With part 1 and part 2, covering the novelizations, out of the way, it's finally time to look at the original stories published in the early days. The first was published by Whitman Publishing (who also published Star Trek comics), and the remaining thirteen were published by Bantam Books. I've written much more in my individual reviews, but here's a brief overview of the books:

• Mission to Horatius (1968): YA. The Enterprise responds to a distress call from the Horatius system, where it finds three planets, two menaced by the third, Bavarya, a militaristic world led by Nummer Ein. Meanwhile, McCoy worries about an outbreak of space cafard–a psychological phenomenon caused by being too long in space–and Sulu's pet rat Mickey is suspected of carrying bubonic plague.
• Spock Must Die! (1970): The Enterprise is near the Klingon empire when suddenly war breaks out, trapping them behind enemy lines. In an attempt to contact Organia, in hopes they'll enforce the peace treaty, Spock uses an experimental transporter, but it results in a second spock being created, apparently identical. Which is the real Spock?
• Spock, Messiah! (1976): They are testing implants that telepathically link a crew member to a native of the planet they're investigating, so they can have the instincts and background knowledge to blend in when surveying an inhabited planet. However, something goes wrong, and Spock sabotages the ship and abandons them to lead a cult. If they cannot solve this problem soon, an approaching radiation storm will destroy the ship.
• The Price of the Phoenix (1977): Kirk is apparently killed in an accident, and the leader of the planet, Omne, attempts to bribe Spock with a clone of Kirk–both body and mind–in exchange for his cooperation in starting a war between the Romulans and the Federation. But the real Kirk is still alive and captive, and the stakes are even higher than they initially appear.
• Planet of Judgment (1977): They encounter an apparently artificial rogue planet. When they take a shuttle down to investigate, it ceases to function, trapping them on the planet, which is populated by deadly plants and animals. An advanced species living there, the Arivne, inform them that another species, the Irapina, are approaching, intent on bloody conquest.
• Vulcan! (1978): They must determine whether the inhabitants of the planet Arachnae, which will soon be enveloped by the shifting boundary of the Romulan Neutral Zone, are intelligent. They are assigned an expert, Dr. Katalya Tremain, but she turns out to inexplicably hate Vulcans. The situation turns deadly, and she and Spock are trapped together on the planet.
• The Starless World (1978): The Enterprise is brought by the sun god Ay-nab inside a Dyson sphere, which is soon to fall into a black hole. They must convince Ay-nab to release them, before it's too late.
• Trek to Madworld (1979): The Enterprise is on a rescue mission to evacuate a colony, when it, along with a Klingon and a Romulan ship, is trapped in a bubble of space by a peculiar, gnome-like Organian named Enowil. He has built a planet of wonders, and now he is bored. Whoever can tell him what his life is missing will be rewarded with whatever he desires. Kirk can hardly allow the enemies of the Federation to obtain this reward, so he plays along.
• World Without End (1979): They encounter a hollow asteroid that is really a spaceship. Its inhabitants do not know that there is an outside world.
• The Fate of the Phoenix (1979): The sequel to The Price of the Phoenix. Omne is back and once again a threat. James, the clone of Kirk, has been living among the Romulans, but is kidnapped by another clone of Omne that has his own plans.
• Devil World (1979): Kirk meets a woman, Gilla Dupree, and takes the Enterprise to the quarantined planet Heartland, whose natives look like the traditional depiction of devils, to search for her father.
• Perry's Planet (1980): They visit the planet Perry, which wishes to join the federation. Arriving, they find that there is no violence of any kind on the planet, as a result of a 'peackeeper virus' on the planet.
• The Galactic Whirlpool (1980): They once again encounter a spacecraft, the Wanderer whose inhabitants have forgotten that there are other people in the universe. However, the Wanderer is on course to pass through the Galactic Whirlpool, a region of space flooded with deadly radiation.
• Death's Angel (1981): Someone is killing ambassadors aboard the Enterprise–apparently a supernatural being, the Angel of Death. Col. Elizabeth Schaeffer, a member of the Special Security Division, is dispatched to solve the mystery.

