ST09: The novelization - extra content
Phillip Thorne
Based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
A novel by Alan Dean Foster
Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
As a written work (by an experienced novelist) the novelization gives
us aspects alien to a movie: third-person omniscient introspection,
asides by peripheral characters, similes. OTOH, many exchanges are
wordier than the counterparts in the movie, and bog down for it.
Several explanatory scenes are here, but at least one action scene is
missing.
Chapter 1
Extra: Spock's birth. Amanda, miffed, speaks her mind when Sarek is
late to arrive (it's not traditional for a Vulcan father to attend the
birth). He suggests the name of "one of our respected early
society-builders," Spock.
The _Kelvin_ encounter is identified as a full light-year outside the
Klingon Neutral Zone. The crew comments that the ship seems
needlessly large, "as if whoever designed it couldn't stop building."
There's a comparison made between the birth of Jim Kirk and the
expulsion of Shuttle 34 from the Kelvin.
Chapter 3
Spock's education (age 11): he progresses faster than average. On the
pop quiz is this: "What is the central assumption of quantum
cosmology?" "Everything that can happen does happen, in equal and
parallel universes." Yes, novels can have foreshadowing.
Extra: Amanda argues with Sarek before he speaks to Spock.
Extra: Jim Kirk is washing the classic Corvette when his older brother
George tells him he's running away. It's their father's car, not
their stepfather Frank's, who is going to sell it while Winona is
away. Driving off in the car was rebellion, but the quarry wasn't
Jim's original plan.
The youth Jim passes on the roadside is George. The highway patrol
officer is human. (Here's something missing from the movie: he
pursues Jim, but makes no attempt at *rescue* when he heads for the
quarry. And he's not concerned when Jim climbs up over the edge, just
stern. Consider the semi-parallel when Kirk offers to rescue Nero
from the black hole.)
Spock and Amanda before his admission hearing at the Vulcan High
Council. He retches in "the hygiene chamber," which puts the lie to
not being nervous.
Chapter 4
The bar (The Shipyard) is in Storm Lake. The prose identifies Uhura
as East African. How does Pike recognize Kirk after the altercation?
"I've got a bear-trap memory for promising individuals, and I know
your history. Your aptitude tests were off the charts ... I don't
remember everybody's results [, only the] exceptional."
Why was the _Enterprise_ being constructed in central Iowa? Proximity
to the Mississippi shipping and the industrial-commercial hubs of the
Midwest; isolation in case of accident; empty land for support firms;
the ground is flat and tectonically stable.
Extra: Kirk tells Pike how talked his way into the shipyard to reach
the recruit shuttle. (This scene makes no sense. If Pike had invited
him to the shuttle, why would there be security?)
McCoy's first conversation with Kirk is extended and misses the joke.
"All I got left is the skeleton, and I wouldn't be surprised if she
put a lien on that." (And what can this possibly mean: "She took
everything, including the planet.")
Chapter 5
In Uhura's dorm room, Kirk and Uhura trade barbs. "That's a South
African proverb. I'm not from [there.]" "And thus by such means we
draw ever nearer to your actual first name."
As he's dressing, Uhura addresses Gaila in Orion Prime. Kirk replies,
demonstrating multilingual smarts. (Later, he'll examine a report in
its original Vulcan.)
Gaila is a tech monitoring Kirk's "Kobayashi Maru" (KM) test. "Since
it was both visually and chemically unavoidable, admiration of such
beings was permitted, so long as the admirer did not linger in the
vicinity. It was recognized that extended proximity to an Orion
female was distracting to other humanoids." There's a transient
malfunction in the controls, but the explanation of Kirk's exploit
doesn't appear till the epilogue.
The _Narada_ is continually expanded by "automated constructors."
Chapter 6
Extended discussion between Kirk and Spock at Kirk's hearing on the
philosophy of the KM test and the no-win scenario.
Ships named as the cadets disperse: Antares, Bradbury, Drake,
Endeavor, Enterprise, Farragut, Kongo, Newton, Odyssey, Potemkin,
Bradbury. Also Starbae Three and Regula One. (Why would they be
emergency-assigning cadets to stations?) In ch8, "Excelsior" is added
to the taskforce.
