by Adam Hunault
Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Star Trek books panel at New York Comic Con. I was fascinated as the editor and a few authors described what was to come in Star Trek fiction. In middle school I read close to a hundred of these paperback novels. Maybe I should check these books out again, I thought during the panel, and snapped up a free preview of the upcoming novels. I opened it to the first page of Star Trek: Enterprise: Kobayashi Maru, by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. I immediately remembered why I don’t read Star Trek novels.
I’m a big Trekkie. Has to be said. I would love to read new Star Trek stories but these books are so poorly written they’re unreadable. I occasionally have to do some writing at work—a newsletter, maybe—and I would be fired if my writing was as bad as what the so-called authors employed by Pocket Books cook up for Star Trek.
Here’s what lurked on page one of the Kobayashi Maru preview, waiting for an unsuspecting reader like a cheetah waiting in tall grass for one of Captain Archer’s beloved gazelles.
“Admit it, Jonathan. You’re already at least as bored with this mission as I am.”
Unable to deny his fellow NX-class starship captain’s assertion, Captain Jonathan Archer smoothed his rumpled uniform and leaned back in his chair with a resigned sigh. Porthos, whom Archer had though was fast asleep behind him at the foot of his bed, released a short but portentous bark, as if voicing agreement with the woman who looked on expectantly from the screen. Archer turned away from the lone desktop terminal in his quarters just long enough to toss a small dog treat to the beagle, who immediately became far too preoccupied with the crunchy tidbit to tender any further opinions.
“My feelings really don’t matter all that much, Erika,” Archer said to the image on the terminal. “And frankly, neither do yours. This was Starfleet’s call to make, not ours.”
From across the nearly six-parsec-gulf of interstellar space that currently separated Enterprise and Columbia, Captain Erika Hernandez punctuated her reply with a withering frown. “All right. Who are you, and what have you done with Jonny Archer?”
His lips curled in an inadvertent grin. “I’m just an explorer, Erika. I don’t make policy. And I don’t like babysitting Earth Cargo Service freighter convoys any more than you do. But you’ve got to admit that there have been enough attacks on the main civilian shipping lanes over the past few weeks to justify keeping Earth’s two fastest and best-armed starships out on continuous patrol, at least for a while.”
Whoa, dude!
Out of pure reflex I grabbed a pencil and began striking out great swaths of text.
The second paragraph alone would be enough to make William Shakespeare catatonic. It’s peppered with out of place synonyms for everyday words, as if Martin & Mangels just discovered the thesaurus. Instead of a statement, Hernandez’s opening line is an “assertion,” while Porthos “tenders” his opinions (that’s how people with sticks up their butts say “offer”), and his doggie treat becomes a “crunchy tidbit.” The author also takes time out of telling his story to: clarify the number of desktop terminals in Archer’s quarters (one, and it’s apparently lonely, poor thing); to make us guess the identity of the opening speaker (he gives many hints before unmasking her in paragraph 4, surely the biggest revelation since Darth Vader said, “I am your father”); to let Archer flail about awkwardly (try to imagine Scott Bakula smoothing out his uniform while simultaneously leaning back in a chair, then turning around to feed his dog, all while talking on the comm); and, finally, to give the Trek tech geeks a boner by mentioning that Enterprise and Columbia are NX-class starships when only one type of starship exists in this Star Trek era.
Like many inept writers, Mr. Martin and Mr. Mangels seem to think no noun is complete without an adjective, and no verb without an adverb. Archer heaves a “resigned” sigh, as opposed to an optimistic or proactive one. Porthos eats “immediately,” even though readers would assume promptness without a modifier. The dog treat is “small,” as if we might mistakenly think it was enormous. The uniform is rumpled. Hernandez “looks on expectedly” instead of watching, even though she couldn’t possibly see Porthos at the foot of Archer’s bed on her viewscreen.
[nms:jonathan archer star trek,1,0]
My favorite line in this whole mess with when Porthos gives “a short but portentous bark.” A portent is an omen of something momentous or calamitous to come. Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a dog bark portentously. Nobody? That’s what I thought.
And I imagine (hope, pray!) that people will no longer find the allegedly witty expression “who are you and what have you done with so-and-so” clever a hundred and fifty years from now.
At this point you’re probably saying, “If you’re just going to nitpick everything he says what does that leave?”
