I was going to do this tomorrow but recent personal events have me in a bad mood today and I don’t want to say something I’ll regret regarding a review that already ticks me off. So we’ll save it for tomorrow or later this week, schedule depending.

So it’s time to reveal the new book we’ll be reading Chapter By Chapter. And remember:

Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

Recently Paramount decided to reboot the Star Trek franchise. J.J. Abrams gave us a new continuity with a new way for the crew to meet and become a strong unit. The results were…debatable. Abrams seems to be more interested in the action than the morality plays of the various TV series. Plus the first outing involved blowing up Vulcan, Spock and Uhura getting it on, and Kirk being a jerk. At least Scotty was cool and I liked the new McCoy. Actually, they all seemed right for the part had they stayed closer to the original style as well as Abrams’ version so it could have gone either way. I thought the new Enterprise was overdone but I have to admit it looks cool. Except for the engine room that looks like it was shot in the studio’s boiler room.

However, there already was an accounting of how the famous U.S.S. Enterprise crew we’ve come to know and lvoe met, and I remember really enjoying it. Therefore I was disappointed when it wasn’t even browsed for the script we ended up seeing filmed. For our latest Chapter By Chapter we will be reading that book:

Enterprise: The First Adventures

by Vonda N. McIntyre

McIntyre has only written one other Star Trek novel, “The Entropy Effect”, unless you count adaptations of the second, third, and fourth movies. (I also have the “Voyage Home” adaptation.) She also wrote a Star Wars tie-in as well. My copy isn’t as well-read as the banner indicates, though. It’s a rather long one, coming in at 371 pages and 13 chapters of rather small text for a paperback. Plus they’re very long chapters. I blame the condition of the book on the way I used to store them. Now I have a bookshelf.

The back cover starts with Gene Roddenberry giving his approval of the book as “a most creative and enjoyable tale of Star Trek‘s beginning”. That’s some hearty praise right there, when the creator approves your origin story. I don’t know if that makes the book canon to the original continuity or not, though.

He was the youngest man to captain a starship in Federation history. His crew included an untried first officer–and a maverick ship’s surgeon. In the years to come the voyages of Captain James T. Kirk and the U.S.S. Enterprise would become a legend.

But before their historic five-year mission began, before the crew meshed into the superb unit that would journey across the galaxy, before the legend took shape, there was the mission that brought them together for the first time.

Here’s what I remember: it was Chris Pike’s last day and James Kirk’s first as captain of the Enterprise. Bones’ presence here and yet absence in the second pilot is explained in Strangers From The Sky, where he was on leave during the pivotal events of that novel and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. However, I guess McIntyre didn’t think she could do this story without McCoy.

So how did the crew come together? Will Pike’s crew accept a new captain with his own way of doing things? Can McCoy help him make a smooth transition? And what crazy event will either bring the crew together or…yeah, we know they’re not going to be torn apart, don’t we?

If you want to follow along on this one (and help me out a bit) you can order through this Amazon link and follow along with us. It’s quite cheap, which saddens me, really. (There’s also a sample from the Audiable audiobook, as read by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy, who have other joint audio adaptations together.) I plan to start in a week or two but they are long chapters. Remember, no spoilers on unreviewed chapters if you’ve read this one. I haven’t read it in years and some people may be exposed to this novel for the first time. Join us soon on an adventure where J.J. Abrams should have gone before…giving us that movie we got.

Next Time: Prologue (there are no names for the chapters)