Set phasers on weak

I loved the recent *Star Trek* movie. There were some jar­ring sur­pris­es and it had plot holes you could fly a star­ship through, but that did­n’t mat­ter. The film brought the beloved fran­chise back intact, and showed a new gen­er­a­tion what some of us saw in the old show. There were changes; it’s not the same old Star Trek. It remains to be seen whether the sequels will bring back the spir­it of the orig­i­nal series, but they’ve done an admirable job. New actors have reimag­ined rather than either rein­vent or mim­ic the old roles. It’s more than a fan could have hoped.

I had hoped that Alan Dean Fos­ter’s nov­el­iza­tion of the Star Trek movie might expand on the sto­ry­line, pro­vide details that did­n’t make it to the movie. It’s been years since I’ve read any of Alan Dean Fos­ter’s nov­els but I remem­ber him being a com­pe­tent sci­ence fic­tion writer.

The book was a dis­ap­point­ment on all sides. It may as well be a frame by frame retelling of the movie, and while one might nor­mal­ly expect rich­ness of detail in writ­ing, Fos­ter seems to have left his descrip­tive tal­ents behind. The writ­ing is flat and pas­sive, and the few places his dia­logue diverges from the screen­play adds lines that are wood­en, awk­ward, and unnecce­sary. The writ­ing style is over­ly pre­cious and full of obscure words despite a com­plete lack of nar­ra­tive tone or sen­tence structure.

A writer like Umber­to Eco can get away with using words most peo­ple have to look up, because he uses them with cause and con­text; his words are cho­sen for nuanced mean­ings. Here Fos­ter appears to have grabbed a the­saurus and ran­dom­ly insert­ed abstruse words where sim­ple and clear lan­guage would have bet­ter served. The atmos­phere of Titan is «fetid with sus­pend­ed hydro­car­bons»? Would­n’t some­one have to try to breathe it in order to report on its odor? And I have trou­ble imag­in­ing Cap­tain Kirk using the word «inex­orable» dur­ing an offer of emer­gency assis­tance to a ship falling into a black hole. Fos­ter phoned in this job, and I would not be sur­prised if this were a first draft.

It was pleas­ant to re-expe­ri­ence the movie, but I could have had that by rent­ing a DVD. At least it was a quick read to get me start­ed on 2010’s read­ing list.