What is so shocking about number 10, changing your bar for bookshelves sounds an eminently sensible idea.

I really appreciate your videos, since not a lot of people delve into the illustration side of SF which is honestly what sold so many books and captured the imagination from the outset. And you know your stuff and are very well spoken on the historical topic, so that is much appreciated as a fellow artist.

Read the Asimov novelization; but the original story by Bixby and Klement? is hard to find.

I don’t see how anyone can write ST fiction who is not thoroughly versed in the show, and your review proves my point. I read a lot of it many years ago and learned to be picky about it. Even without the homoerotic stuff there is some real trash out there. I don’t know how it gets published.

It is so hard to let books go! I enjoyed the video

Wish I could help out, but I am in desperate need of an "unhaul", myself. I am literally running out of flat spaces upon which to pile books. I'm not exaggerating when I say I don't even eat at my kitchen table. (I promise I'm not a hoarder, LOL!) Thanks for explaining the term, "alienist"! I saw that book everywhere back in the day and had no clue. You'd think I'd have taken 5 minutes to look it up. But I'd always forget. I have my own copy of The Caine Mutiny, or else I'd be tempted to grab that one. It really is fantastic! I read it a few years ago and could not put it down. I've not seen the movie. I always feel sad for books that don't have a home. I've sold pretty much all that can be sold. (For a pittance. Ugh!) It's so hard to know what to do with them. I hate the thought of them in a dumpster too. If there are any of the Little Free Libraries around you, that might work.

I had all the Blish books before I moved! My Mum gave them to me! Is it weird that as soon as I saw the thumbnail, I could SMELL the book?

I grew up in a seaside town in the UK and picked up Star Trek 1 at a shop on the sea front one summer. I remember getting the orange cover version of Spock Must Die and getting rather worried about the transporter.

36:30 I prefer the orange cover for the memories but like the Japanese cover as well.

22:00 wow, I had all four of those books with those covers.

That Japanese cover gets an A for energy, even if it only gets a D for accuracy.

Only just started my own channel and was delighted to find yours. Man, this amount of detail is what I need to include. I've subbed. Please give me a sub. Nice bottle of Jamesons on your shelf by the way. By the way how long does it take to download a 48 min vid to the tube.

Read this book so many years ago...will have to track it down for a re-read.

The original cover art for Mission to Horatius was auctioned on eBay 20 or 25 years ago. I bid on it, but it soon got too expensive for me.

Interesting video. Star Trek 12 is also by Eddie Jones, and like 9-11, actually originated on German translations of earlier volumes of Blish’s Star Trek titles. Which explains why the cover layout for Star Trek 10 somehow manages to hide the Enterprise behind a block of text! It was painted for an entirely different cover layout: www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/4f/NTRPRSXJJP1973.jpg (the numbering was different in German - this is actually a translation of HALF of Star Trek 9)

I said the same thing about Jar-Jar Blinks 😂!!!

I've mentioned in another comment that we didn't get Star Trek in the UK until very late - I think I said it was 1970 but I just checked and it was July 1969, coinciding with Apollo 11. I rember having those early collections, and Spock Must Die as well, but I wonder if I read the collections before I even saw the series? And the novel after seeing just season 1? I remember the story so well, all the rumonations on the transporter. The great idea of a duplicate Spock, the clever science behind it all. I'd like to read it again now, to spot the inconsistencies you mention, that passed me by as as a young teenager. I remember I had the original orange cover, goodness knows where I got it from. Great memories.

Just discovered your channel! Nice video. Nice set of books on your shelves as well.

Wow. Haven’t seen this book cover since I was a little girl growing up in south Texas in the 70’s (and yes, Spock was/is my favorite character). James Blish wrote so many of the Star Trek novels/stories I read in the 70’s. I saved all my allowance every week to buy Star Trek books. I’d con my big brother into giving me candy he bought from his allowance. 🤣 My favorites were the photo novels which came out during that period. Thanks for posting this! ❤ I wasn’t a huge fan of the Blish novels from the 70’s. He had great ideas, but his characterizations always seemed off to me so it was hard for me get into the stories. Did you ever read The Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix? Great but weird books about duplicate Kirks. Those books came out in the late 70’s. They explore the Kirk and Spock friendship thoroughly, some might think even too thoroughly, but I loved those books as a pre-teen girl. Still have them somewhere in my collection.

Definitely the first Star Trek novel for adults - there are a LOT of very esoteric scientific concepts in this novel, and I love the debate of life vs death that we get throughout. Bones McCoy has good reason to fear the transporter!! It took me a long time to really like the novel. When I first read the book, I was too young to really understand it, and the relationships between the crew seemed (to me) very off. But repeated readings helped me understand its point and its focus. And it's nihilistic ending would never be permitted in spinoff media nowadays. Now, it's one of my favorite Star Trek novels, along with Vonda McIntyre's The Entropy Effect, which also had some interesting scientific concepts.

