“Go maire tu’ I bhfad agus rath!”
Old Irish wayfarer’s blessing: “Live long and prosper”
It occurred to me that I haven’t reviewed a Star Trek book in honor of Leonard Nimoy yet. No excuse for that, really, since I read a lot of Star Trek back in high school. Star Trek: TNG was my drug of choice, but I read several novels based on the original Star Trek series as well. By far my favorite of those – the one I’ve reread the most times – is Diane Duane’s epic story of Vulcan, Spock’s World.
A Vulcan anti-human movement has been growing for decades, based on fears of the damage that illogical, emotional, and violent humanity can cause. Word comes to the Enterprise that several clandestine organizations on Spock’s homeworld have now pushed the government to hold a planet-wide vote to secede from the Federation. Faced with the threat of having to either give up all ties to the Earth, or live in exile, Spock and his father Sarek return to Vulcan with the crew of the Enterprise to argue against secession. The story alternates between the debates (and an investigation to find out who’s been working behind the scenes to push for the vote, and why) and stories of the planet Vulcan itself, with its history of a population even more illogical, emotional, and violent than the human race that the Vulcans are trying so desperately to banish.
One thing that becomes very clear when reading one of Diane Duane’s Star Trek novels is how much she loves the whole Star Trek universe. It come across in the characterizations and the snappy back-and-forth dialog (pitch-perfect, every one, especially the verbal sniping that takes place between Spock and McCoy), in the lovingly-described alien settings (including what planets look like from space), and in how gleefully she dives into all of the tiny details of life in the future: figuring out all the minutiae of what goes into an overhaul and refit of starship, what kinds of “mixers” get thrown when a starship crew comes back from extended leave, and even a side story involving Enterprise’s Bulletin Board System (a kind of proto-internet, and a fairly good prediction of what an online message board would look like five or ten years down the road.)
The author takes the opportunity to show a lot of the Enterprise crew members who wouldn’t normally appear. Horta, Sulamid, Denebian, Mizarthu, Irdeshi, Alsharan; you name it, and there’s probably a representative serving aboard the Enterprise (excluding Romulan and Klingon, natch). Having the story in novel-format instead of on TV means not having to worry about complicated makeup, or the cost of filming thousands of years of Vulcan history, from the planet’s formation out of interstellar dust, through the invention of space travel, and on to the diplomatic post on Earth where Spock’s father and mother meet for the first time.
That’s the read draw for me in this story. The speeches at the debate are interesting (except for McCoy’s, which is a hell of lot of fun, and extremely quotable), but I was pulled in by the stories from Vulcan’s past. It’s pretty common knowledge now, but it was a revelation when I first read this book that Vulcans aren’t without emotion, in fact in many ways they have too much emotion, and many of them have to keep it in check all of the time. The way of logic, peaceful coexistence, and the hard-to-translate concept of cthia (reality-truth) is a relatively new development for the planet; Vulcans were developing psi-talents to kill each other telepathically for a long time before they came up with ways to bomb each other with weapons powerful enough to crack the moon in half. The history of Vulcan – after a solar flare turned the lush prehistoric jungles into a planet-wide desert – is a constant series of wars being fought for control of water, territory, or the right to breed with Vulcans born with a particularly useful psi-talent. It’s all mixed in with family squabbles, betrayal, survival, and discovery.
It also has one of the sweetest, saddest love stories I’ve ever read, one that lasts only one chapter.
“But that pretense betrays our great secret to those who can see: and the secret is that, cthia or not, we are still uncertain about our mastery. We are still, as Surak said, afraid of one another, and of ourselves: afraid that the emotion we so carefully manage will somehow break loose and doom us again.”
Spock’s World was first released more than twenty-six years ago, so some of its history of Vulcan is now out of date (and that was before the latest round of movies came along to change everything.) The person behind the whole move for secession is doing it for amazingly petty reasons, the accepted portrayal of Sarek as stern and unyielding doesn’t quite mesh with the scenes where he laughs uncontrollably, and don’t even get me started on the trope of having the humans come sweeping in to save another race from themselves. And you know what? None of those things detracted even a little from how much I enjoyed this book. Duane stresses the point many times that being logical can bring about the worst results if there isn’t compassion too, or at least some sense that other people in the universe are important too. The chapter featuring Sarek and Amanda’s romance was delightful, I don’t care how out-of-character any of it might have been.
And as to the humans saving the day? After the investigations by the humans and a masterfully planned decision by a high-ranking Vulcan, it’s Spock – the product of the best that both worlds have to offer – who makes the final speech in the debate. And that sounds like the best plan in any situation: always let Spock have the last word.