Chapter 7
In the movie, when McCoy innoculates Kirk, it appears to be a medical
station. In the book, it's just a stack of medical supplies, and he
pulls the first he can find -- Melvarian mud flea. Kirk's swollen
hands happen immediately in the book.
Identifies the big Earth-orbital station as Starbase One.
Chapter 8
Chekov's pr�cis of the Vulcan incident: "an energy surge of
astronomical proportions in the Vulcan quadrant of Federation space."
This only makes sense if the "lightning storm" is Spock's arrival, but
why does it occur so far from the _Narada's_, near Klingon space?
Unless Klingon and Vulcan areas are adjacent.
Continuing: "A distress signal ... predicting massive tectonic shifts
within the planetary crust" Predicting? And how'd they miss the
*source* of the activity? Unless the implication is that the
exit-hole had sufficient gravity to cause the tectonic stress.
It can't be a false signal sent by Nero because Kirk finds the
original Vulcan message inside.
Extra: Kirk, upon hearing the pr�cis, looks up the untranslated
original. "Unusually, there was no accompanying visual and the words
were distorted due to distance and having been relayed several times
prior to decoding." (No scriptwriter ever understands digital and
error-correction redundancy -- or if they do, they find its fidelity
inconvenient.)
Sarek is fond of Viennese /schlag/ (per Amanda's comparison to
Vulcan's geography). (That would be /schlagobers/, or whipped cream.
Huh, and I was thinking of the layered nature of Turkish /baklava/
pastry.)
Red Matter: the red spheres are actually individual containment fields
for miniscule specks of "the most unstable material known to galactic
science." (ST3 protomatter?) And they're digging the hole because it
requires extreme heat and pressure to activate.
Chapter 9
"My formal designation is �'r�n [actually has more diacritics], with
an accent and syllabic stress that is difficult for the human larynx
to deal with. As is not uncommon, reversing and softening the entire
process yields a name you can pronouce. Address me as Nero."
Yes, it is "the Laurentian system."
Chapter 11
The "katric ark" the High Council are guarding purportedly contains
the /katra/ of Surak.
Chapter 12
The _Enterprise_ crew have an extended discussion of time travel
speculation: might Nero try again? why didn't he attack during a more
vulnerable era?
Nero's extended explanation to Pike of the "this is a -- well, no
matter." (Scriptwriters hadn't decided on "Centauran slug" yet?) It
clamps itself to the host's spinal cord, and secretes a fluid to
prevent damage to or intereference with the nervous system; but this
happens to block deception in sentient beings.
Chapter 13
On Delta Vega, Kirks encounters a /drakoulias/, then the big red
/hengrauggi/. "Where am I pulling these names from?" (Where indeed?)
He meets Spock. The cave isn't where Nero left him -- he'd already
been to the outpost for supplies, but preferred to be alone.
Chapter 14
Extended discussion of Scotty's transwarp beaming. "Carry the omega
-- twelve to the fourth -- imagine that!" The bit about the shuttle's
deflector being "banjaxed" is absent.
Chapter 16
Extended strategy discussion about sneaking up on the _Narada_ --
scanning range, hiding behind planets will block the transporter beam,
far enough that they can skedaddle if seen. And Kirk points out they
can't *destroy* the device, letting the Red Matter loose.
In the _Narada_ cargo bay, Spock clobbers five Romulans with /Suus
Mahma/, a Vulcan martial art intended only for self-defense. Kirk
gives him a rationalization to beat Pike's location out of the
remaining conscious Romulan.
Chapter 17
Kirk goes straight from the cargo bay to Pike; there's no
confrontation with "got your gun" Romulan or with Nero.
Ayel advises against firing on Spock's ship (the name "Jellyfish" is
never used), because it could ignite the Red Matter. Nero fires
anyway.
Chapter 18
Fortunately the resultant black hole is on a trajectory out of the
solar system. By this point, Spock has led them back to the vicinity
of Saturn.
(Not pertaining to the novel, but: re: Kirk's offer to rescue Nero,
then blowing him up. Someone on TrekMovie.com, one of the
Kurtzman-Orci interviews, points out that this isn't adequate. Under
these conditions, an allegedly humanitarian organization like
Starfleet would not take "no" for an answer. Regulations, we must
assume, would dictate that Kirk rescue as many of the _Narada's_ crew
as practical.)
