Ghost Ship (Star Trek The Next Generation - No 1)
Video Transcript
Introduction
I hate long video intros so please use the timestamps below, or the links in the description, to skip to the good stuff.
As you may guess from the title, the tone of this review is quite negative. Suggesting Ghost ship is the worst Star Trek book ever is a little clickbaity, but not as much as you might think. I have read a lot of Star Trek books. I love many of them, and merely “like” nearly all the rest. So, finding one that I dislike strongly is significant.
Review
Ghost Ship is the very first published Star Trek: TNG novel. That is less than a year after the show started.
This means nothing in the book really depends on events that happened in the show. Just having seen the first two episodes of the Next Generation is sufficient to set the scene. And obviously there are no previous books you need to have read before you read this one. But should you?
Well, the problems with the book start before you even open it. Look at the cover for a moment. Notice any issues? I don’t mean the overall design, which makes most of the text hard to read, or even the misspelling of the word “interstellar”. I’m talking about the ship. That is the Battlestar Galactica from the 1978 series of the same name. Today you would be forgiven for not recognizing it but, if you are a sci-fi fan buying a novel in the 80s it was probably more obvious. Thankfully they made sure to have it upside down to throw you off the scent.
Once you start reading it, the most basic problem with the book is it feels like it was written by someone who had never seen the show. And that’s because it almost certainly was. It takes time to write a novel. A random internet search suggests six month is common for a full time professional novelist, and that a full year is not unreasonable. The book was definitely written before season one had finished airing, possibly before it had started airing, and perhaps even before more than a couple of scripts were finalized.
There are two main consequences of this: firstly a lot of the terminology is wrong, and is often straight out of the original series. For example, Beverly Crusher is the ship’s surgeon, technical issues with the ship are caused by problems with the “circuits”, and they encounter a foe that can travel at warp 14.9. These things on their own would be fine. It’s a little jarring to read now, but the early seasons of the TV show did have similar issues.
The second problem is bigger. None of the characters feel right. This was probably unavoidable since there would have been very little source material to pull from for characterizations, and it might have been forgivable if not for the specific way it was handled.
The author decides to go all-in and make up detailed personalities for all the characters, despite knowing that the show would do that anyway, and the shows ideas and the author’s were unlikely to match. This is where we reach the biggest reason the book is bad. The characters are not just wrong, but really unpleasant. And not just once or twice, but persistently. Several characters get introduced with a couple of pages of description, often involving their own thoughts emphasising how terrible they are. And as the story progresses, the inner thoughts are presented repeatedly, and they often reveal them to be awful people.
Here’s a quick run down of the characters as they appear in the book:
Picard is a strict authoritarian who sounds angry all the time. There are times he gets annoyed at people not giving him answers fast enough, and other times he gets annoyed because they provided too much detail. He is also bothered by the fact he has a blind pilot. This kind of casual prejudice feels really out of place.
Riker is full of insecurities, both with how Picard views him and how the crew view him. He comes across as a bit of a fool. He has a significant plot thread in which he struggles to think of Data as a person, sometimes casually, sometimes with anger.
Wesley’s genius is greatly scaled back. He doesn’t know the difference between a passive scan and active scan, and at one point casually experiments with anti-matter without worrying that he might destroy the ship. Picard regrets making him an acting ensign and does not really want him on the bridge (which is at least consistent with how Picard is portrayed).
La Forge is prone to emotional outbursts. Some of them are actually quite righteous and based on the rest of the crew behaving unreasonably, but still out of place both from him specifically and a member of Starfleet in general. And even stranger is Picard doesn’t really react to them, despite being more of a disciplinarian.
Troi is actually quite good. Ironically the biggest difference between how she is portrayed in the book and the show is she is that integral to the story. She is responsible for the most awkward phrase in the whole book.
Yar is also fine in how she acts, but has an inconsistent (and again, unnecessarily detailed) back story. It is mentioned in passing that she is Lithuanian, and later it becomes a plot point that this means she can recognize written Russian. This may have been in early character descriptions of her for the show, and would be fine, except we know she was born on a different planet. Although she may have retained enough elements of Lithuanian heritage to think of herself as Lithuanian, that doesn’t really extend to being familiar with Russian.
Data starts off well, but declines. There are some early interactions that are very reminiscent of the show. He tries to use slang but does so quite badly. Unlike the humour in the show however, this is handled with anger by the rest of the crew. One interaction with Riker then sends him into an apparent depression. His very nature is also expanded upon in ways that don’t match the show. He disobeys orders and has to physically fight against his programming to do so. He also, apparently, has a heart. I suppose it wasn’t unreasonable to guess that Data may have synthetic versions of different human systems, but it comes up more than once and is weird everytime.
Beverly Crusher and Worf are fine. They don’t really feature much. There are a few references to Worf’s Klinzhai heritage, which might confuse most readers. It was originally part of a fleshing out of the Klingon culture in a RPG source book.
It is a little odd to go this far without mentioning the plot. I would have previously said that plot is the most important element of a Star Trek book for me, but that comes with the assumption that the characters are correct. In this case, the plot is… fine. There is a sense of mystery early on, some decent action sequences, and even a significant ethical debate featuring most of the senior staff that is quite emblematic of Star Trek. I could easily imagine it being an episode of the Original Series, and not unreasonably an episode of TNG, Enterprise or even Voyager. The biggest flaw is it hinges around a significant ethical question and you need to have some insight into the characters to make that work.
At this point, I’ll feel I should pull back from the criticism a little. I re-read the book while scouring it for quotes and despite everything, there is some good to be found.
Although the details aren’t quite right, there are nice bits between La Forge and Data regarding the nature of biological vs. mechanical life, and whether Data should even try to be more human, or just be a better android. Even Riker repents and shows some growth by accepting he might be wrong about Data.
And Worf, although featured very little, has a few nuggets of pure Worf-ness.
TL;DW Summary
In summary, Ghost Ship was written too early, and was more-or-less doomed to some kind of failure. But even considering that, it manages to be even worse than necessary.
It is difficult to recommend that you read it since there are so many good Star Trek books available now, and, in so many ways this does not even always feel like a Star Trek book. On the other hand, some aspects are so surprisingly bad they have to be read to be believed, and the experience made me appreciate some other novels more, simply because the characters are well written. Even books I would previously have described as merely “okay”.
In Closing
For anyone else who has read it, do you think it was the worst Star Trek book ever? Do you have any other good candidates? And I mean books that are explicitly bad, not just dull or uninteresting? While you ponder that, I’ll leave you with the weirdest quote from the book.
