“We’ll have to be rid of some of you….”
Stardate: 6132.8
Unfortunately, despite being written by celebrated Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Joe Haldeman, Planet of Judgment is another fairly flimsy early Star Trek novel. It begins after a four-week detour running maneuvers and the crew are in high spirits. The Enterprise is transporting Dr. James “Jim” Atheling, a celebrated astrophysics professor, to the Academy where he is to become the new dean of “Star Fleet’s College of Science.” Notably, Dr. Atheling has refused youth stimulating cosmetic drugs, he looks his age (sixties), and he is well-respected by many members of the crew. A fascinating premise? You bet. However, the novel simply abandons Dr. Atheling after the first couple chapters.
While en route to the Academy, the Enterprise encounters a rare Earthlike rogue planet, naturally Class-M (later dubbed the planet “Anomaly” by Lt. Commander Andre Charvat, a senior science officer second only to Spock). Strangely, near the planet is a tiny blue black hole the size of a pea with a fairly dense cloud of hydrogen and helium: “The bigger mystery is that the darned thing shouldn’t exist at all! As tiny as the black hole is, it’s far too massive. It should use up all that gas in seconds; go out in a blaze of glory. But it doesn’t. Something is holding the gas back” (12). A landing party is organized consisting of Kirk, three brawny security men (Hevelin, Bounds, Moore), a science officer named Sharon Follett, and Octavio Hernandez, a planetary sciences specialist.
However, a transporter failure means the landing party must take a shuttlecraft. Shortly after arrival on the planet’s surface, Kirk and crew realize all their technology no longer functions. They cannot operate the shuttlecraft and communications are down. To make matters worse, the tall grass and jungles are teeming with super races of flying eagle-like creatures, massive snake-like reptiles, huge black bear-like animals with six legs, and large hostile plants with vines that easily consume members of the crew. Despite it being somewhat illogical, and with no clear evidence that the landing survived, Spock orders several more shuttlecrafts down to the surface while the Enterprise continues on to the Academy.
Things get considerably violent for a Trek novel as the crew discovers there is a superior race of large god-like telepathic humanoids with four fingers and no mouths that are running amok on the planet (the beings look like ‘abandoned marionettes’). While they are not particularly technologically savvy (firing arrows at the crew) their minds are extremely advanced. They call themselves “Arivne,” a Vulcan word expressing interdependence or even unity between matter, energy, and thought.
The Arivne put the crew through a series of rigorous hallucinogenic tests: Spock experiences his Pon Farr again from the episode “Amok Time” (though Joe Haldeman simply adapted this scene from James Blish’s script adaptation), Bones has a flashback to his wife divorcing him and leaving with his daughter Joanna before he had joined Starfleet, Spock has another flashback to his first visit to earth as a boy, science officer Sharon Follett relives the painful moment she chose to have an abortion, and Lt. Commander Andre Charvat goes back to a difficult day at the Academy when his roommate committed suicide… In each troubling vision, Haldeman shifts the prose to first-person stream-of-consciousness while the characters are effectively asleep. These scenes are followed by other dramatic conflicts, such as a tense game of poker, a simulation back aboard the Enterprise, and even a seafaring pirate adventure, until Kirk, Spock, and Bones finally learn the true purpose in this whole charade.
The Arivne are testing the Federation to see if it is strong enough for a far more powerful foe, the shapeshifting centaur-like creature called the “Irapina” which are planning to conquer the Federation in a thousand years. In the end, the Enterprise trio naturally prevails thanks to Spock outsmarting the scenario and the Irapina plan to change their course of slowly over the ensuing centuries and test the Romulan Empire instead. The Arivne erase all record of their rogue planet’s position before sending the crew back aboard the Enterprise. In one final telepathic message, the Arivne declare:
“Our races will not be able to meet again, to mutual benefit, for a long time” (149).
Final Thoughts:
I found the first half of Planet of Judgment to be an intriguing horror thriller of sorts (at one point, a crewman, Bill Hixon, is captured and he returns with his face horribly mutilated while presenting strange new telepathic powers). It sets up a terrifying premise for the trapped crew on “Anomaly,” but there are simply too many loosely introduced plot threads which ultimately they do not conclude, or if they do, the resolutions are unsatisfying. After all, the theme of god-like alien beings testing the Enterprise crew is incredibly well-trod territory (dare I say it, even boring at this point). One wonders to what extent editors might have been overly involved in writing this story. It might explain why the novel shifts its whole tone halfway through. And additionally it might explain why there are several fairly silly moments in the novel –like a scene of Spock talking with Dr. McCoy about the nature of sex and Nurse Chapel’s infatuation with him. It’s just one of several patchwork scenes that seem to have been haphazardly cobbled together as the story wildly changes tone and purpose. At any rate, Joe Haldeman was initially contracted to write a second Star Trek novel through Paramount/Bantam, it was later published as World Without End (1979), however he apparently did not relish the writing process for it and even tried to buy his way out of the contract. I can’t say I’m looking forward to reading this one in the near future.
Notes:
- Commodore Martin Lawrence is chief of Starship Flight Training at the Academy.
- Turbolift can changes axes.
- Early interstellar transports scooped up hydrogen and helium to use as fuel.
- The shuttlecraft on the Enterprise contains seven days of air, food, and water for seven people. A group of five could survive for about a month with proper rationing.
- Krovill – an animal on Vulcan, toothless but able to eat anything from an artichoke to a xylophone.
- There is also a creature on the planet Babel like a “mind-toad” with no organs, sight, or hearing. It detects its prey telepathically it kills with nerve poison from its saliva.
- “Arivne” – a Vulcan word expressing interdependence or even unity between matter, energy, and thought.
- Ensign Bill Johnson – one of eight Enterprise crewmen categorized as an alien, a Tarl from Epsilon Indi.
- The Organians are briefly referenced in this novel.
- Denebian brandy and tritanium are mentioned.
- This novel also features a brief sequence of the USS Lysander squaring off with the Enterprise in a near conflict thanks to the Arivne.
Haldeman, Joe. Planet of Judgment. Bantam Books, New York, New York, 1977.
Note: Joe Haldeman was initially invited to write for Star Trek fiction for Paramount by Frederick Pohl (early editor of Star Trek’s Bantam Books) as a result of the “the Analog novelettes and novellas that became The Forever War.” He was asked after the death of James Blish. This despite the fact that Haldeman hadn’t seen all of the series (he was just handed some photocopies of episode scripts). He saw the original pilot at the World Science Fiction Convention before the series aired, but missed the second two seasons. Nevertheless, Haldeman said Planet of Judgment was “a lot of fun” to write (his working title was “Now You See Them”) unlike his second Star Trek novel World Without End (1979) which he described as a miserable writing experience. However, one thing Haldeman regretted about Planet of Judgment was his epigraph at the start of the novel: “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine. It’s queerer than we can imagine” by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (even though this epigraph was apparently misquoted and the author was actually J.B.S. Haldane, Haldeman later called it a “grievous mistake”).