Epilogue
Spock asks Kirk how he broke the encryption on the KM sim. "Orion
women talk in their sleep."
--
** Phillip Thorne ** peth...@comcast.net **************
* RPI CompSci 1998 *
** underbase.livejournal.com ***************************
Joseph Nebus
>Star Trek
>Based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry
>A novel by Alan Dean Foster
>Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
CROW: Inspired by a sneeze of Harlan Ellison!
>As a written work (by an experienced novelist) the novelization gives
>us aspects alien to a movie: third-person omniscient introspection,
>asides by peripheral characters, similes. OTOH, many exchanges are
>wordier than the counterparts in the movie, and bog down for it.
I'm oddly not surprised, despite Foster's general competence in
writing. It's probably almost impossible to simply add material to the
dialogue already in the film --- which for the most part will explain
all that really needs explanation --- without it being redundant to that
stuff. With a snappy enough style its unimportance can be hidden, but
it has to be both stylish enough to be interesting and consistent with
the stuff from the script. It's a tough balance; you can see why Vonda
McIntyre decided to just make up her own subplots.
>Chapter 1
>There's a comparison made between the birth of Jim Kirk and the
>expulsion of Shuttle 34 from the Kelvin.
Easy comparison to make, though; I can't imagine that was a
coincidence for the scriptwriters.
You can see how they were shaking Trekdom to its core by not
making it Shuttle 47, though.
>Chapter 3
>Spock's education (age 11): he progresses faster than average. On the
>pop quiz is this: "What is the central assumption of quantum
>cosmology?" "Everything that can happen does happen, in equal and
>parallel universes." Yes, novels can have foreshadowing.
Hm. I don't like that 'equal' part; it assumes uniform
probability for each universe. I'd imagine some would have a greater
Gibbs factor than others would.
>Extra: Jim Kirk is washing the classic Corvette when his older brother
>George tells him he's running away. It's their father's car, not
>their stepfather Frank's, who is going to sell it while Winona is
>away. Driving off in the car was rebellion, but the quarry wasn't
>Jim's original plan.
Hm. That seems to change the tone of the Corvette scene, but I
suppose the dropping of George from the movie makes that unavoidable.
>The youth Jim passes on the roadside is George. The highway patrol
>officer is human. (Here's something missing from the movie: he
>pursues Jim, but makes no attempt at *rescue* when he heads for the
>quarry. And he's not concerned when Jim climbs up over the edge, just
>stern. Consider the semi-parallel when Kirk offers to rescue Nero
>from the black hole.)
Yeah, that's a good semi-parallel. I do wonder whether there
wasn't a safety force field on the quarry for any particular reason,
though; while Trek under-applied force fields they did have gravity
control from the late 1990s, in Trek technology, and the advantages of
variable gravity technology in quarrying are really irresistible.
>Chapter 4
>Extra: Kirk tells Pike how talked his way into the shipyard to reach
>the recruit shuttle. (This scene makes no sense. If Pike had invited
>him to the shuttle, why would there be security?)
Yeah, that's weird. Maybe Pike meant it as one more of those
weird sadistic head-game tests Star Fleet Academy seems to like so much
(qv Wesley's little academy test in the first season of Next Generation,
or the ... Julia Ecklar? ... _Kobayashi Maru_ novel).
>McCoy's first conversation with Kirk is extended and misses the joke.
>"All I got left is the skeleton, and I wouldn't be surprised if she
>put a lien on that." (And what can this possibly mean: "She took
>everything, including the planet.")
Still, that's not as bad as ... J M Dillard? ... coming up with
a convoluted explanation for how Saint John Talbot got canonized for
the novelization of _The Final Frontier_, oblivious to the information
that ``Saint John'' is a respectable if slightly obscure English name.
And it's only a bit more tone-deaf than Vonda McIntyre carefully amending
Kirk and Taylor's ``pizza and Michelob'' order to ``make that two'' and
explain that Kirk meant just two beers, not two pizzas.
