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 our last chapter we checked in on the plague planet for a bit of a tease to the cause. Not much to say besides it’s getting worse.
This chapter goes back to Vulcan and Sorel. When I first read this book I didn’t read The Vulcan Academy Murders yet, but it’s been so long since I’ve read this novel that I don’t know what level of interest I had in this part of the story. In the first book, Sorel was one of the murder victims, which gave us an idea about how Vulcans grieve, at least in Jean Lorrah’s rendition. The novels are not canon unless they’re worked into the show or movies, the official source material versus the usually unofficial material like the novels, comics, audio dramas, and video games. So how Vulcan telepathic linkage might not work officially as it does in this story.
These were new characters to me, because Sorel, Dr. Corrigan, and T’Mir were Lorrah’s original characters, and as far I currently know never appeared outside of these two novels, or at least ones she made. Dr. M’Benga might as well have been new as he made so little impact compared to Dr. McCoy or even Pike’s doctor in “The Cage”, Boyce, because he was part of a character moment scene for Pike as well as his later appearances in the Early Voyages comic, a better take on Pike’s time as captain of the Enterprise from what I’ve seen of Strange New Worlds. No Spock with mental issues and no Klingon boy bands. As to whether I had any interest Lorrah’s original characters alongside the main cast I couldn’t tell you. It’s been too long. We’re also introducing more new characters that may or may not be important. We’ll see as the book goes on but we should get to the chapter now.