There were also two collections of fanfiction published:

• Star Trek: The New Voyages (1976)
• Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 (1978)

And two children's books:

• The Truth Machine (1977)
• The Prisoner of Vega (1977)

A cornucopia of new Trek! Through 1978 (when the novelizations of TAS finished), there were just seven original novels but twenty-three books of novelizations, and then the next three years offered seven more original novels. Quite an improvement!

In quantity, at least. I'd say three of the fourteen novels (World Without End, The Galactic Whirlpool, Trek to Madworld) are pretty good, and three more are all right, but the remaining eight are somewhere between forgettable and bad.

The two collections of fanfiction are all right, but they are very much 70s fanfiction, and are probably only of interest to dedicated fans. The children's books are exactly that: they're fine, but nothing special–only interesting for children.

Some details about the novels:

• 10 were written by men
• 5 feature Klingons
• 4 feature Romulans (including one of the five Klingon books)
• 4 feature a powerful computer as an antagonist
• 4 feature telepathy
• 3 had pretty inexcusable sexism (Spock, Messiah!, Vulcan!, Death's Angel)

There are a number of books from this period that I haven't covered yet: the novelization of the movie (which I'll discuss along with other books published by Pocket) and lots of nonfiction, which I'll write about separately.

In the previous summary post, I discussed James Blish's adaptations of TOS. The other major set of adaptations are the Star Trek Log series by Alan Dean Foster, which adapted Star Trek: The Animated Series:

• Star Trek Log One (1974)
• Star Trek Log Two (1974)
• Star Trek Log Three (1974)
• Star Trek Log Four (1975)
• Star Trek Log Five (1975)
• Star Trek Log Six (1976)
• Star Trek Log Seven (1976)
• Star Trek Log Eight (1976)
• Star Trek Log Nine (1977)
• Star Trek Log Ten (1978)

Compared to Blish's series, these are very nice. Foster has more than twice as many pages per story, and only half as much story to adapt, so he's able to add a lot to the scripts–the characters' thoughts, narration expanding on the speculative elements, whole new events added to the story. And the last four books in the series adapt just one episode each, so Foster extends the stories with substantial original material.

There will still be some novelizations after this series–the movies, a few episodes of the later series–but as this series concluded, the publication of original Trek stories started picking up to several per year, half a dozen by the mid eighties, and at least one per month by the late eighties.

Unlike Blish's adaptations, these books are worth a read for modern fans.

I am (slowly, I fear) working my way through the entire published corpus of Star Trek books. There are nearly a thousand–too many for me to recognize trends by looking at them all individually. I will collect my thoughts on some suitable subset of them (generally chronologically) periodically, in hopes of cutting the problem down to a more manageable size.

So, let's begin at the beginning. Early fanfic authors and zine editors say they wanted more Trek, and there wasn't any, so they made their own, and nearly six decades later fans are still at it. Eventually, the suits clued in and started publishing Star Trek novels by the shelf-full (and comics, movies, and everything else–but this is about the books), but at first, there were only James Blish's adaptations of the TV scripts on offer.

There are twelve numbered books, plus one extra:

• Star Trek (1967)
• Star Trek 2 (1968)
• Star Trek 3 (1969)
• Star Trek 4 (1971)
• Star Trek 5 (1972)
• Star Trek 6 (1972)
• Star Trek 7 (1972)
• Star Trek 8 (1972)
• Star Trek 9 (1973)
• Star Trek 10 (1974)
• Star Trek 11 (1975)
• Star Trek 12 (1977)
• Mudd's Angels (1978)

The final of these books includes an original story featuring Harry Mudd (in addition to adaptations of the two episodes he's in). Beginning with Star Trek 6, the books were actually written by Blish's wife, Judy (J. A. Lawrence), and her mother (Ketterer, 1987, p. 25), with Blish doing only "quality control" (Ayers, 2006, p. 9). I did enjoy the writing more in several of the later books–perhaps that's why.

Looking back over my notes, I'm surprised by how positive I was about them, overall. By the time I got through all of them and Alan Dean Foster's adaptations of Star Trek: The Animated Series too, I was really sick of reading novelizations, and it colored my memories of these.