>Chapter 5
>Gaila is a tech monitoring Kirk's "Kobayashi Maru" (KM) test. "Since
>it was both visually and chemically unavoidable, admiration of such
>beings was permitted, so long as the admirer did not linger in the
>vicinity. It was recognized that extended proximity to an Orion
>female was distracting to other humanoids." There's a transient
>malfunction in the controls, but the explanation of Kirk's exploit
>doesn't appear till the epilogue.
Say, could I have a memory check here: have we *ever* encountered
an Orion woman who actually fit the ``animal-woman slave'' stereotype
sold back in ``The Cage''? It seems to me they're never less than the
sharpest tack in the room, even when sometimes insane.
>Chapter 6
>Ships named as the cadets disperse: Antares, Bradbury, Drake,
>Endeavor, Enterprise, Farragut, Kongo, Newton, Odyssey, Potemkin,
>Bradbury. Also Starbae Three and Regula One. (Why would they be
>emergency-assigning cadets to stations?) In ch8, "Excelsior" is added
>to the taskforce.
Kongo! Brought off the decal sheet of the AMT/ERTL kits at
last! ... No idea why they'd emergency-assign someone to a station,
except maybe if the station people were being dumped into starships
as the core for a crew. That may seem like a lot of useless people-
moving, but it may well be that ten starships with fifty experienced
people on them and a flock of cadets serves as a better unit than
eight amateur ships and two veterans.
>Chapter 8
>Chekov's prcis of the Vulcan incident: "an energy surge of
>astronomical proportions in the Vulcan quadrant of Federation space."
>This only makes sense if the "lightning storm" is Spock's arrival, but
>why does it occur so far from the _Narada's_, near Klingon space?
>Unless Klingon and Vulcan areas are adjacent.
They'd have to be near, if we're keeping the _Enterprise_ view
of Earth/Klingon contact being early on when Earth and Klingons could
not get going so very fast. And, really, if Earth is that near Kling
the easiest way to suppose that Earthers weren't conquered back in the
time of Napoleon, other than the Klingons' demonstrated strategic
doofiness, is that Vulcan was in the way and keeping them bottled up.
>Continuing: "A distress signal ... predicting massive tectonic shifts
>within the planetary crust" Predicting? And how'd they miss the
>*source* of the activity? Unless the implication is that the
>exit-hole had sufficient gravity to cause the tectonic stress.
>It can't be a false signal sent by Nero because Kirk finds the
>original Vulcan message inside.
Maybe Foster lost track of what he needed to foreshadow and what
to leave happen.
Nero's ship had cloaking, didn't it? Maybe he was softening up
Vulcan before revealing himself. He might only have to swat off gnats,
relatively speaking, from the Vulcan forces of the time but why bother
with them before you have to? Other than that Nero really wasn't all
that bright, I mean.
>Extra: Kirk, upon hearing the prcis, looks up the untranslated
>original. "Unusually, there was no accompanying visual and the words
>were distorted due to distance and having been relayed several times
>prior to decoding." (No scriptwriter ever understands digital and
>error-correction redundancy -- or if they do, they find its fidelity
>inconvenient.)
On the other hand, I think an experience with satellite TV and
a good proper rainstorm can show there are distortions that go along
with digital transmission even with error-correcting. Some natural law
will assure that any really interesting signal will be on the edge of
what can be received.
>Red Matter: the red spheres are actually individual containment fields
>for miniscule specks of "the most unstable material known to galactic
>science." (ST3 protomatter?) And they're digging the hole because it
>requires extreme heat and pressure to activate.
Oh. From the movie I thought they just wanted the planet to
crumple inward pretty uniformly while making a safe escape.
>Chapter 9
>"My formal designation is 'rn [actually has more diacritics], with
>an accent and syllabic stress that is difficult for the human larynx
>to deal with. As is not uncommon, reversing and softening the entire
>process yields a name you can pronouce. Address me as Nero."
Oh, of *course* his name has way too many silly marks and can't
be pronounced. That's not something Trek, science fiction, and fantastic
literature in general haven't way overused. I'm kind of looking forward
to the discovery of an alien species that just has pleasant-sounding names
none trickier than you find in, say, Malaysia.
>Chapter 12
>The _Enterprise_ crew have an extended discussion of time travel
>speculation: might Nero try again? why didn't he attack during a more
>vulnerable era?
