The Robot Masters – Stardate 95.9066: Shipments of worker robots have been going missing across the Federation, including robots that Scotty was expecting to serve aboard the Enterprise. The missing robots are traced to pirates who are reprogramming them to serve as a mechanical army…for the Romulans.
The Logistics Of Stampede – Stardate 5466.9: Starfleet dispatches the Enterprise to help an agricultural colony with a unique problem – the indigenous livestock stampedes violently every six years, destroying every crop the colony plants. Spock and McCoy must find out how to prevent the devastating crop losses without destroying local wildlife.
The Human Factor – Stardate 96.024: An exchange of ambassadorial pleasantries with a new Federation member world goes horribly wrong when the ambassadors hijack an Enterprise shuttlecraft, and Lt. Uhura with it. Kirk storms into the capitol city of the Federation’s newest world, stopping just short of issuing threats if Uhura isn’t returned. When his landing party is attacked, Kirk and Spock go into hiding to try to find out what’s going on – and why Uhura is scheduled for sacrifice to this culture’s god.
The Man Who Trained Meteors – Stardate 95.801: The surface of a Federation colony world is laid to waste by a surprisingly dense meteor storm before the eyes of the Enterprise crew, and even the technological might of Starfleet can’t stop the devastation. When surviving colonists tell Kirk of a madman who can control meteors, the captain makes it his mission to find this man…only to discover that this maniac already has the Enterprise in his sights.
A Mirror For Futility – Stardate 5470: Two immensely powerful vessels are locked in endless combat. The sheer destructive power at their disposal is severe enough that the resulting disturbance reads as a massive space storm to the Enterprise’s sensors. Kirk tries to open contact with both ships, neither of them from a race ever encountered before by Starfleet, and discovers that the crew of each ship is long gone, victims of a war they refused to resolve. The ships’ computers are carrying out their final orders: finish the war, at any cost…regardless of the impact on anyone nearby.
Crier In Emptiness – (this story appeared on a previous album; you can see a synopsis here.)
Review: As with my previous review of another of Peter Pan Records’ Star Trek children’s story compilations, I tend to give these records quite a wide latitude in sticking to what we know about Star Trek lore – simply because the body of that lore didn’t exist at the time. Based on the original series and loosely on the animated continuation of that series, Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek audio stories had a blank slate on which to build their stories, unencumbered by the framework built by the later TV series or even the feature films.
However, that free pass is on pretty shaky ground for The Robot Masters, which implies that robots serve aboard Starfleet ships and are in abundance everywhere else. The original series barely touched upon the concept of androids (What Are Little Girls Made Of?, I, Mudd), but nowhere was there any evidence that Scotty keeps robots in stock in engineering. I almost thought that Robot Masters was insulting my intelligence with its implication that Kirk could wear a different outfit, call himself “Jim Kirk”, space pirate, and nobody would be any the wiser, until the story thankfully gave the suspiciously Transylvanian-sounding Romulans a glimmer of intelligence. Turns out that they recognized him all along.
The Logistics Of Stampede is a refreshingly intelligent story with an ecological lesson at its heart that wouldn’t have been out of place in the original series, although its scenes involving herding thousands of wild creatures outdoors would’ve bankrupted the budget for most Hollywood cowboy epics, let alone an episode of classic Star Trek. This one’s worth the price of admission: despite by played by different actors, the characters ring absolutely true, and whoever was portraying Dr. McCoy for Peter Pan Records hit the character perfectly in this story. Logistics has some intriguing background notes as well, including the idea that the Federation is based on the same model as the British Empire, with far-flung colonies paying a wealth of taxes but not getting a lot of hands-on help for their trouble.
The Human Factor throws a few mainstays of classic Trek storytelling into the blender and mashes them into a bit of a frothy mess. Setting aside for the moment the astounding notion that Kirk and Spock would leave an unconscious Sulu and Chekov to their fates at the hands of a violent mob, there simply isn’t anything here that hadn’t been done on a more sophisticated level by such TV episodes as Return Of The Archons or The Apple.
The Man Who Trained Meteors is pure B-movie-worthy silliness, complete with a megalomaniacal mad scientist and a mention that Spock has Vulcan “mind-lock” abilities – something which the story seems to treat as common knowledge (perhaps the writer had the mind meld in mind here…so to speak).
A Mirror For Futility joins The Logistics Of Stampede in the “stories that would’ve made a fine full-length live-action episode” category, though it too borrows some tried-and-true Trek tropes and comes across sounding very familiar – the love child of A Taste Of Armageddon and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It’s worth remembering that the latter didn’t exist at the time these stories were written and recorded – though writer Alan Dean Foster did go on to write drafts of the Star Trek Phase II story that would become The Motion Picture, so is it even remotely possible – or plausible – that Peter Pan’s audio stories for kids played a major role in forming the future of the Star Trek franchise?
At this point in Star Trek history, when there was no more story and/or backstory than the 79 original episodes, the animated episodes, and maybe the Franz Joseph Technical Manual, anything was indeed possible. It’s that kind of promising blank slate that excites me about the new movie’s setup, but at the same time, there’s something endearing about these stories’ attempt to recreate the feel of the original series. It occasionally falls flat – I could probably add a few paragraphs here just complaining about the totally unnecessary and not-just-a-little-offensive “Charlie Chan” accent bestowed upon Sulu in these stories – but these stories hail from a time when Paramount wasn’t monitoring the use of the characters and intellectual property very closely, and, frankly, from a time when complaints about such things often fell upon deaf ears.
The stories are of wildly varying quality – and I’m being charitable there – but serve as an interesting snapshot in time of the history of the franchise circa 1976 (the cover art shown, with photos from The Motion Picture, is from a reissue of the stories at the time of the film’s release).