Chapter By Chapter> Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders chapter 2

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a 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 a read-along book club.

In the last chapter we saw what’s going to bring the Enterprise into the events of the story, and that it understood the characters better than the current show writers and movie directors. And this is a non-canon novel.

Vulcan is possibly the second most visited planet in the Star Trek franchise, with Earth being number one. Outside of Spock I’m not sure how memorable it is. It’s a desert planet where the people nearly created self-genocide until the rise of logic. Vulcans do not lack emotions, or else they wouldn’t have music and other arts, nor would they get married and stuff. Those are emotion-driven. It’s why Data in the TNG timeframe can only imitate other artists but has trouble making his own art. He lacks emotions. Vulcans still create, still have feelings. It’s more about controlling emotions. They will act logical, but logical from their perspective, like the Vulcan member of the conspiracy in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country that I’m so glad wasn’t Saavik as intended. Her actions seem rather evil to us, but to her they were based on a logical, if not flawed, deduction. How can you say Klingons and the Federation can’t work together when the lies and murders your creating to put them into war requires you to work together? A discussion for another time.

With all that in mind, let’s see what’s happening on Vulcan at the moment. It’s a bit early for the murders, so I imagine it will be continued establishment of our cast for this tale.

Our focus for this chapter stays with Sarek. We see him go about his work day, meet his human assistant, Eleyna Miller, teach his students, and then go to check on Amanda. There he runs into Sorel, one of the doctors on the project that will restore her and the crewman. Apparently his wife was involved in an accident, but Corrigan’s process may heal her as well. T’Zan was originally thought to not be able to completely heal, but Dr Daniel Corrigan himself shows up, stating that she’s responding better than planned and she may actually recover fully. This I believe are the important characters in this story, but this is only the second time I’ve read the book and the first in years. I remember a young couple from The IDIC Epidemic was also from this story but I don’t remember if they were any of the people we’ve met.

There are two things of interest we learn about in this chapter; Sarek himself and basic life on Vulcan in the Academy. The young humans sexually mature faster than the Vulcans, probably due to their lifespan, but you’ll have to tell the humans’ hormones first. There’s one bit where he speculates over a pair of human males hanging out with a Vulcan girl and wondering if they got the memo. Meanwhile, human women who might want to date a Vulcan (Eleyna, for example, is a human who tends to act “more Vulcan than Vulcan”) are interested in the professors, not that college students being hot for teacher is anything new among us Earthlings, but they’re often already spoken for. Meanwhile, this is the hottest point of summer in this region of Vulcan (though of course the way it’s written makes you think all of Vulcan have the same temperature in summer because in sci-fi, planets are practically countries), which may play a role. Also what I think will play a role: Eleyna is using Sarek’s terminal to check in on Amanda, since the teachers’ terminals have higher access than students, and Eleyna is a student assistant.

Sarek invited Corrigan and Sorel to dinner, and we learn Sorel and T’Zan also has children, including a daughter who won’t be able to attend but may well become a character along with her brother. Sarek is a bit more willing to…”embrace” his emotions may be a big strong. He will use humor, a rarity for Vulcans, in his classes (and if you hear his dialog with the late Mark Lenard’s voice it sounds even better), isn’t bothered by his emotional reactions to Amanda’s condition–which Sorel finally understands when his own wife is also a patient and also has an urge to visit his healing wife–, and after the events of Spock’s pon-farr and the Babel incident is pleased to have a proper father/son relationship with Spock. I hope we get a chance to see what their relationship is now, bonded by Amanda’s condition and tempered by the events in the show. I’m also curious to see hints of his condition in the Next Generation episode “Sarek”, or his thoughts during that time. The book came out long before that but I always find it interesting when authors accidentally get the “future” right.

Is the full stage set? At least we have the first players in our performance. This is only chapter two of 35, so we still have a ways to go before all the murders happen.