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muccamukkRe a conversation I'm having in comments with trepkos.
I think I've mentioned before that growing up without TV reception, I really only saw shows when I was visiting Grandma or one of my cousins, and therefore my knowledge of Star Trek was largely based on the novels, and the very rare episode I caught while in town, or that someone had on VHS (mostly TNG, which was airing at the time).
I relied on the secondhand knowledge provided by the novels, which would refer back to canon events in an entirely muddled way that made it difficult to know what had happened. I was therefore delighted to discover that James Blish had written narrative versions of all the Original Series episodes.
"Great!" I thought, "Now I can get all the details straight, and understand the references in the novels."
I forget how I figured it out, maybe one of the novels contradicted the Blish versions, or maybe it was in one of the other reference books (we had, at one point, the nitpicker's guides and the encyclopedia). But I worked out that Blish was not only changing details, but sometimes changing the entire endings of episodes! Shock! Betrayal! Horror! Imagine the most outraged 9-10 year old you've ever seen!
(In retrospect, I'm wondering if Blish was writing them from memory? Or possibly shooting scripts? Does anyone know? Knowledge of this must exist.)
However, I was actually kind of disappointed when I finally saw "Amok Time," because I low-key liked some of Blish's made-up details? Well, not most of them, but there's a beat in the ending that I fully imprinted on, and that isn't in the original episode. And I know this is blasphemy, because the original ending is fully iconic, with Spock smiling and almost hugging Kirk before he remembers he's not supposed to have feelings. However, hear me out. I went and found the Blish version on Archive.org (they're all there, if you want to delight in corny 1970s renderings of 1960s camp), and it goes thusly:
I know it's not a masterpiece of literary genius,‡ but it does hit the niche trope of "emotionally more open character comes upon emotionally closed character secretly having a good cry, and that leads tobanging revelations of true feelings." Which I could read a hundred thousand versions of and never tire of wanting more, and I have indeed included in at least a couple of my own fic. I'm not sure if this is the first time I ran into it, but it might have been? If so, Thank you, Mr. Blish!
Anyway, hi. I'm actually doing reading for history. Of 12th-century nuns, not mid-20th-century pop culture.
* Definite article in the original?
† Nurse Does Not Have a Last Name!?
‡ Look. The thing about being nine is you don't notice when the prose is Not Very Good.
trepkos.I think I've mentioned before that growing up without TV reception, I really only saw shows when I was visiting Grandma or one of my cousins, and therefore my knowledge of Star Trek was largely based on the novels, and the very rare episode I caught while in town, or that someone had on VHS (mostly TNG, which was airing at the time).
I relied on the secondhand knowledge provided by the novels, which would refer back to canon events in an entirely muddled way that made it difficult to know what had happened. I was therefore delighted to discover that James Blish had written narrative versions of all the Original Series episodes.
"Great!" I thought, "Now I can get all the details straight, and understand the references in the novels."
I forget how I figured it out, maybe one of the novels contradicted the Blish versions, or maybe it was in one of the other reference books (we had, at one point, the nitpicker's guides and the encyclopedia). But I worked out that Blish was not only changing details, but sometimes changing the entire endings of episodes! Shock! Betrayal! Horror! Imagine the most outraged 9-10 year old you've ever seen!
(In retrospect, I'm wondering if Blish was writing them from memory? Or possibly shooting scripts? Does anyone know? Knowledge of this must exist.)
However, I was actually kind of disappointed when I finally saw "Amok Time," because I low-key liked some of Blish's made-up details? Well, not most of them, but there's a beat in the ending that I fully imprinted on, and that isn't in the original episode. And I know this is blasphemy, because the original ending is fully iconic, with Spock smiling and almost hugging Kirk before he remembers he's not supposed to have feelings. However, hear me out. I went and found the Blish version on Archive.org (they're all there, if you want to delight in corny 1970s renderings of 1960s camp), and it goes thusly:
[Kirk] came gradually back to consciousness in the Sickbay.* McCoy was bending over him. Nearby was Spock, his hands over his face. His shoulders were shaking.
Nurse Christine† came into his field of view, and turning Spock towards the Captain, gently pulled his hands away from his face. Kirk smiled weakly, and spoke in a faint but cheerful voice.
"Mr. Spock—I never thought I'd see the day..."
"Captain!" Spock stared down at him, absolutely dazed with astonishment.‡ Then, obviously realizing what his face and voice were revealing, he looked away.
I know it's not a masterpiece of literary genius,‡ but it does hit the niche trope of "emotionally more open character comes upon emotionally closed character secretly having a good cry, and that leads to
Anyway, hi. I'm actually doing reading for history. Of 12th-century nuns, not mid-20th-century pop culture.
* Definite article in the original?
† Nurse Does Not Have a Last Name!?
‡ Look. The thing about being nine is you don't notice when the prose is Not Very Good.
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Date: 13 June 2026 22:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 June 2026 22:19 (UTC)Decker not dying at the end of "The Doomsday Machine" was what tipped me off, I think.
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Date: 14 June 2026 13:41 (UTC)(I still haven't seen the animated series but I loved the ADF novelizations of those while having no idea how accurate *they* were)
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Date: 14 June 2026 23:37 (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 00:27 (UTC)Blish's versions were canon to me for a long time, and I didn't find out about the differences until I was at uni and got to watch some actual episodes. He was indeed writing from early versions of scripts, then apparently he became quite ill while writing the third season episodes so his wife took over. Uncredited, of course.
