Going Back "Where No Man Has Gone Before"

In typical algorithmic fashion, after I finished the These Are the Voyages books by Marc Cushman, the "because you liked this, you might like this" gnomes suggested for me the ponderously titled The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek. This two-volume history of Star Trek was published around the 50th anniversary of the franchise a few years back, each volume divided in theory into a 25 year chunk.

In practice, writers Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman made their first volume ("The First 25 Years") all about the original series and related topics -- the building of the fans' devotion, the short-lived animated series, the failed effort to start a new series with the original cast, and the six feature films that emerged instead. Consequently, a great deal of this material was already well covered by Marc Cushman in his trilogy. Nevertheless, Gross and Altman take a very different approach that makes any repetition still worthwhile.

This book is comprised almost entirely of interviews. They conducted new interviews and mined old quotes from cast, writers, behind the scenes people, television critics, even some fans. These are parceled out a paragraph or two at a time, flitting from person to person. The writers themselves interrupt only rarely to set a backdrop, mostly allowing their interview subjects to create context instead. But don't mistake this for declining to take a point of view on things; the wry choices in how one person's quotes are juxtaposed against another conveys a lot.

Everyone with Star Trek from the early days has something intriguing to say. Sometimes it's self-aggrandizement, and other times a polished version more pristine than the truth is likely to be. But mostly, people exposed warts-and-all feelings about their work and the process that created it. It's not all sniping either, though I did find the interviews on Star Trek's less successful moments to be more interesting than those on its triumphs.

Because Cushman never wrote in the These Are the Voyages books about the Star Trek movies (or, at least, has yet to), those sections of this book are the more revelatory. The First 25 Years is particularly engrossing in the long chapter on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (a white-knuckled race to meet a preset release date), as well as the sections on Star Treks II and IV (where writers and directors given more creative control were able to produce something great).

Still, you can't look to this book to provide any authoritative account of what happened during the making of Star Trek. That's the flip side of the coin in taking this interview approach; different people often say contradictory things (which Gross and Altman usually position back-to-back). You can guess which statement you think is more likely to be true, though you must realistically assume that neither has it completely correct. But then, if you're the sort of Star Trek fan looking for this kind of deep dive, you're probably okay with navigating the haze of conflicting memories.

Though less researched than Marc Cushman's mammoth series, the first volume of this The Fifty-Year Mission series was nevertheless an entertaining read. I give it a B+. I'll be continuing on into the second book, focusing on the franchise from The Next Generation onward.