Something like this:
“Admit it, Jonathan,” said Captain Erika Hernandez over subspace. “You’re at least as bored with this mission as I am.”
Porthos barked, as if agreeing with Hernandez. Captain Jonathan Archer sighed and tossed a piece of cheese to the beagle to silence him.
“My feelings don’t matter, Erika,” Archer said. “Neither do yours. This was Starfleet’s call.”
Hernandez frowned across the six parsecs separating Columbia from Enterprise. “That’s surprising, coming from you.”
Archer smiled. “I’m an explorer. I don’t like babysitting freighter convoys either but there have been enough attacks over the past few weeks to justify it.”
Short, sweet, to the point.
You see, there’s a simple mathematical formula for writers: the number of words in a paragraph is inversely proportional to how interesting that paragraph is. Put simply, the longer you talk the more boring you are. Martin’s and Mangel’s paragraphs could charitably be described as dull. Nobody’s interested in Archer’s rumpled uniform or how many desktop terminals he has. We don’t care the slightest bit about the size of Porthos’s doggie treat, or whether it’s crunchy or chewy, or how quickly he’s distracted by it.
I’ll admit I’m sort of interested in Porthos’s portentous barking—fascinated, in fact. But since I doubt it will be a major plot point later on, that gem should probably be cut.
Martin and Mangels crammed 254 words into their five paragraphs. I cut about 60% of them, preserved all the salient information and didn’t get rid of anything you’d miss (except the portentous barking). I axed a cliché (“who are you and what have you done with…”), cut out a lot of hemming and hawing in the dialogue (really, all that much, frankly, you’ve got to admit), and even added some details (Porthos’s unspecific “treat” is cheese now—it’s bad for him, but he loves it, so I couldn’t resist).
George Orwell put it best. “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
He goes on, “I think the following rules will cover most cases: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
[nms:george orwell,1,0]
The point to all this? Not everybody sits around reading great wordsmiths like Twain, Faulkner and Salman Rushdie all day. Just because it’s a sci-fi paperback, pulp fiction by any definition, doesn’t mean intelligent people don’t want to read it and a book read by intelligent people should be written in a style that would pass muster in a high school newspaper. English language writing for everyday people has sunken pretty low if two professional authors and at least one editor can’t do better than this—especially since writing well would be half as much work! It’s frightening to think that there are a few people out there who consume Star Trek books voraciously and who may have read so many that they would mistake this for good writing. Perhaps they even try to imitate it and allow this dearth of style to spread.
That isn’t the case, for the most part. In more cases, vague, plodding and irrelevant prose is just pushing readers like me away from otherwise entertaining Star Trek stories. That’s sad too.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
You’re right, Zianeu, Triangle WAS pretty bad — and the first Imzadi was one for my favorite Star Trek novels ever. Lilacsigil, I agree Trek novels were pretty great back in the day. I have fond memories of Final Frontier, Spock’s World, Q Squared, Spock Must Die, Imzadi, Q-in-Law, A Rock and a Hard Place, Strangers from the Sky… I haven’t read these books in ten years but all of their titles spring straight to mind!
I recall reading a TREK novel that opened something like this:
The Klingon pointed his phaser.
Directly at Kirk.
Ready to fire.
At a moment’s notice.
I used to rewrite paragraphs from the PERRY RHODAN series, mostly for amusement but partly for practice, into something that wouldn’t put me to sleep. I’m currently editing the English version of a German sf series called NEBULAR, not for profit. I’ll rewrite lines like “We must depart these premises with all haste” to “Go!” I do love reading older fantasy stories by prose poets like Clark Ashton Smith and Fritz Leiber, and will admit to sneaking in an exotic word here and there, but you’re write about the TREKs.
It’s not just the prose, either. I put down a recent TREK unfinished last year because the first third of the book started out with Spock flashing back to his service with Captain Pike, then went to a flashback of Pike’s about his childhood, and never got anywhere near the actual plot. I liked the older TREKs, but the only one I’ve enjoyed lately was Tony Isabella’s THE CASE OF THE COLONIST’S CORPSE.
Not much of an ENTERPRISE follower, but I seem to pick up a few continuity glitches in KOBAYASHI MARU. Wasn’t it a plot point in TOS’s “Turnabout Intruder” that a woman couldn’t be a starship commander as far ahead as Kirk’s era? Wasn’t Enterprise on an exploratory mission at the edges of known space, too far to be recalled for a transport mission in the shipping lanes? Were a few raids on shipping too much for one NX-class ship to handle?