Wondering about your "Bones" comment. I pulled my copy off the shelf just now. The first chapter is called "McCoy without Bones."

I used to read Star Trek TOS original novels and most of them did not have the same feel of the original series and characters so I stopped. I suspect that many of the writers were just using Star Trek as a vehicle to start or boost their own careers as writers and had no knowledge of Star Trek.

fantastic voyage will always be my favorite movie.

If Brave New Worlds rolls over into a remake of TOS, I would love to see some of the better ST novels made into episodes - especially this one.

Spock Must Die was an oasis in the desert for fans after the end of TOS. Still remember Scotty's complaint about the pants having no pockets, and how the improvised energy source of the escape ship was like tapping directly into God. Great stuff!

Are any of you fans of James Blish? How does this book Spock mistake? Compare to his other writing. Are there common seams or common interest of the author present?

I've always thought they should have played off McCoy's "taker your molecules apart" notion as just something that an uninformed or comedic person says. That it really is related to the warp drive and bends space-time locally. That makes more sense and has the added benefit of eliminating stupid episodes like "Enemy Within" and "Tuvix" 🙂 BTW, some of those early original novels were really bad!

I remember hearing about this novel decades ago, but I never read it personally.

I bought this book when it first came out and read it at that time. But I haven't read it since and I don't remember it. I'm going to have to dig it out of one of the boxes I have in storage and read it again. I loved the book. I loved all of the books that James blish wrote for the Star Trek series. I had all of the original first three books of adaptations from the screenplays. Unfortunately, when I went to college, my brother donated my entire collection to the library so it took years for me to get copies of those books back. I still don't have the original first editions of the books which makes me sad.

I started with Blish's first adaptation and continued until his last. I did NOT continue with the Alan Dean Foster books for the cartoon series. My reading of Blish's versions was a bit off, because Blish would include stuff from his own future history, like the Vegan Tyranny; but eventually I became a fan of Blish's own work even more than I had been a Star Trek fan. I remembered that in Spock Must Die! he included stuff about Eurish, the strange pastiche language that James Joyce wrote his Finnegan's Wake in; because Blish himself was a great fan of Joyce. It became a feature on New Wave SF, as the New Wave seemed to love the Joycean stream of consciousness style. I suppose I wasn't at first thrown off by Blish not seeing the series, as I had not myself seen much of the series at first either. To my recollection, the first and possibly only ep I saw on the first run was Cat's Paw.

“The question,” said McCoy, “is, obviously, the soul. Am I still the Leonard McCoy who first stepped into that infernal machine twenty years ago, or just a very convincing simulacrum?” Kirk said, “The ability to worry about the question is, I think, its own answer.” “You may be right, Jim. In fact, you had better be right. Because if you’re not, every time we send someone through the transporter for the first time, we commit murder.” And that’s not even really the main plot of the book! Yes, the novel doesn’t capture the characters all that well, but it definitely is the product of someone who wrote about ideas for a living.

As described in the story, Mirror Spock was reversed on the molecular level, which made his body chemistry incompatible with normal food. Doesn't mean his tunic was visibly reversed, or the reversal would be noticed without tricorder scan.

I like how the second Bantam cover art deliberately puts a lot of orange in it's palette, as if to say "Recognize me, this is the same book as the earlier edition."

It's been so long since I read it. I recall that one of the reasons it was difficult to differentiate the two Spocks upon initial medical examination was a mention of a symmetrical internal anatomy. Internal imaging would be inconclusive. I know that's not canon.

I recall owning and reading the original Bantam orange edition. Nice collection of books, featuring a lot of great Asimov, Clarke and Carl Sagan titles. “The Demon Haunted World” is perhaps my favorite of the 10 or so titles I read by Sagan.

Remember Kirk calling MCcoy Doc that was annoying but the story was good and the idea of two Spock's was cool

Asimov's 'sequel' -- or 're-jiggering' -- novel "FANTASTIC VOYAGE II: DESTINATION BRAIN" is quite excellent, and it helps tie-in his other sci-fi novels' concepts, especially his version of Hyperdrive technology & physics. Basically, his interstellar spaceships make 'jumps' through Hyperspace, and it seems that the way they do this is they instantaneously are reduced to Zero Mass and Zero Volume -- and, perhaps, to LESS than Zero Mass and Volume -- so that they can zip across space-time like a tachyon in Zero Time from one position to another. The miniaturized submarine-like vehicle in the 'sequel' novel is specified to be less massive than its non-miniaturized form, losing mass as it loses size in proportion. As I recall, it is in the aftermath of the adventure that the notion of applying the miniaturization technology to Spaceflight is deduced to be the next logical application of the idea, opening the door to the potentiality of Humanity spreading out into the Galaxy. In addition to that sci-fi aspect which complements Asimov's previous notions, it's a great adventure involving West-versus-East (i.e. Soviets -- the novel having been written several years before the collapse of the USSR) intrigue, an element from the original FV screenplay-and-novelization that he probably thought ought to be included in his own 'sequel'. Incidentally, Asimov also wrote a short story (in one of his later collections of Robot stories) involving the miniaturization notion. It, too, was a good read. Its title escapes me at the moment -- sorry!

