4

I am very grateful to Diane Duane for one of the favourite books of my childhood. It happened to be So You Want to Be a Wizard (I read it in Russian, of course). The whole series was not available to me, but this first volume I reread many times. I remember there were some references to Star Wars which I did not really appreciate then, the universe being quite unknown to me. It still is, in fact, but I came to be really fond of Star Trek, so one fine day the book cover with familiar images of Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy and the author’s name long since familiar as well caught my eye. A pleasant surprise it was, and I do not regret that I gave it a try.
Even if I am not yet a very experienced trekkie, the bridge of Enterprise feels like home. Everyone’s manner is so well known – Uhura touching controls, Spock coming down from his station to stand beside the center seat, Chekov’s would-be Russian accent and Sulu’s confident virtuosity. In Doctor’s Orders, they all do more or less what they are expected to do, in their recognizable ways. I suppose this kind of fiction does not imply any dramatic evolution of characters; the point of it is that you are not limited by the timeframe of a single episode, or a scope of special effects affordable, or any other concerns about this or that scene just being handy for filming or not. To tell the truth, space battles in TOS never looked so great as you can imagine them from Diane Duane’s spectacular descriptions. The three alien species, by the way, are also quite original and no hominids, as they were all too often in classic episodes.
The idea of Dr. McCoy grumbling about Kirk’s privileged position and eventually being given the conn reminds of that old tale about a husband who always complained about how he had to go off every day to the fields while his wife had it easy. This kind of motive looks somewhat unconvincing to me, as I bet no-one of the crew in his or her right mind could ever esteem the captain’s job to be lolling in the rose garden, after all the incidents Enterprise had survived. But you may freely consider me nitpicking; the story was worth it, I admit.
When the couple in the tale switched tasks, the hapless husband wound up in a terrible mess. But of course, Doctor’s Orders was never going to be a comedy about a green officer in command making silly mistakes. The phrase itself is actually an idiom meaning strong recommendations of a competent person. Sometimes it worked, as when dealing with the Klingon Commander Kaiev, and sometimes not entirely, as when choosing a combat strategy against an Orion pirate vessel. Anyway, the doctor’s responsibility in the surgery room requires just the same qualities of self-mastery, quick reactions and proper bedside manner, and his priority of saving life, even that of an enemy, is not so different from Captain Kirk’s usual behaviour. He never abused the force of weapon in hand if he could help it. This is what finally brought him and his people the favour of mysterious creatures of the serene planet Flyspeck, who might be something more than just another aliens.
All in all, the novel started a bit slowly but got better as it went, and I loved the aftertaste of the ending. The reason for me to take off a star was the language, definitely not designed to be admired. There is pretty much tautology and unwanted assonance (such as ‘undisguised disgust’, ‘any attempts the Klingons might make to attempt to frighten them’, ‘tilting slowly forward in its orbit, the great forward disc pitching downward’), as well as awkwardish constructions like ‘There was going to have to be a resolution to this problem’. I’m a rather fluent English reader now, but things like that made me stumble. Not so severely, though, as to discourage from picking another Star Trek novel some time later.