Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: The Autobiography of Mr. Spock!
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Our book today is The Autobiography of Mr. Spock: The Life of a Federation Legend, “edited” by an author going by the name of Una McCormack. It’s from Titan Books, and it follows similar autobiographies centering on Captain Kirk, Captain Kahtryn Janeway, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard - making it, obviously, a bit of an oddity. True, Mr. Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan First Officer to Captain Kirk in the classic original Star Trek series, did eventually achieve the rank of captain - was even for a while captain of the USS Enterprise. But he’s not known as a captain, like the three previous stars of this series were.
There’s also another oddity, one the character of Mr. Spock shares with Captain Kirk but not with Picard or Janeway: he’s dead, Jim. James Kirk dies on-screen, in-continuity, in the movie Generations, and Mr. Spock’s death, in-continuity (and apparently of natural causes), is announced in 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. In both cases, there’s a notion of finality, of all adventures ended, that’s naturally lacking in the case of Picard and Janeway, who are still alive in-continuity and having further adventures.
With Mr. Spock, all that is ended. Fans of the character have endured his death twice - first in The Wrath of Khan and then off-screen in Star Trek Beyond - so there’s the strong feeling of a known quantity: fans know the outline of the whole of Spock’s story.
This book makes the probably doomed attempt to tell that whole story. The author casts it as an example of yet another ancient Vulcan tradition: the writing of a T’san a’lat, a “book of wisdom,” a thing all Vulcans do late in their lives - Mr. Spock included.
And the main thing that stops the book from being predictable is the simple fact that Mr. Spock’s story has continued to expand over the decades. Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced Perrin, the third wife of Ambassador Sarek and therefore Spock’s stepmother; The Star Trek movies introduced Spock disciples like Saavik and Valeris; Star Trek: The Final Frontier introduced Spock’s half-brother Sybok; the so-called Kelvin timeline sent a very old Mr. Spock into an alternate reality, where he could meet younger versions of himself and Kirk (and where, as noted, he’d die, without ever returning to his own reality); Star Trek Discovery introduced the character of Michael Burnham and told viewers she’d been raised on Vulcan as essentially Spock’s foster-sister.
The author here is working fairly strictly within prescribed continuity - i.e. things established on-screen - which necessarily restricts creativity. Una McCormack can hardly have her version of Spock reveal in Chapter 3 that he virulently hated his stepmother, right? Or that he found Michael Burnham every bit as annoying as all Star Trek Discovery viewers do? Or even, amply implied in canon but never stated and therefore off limits, that his father Sarek was a jerk?
No, instead we get a patchwork of pieces stitched together by first-person ruminations that are, at best, anodyne - and at worst so numbingly dull that it creates a horrifying possibility: no matter how compelling a character Spock was on-screen, is it possible that this same character would have been a boring writer? The book includes many passages like this:
Wisdom, then, however we might define it, tends in both human and Vulcan philosophies to be associated with old age - with the excellence achieved through many years of learning and scholarship, or the hard-won experience of daily life. But there is a risk to this, for people such as you and me, I think. That when we see the past repeat itself yet again, we begin to confuse our weariness at such repetitions, and at the folly of youth, with wisdom. In the minds of some, cynicism - that rather studied disillusionment with the world which many take on in their later years - masquerades as wisdom. One can see the appeal of such a position. It is frequently borne out by events (although, to my mind, is at least as often contributory) …
Etc. … etc …
This is either an interesting author trying to write a boring character or a boring author who feels liberated to be boring because she’s writing a character she thinks is boring.
Spock addresses these pages not to any familiar characters from the original series but instead to Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Partly the reason for this is pragmatic: In the series continuity of this book, Spock is now very old and has outlived both Kirk and McCoy, outlived his mother Amanda and his father Sarek. It’s possible that Saavik would have made a more sensible recipient, but her own canonical existence is confined to two movies - is she still alive when Spock is dictating his T’san a’lat? It’s unknown - whereas Picard, with whom Spock has shared the intimacy of a Vulcan mind-meld, is still alive and in harness for Starfleet.
Which doesn’t mean all those other intimates don’t get plenty of page-space - all but one. About McCoy we learn quite a bit: that he attended the dying Amanda in her last days and stayed a while on Vulcan to help Spock and Sarek process their grief, that he and Spock became such good friends in the aftermath of Kirk’s death that Spock throughout this book feels comfortable calling him “Bones,” and so on. Likewise we’re given fresh emotional surmises about Spock’s relations with his parents, or with his older brother. But although Spock-the-narrator says that his best friend Jim Kirk hovers over every page of the manuscript, the actual chapter devoted to this most famous friendship in all of science fiction is the shortest chapter in the book and is almost elliptical in its resistance to specifics.
About that famous five-year-mission itself he’s more forthcoming, reflecting on what it’s like to be a part of modern-day mythology:
What is there to be said, after so long, and after so much has been said already, about the five-year mission we undertook on the Enterprise under James T. Kirk? Sometimes I believe that I participated in a piece of epic literature - the voyages of Odysseus, perhaps, or the great journey of Setel, across the Forge, to swear his oath to Sura in the last days of the war. You do not realize at the time, of course, that history is being made. You are simply reacting as calmly as possible to the latest situation that is unfolding around you.
One of the oddest aspects of The Autobiography of Mr. Spock is that its readers know more than its participants, including its author. We know that Spock leaves his own reality and enters the alternate reality of the JJ Abrams “Kelvin” timeline, which is mostly composed of brainless action sequences and ubiquitous lens-flares. In that alternate reality, he meets a younger version of Jim Kirk and a younger version of himself, he helps and advises that alternate Enterprise crew, and he dies, off-camera, without ever returning to his own version of reality. Jean-Luc Picard, reading this memoir, knows nothing of any of this and presumably never will. All autobiographies are necessarily incomplete, but has ever been lacking such a dramatic final act?