Justifiable question, and one that might have made it to the
movie, given that it was only later they'd reveal that Nero was in his
past by accident.
>Nero's extended explanation to Pike of the "this is a -- well, no
>matter." (Scriptwriters hadn't decided on "Centauran slug" yet?) It
>clamps itself to the host's spinal cord, and secretes a fluid to
>prevent damage to or intereference with the nervous system; but this
>happens to block deception in sentient beings.
Maybe they were trying to figure whether to make it a Ceti Eel
or not. I remember people sulking about how the New Movie got the use
of Chekov's Ear Worm wrong, when it quite explicitly and a little bit
wisely avoided that.
>Chapter 13
>On Delta Vega, Kirks encounters a /drakoulias/, then the big red
>/hengrauggi/. "Where am I pulling these names from?" (Where indeed?)
Well, the first looks like Foster just mangled 'Draculas'; the
other ... hm. 'Hen Groggy?'
>He meets Spock. The cave isn't where Nero left him -- he'd already
>been to the outpost for supplies, but preferred to be alone.
And Spock hadn't met Scott then? Two people in the station
and he gets surprised by the one he'd recognize?
>Chapter 14
>Extended discussion of Scotty's transwarp beaming. "Carry the omega
>-- twelve to the fourth -- imagine that!" The bit about the shuttle's
>deflector being "banjaxed" is absent.
That twelve to the fourth sounds familiar. Wasn't there some
power reading from Classic Trek which used a twelve-to-the-fourth?
>Chapter 17
>Ayel advises against firing on Spock's ship (the name "Jellyfish" is
>never used), because it could ignite the Red Matter. Nero fires
>anyway.
A fair point that nobody seems to worry about in the movie, but
again, Nero's pretty dopey.
>Chapter 18
>Fortunately the resultant black hole is on a trajectory out of the
>solar system. By this point, Spock has led them back to the vicinity
>of Saturn.
To be fair, there's a lot of empty space in any solar system, so
it isn't all that wild a stroke of luck. Still, a roving black hole in
the vicinity of Earth is sure to mess up the trade routes, at least if
Trek has trade routes this year.
>(Not pertaining to the novel, but: re: Kirk's offer to rescue Nero,
>then blowing him up. Someone on TrekMovie.com, one of the
>Kurtzman-Orci interviews, points out that this isn't adequate. Under
>these conditions, an allegedly humanitarian organization like
>Starfleet would not take "no" for an answer. Regulations, we must
>assume, would dictate that Kirk rescue as many of the _Narada's_ crew
>as practical.)
I don't doubt that Original Series Kirk would; consider his
offer in ``Balance of Terror'', for example. Young Jerk Kirk, that's
maybe a bit more variable, but in the heat of the moment with spacetime
warping all around them there might not be much chance to do anything
whatever Kirk's or organizational preferences might be.
>Epilogue
>Spock asks Kirk how he broke the encryption on the KM sim. "Orion
>women talk in their sleep."
Perhaps. I question whether they describe encryption protocols
in their sleep, however. See also Roger Ebert's Movie Glossary regarding
skills picked up through osmosis.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Goss
> Yeah, that's a good semi-parallel. I do wonder whether there
>wasn't a safety force field on the quarry for any particular reason,
>though; while Trek under-applied force fields they did have gravity
>control from the late 1990s, in Trek technology, and the advantages of
>variable gravity technology in quarrying are really irresistible.
The car falls all the way down. But the ease with which "life signs"
can be detected even in environments where radio can't get through may
mean that the agrav would only switch on if someONE was falling into
the pit.
> That twelve to the fourth sounds familiar. Wasn't there some
>power reading from Classic Trek which used a twelve-to-the-fourth?
Do we know anything about Vulcan numbering systems? Twelve is such a
"logical" choice to base a number system on. If so, a high-end tech
might have to be comfortable in both base systems.
--
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27
OM
>CROW: Inspired by a sneeze of Harlan Ellison!
...More likely a quiff.
OM
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OM
>It's a tough balance; you can see why Vonda
>McIntyre decided to just make up her own subplots.
...And squealed like a stuck hog when a) Trek fandom said her subplots
were not only just padding, they were *awful* and b) they weren't
accepted as "Trek Canon".