There is a fascinating connection between the creation of The New Voyages 2 anthology and the late ’70s political battle to save NASA from oblivion. Around the time of publication, NASA was struggling and facing steep financial cuts (in fact, the introduction to The New Voyages 2 mentions that some of the key people who helped put man on the moon only a decade earlier were suddenly now forced to sell burgers). Nichelle Nichols was still under contract with NASA at the time to help recruit women and minorities to the space program, she even spoke before the U.S. House of Representatives on the topic, and when she joined together with Star Trek fanzine editors Sandra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, the three of them managed to persuade the head of Advanced Long Range Planning for NASA, Jesco von Puttkamer, to pen a Star Trek novella geared toward helping build enthusiasm among Trekkies to save NASA (Puttkamer was an authentic German baron who wrote science fiction stories in his youth before joining NASA). This stranger-than-fiction crossover from the Star Trek universe to the real world hope of 20th century space exploration proved to be yet another important way Star Trek demonstrated itself as a serious cultural force in the modern world.
Like its predecessor, The New Voyages 2 includes eight short stories written mostly by fans, and this time there are two poems included. “In short, it’s another New Voyages. A touch of humor, maybe a touch of tears, some surprises… A kind of thank-you bonus for your response to The New Voyages (1).”
The first story “Surprise!” (written by Nichelle Nichols along with editors Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath) is a quirky, silly tale. The Enterprise rescues a boy (Mori) from a damaged ship and he turns out to be the grandson of the Triumvir of Arcos, a planet of strategic importance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. But this context is all merely a backdrop. The real plot concerns the clumsy attempts of the Enterprise crew to throw a surprise birthday party for Captain Kirk. For much of the story, Spock is frantically running around the ship trying to distract Kirk, while a “motherly” Uhura eagerly prepares for the celebration. And, as is standard in a Marshak/Culbreath Star Trek story, this one is filled with all manner of ridiculous sexual innuendos. Spock and Kirk praise the idea of spanking people on their birthdays, Kirk and Uhura are constantly on the edge of making love, and at one point, Uhura walks in on Kirk stepping out of the shower fully nude barely covering himself with a small towel while Spock looks on (the Kirk-Uhura-Spock love triangle is laid on thick in this one). After running some “class one” checks on the ship (in which power surges are discovered in the food processors due to making cupcakes), it turns out there is an ‘energy being’ on the ship, a creature adapted for children that can serve as a teddy bear, sehlat, nanny and so on. Kirk passes along the creature to the boy Mori as a gift. All things considered, I recommend skipping this story.
In the second story “Snake Pit!” (by Connie Faddis) Nurse Chapel joins Kirk to resolve a medical dilemma on the humid serpent-filled planet of Vestalan where a tribe known as the Hualans has sabotaged the planetary air coolers. Filled with sad memories of her lover Roger Corby (from the episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”), Chapel joins Kirk as they attempt to negotiate with the Hualans over the release of the D-249 chemical which is present in “coatl” serpent venom (it is needed for medicinal purposes). But both of Kirk and Chapel are quickly captured and tortured. Another Federation crewman named Domberwicky orchestrates Chapel’s release, but she refuses to leave Kirk behind. When Kirk is tossed into a “coatl” snake pit for a ritual sacrifice, Chapel volunteers to go down into the pit armed with only a knife to rescue her wounded captain. Of course, the Hualans insist that she must strip nude. So, we are given an extended scene of a fully nude, sweaty Nurse Chapel battling various giant “coatl” snakes in a gladiatorial ring. It doesn’t get any more unbelievably pulp fiction than that! Unsurprisingly, Chapel defeats them all. She rescues Kirk and the Hualans interpret it as a good omen. So, in the end the Vestalan bureaucrat Gehres gets his D-249 chemical and Starfleet awards Chapel a commendation for courage. This is another absurdly campy Trek story but at least it offers a more interesting adventure than the first story “Surprise!”
