Christopher Cerf

I can't believe this thing is real. The Klingons look like...no Klingons that ever graced TV screens. Kirk, Spock and Bones spend most of the book in disguise in leotards. I cannot even. It's one of my favorite Star Trek objects for how utterly seriously it takes itself and how utterly ridiculous it is.

Access a version of the below that includes more illustrations on my blog.

By any objective measure, this is not a very good book: Kirk and the Enterprise visit an alien planet to secure trade with the Federation, the Klingons are there, Kirk wins by beaming the Klingon commander up with a plan that depends on an incredible amount of coincidence and isn't really explained all that well.

What makes the book fun are the pictures by Robert Swanson, which are excellent, but weirdly inaccurate. show more Like, he gets the likenesses down perfectly, but no one has an assignment patch on their uniform, and Captain Kirk has a digital wristwatch. Plus there's his Klingon uniforms, which defy all explanation, and give you some pretty awesome pictures of Captain Kirk showing off his legs.

The plot means that Kirk actually spends most of the story in this goofy disguise, rather than his usual uniform, which seems a pretty big oversight for a picture book.

Swanson's clearly been given some reference material, but no one has told him what it actually means. His Klingon ship on the surface of Vega looks like the Federation installation Deep Space Station K-7. Did someone hand him pictures from "The Trouble with Tribbles" but not tell him no Klingon ship actually appears in the episode? Still, it looks pretty good even if the subject matter is goofy. I can't wait until I have a kid, and this book is their introduction to Star Trek. It'll warp their perceptions for life. show less

A children's picture book.

The Enterprise receives a distress signal from the fifth planet of the star Fomalhaut--it seems that dinosaurs are terrorizing the populace, destroying their cities. The Enterprise rushes to their aid, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to investigate.

There are no dinosaurs. Instead, they encounter Colonel Kragg, who informs them that his armies are prepared to take over the universe--as soon as they learn the secret of the Warp Drive. And they will get it, too: show more they have a machine that can force a man to tell the truth.

Spock volunteers to be subjected to the machine, on the theory that if any of them can resist, it will be him, but it seems that his plan has failed. On command, he draws up plans for a warp engine.

In only two days, an engine has been built and placed into one of the Fomalhaut warships, but when they test the ship--it explodes! Spock has told a lie of omission--he did not inform them that if the dilithium crystals were not cut just so, then their ships would explode.

In the confusion, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are able to get the drop on the men of Fomalhaut, and return to the ship with Kragg as their prisoner.

A silly, simple story, with silly, simple language, but what do you expect from a picture book? As for the ending, well... we all remember "The Enterprise Incident", don't we? As Spock said, then, "It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself." show less

When I picked up this book, I expected the common fantasy genre with vampires, cute and cuddly aliens, hobbits and elves. But in The Vintage anthology of science fantasy, a collection of short stories written in the late 50s and early 60s, this was not the case. In this period, “space opera” and technology were replaced by stories on sociological issues and relationships among men. Editor Christopher Cerf explains that Sputnik and the race to the moon was a reality in this time period show more and much more exciting to readers than fictional trips to the next galaxy. Twenty stories which follow this trend are presented. I was familiar with many of the authors such as Simak, Roald Dahl, Bradbury, Walter Miller Jr., et al. and was introduced to Gironella, Kawalec, Brust and Seabright. All the stories were well written, interesting and entertaining.

Clifford Simak’s Shadow show takes a remote location, a special research project and the mental health of the scientists along with the play, a nightly ritual. Time is an exceptionally interesting topic, especially when J.G. Ballard uses it in Chronopolis. Time can also be an enemy as Alfred Bester knows in The man who murdered Mohammed. Random quest, probably my favorite story, is about an elderly doctor and the young man who comes to him with questions; John Wyndham takes what would be a trite story and makes it into a classic. Then there is Arthur C. Clarke’s Patent pending and Roald Dahl’s The great automatic grammatisator. I want my very own grammatisator (laptop model should be available now), especially when writing LT reviews. Eerie is the only word for José Maria Gironella’s The death of the sea. Equally disturbing is Avram Davidson’s Or all the seas with oysters, the portrait of a bicycle shop owner with his own agenda. Popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner contributes No-sided professor and topology will never be the same. We read A canticle for Leibowitz, the short story that Miller later expanded into his wonderful novel. In addition to the book of the month club, there is one for eggs in Idris Seabright’s An egg a month from all over. And there are more great stories.

In reading this book, it was very evident that the technology was from the 1960s with tubes in TVs, computers taking up whole buildings, telephones that depended on wires, and absence of ebooks. But the stories also dealt with the human condition and that does not change.

Usually collections of science fiction stories will have one or two outstanding stories and the rest are ordinary or unreadable, but this was not the case here. Not all the stories were to my taste but all were well written and thoughtful. show less