100 days of enemy recs: 47. Star Trek (pt. 1)

[melannen]

So the obvious enemyslash ship for Star Trek is Spock/McCoy. (Reboot tried to make it work with Kirk/Spock but it always felt a bit forced.) I do, in fact, ship Spock/McCoy! I am super, super picky about it though.

Also, last week I joined in on Galactic Journey's Star Trek watch. Galactic Journey, if you aren't familiar, is basically a bunch of SUPER nerds role-playing 1960s SF fandom, if it had blogs. And they just got up to 1966, so they are watching every episode of Star Trek, exactly 55 years after first airing, in a stream with the original commercials, with a Discord room where you can discuss it as long as you keep kayfabe. My mom actually *did* watch Star Trek in the first airing, and occasionally reminisces, so I thought I would try to get her to watchalong with me. (We'll see if it outlasts the first two episodes.)

Last week was Charlie X and it really brought forward how little I know TOS? I'm fairly sure I *did* watch every episode (possibly I never managed to catch The Cloud Minders) but that was out of order, 25 years ago, on VHS home-taped off of a Philadephia station's 2 AM reruns, often with extremely bad reception. Later I listened to most of them on the radio in my mom's sewing room, which picked up TV-band audio signal. And I read all the Bliss novelizations! But as we know I am really bad at actually watching things, so other than bits and pieces here and there I haven't really rewatched since. So I suspect that if I keep up on watching through a stream that actually lets me see people's faces, I might come away with very different impressions! Charlie X had much better roles for Rand and Uhura than I remembered, and Kirk was much dorkier. (Also I was not super embarrassment squicked? I did not have to hide behind the couch once? Maybe I am starting to outgrow that! Maybe I'll finally make it all the way through Amok Time!)

I may not have rewatched, but I did read a lot of tie-in novels. A LOT. I may come back and do a proper TOS enemyfic recs set later if this goes on long enough, but today I am going to revert back in time, to the version of me who didn't have access to any shared fandom other than tie-in novels, and rec some published tie-in novels. Novels for the real most important TOS enemyship: Starfleet officers and Romulan Commanders.

The Price of the Phoenix and the Fate of the Phoenix, by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. These are the ones where there is a clone of Captain Kirk, and the original is being held captive, so Spock establishes a telepathic soulbond with the clone, and then they team up with them Romulan Commander to rescue him, and then the Romulan Commander claims the clone as her reward, disguises him as a Romulan, and takes him back to a part of Romulan space where "where men are properly treated as delicate creatures and not permitted to fight."

I am not going to claim these are, idk, objectively good, but when I read them I discovered something about myself and everything changed. (Along with bringing in the Romulan Commander as an enemy-turned-ally love interest, they are deeply, deeply slashy in a way 14-year-old me had never yet encountered.)

My Enemy, My Ally, by Diane Duane, and the rest of the Rihannsu extended universe around it, are objectively good however! Another female Romulan Commander - the aunt of the original - has discovered a deadly secret festering in the Romulan high command, and unable to get help from her own people, she turns to her most honorable enemy, Kirk and the Enterprise! And together they take the Federation and the Romulan Empire down a whole new pathway together.

(And you should also read The Final Reflection by John M. Ford, which does for the Klingons what My Enemy, My Ally does for the Romulans, although sadly in a much less shippy way.)

Comments

[pauraque]

Galactic Journey sounds awesome! I actually toyed with the idea of doing a similar thing on my own of rewatching the shows I watched in the '90s from week to week on the schedule they originally aired, rather than binging them. Realistically, I wouldn't have time, though, unless I limited it to just a few shows. (Mysteriously, I had a lot more time to watch TV in the '90s. Maybe something to do with not being an adult and the internet existing in only rudimentary form.)

[melannen]

It's fun! There wasn't a lot of chatter on the Trek stream tonight, probably because a lot of people had already seen this episode in the con preview, but the blog is always fun to dip into (And I'm always amazed and which books I read in 70s and 80s vintage repackages and reprints that were actually much older than that.)

Mysteriously I have a lot less time for TV than in my early 20s too...

[grammarwoman]

Diane Duane was a master of the Star Trek tie-ins. Her OCs were magnificent, and the layers she brought to the core crew were *chef's kiss* brilliant.

[melannen]

Yes, part of the reason I haven't rewatched much is that given the choice I will always re-read her tie-ins instead!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I recently watched most of Amok Time and part of MirroVerse!

[melannen]

Mirrorverse is probably a good one for enemyship but so much has happened with it in canon since Disco and I have lost track.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I've not seen Disco, and only just now an episode of Enterprise. I missed even later seasons of Voyager, ironically due to the UPN station coming online.

MirrorVerse Sulu has a nasty scar open parenthesis his right eye.

[azurelunatic]

All three of these recs delight me so much, but in different ways.

DD recently (as in, this past week I think) posted a thing about the place that Jim hung the pennant.

... Yesterday, in fact!
Tweet: https://twitter.com/dduane/status/1439997321429848069
Bloggybit: https://www.dianeduane.com/outofambit/2021/09/20/star-trek-and-sespe/

[melannen]

Oooh! ...and now I want to just wander off backpacking alone next weekend.

Somehow I had thought the Star Trek came before Middle Kingdoms! Interesting that they saw an author whose only publishing credit was wildly poly and queer and decided yes, we need this one for Star Trek novels, only she can do justice to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. :D

[blueswan]

Price of the Phoenix was quite likely the first slashy thing I'd read, though at that time, I had no idea what slash was. Didn't both authors come from fandom? Or is that one of those things you pick up through osmosis? That is one of the few ST books I've kept over the years. It makes a fine re-read.

[melannen]

It was! THere's a fanlore entry (That I though I had linked to above and completely failed) that says it started out as a self-published fanzine called "Never Mourn Black Omne". I have to wonder if that version was even slashier (And if that's possible.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Gene being Gene encouraged zine editors to send him a copy or two. Nimoy and Doohan both would make themselves available to the California fen in exchange for whichever snacks the meetings provided--recall, those were suburban housewives and their potluck was good.

Paramount did actually pro-publish some fanfic; I read the first collection but my source didn't have the second one. That was in between, though it might have been after the first movie. I'd have to search it.

[blueswan]

Were those the New Voyages collections? Still have two of those (don't know how many were published).

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Yep. There's just the two, though Pocket Books in 1998 started similarly Strange New Worlds; Bantam's projects weren't continued when the switch occurred.

[melannen]

New Voyages was great! They were basically my intro to fanfic, back in the days when paper was the only way to get it. (And they were definitely fanfic, full of tropes that are still instantly recognizable. The one where Kirk gets his brain scrambled and leaps through the Guardian of Forever to be lovingly nursed back to health by somebody's OC in 1960s America will always be my type specimen of h/c.)

[brownbetty]

OH BOY. Man, I had some feelings about those Romulan 'ships. There were some vary horny captivity scenarios in those tie-in novels, weren't there?

I have been having some ToS feelings recently, because I do miss the relative warmth and humour of ToS!Spock when reading reboot things.

I'm really enjoying this project of yours, even though I don't always have comments. Every time one goes by it makes me happy.

[melannen]

A lot of the tie-in novels were extremely horny, especially the earlier ones before someone decided to put a tighter rein on editorial.