The third story “The Patient Parasites” was written by Russell Bates, a Kiowa Indian American who wrote the story while hospitalized during World War II. He gained fame for writing scripts for Star Trek, like the TAS episode “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” which notably features a new Native American crewman named “Walking Bear” (he also appears in this short story). In fact, this story is really just a script that was rejected for TAS. In the script, The Enterprise is orbiting an uncharted red-brown planet where a landing party is facing a large energy storm. They soon learn it is actually caused by a trance-inducing machine called “Finder” who uses bubbles and beams of light to control members of the landing party. Above all, Finder urges “patience,” he was sent by his masters to “find” what his masters desire: the secret to traveling faster than light speed. Finder then tries to steal the minds of Sulu and a few redshirts, but Kirk and crew realize Finder is feeding on the nearby sun’s power. When they conduct further research on Finder, they discover that his masters were Tullvans, a fossil culture once located in the Zeta Geminorum system whose demise took place over 1,800 earth years ago. And so, after weakening Finder’s power source, Kirk reasons with this machine (as he so often does in the show) by explaining that Finder’s masters all died out, and thus he has no purpose anymore. Finder then self-destructs. And while this could have made for an entertaining episode of TAS, as a story/script this reads like just a fairly flimsy re-hashed Trek mission.
The fourth story “In the Maze” (by Jennifer Guttridge) first appeared in T-NEGATIVE fanzine which was edited by Ruth Berman, whose written Star Trek work also appeared twice in first publication of The New Voyages. In the story, the Enterprise has lost a six-man landing party on a feudal planet so Kirk, Spock, and Bones head down to find out what has happened. They find an odd structure on a hill that doesn’t match the feudal aesthetic of the planet. Kirk heads in first and he is quickly imprisoned while Spock and Bones go wandering through a maze. Here, they encounter a fearsome being with yellow eyes and rippled skin. Down here, phasers have no effect. Spock later discovers that the being communicates by radiation and emotion, and that he has been conducting experiments on humans through a misunderstanding of sorts. This story offers some friendly banter between Spock and McCoy as they wander aimlessly through this huge labyrinthine maze, but all things considered “In the Maze” is another somewhat forgettable story in this collection.
“Cave-In” (by Jane Peyton) was first published in the Spockanalia fanzine. This is an odd little poetic dialectic between Spock and an unnamed individual following an apparent cave-in. Presumably these are Spock’s final thoughts, either with his own human-half or a person like Doctor McCoy. I’m not really sure what to make of this avant-garde piece but it adds a nice flavor to the collection all the same.
The sixth story “Marginal Existence” (by Connie Faddis) was first published in the fanzine T-NEGATIVE. The Enterprise crew encounters a dusty planet whose deserted city has been abandoned for 600 years. But suddenly Bones and his colleagues disappear. It is then up to Kirk, Spock, Chekov, and Chapel to discover the horrifying secret of this place. Along the way, they encounter desiccated sleepers wired into stasis pods, autonomous robots guarding them, and roaming bands of alien humanoids who are terrified of loud noises (these people communicate primarily via hand signals). As it turns out, centuries ago people devised these stasis pods as pleasure chambers to escape from their lives, however in time, they lost their muscular functions and could no longer escape from the pods. Thus, they went willingly into their self-imprisonment, with their robot guards forever protecting them, and now the humanoid natives (who are petrified of sounds) are either the descendants of escapees or of those refused to take part in the initial stasis experiment. These people fear noises because sounds trigger the robot guards. “Marginal Existence” is a terrific horror story with nods to the episode “Space Seed” –at long last in this collection, the characters of Kirk and Spock and the others finally feel like the familiar faces we have come to know from the show. This was likely my favorite story in The New Voyages 2.
