The Children Shall Lead.")

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Refer to my review of Logs 9-10 here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24... for why I have not become a fan of the Log series.

In Logs 1-2, my primary interest was in reading "Yesteryear." Recently I availed myself of the animated series' DVDs via Netflix. It was not a nostalgic return to my youth. Most of the episodes were pretty lame and the animation was atrocious (even by mid-'70s standards).

On the other hand, Foster has often been a good novelizer (is that a word?) of movies, and I hoped he could work his charms on these stories.

In this collection, "Yesteryear" isn't bad. The quality of the material certainly helps - Spock, Kirk and a historian use the Guardian of Forever (from the live-action episode "City on the Edge of Forever") to go back in time. While there, something happens that erases Spock from the timeline because his 7-year-old self dies on Vulcan. Spock then returns to the past and intervenes to save himself. We get a glimpse of a young Spock struggling with his human emotions and the demands placed on a Vulcan child, and we see a bit of the turmoil his parents went through raising him. (We also get to see his pet "teddy bear," the sehlat mentioned in "Journey to Babel.")

I couldn't do much more than skim through the remaining stories. The flaws I elaborate upon in my review of Logs 9-10 are evident here as well.

Logs 1-2 gets 2 stars because of the presence of "Yesteryear" but, otherwise, I'd recommend skipping the rest.

[Bmj2k · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these stories are very, very padded. That's not the fault of Alan Dean Foster, it's the short animated source material he has to work with. The stories are adapted from episodes written by a variety of other writers so the quality of the plots varies too. Interestingly, Foster has a low tech approach to Trek, with old- fashioned books on the bridge. It's good to compare these with the James Blish adaptations of the original tv shows to see how two different writers handle essentially the same source material.

[Ben Guilfoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These aren't the best, but I think the book is worth 4 stars because it's fascinating to look back on these stories and see how Mr Foster embellished them without the ensuing hundreds of hours of "Star Trek" continuity to worry about. So the book itself is probably about 3 stars, but I gave it an extra one for the historical context and curiosity of it all.

Looking forward to seeing what he does with the rest of the episodes for the animated series.

[Abraham Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice collection of star trek cartoon episodes in book form.