Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography
Star Trek: Foul Deeds Will Riseby Greg CoxPocket Books, 2014Greg Cox's latest Star Trek novel Foul Deeds Will Rise takes its title, obviously, from Hamlet, and since the book is set in the Original Series continuity, the one created by Gene Roddenberry for network TV back in the1960s, the show's most prescient fans might feel a penny drop. After all, a 1966 episode of the original series also had a Hamlet title: "The Conscience of the King" - an episode in which the starship Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk hosts a traveling company of Shakespearean actors led by an actor named Anton Karidian and his beautiful young daughter Lenore, who has, predictably, a starry-eyed flirtation with Kirk. It turns out that the man calling himself Anton Karidian was actually an infamous figure called "Kodos the Executioner," who ordered mass executions on the planet Tarsus IV twenty-something years before - executions that had comparatively few survivors who'd actually ever seen Kodos in person. Kodos was thougt to have died, and twenty-something years later, two of those few survivors who could identify the man were, by sheer coincidence, on board the Enterprise: Kirk and a boyish young ensign named Kevin Riley.As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that someone is methodically poisoning those few eye-witnesses - including Riley, who spends most of the episode on life support. At the episode's climax, the killer is revealed as not Anton Karidian but his daughter Lenore, who accidentally kills her father while trying to kill Kirk (at the last minute, Karidian leaps in front of her phaser shot, demonstrating that perhaps episode writer Barry Trivers was a bit unclear on the concept of the speed of light) and then has a mad scene worthy of Ophelia. The episode ends with Riley out of danger and poor ranting Lenore shipped off to a 23rd century asylum for the insane.Foul Deeds Will Rise has one foot in that little bit of Star Trek history, but it has its other foot in a later bit of that same history: the 1986 movie Star Trek: The Voyage Home, in which, as a reward for having saved the Earth from destruction by an alient probe, an older Kirk and his seasoned crew are given command of the newly-commissioned Enterprise-A (the replacement for the original Enterprise, which was destroyed in the earlier movie The Search for Spock - like all things Star Trek, it's a long story) and the freedom to go on more voyages.Two more Star Trek movies followed, in which we see something of this older crew in the Enterprise-A before the film franchise moved on into the disastrous domain of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the iteration of the series that killed the original movie franchise, and that was all fans heard of the voyages of the Enterprise-A. Foul Deeds Will Rise is one of very few novels to be set in the period of those voyages; it's twenty-something years later than that original "Conscience of the King" episode (Stardate 8514.6, for the virgins among you), and Captain Kirk is hosting not a theater company but a meeting of diplomats from the warring worlds of Pavak and Oyolu. The Pavakians are represented by crusty old General Tem and his aide-de-camp Colonel Gast, and the Oyolu delegation consists of flamboyant Minister A'Barra and his aide Ifusi - and the summit itself is being facilitated by a Federation Ambassador: a grown-up Kevin Riley.Cox has written an entire shelf of Star Trek novels (including 2012's The Rings of Time); he's thoroughly steeped in the show's rich history, so Foul Deeds Will Rise is chock-full of enough allusions to thirty years of continuity to make most fans very happy and most non-fans very confused. And he can be relied upon to throw in a few good insights into his central characters, starting with Kirk himself, who reflects on the stoked fires of his explorer's nature as he waits for the delegates to arrive:
As Scott operated the controls, Kirk looked forward to meeting his first Pavakians. He had never encountered either species before and, despite the weighty nature of his mission, felt the same thrill he always experienced when visiting a new planet or civilization. The joy of discovery was a big part of why he had joined Starfleet. He hoped he never got so jaded that he lost his natural curiosity about alien races and cultures.
While Riley conducts the summit, Kirk and his command crew (not lesser officers and crew, as would happen on any non-Star Trek vessel at any time, anywhere) shuttle food and medical supplies to the war-torn planets. While Kirk and his ship's surgeon Dr. McCoy are dispensing aid on Oyolu, they're treated to, of all things, a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest ... and in the role of Prospero, Lenore Karidian!McCoy and Kirk are stunned, but the older and wiser Lenore seems perfectly stable and sane (they're both a little sheepish at having lost track of her progress for all these years) - which makes things that much more awkward when, shortly afterward, delate A'Barra is, you guessed it, poisoned. Kirk at first refuses to believe that the grounded, slightly wistful older woman he's only just met again could possibly be guilty, and Cox does a good job of conveying how Riley, himself almost a victim of the old Lenore, has no patience for such hesitation:
“I can't believe I'm hearing this,” Riley said. “It's like you're both going out of your way to avoid seeing the obvious. Lenore Karidian is a poisoner. She presumably has this specific drug in her possession. And you still think it's merely a coincidence that A'Barra just happened to be poisoned while she's aboard the Enterprise, reading only a few doors away on the very same deck?”
As for Lenore herself, Cox evaporates any suspense by bringing us inside her thoughts, which are sad and seasoned but entirely level-headed:
It was funny. There had been times, back at the hospital on Gilead, when she had hated Kirk and had wanted him dead. She'd blamed him for her undoing and had fantasized about killing him a thousand times, in a thousand grisly ways. And there had been other times when she'd wanted so much to apologize to him for what she'd done, and had wondered what might have been had her crimes and delusions not come between them. And now here she was again, back on his ship, making more trouble for him … and the entire peace process.
The calm rationality of such thoughts is a very accurate indicator of all that's wrong with Foul Deeds Will Rise: like so much Star Trek fiction of all kinds, this novel is strictly an exercise in muffled nostalgia. All the characters speak in blocks of interchangeable exposition; simple gestures are substituted for anything like character development; bitter or unsatisfying outcomes are avoided; actions sequences are leeched of all motion, let alone tension. Worst of all, this is unsatisfying even as nostalgia, because every single character is equally lobotomized when it comes to the actual fictive world in which the whole story takes place. The Captain Kirk and crew at the time of this novel have saved not only the Earth but also the entire Federation publicly many times - they're old hands who've seen it all and done it all, and yet neither they nor anybody they meet seem aware of this. Instead, Starship Officers help Diplomats stop War and flush out Killer.Novels like this one are inherently mysteries, in a way. J. J. Abrams' addle-brained big-screen reboot of the Star Trek continuity scrubbed this entire version of the show from view, never to return, so the allure of novels set in one small, unexplored corner of that old, discarded continuity must necessarily be vanishingly slim. And that very fact makes a misfire like this one all the more maddening: after all, what's the risk anymore, either to Pocket Books or CBS Studios, in writing these books with bite and temper? Why not commission an author to write a book starring a crew who've stopped wars, met (and killed) gods, traveled through time, and become legends in their own time - and act like it? It would sure as hell be a lot more interesting than this room-temperature oatmeal.