I’m a little disheartened that you’re condemning the entire line of TREK novels based on one excerpt from one novel. Did you at least read the other two excerpts in the book you got? Andy & Mike aren’t the only writers in the line, and we don’t all write the same way.
#1: Paramount (now CBS, thanks to corporate merging) has ALWAYS vetted the TREK novels. You don’t see Barbara Hambly anymore because she isn’t interested in doing any kind of tie-in fiction any more, Diane Duane just wrote a TREK book a year and a half ago, and John M. Ford is dead. *grin*
#12: The book you couldn’t finish was BURNING DREAMS by Margaret Wander Bonanno, which was a biography of Christopher Pike, so that =was= the plot. And there are no continuity glitches in that excerpt, as Captain Erika Hernandez was established on the TV show, and appeared in several episodes. As for “Turnabout Intruder,” keep in mind that the person who stated that there was no place for women among starship captains was a lunatic woman who switched bodies with Captain Kirk — no one else confirmed that statement, and she’s hardly what you’d call a reliable source. *grin*
Also, while your rewrite is “Short, sweet, to the point,” it also was in serious danger of putting me to sleep. If I had to choose between reading the original, or take your fix, I’d pick the original in a heartbeat, as your rewrite is bland and lifeless with no impression of context or scene-setting. It’s “white room” writing.
You shoot yourself in the foot with the rewrite, which goes too far the other way (it’s a script, not a novel), but I think your general point is sound.
The Star Trek books are novels, they should be … novelistic. The problem with that passage is that it’s using dull language to give an almost purely physical description of a set from a TV show. Every description is aural or visual – because that’s what you know from TV. It’s only setting the bar at ‘you know that ready room set? well, Archer’s bored, on the phone and feeding the dog in it’.
The very best tie-in novels are the Doctor Who ones. The new series has clipped their wings a little, but compared with something like Paul Cornell’s Human Nature or Love and War, Lance Parkin’s Father Time or Just War, Gareth Robert’s The Plotters or The Romance of Crime, Russell Davies’ Damaged Goods, Ben Aaronovitch’s The Also People, Lloyd Rose’s Camera Obscura … it’s embarassing. Ten years ago, Peter David (then at his height, not the unedited first drafts that get put out now) would have struggled to make the top twenty Who authors. The recent David McIntee short story was one of the better ones in the collection – and McIntee was perhaps the very worst Doctor Who author who got regular gigs.
Christopher Bennett is the best current Trek writer, but even his stuff feels weighed down at times, like it needs to drop continuity stuff in.
Example: Ex Machina has Kirk staring out of the Enterprise window at one point and the author says – paraphrasing, sorry – that Kirk ‘gazed out at the sixteen million plates of bonded duralinium’. No, no, no. He’s either staring out at the *ship he loves like a woman* (to quote Futurama), one that (because it’s just post-TMP) has never looked better *or* at the stars – something that is everyday for him but *we can’t do, because we can’t go to space*. It’s either love or a casual miracle. You wouldn’t stare at a beautiful woman and admire the billions of skin cells, you certainly wouldn’t bloody *count* them. And if you were on the ISS, staring out the window, you’d be in awe at the *view*, not the sodding *glass*.
With no TV series, it’s up to the Star Trek books to go ‘broader and deeper’ than the TV show, use the strengths of the medium. The Trek books have their heart in the right place, the editorial direction is just fine (and Keith’s books are better than most), but that is a pretty typical sample of the writing, and a great demonstration of the problem.
Writers and editors of the Trek books shouldn’t get defensive about this, they should be listening and saying ‘we want these books to be as brilliant as possible’. They are not, in any way, as brilliant as possible. The great danger is laziness, and the passage in the article up there is lazy.
Keith, you write for the Doctor Who books, too – don’t you have some of the Who authors’ phone numbers?
‘NX-01 Enterprise, Captain’s Log, 15 April.
Following the mysterious attacks on the main civilian shipping lanes over the past few weeks, it was easy for Starfleet Command to justify diverting Earth’s two fastest and best-armed starships away from their mission and out on continuous patrol. We are currently six parsecs ahead of Columbia. All departments report we are ready for action, keen to engage our unseen enemy. Indistinct. Long yawn. Short yawn. Indistinct. No, don’t put that down. Oh darn.’