I could be wrong, but I would guess knopf is pronounced without the K, as in Knee, Knock, Knight, Knack, Knuckle etc etc. I believe I have read all the Macdonald novels. His best for me was The Underground Man. It was his The Long Goodbye. Chandler didn't rate him though. He uses far more similes than Chandler ever did. As you probably know there is/was a legend going around that the name Archer came from the last name of Sam Spade's partner in The Maltese Falcon. Thanks for the correct story. I didn't know that The Moving Target was first published under the John McDonald name. I looked up the other books except The Big Sleep (Chandler is my favourite writer) depicted at around the 25 min mark. The Blank wall was adapted into the Movies The Reckless moment and The Deep end. On the cover of Archer fighting on the bridge he is wearing a blue suit. That reminds me of the opening of The Big Sleep in which Marlowe is wearing a powder blue suit. Regarding the picture at around the 27th minute mark, Archer (if it supposed to him) looks positively satanic to me. Here I am reminded of Hammets description of Sam Spade looking like a blond satan. Wow, it wasn't until the seventh novel, that he used Ross Macdonald. On around the 31 minute mark. so the name wasn't changed fom Archer to Harper, because Paul Newman had hits with H movies such The Hustler, and Hud. Love the cover at around the 46 min mark. I don't find the words hard to read.But I am only seeing the cover on a screen. I live in irelamd. and I think the first Archer novel I read was The Doomsters. It was under Fontana Books. This was the cover for The Moving Target. live.staticflickr.com/5502/9550998618_389ab64424_b.jpg

That Hayakawa artwork would make a great wall poster.

Regarding the Transporter, see the novel Way Station, by Clifford D Simak.

I really enjoyed this book. I only started reading Star Trek recently, and would never have noticed much of this (but I loooove your detail here!)

Still have my original Bantam copy I bought as a kid. Cover price 60cents. Remember having the same reaction to “Doc” although the first chapter name is called McCoy Without Bones. I knew Blish was working from scripts for the series adaptations but never realized he hadn’t actually seen the series initially. Although some character moments were off, I really enjoyed the story.

Thanks for the well-measured comments. For me, Blish never really "got" Star Trek- as you say, his Star trek novels would have been greatly improved - had he been able to actually watch the show. My highest admiration for Blish is for his religion-based material, such as the two-book novel, Black Easter / The Day After Judgment...

These transporter "malfunctions" sound like the origin of the food replicaror, except the replicator won't give you an "evil" version of your chicken soup.

Never before have I been talked out of reading a novel, much less a Star Trek novel, but you have just pulled it off. Thanks for the admonition. 😕

Wow, I seriously never thought I'd see anyone on KZbin ever bring this book up. Still have my 1st edition on the shelf.

I love the idea that the transporter is a death machine! lol!

WOW! Mr. Blish never saw Star Trek when he wrote the adaptations!

If you'd like a recommendation for another Star Trek novel that's very well-grounded in Trek lore and gets the characters right, I'd suggest "Enterprise!" by Vonda McIntyre. It's a story set at the time when Kirk first takes command of the Enterprise, and his first mission with his new ship and crew. It does contain some details that have since been rendered non-canonical by later series, such as explaining the skull-ridged and non-skull-ridged Klingons as being two different races of sentient Klingons, with the ridged variety being the oppressed minority within the story. There is one wonderful scene, though, which is very true to the original series and its characters -- during the reception after the change of command ceremony, when Pike hands over the center seat to Kirk, there's one of those lulls in conversation when one person's voice suddenly booms through the room, heard by all. We've all seen and heard it. In this case, it was Scotty, saying, with a distaste fueled by several glasses of Scotch, "Of course, Starfleet would be handin' its finest ship over to a greenhorn Captain!" Nice moment.

In addition to all the great points that you brought up here, there is also the _non sequiter_ of why would a reversed Spock also suddenly develop an allegiance to the Klingons? Anti-hydrogen still behaves like hydrogen in every way. Anti-Spock would still think logically and no logic would lead him to conclude that working against the crew is smart or even justifiable. I get what Blish was shooting for. Could there be a more dangerous opponent for Kirk to face than his friend Spock? Like Kirk, he knows the ship and crew like the back of his hand. Unlike Kirk, he has a plethora of unique Vulcan gifts. It is a worthy idea, but it was handled very badly.