Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Child of Two Worlds!

The earliest fans of Star Trek encountered for the first time in 1966 something they’d before then only inferred: the past of their beloved starship Enterprise.

They’d always known the Enterprise must have a past. They knew that Captain James T. Kirk had been the youngest person ever to command a starship, but there’d never been any hint that he was the first captain of the Enterprise – the ship had obviously been in service much longer than Kirk’s individual career. So the truth must be mind-blowing: an Enterprise with a different crew of heroes.

Or not entirely different. In 1966, the Star Trek episode The Menagerie aired, and fans were given a glimpse of a previous cruise of the Enterprise – this time captained by Christopher Pike, with an elderly ship’s surgeon named Dr. Boyce, a striking and enigmatic female officer named simply Number One, and a science officer named … Mr. Spock.

In this glimpse of an earlier Enterprise, he’s not quite the same Mr. Spock. His famous upswept eyebrows are bushy instead of pencil-thin, and he behaved more abruptly, often shouting. It was a startling revelation: our Mr. Spock had been an officer on the Enterprise long before Captain Kirk took command – he’d been part of an entirely different crew, with different chemistry and different adventures. In fact, in The Menagerie we see the ‘present-day’ Mr. Spock defying both Captain Kirk and Starfleet in order to help his former commander.

It was a two-part episode of exceptional quality, and its most amazing aspect of it was that flashback-glimpse of the earlier Enterprise. Those glimpses were bits and pieces of an earlier, unused pilot episode for version of Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry hadn’t been able to sell to the studio, and those glimpses set Star Trek fans wondering – in their signature way – what kinds of stories happened on that earlier ship, with that earlier crew. Not so much Captain Pike, who certainly seemed bland compared to Captain Kirk – but definitely the mysterious Number One, and also, naturally, this earlier, cruder version of Mr. Spock.

The latest “Original Series” Star Trek novel, Child of Two Worlds by reliable hack Greg Cox, takes its readers back to those years, that earlier cruise of the Enterprise, and as its title indicates, a large part of its plot centers on the personal conflict inside Mr. Spock, his human half and his Vulcan half always irreconcilable. The novel opens with a lovely little scene from Spock’s childhood, with his human mother presenting him with a cake on his birthday, much to his confusion.

The novel then jumps forward eighteen years to find Spock a member of Captain Pike’s bridge crew during an emergency: deadly Rigelian fever has broken out onboard the Enterprise, and the only possible cure within range requires a rare mineral called ryetalyn, which can be found on the nearby world of Cypria III. As the Enterprise is en route, they encounter a Cyprian vessel under attack by a Klingon warship. A Cyprian trader named Soleste had kidnapped a Klingon woman named Merata, and the Klingons want her back – but it turns out Merata is actually a Cyprian, Soleste’s sister Elzura, who was herself taken by the Klingons in a raid years earlier and raised as Klingon. She believes herself a Klingon, and she rages at finding herself essentially a prisoner on board the Enterprise.

Captain Pike assigns Mr. Spock the task of talking to Merata, trying to tease out from her more details about her life. Spock at first protests that he’s not a suitable candidate for such a job, but Pike apparently knows something of Spock’s own divided heritage and guesses that might help him form a connection with Merata. The dialogue scenes between the two of them are by far the best part of Cox’s novel, which otherwise shares too much in common with many of the most recent Star Trek novels we’ve looked at: flat characters, a cringing reluctance to create any dialogue or plot twist that might so much as wrinkle accepted canon, and a tendency to write characters at a fourth grade level. Take just one moment among countless examples: during a shipboard emergency halfway through the book, Pike calls down to the Transporter Room to talk to his Transporter Chief Pitcairn and is informed by his subordinate that he’s succumbed to the Rigelian fever. This what we’re told about Pike’s response: “”No worries, Mister Yamata,’ Pike said, even as he regretted hearing that one of his senior officers had been taken out of commission by the implacable fever.” Yeesh.

The book, in other words, is fairly pedestrian. The twin plots – the kidnapped young woman and the badly-needed ryetalyn – are woven together cleverly enough in the story’s climax, and there is, of course, a neatly-done parallel late scene involving a birthday cake, but mostly this is just the normal standard post-Next Generation anodyne Trek stuff.

There are a couple of interesting nuggets here and there. For instance, in this novel we’re just matter-of-factly informed that Number One is an Ilyrian, a detail that was somehow new to me (and one that seems a bit odd, since a quick recourse to Star Trek Memory Alpha shows that Ilyrians had pronounced cranial ridges, which Number One certainly didn’t have in The Menagerie), and Cox also surprised me by making reference to Sybok, Mr. Spock’s half-brother:

The forbidden topic felt strange upon Spock’s tongue and triggered memories he had done his best to bury. As a boy, Spock had idolized his half-brother’s fierce intellect, but after Sybok renounced logic to explore the forbidden realm of unchecked emotion, Sybok had been more than simply banished from Vulcan. It was as though he had ceased to exist. He had vanished from Spock’s life, never to be spoken of again.

Sybok was the main guest-character in the William Shatner-directed Star Trek V, and even most Star Trek fans tend to look askance at that movie, regarding everything in it as … well, not exactly canonical, since at no point in the previous thirty years had the Spock character ever mentioned having a brother, until Shatner and his writers dreamed up the idea for the movei. Never to be spoken of again indeed.

It was of course something of a foregone conclusion that Cox couldn’t really do much to resolve or even directly the very subject of his book’s title, since we know that Mr. Spock would go right on fighting with his dual nature all through the original run of the series. But I couldn’t help feeling, while reading Child of Two Worlds, that some of Star Trek’s more inventive writers might even so have found a way to make this novel feel more immediate.

And the great, epic Captain Pike & Crew Star Trek novel still very much hasn’t been written …