Captain Jonathan Archer sat up, his attention on the logbook for the first time. He got the device to delete the last twelve words then read the entry back to himself. It served its purpose, he decided. He stored the entry.
The desktop terminal chimed, waking Porthos, who glowered up at him.
‘Yeah?’ Archer told the terminal, more worried about finding a dog treat.
‘You look as bored with this mission as I feel.’ Erika Hernandez said, her voice cutting through the room.
Archer turned to the screen. The Captain of the Columbia was sat in her near-identical quarters in her near-identical starship, slumped in her chair.
‘I’m ready for action, keen to engage our unseen enemy,’ Archer told her. ‘It must be true, it says so in the ship’s log.’
He looked down at Porthos, who was settling back in his basket.
‘You can’t put that,’ Erika complained. ‘I’ve just put that. Those exact words. Starfleet Command will think you copied me.’
‘They’ll think you copied me,’ Archer corrected her. He’d walked over to the window. Columbia was somewhere in among the field of stars.
‘What are we doing here, Jonathan?’
Archer smiled at that. Here. There was nearly twenty light years between them. A generation ago, it would have taken decades for her message to travel the distance. A hundred years ago ‘here’ was one little patch on one little continent on one little planet. Millions had died fighting over lines on a map or lines in a book, thinking they were defending ‘here’.
Space had a way of putting that way of thinking in perspective.
‘This was Starfleet’s call to make, not ours.’
Without looking, he knew that had earned him a withering frown.
‘Both starships on a routine mission to – ’
‘Hey,’ he said, holding up his hand. ‘I’m an explorer, Erika. I don’t like babysitting Earth Cargo Service freighter convoys any more than you do.’
As he’d been talking, he’d been looking out at the stars. One group in particular. A constellation of nine. All green, arranged in a line. He recognised it as the Baraal Cluster. It was a thousand light years away. And the charts all said there were only seven stars in the Baraal Cluster. He’d discovered two new stars, just by looking out of the window.
‘But there are no routine missions out here,’ he said quietly. ‘How could there ever be?’
Keith DeCandido (a Star Trek author, ladies and gentlemen!) makes some good points. Thanks for commenting, Keith. I haven’t read many of your books because I stopped reading Star Trek fiction a while back. I have read one though, “The Art of the Impossible,” and it was pretty darn decent.
Let me respond to some of the very good points you made.
Did I paint all the Trek novelists with one brush? Yep. I’m telling the truth when I say those paragraphs were the first five I read in the sampler. There, in five paragraphs, were nearly all of the style problems that drove me away from Trek books. It was too perfect to resist.
Without a doubt my critique is based on anecdotal evidence from one Trek novel. There’s no point in trying to fully support my position. Good and bad style are a matter of opinion. There’s no way to prove (or disprove) that these paragraphs is an extreme example of common style problems in Star Trek novels. I happen to believe that, so I used it that way. No amount of evidence would support anything that I’m saying.
I understand that it’s unfair to judge you based on other writers’ work. Unfortunately a series is sometimes going to be judged on individual books in it. A chain is only as weak as yadda yadda yadda, right? You’re correct that the other chapters in the sampler were better — but they all suffered from the same type of problem to some degree. It makes me wonder if good writers aren’t writing in this style on purpose because the readers expect it. Scary thought.
I’ll grant that my rewrite was nothing special. And I have nothing against rhetorical flourishes. This scene is dull, plain and simple. It was going to be boring short and boring long, stuffed full of cliches and bizarre wordings. Maybe the solution is to cut it and deliver the exposition another way. I didn’t feel like I could say that without reading the whole novel.
I Piggle makes all of the other points I would like to make in his comment, which is very insightful and diplomatic. And kudos to M Pakka on his rewrite. Using the captain’s log as it was intended! Keith, tell your editor to hire that guy. I’m serious.
Well, I'm glad you liked The Art of the Impossible. *grin*
Adam @ 17: Did I paint all the Trek novelists with one brush? Yep. [...] There, in five paragraphs, were nearly all of the style problems that drove me away from Trek books. [...] There’s no point in trying to fully support my position. Good and bad style are a matter of opinion.
The labels “good” and “bad” are opinion, yes. Stating that all, or most, of the Trek novels in the recent past share the same style, however, is an assertion which you should offer support for, if you want to be taken seriously.