reread: How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford ★★★

How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford
My rating: ★★★

So many feelings after rereading this decades after a first reading upon its initial release. It's still such a silly take on Star Trek, right up there with the Original Series episodes, "A Piece of the Action", "Shore Leave" and "The Trouble With Tribbles". And yet I can't reconcile its innocent charm, skewed characterizations and flawed storytelling with ratings I previously gave the book: 2 stars at one point, long forgotten and undeserved, and then 4 stars, apparently based on my faulty memory of how funny I must have found it.

Three stars seems about right. I shouldn't fault the author for playing around with Star Trek lore at a time when it was far less established. And I won't. Although the Klingons never quite ring 'true' here, weighted down as I am with 40 more years of books, TV and film. They are much too personable. Everyone else seems about right, for the time. What kept distracting me, though, were the casual references to what should have been archaic Earth cultural touchpoints. Even the humans of Kirk's time are usually presented with larger gaps in their knowledge of 19th and 20th century British and American stage and film. How the isolated colonists on Direidi, much less the Klingons, know so much about Gilbert and Sullivan, classic Hollywood films and romantic comedy is a mystery.

Leaving all that as the key suspension of disbelief, the reader is left with a pleasant story of cunning locals pulling the wool over the eyes of supposedly more sophisticated visitors out to exploit them.

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