In February 1975 was published Alan Dean Foster's fourth book of Star Trek: The Animated Series novelizations, imaginatively titled Star Trek Log Four. This volume contains adaptations of "The Terratin Incident", "The Time Trap", and "More Tribbles, More Troubles".

If there's one unifying theme to these stories, it's that they have very little plot to speak of. Just oops, here's a bit of trouble for five dozen pages, and then they turn the crank or whatever and the trouble is resolved. For a bit more detail…

The Terratin Incident

The Enterprise receives a strange transmission in a long-obsolete code, the only intelligible word of which being 'Terratin'. When they go to investigate, they are hit by a strange light, which destroys their dilithium crystals and–it turns out–causes the crew and all organic material on board to begin to shrink. They must find some way to fix things before they become too small to operate the ship.

This story is filled with interesting asides, satisfying bits of trivia about the characters, and an utter lack of developing plot. Just page after page of "and they got a bit smaller, so they had to rig up an extra-long pole to reach the coffee pot", until finally they get to the end of the story and things are explained, and they solve the problem by sending everyone through the transporter to return them to their natural size.

Time Trap

Exploring a weird section of space, the "Delta Triangle", a futuristic analog of the Bermuda Triangle, the Enterprise is attacked by a Klingon ship which promptly vanishes. Then they escape from that ship's compatriots by following it through a pothole in space to a pocket dimension called Elysia where, for some reason, people don't age and dilithium quickly degrades to uselessness (unreliable stuff, apparently).

This is another story in which there is precious little plot. The Enterprise gets stuck, so they glue it to the Klingon ship for an extra boost, and the problem is solved. The people living in Elysia exist pretty much solely for the sake of communicating to Kirk a last minute warning about a Klingon plot.

More Tribbles, More Troubles

The Enterprise, escorting ships carrying grain, encounters a Klingon ship chasing a small Federation vessel. They beam the pilot aboard just as his ship is destroyed, and what do you know, it's Cyrano Jones, out selling tribbles again. This time, instead of reproducing rapidly, they just grow to immense proportions. Oh, but actually they still breed explosively, too. So… yeah. Tribbles, again. They beam them over to the Klingon ship, again.

In Summary

This is just not a good selection of stories. If it'd been just one or even two of them that were very light on plot, it'd be bearable, but for all three to be so mindless? It's pretty bad. The writing is as good as usual, though, and Arex gets a fair bit of 'screen time' throughout, which is nice. The show could really have done with some more focus on the non-human (and non-Vulcan) crew, so it's good to see the novelizations correcting that. Even so, I wouldn't recommend reading this one unless you're a completionist.