The seventh story is “The Procrustean Petard” (by editors Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath). This is a bafflingly ridiculous tale in the vein of the episode “Turnabout Intruder” in which the Enterprise is lured to a planet by the Klingons (under Kang from “Day of the Dove”) where a force-field is unleashed and it swaps the genders for a variety of characters, most notably Captain Kirk who is transformed into a gorgeous blonde bombshell. “The Procrustean Petard” is another outrageously sexualized (and sexist) story filled with all manner of pleasure palaces, reminders that women are weak and men are strong, and plenty of innuendo-filled dialogue in a new love triangle between Kirk, Spock, and Kang. The central question here is: “Was it true that a woman just couldn’t function under the stress of command?” Other characters experience a gender-swap in the story, like Nurse Chapel who becomes a tall strong man and Sulu who becomes a small “Oriental” lady, before in the end the issue is finally resolved. I would absolutely recommend skipping this lengthy drawn-out farce of a story, though I was interested to learn more about Procrustes, a mythical Greek giant who was known for stretching travelers to fit onto his bed, or else cut off their legs. There was at least an interesting bit of mythology introduced in this one.
The eighth and final story entitled “The Sleeping God” (by Jesco von Puttkamer) is an immensely compelling science fiction tale that clearly paves the way for the character V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Puttkamer served as an advisor for the film). In this story, a centuries-old godlike non-organic sentient planet-sized machine that calls itself “Nagha” is wreaking havoc across Federation space. The Hadrian outpost drops a distress buoy before Nagha annihilates the whole outpost, and the planet Altair VII is suddenly obliterated, as well. Now, Nagha is headed straight for the heart of the Federation. However, the Enterprise is summoned to lead a highly classified mission – to transport “Singa, the sleeper” to Raga’s Planet. What is Singa? He is one of the Federation’s best kept secrets: a mutant genius with untold telepathic abilities who has been placed in a cryogenic sleeping tank and is overseen Mandoa-Rao, a priest of the sleeper. Of course, along the way the Enterprise has a direct run-in with the Nagha machine and unfortunately neither phasers nor photon torpedoes seem to work. And at the same time, after 300,000 years, Nagha realizes it has found a hole in the space-time continuum connecting it to another universe. But when the Enterprise accidentally follows Nagha, there is an extensive scene of telehypnotic confusion as the whole crew is taken prisoner for vivisection experiments by Nagha, except for Kirk (for some reason?) and as it turns out Kirk is able to fairly easily outmaneuver Nagha thanks to help from the telepathic abilities of Singa. There are quite a few interesting science fiction ideas explored here and one can easily see how this may have served as an early draft of sorts for the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
The New Voyages 2 concludes with two brief poems, one for Charlie (from the episode “Charlie X”) entitled “Elegy for Charlie” by Antonia Vallario, and the other a melancholic lover’s lament from the perspective of Spock entitled “Soliloquy” by Marguerite B. Thompson. “Soliloquy” hilariously ends with the pining romantic line from Spock to Kirk: “What will they find when I am ripped apart? / ‘I love you, Captain,’ written on my heart.”
I remain of mixed about these New Voyages anthologies. On the one hand, they offer a fascinating glimpse into early Star Trek fandom, preserving the adventures in short stories, poems, and even unused scripts. But on the other hand, very few of these stories actually managed to capture the true tenor of the characters in the show, and many of them freely use the sexualized “slash” nonsense. My favorite stories in The New Voyages 2 are undoubtedly “Marginal Existence” and “The Sleeping God” while the worst are easily “The Procrustean Petard” and “Surprise!” I guess I am not a fan of Marshak and Culbreath’s Trek prose, though I can appreciate their extensive efforts in collecting these works for the two New Voyages collections. Interestingly, I believe the inspired cover artwork (later revealed to have been completed by Eddie Jones) offers a wonderful image taken from the story “The Sleeping God” (I believe). While more New Voyages anthologies were apparently planned, the license for Star Trek publishing was transferred from Bantam to Pocket Books in 1979 (the year after The New Voyages 2 was released) and Pocket Books decided to take Star Trek literature in a wholly different direction with the introduction of the numbered line of novels.
Marshak, Sandra and Myrna Culbreath. Star Trek: The New Voyages 2. Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1978. This book is lovingly dedicated to Terry Shore (1944-1968), a relative of Sondra Marshak.