Previously here on the site I took a look at a book that collected a handful of James Blish’s other Star Trek adaptations, he worked on 13 such books, including the book this story came from.
This time I won’t be reviewing the entire book, because this is part of a special Tribble themed month I wanted to try to pull off!
So, weighing in at about 17 pages, how will this stand up against the actual episode?
Let’s dive in and take a look, gang.
This is your oft overlooked, though still super serious and official ***SPOILER ALERT***
After receiving a priority one distress signal, The Enterprise heads to the K-7 station over Sherman’s Planet, a barren yet strategically important planet between The Federation and The Klingon Empire that either side must prove they could develop before it could be claimed.
But when they arrive, no threat can be found on sensors.
Kirk and Spock beam to the station where no emergency can be found either, though they do find the Federation Undersecretary for Agricultural Affairs for the quadrant raised the alarm because they’ve started to grow a perennial grain which is a hybrid of wheat and rye on the planet below, which could be just the win the Federation needs to claim the planet.
Soon guards are posted at the warehouse containing the grain, shoreleave is ordered for all off-duty Enterprise personnel, and the crew arrives quickly to shop and relax.
Uhura heads to a shop where she runs into a peddler trying to sell his wares to the shopkeeper, the final “item” being the soon-to-be troublesome tribbles.
Just then the Klingons arrive for their own shoreleave to add yet another wrinkle to an already complicated situation…that’s about to get far worse!
We all know this classic ep and where it ends up, this isn’t a review of the episode itself though, this is a review of the adaptation.
And that is what I find most interesting.
This is a pretty damn faithful adaptation, as far as I remember the only thing missing is the mess hall fight.
The focus is more on the Tribbles and their impact than the political machinations of the Federation and the Klingon Empire, which leads to the story feeling a bit more whimsical and light hearted as I believe it was originally intended to be.
But there’s also the stark contrast between adapting an episode back in the late 60s versus adapting an episode in the early 2000s or even today.
As I said above, this was just 17 pages long based on a 50 minute episode.
While I know it was a 2-part pilot, take a look at my Broken Bow review again and see that, despite it only being about 30ish mins longer, the adaptation is roughly 10 times as many pages.
In fact, the 6 episodes that are adapted in this book would fit into the page count of Broken Bow with plenty of room for 3 or 4 more.
I don’t know if it was audience appetite or publishing in general that caused it but I find it absolutely, no pun intended, fascinating how the process had changed in just 30ish years.
They don’t really adapt Star Trek episodes anymore, but I’d hazard a guess that the business has changed even more in the 20 or so years since Broken Bow.
Here’s the thing, gang, this is a stripped down quick run-through of an iconic episode.
It is by no metric a superior version, but if you want a snappy refresher without burning 50 minutes, this is more fun than a Wikipedia or Memory Alpha entry.
Despite the rumors that Blish started out sort of ambivalent to Star Trek, he certainly got a good grasp early on.
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