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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Shatner Pens First ‘Star Trek’ Novel

Alan Rosenberg Providence Journal

“The Ashes of Eden” By William Shatner (Pocket Books, $23)

You have to know this isn’t your average “Star Trek” novel by the end of Chapter 3, when the heroic Capt. James T. Kirk is drinking to forget he’s impotent.

Then there are the musings on the quirks of celebrity, the strained relationship between Kirk and engineer Scott, the questioning of whether longtime helmsman Sulu really has what it takes to command his own ship.

And the continuing discussion among all the other characters of whether Kirk is simply being blinded by his sex drive or is a traitor.

What’s going on? It’s “The Ashes of Eden,” the first “Star Trek” novel by the actor who has personified Kirk for almost 30 years, William Shatner.

And because Shatner wrote it, the book is impossible to read without wondering how much the author’s own experiences and perspectives are being allowed to reshape the wellestablished Star Trek characters.

For instance, Shatner is infamous in Trekker circles for an old “Saturday Night Live” skit in which he told obsessed fans to “get a life.”

Now Shatner writes of how Kirk, nearing the end of his renowned Starfleet career, “couldn’t go anywhere without detecting the unsettling flash of recognition in strangers’ eyes.”

He attends a reception with 2,000 dignitaries, “and all of them knew him. Or thought they did… . He was filed away in their brains with other long-term acquaintances, the same memory slots given over to family members and lifelong friends. So that’s how they approached him now. … But the truth was, to Kirk, they were still no more than strangers.”

In a handful of sentences, that’s more introspection than we’ve gotten from Kirk over 79 TV episodes, seven movies and dozens of “Star Trek” novels.

Shatner has written other novels (he’s credited with the successful “TekWar” books, which have been turned into a TV series of their own) and was the creative force behind the movie “Star Trek V,” so he’s not a novice.

And here he has help, noted on the title page (though not on the cover), from veteran “Star Trek” novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens.

The book they’ve crafted zips right along. It’s set six months before Kirk’s death, which was portrayed in last year’s movie “Star Trek Generations.”

There’s skulduggery in Starfleet, rogue Klingons, a chase across the galaxy, a climactic battle and a closing epilogue in which it’s hinted that Kirk’s cinematic death may not have been final after all (a point which wouldn’t surprise anyone who saw Spock revive in the movie “Star Trek III” after dying in “Star Trek II,” but which the folks at Paramount, who feel free to ignore developments in the novels when they make films, have so far not conceded).

All this texture and psychodrama make for a satisfying book, a cut above the typical “Star Trek” novel, where the need for consistency in a long series means characters seldom change and grow.

But it does raise the question of where Kirk ends and Shatner begins, and whether these changes will carry forward in future stories or be a oneshot aberration.