Which isn't to say they're particularly good! They suffer from being straight adaptations of TV scripts, with very little in the way of added depth. They served as a barely adequate substitute for the episodes, I imagine, in a time before home video or streaming, but I guess at least half of the adaptations were outright bad, usually either because they adapted bad episodes or because they adapted episodes that were carried by the strength of the acting.

To boil it all down to a single recommendation: skip these. There were high points and low points, but you won't miss anything, and your time is better spent on other books.

Bibliography

XP3 tool progress

My python XP3 tool can now extract unencrypted archives successfully. Probably it should be cleaned up a little, and there's room for some optimization, but this is a promising start. Still todo: setting the timestamp on the extracted files, handling encryption, creating archives.

I wish to have a pure python tool for extracting (and perhaps creating) XP3 archives, used by the KiriKiri visual novel engine. I'll use the free visual novel Shirogaku Misuken Man'yuutan Kyouto Yoru Genshou (白学ミス研漫遊譚～京都夜幻抄～) (homepage, VNDB) as a test subject. It can be downloaded from Freem!.

I've made an attempt at this before, but had difficulty because I couldn't find a good specification of the format, and I didn't fully trust the several tools that exist for this purpose–they fail to work with some files, which doesn't inspire confidence in their correctness. I have since found a blog post by Jakob Kreuze which looks to be a good reference. I'll work with that post and the source of several tools in various languages in hand.

Header

Each XP3 file begins with a header, which starts with an 11-byte magic number, XP3\x0D\x0A\x20\x0A\x1A\x8B\x67\x01.

It appears (from reading xp3-extract.py from XP3Tools) that an XP3 file might contain more than one XP3 header (maybe only files made with Kirikiri Z?) within the first 4096 bytes of the file. I'll deal with that issue if I encounter it, but for now I'm going to assume files will have just one header at the top. From the start of the header, it contains (per Kreuze):

struct header {
    char     magic[11];
    uint64_t info_offset;
    uint32_t version;
    uint64_t table_size;
    uint8_t  flags;
    uint64_t table_offset;
};

The info_offset is a little-endian offset to (according to Kreuz) the table_size member of the header, relative to the start of the header. Why? It should always be 0x17, shouldn't it? Perhaps I'm misreading. XP3Tools doesn't seem to think that's what this offset means.

xp3-extract.py ignores everything after info_offset and jumps to info_offset. Then, if the next byte is 0x80, it jumps ahead 9 bytes, reads a 8-byte new offset, then jumps there (from the start of the header). Otherwise, it stays in place.

At the start of the file table, it reads the next byte, expecting it to be 0x01. If so, we're at the start of the file table.

How is it that doing simple things requires so much power, these days? I was uploading a file to a new github release:

When displaying this tab, my GPU usage jumps from about 5% (on the page where I'm writing this, for example) to about 65%. It's got a little spinner and a little blue progress bar, and a blinking cursor, and that's it except for static elements. Why does it take more than half the power of a GTX 960 to display that? This makes no sense.

An ounce of cleverness beats a pound of sweat

MJD wrote a few years ago about a problem on Math.SE: "John has 77 boxes each having dimensions 3x3x1. Is it possible for John to build one big box with dimensions 7x9x11?"

He solves the problem by noticing that a single face can be filled only by rectangles of area 3 or 9, but one face has area 77–not a multiple of three.

This solution reminds me of the mutilated chessboard problem. Can a chessboard be tiled with dominoes, if two opposite corners are cut out?

Reading progress

Who was it that said I should check in on my reading progress on the 15th of each month? Someone who doesn't know me very well, perhaps. I'm only a few days late, though.

Philosophy

I completed several Very Short Introductions on topics in philosophy. They weren't spectacular, but the time wasn't wasted, I guess.

I'm in the middle of Chapter 8 in The Great Conversation, on Plato. I've read enough about Plato that I'm not seeing anything new here, but I'll stick with it. The next chapter is on Aristotle, which I expect will be more helpful to me; I find Aristotle rather harder to understand.