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Date: 14 June 2026 23:45 (UTC)Oh well, good job Mrs. Blish, then <3 Just looked it up, and apparently her mom also helped. (Also uncredited)
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Date: 14 June 2026 00:38 (UTC)I hope some of it contains a good cry and then banging.
(I also read most of the Blish novelizations before I saw the episodes or movies, although I believe I have since seen more of TOS than any of the other series.
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Date: 14 June 2026 23:46 (UTC)I have incomplete knowledge of every single Star Trek series. I've probably seen moooooooost of TNG? but for sure not all of it.
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Date: 14 June 2026 02:32 (UTC)I don't remember the differences now at all (though I do remember flipping through the books for particularly juicy h/c scenes and sometimes being a little surprised at how they compared to those episodes I had any specific memories of). But this post happened to be very timely for me because I was just thinking about something related, actually, while I was making lunch today, namely:
I was thinking about how my general experience with Gen Z (or I guess it's post-Gen Z now) tweens/teens suggests that for them, watching short clips of media on Youtube, Tiktok, or other video apps is a core component of having seen a show or movie. I know #notallteens, but it's kind of universal among the under-18s I know that if you chat with them about some media thing or other, when they say something like "Oh, I love that / I'm a big fan of that /etc", asking them about their favorite parts leads to the discovery that what they mean is, they've seen some clips of it.
So I was thinking about that, and what an odd experience of "watching" this seems to me, but this led me to thinking about how my own TV/media experience all through the 80s and 90s was equally odd, random, and not always what you would think of as "watching" it. It often involved random episodes of shows caught on TV (usually with entire missing seasons; unless you happened to catch a show on its pilot episode or it was airing in syndication, you almost never saw all of it); it was novelizations and TV guide summaries of things you hadn't seen, and later, once I got on the internet, some things I considered myself fannish about - like Red Dwarf, say - were things I couldn't watch because they weren't available where I was, that I knew about mainly through fan sites, scripts, and summaries. I remember keeping up with the first few seasons of Stargate SG-1 - which was on cable, which I didn't have - by reading online recaps and then eventually getting to see the episodes a year or two later when they showed up in syndication.
The era of watching an entire show in order without spoilers was something that didn't really happen for me until the last couple years of the 90s/early part of the 2000s, by way of video stores beginning to stock entire season of things, and downloaded episodes from the internet; up until then, it was whatever random episodes you could catch on TV or find at the video store, or whatever supplemental materials you happened to be able to get your hands on. Compared to that, becoming a fan of something by watching clips of it on Youtube seems downright ordinary, and there's nothing odd about it at all.
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Date: 15 June 2026 00:03 (UTC)Yeah! Like I saw maybe a dozen episodes of ToS, a fair bit of TNG, but out of order, and then most but not all of the early seasons of DS9 and Voyager (we set up Grandma's VCR to tape it, then she mailed us the tapes, but it was for reasons you might imagine, not consistent). Some of the episodes and all of the films had novelisations, but to this day I haven't seen every single episode of any of the shows. I occasionally think of just doing a watch through, but then I have a nap instead. I did used to read online recaps of Voyager. There was a site called... Dalta Quadrent Blues? Or something? that did decent episode summaries. This was before TWoP.
But also think of how fanonised some fandoms got when their shows didn't rerun and weren't on home media, like The Sentinel and I think maybe Pros were based on reports from people who had seen the episodes. I remember reading about UK fans of TOS getting to see screenshots and handwritten episode recaps (and were like, I'm sorry WHAT happened!? when Amok Time came out), because VCRs weren't a thing yet, and it didn't air there for a while. Having access to all of basically any canon is basically a post-bit torrent notion.
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Date: 14 June 2026 11:17 (UTC)Haven't thought about those in awhile, thanks for the nostalgia. <3
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Date: 15 June 2026 00:09 (UTC)They're all online now, which is fun.
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Date: 14 June 2026 11:47 (UTC)Not Very Good the prose may be, but ha, that's a good line :D /doesn't go here at all
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Date: 15 June 2026 00:09 (UTC)no subject
Date: 14 June 2026 19:21 (UTC)(I also grew up reading the cover off my combined novelizations of the Star Wars trilogy. I'd seen the movies, too, but the books quickly became more familiar. And when the special edition ones came out I was so happy to see the scene with Solo and Jabba I'd grown up reading a version of.)
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Date: 15 June 2026 00:10 (UTC)I didn't have any of the Star Wars books though. We had the audio drama version on vinyl, then the movies on VHS.
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Date: 14 June 2026 21:07 (UTC)Oh, so interesting!
My experience was similar: I was a huge Star Trek fan, but had only managed to catch a couple of the original series episodes at my grandmother's + The Wrath of Kahn when it was on TV once. So everything was based on whatever random novels I could pick up secondhand. I had the novelisations of the Animated Series (by Alan Dean Foster) and desperately wanted the Original Series novelisations that you mention, but never managed to get hold of them. So strange to discover, many decades later, that the coveted item wasn't even all that faithful to the show :D
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Date: 15 June 2026 00:11 (UTC)no subject
Date: 16 June 2026 13:13 (UTC)no subject
Date: 16 June 2026 15:03 (UTC)