About a week ago I posted photographs of the contents of a box of old paperbacks I'd retrieved from my parents' house. Of course you all immediately noticed the glaring omission in that post: I display the ostensibly-complete sequence of James Blish books (called Star Trek 1 through Star Trek 12) with two volumes missing. That's right, Star Trek 10 and Star Trek 11 were not in the box. (Also, the quality of the "Star Trek paperbacks" picture I posted last week was really bad.)
Of course I knew I had those other two books...I just had misplaced them, that's all. I specifically remember triumphantly completing the set some time in ninth grade, way too old for it but not being able to resist the final volume off a sidewalk blanket. Anyway I had to go back there tonight (my mother's computer...don't ask) and I did some fishing around and located the two missing books. So, above, please observe brand new scans of the 12 covers of these pre-home-video, completely superfluous volumes into which weird British hack James Blish has transcribed the scripts of all 79 episodes of Star Trek, while making arbitrary changes and added his own strange details whenever he felt like it. Terrible stuff...and Blish didn't even survive the process; as you can see, the final book was finished by somebody else (somebody even more of a hack than James Blish).
But, look at those covers! They're incredible. The first book is obviously a conventional 1960s Hollywood illustration based (pretty clearly) on publicity stills from the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before (the second pilot). The second and third are just boring (except for those fantastic numerals)...but then the paintings start, and all nine of them are exceptional. Remember that this was the 'seventies and the only images we'd ever seen of the Enterprise in flight were the awful effects shots from the original show. I fondly remember staring at the covers of these books (while eating cereal after school or whatever) and grooving on the incredible images and the way they made the Trek universe so much fun to picture. Great stuff.
4 comments:
I think #7 is my favorite, I love how aliens were drawn in the 70s. That's a nice set and it's just another reason to envy you.
The cover of #7 is interesting because it actually depicts events from one of the stories you can read in there.
It's the episode called "Who Mourns For Adonis?" in which Kirk & Co. fight the Greek God, Apollo. (And yes, he's actually Apollo; their explanation of how this can be the case is actually pretty good.) The Enterprise is flying around minding its own business when the a giant green human hand grabs the ship, and then they see the face of Apollo out the front viewscreen.
Sounds great, doesn't it? But (as you can see from the linked image in the preceding paragraph) the 1960s television effects aren't exactly up to the challenge of this imaginative idea. But the painter of the Star Trek 7 cover did a much better job.
When I was a kid I loved 4, 6, and 8 for the excellent depictions of the Enterprise. I would have to wait until 2009 to see cinematic images of the Enterprise that looked anywhere near as good.
9, 10, 11, and 12 all look like they're by the same artist, and he/she's not my favorite. (Of course it's a guy.)
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