I read Plato's Cratylus. Some interesting ideas about how names and things correspond, but bloated by too much uninteresting (to me, since I don't understand ancient Greek) discussion of etymology.

I read through all of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality over the course of a few days (a substantial undertaking–it's about 2000 pages). It's entertaining, but I found Harry to be even more annoying in it this time through than I did a decade ago. And since he's really channeling Yudkowsky, I've found that I similarly don't enjoy Less Wrong as much as I did a decade ago. It introduced me to some interesting ideas, so I'm glad I met it, but there are better places to learn philosophy.

I've resumed reading Reasons and Persons. It's very interesting, but it is really hard, sometimes, to keep a sense of where the argument is headed. Probably this is due at least in part to how slowly I'm reading it–I should bump up the priority in my scheduler so I see it more often. Anyway, at this point Parfit is working on discrediting the Self-interest Theory, and will be doing so for the next fifty pages or so. Then it's onward to the question of personal identity.

Everything else

I've begun reading Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Jaynes argues that probability theory should be understood as an extension of logic, and its results interpreted as reasoning from uncertain information. Seems very interesting, so far.

Also begun reading Chemical Principles by Zumdahl. Chemistry class in high school was so very long ago, but it's really worth understanding at least a bit of chemistry, so I hope this will be worth the time investment. I'll probably combine this with some MOOC or other.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson continues to be moderately entertaining, but not really informative.

Completed

Books

• Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
• Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
• Plato: A Very Short Introduction
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• Free Will: A Very Short Introduction

Articles

• From Dead-End to Cutting Edge: Using FMV Design Patterns to Jumpstart a Video Revival
• Gender Composition of Teams and Studios in Video Game Development
• Ethical Considerations for Player Modeling
• Fan Translation of Games, Anime, and Fanfiction
• Rereading the Romance
• “Kirk Here:”: Using Genre Sounds to Monitor Background Activity

It's been a little more than a month since I last checked in with my reading. Maybe the 15th of the month would be a good, regular day to do that. Right, as if I could keep up a habit like that… well, it's good to dream.

Philosophy

Russell's The Problems of Philosophy continues to be moderately entertaining. I'm not exactly sure how Russell is going to build a useful theory of knowledge on the back of acquaintance, but we'll see how it goes. Should get clearer in the next few chapters.

Trek

I'm making slow progress on the Trek project. Gerrold's The Galactic Whirlpool was fun, but Sky's Death's Angel wasn't so good. Unless you're a completionist, I'd skip both of Sky's contributions to the Trek universe.

“We Owe It to Them to Interfere”: Star Trek and U.S. Statecraft in the 1960s and the 1990s offers an interesting perspective on the Federation's treatment of 'more primitive' cultures as a metaphor for the US's treatment of developing nations.

Language acquisition

An extensive reading program is unlikely to provide sufficient contact with words beyond the 2000 most common families (Cobb, 2007). However, there are some possibilities for finding or deliberately constructing texts that will work better. An example is given of software that allows the reader to click a word and get a set of KWIC-style lines showing other uses of the word, either from some large corpus or, potentially, from a restricted one–the current text alone, perhaps, or a set of selected texts such as graded readers.

Swaffar (1985) observes that readers' knowledge of the genre of foreign-language text is important to their ability to understand it.

Person-first language

• ‘Epileptic’, ‘epileptic person’ or ‘person with epilepsy’? Bringing quantitative and qualitative evidence on the views of UK patients and carers to the terminology debate
• Person-first language: are we practicing what we preach?
• Does Language Matter? Identity-First Versus Person-First Language Use in Autism Research: A Response to Vivanti
• Perspectives on Person-First Language: A Focus on College Students

Miscellany

Mangiron (2017) provies a huge list of interesting-sounding references related to game localization, which I intend to work my way through.

Bibliography

Shortages

A couple of years ago, I wrote about The Business, as Usual, during Altercations that it was "simply unbelievable that the dilithium shortage could have reached such a critical stage galaxy-wide before anyone noticed", now it's 2021 and there's a chip shortage, caused by unexpected demand, and here we all are suffering for it. Sometimes sf is more realistic than expected, I guess.