Star Trek, adapted by James Blish (Bantam, 1967).
With the second season of Star Trek: Picard having ended just last Thursday—the same day on which the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was broadcast—my recent attention has been much focused on the legacy of Gene Roddenberry’s science-fiction TV series. The original Star Trek, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, debuted on NBC-TV on September 8, 1966, but disappeared from the airwaves on June 3, 1969, after three seasons.
Only seven months later, though, in January 1967, Star Trek (later retitled Star Trek 1)—the first of 12 paperback books adapting episodes from the show—reached print. Like the volumes to come over the next decade, it was credited to James Blish (1921-1975), a New Jersey-born SF author who’s probably best remembered for penning the four-volume Cities in Flight series. His 1967 collection of stories “was the very first officially licensed Star Trek tie-in book,” according to the Trek Web site Memory Alpha. Its 136 pages contained prose tailorings of the draft scripts from seven Season 1 episodes, including “Dagger of the Mind,” “Balance of Terror,” and “The Conscience of the King.” NBC may not have thought Star Trek deserved to stay on the air, but clearly its fans were not done with the program. “Within nine months of initial publication,” adds Memory Alpha, “the volume was re-printed five times.” I own a copy of the sixth printing, for which I apparently paid 60 cents.
That earliest book was the only Star Trek tie-in for which Bama provided a cover painting. Subsequent collections would carry art by Mitchell Hooks, Lou Feck, and others. I still have about half of them in my personal library. Real treasures.
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