[NeoTrident]

This month marks the 48th anniversary of the very first Star Trek novel, James Blish’s “Star Trek” later printed as "Star Trek 1", published in January 1967.

I love the fact that the artist of the cover transformed the Enterprise’s engineering hull into a giant rocket...

Although being the first novel published, “Star Trek 1” doesn’t have the honour of being the first original story due to it being a novel adaptation of several early TOS Episodes, that honour instead would fall to Mack Reynolds’ “Mission to Horatius” in February of the following year. Unlike the adaptations we would expect today “Star Trek 1” comprised of numerous adaptations each exceptionally short between 14-27 pages, with the entire book being 136 pages, less than half of an average novel today. Cramming an episode into such a small window losses much of the benefit a novelisation brings as thoughts, feelings and far grander scale can be developed but these were largely missed in this book.

That being said if you are a TOS fan these are still worth a read as they provide something very unique. The book was published four months after the start of the series, as you can imagine due to the exceptionally long lead times for novel creation this left a very tiny window for the book to be created. James Blish therefore had to use early and often discarded drafts of the scripts rather than the final episode as the basis for the adaptations. Much of the early drafts of Star Trek episodes have been lost and therefore the novelisations play an important part of how Star Trek evolved from the writers room to the TV screen. The scripts and consequently the adaptations often vary drastically against what we know to be the episode and as such present a “what could of been” for early Star Trek.

James Blish wrote eight more books of adapted Star Trek episodes each using the early draft versions of the available scripts; while novelisations of future Series’ would include cut scenes, "Star Trek 1" and James Blish adaptations continue to be unique in their sole use of early script material and therefore an invaluable part of Star Trek history.