The stories are fine, but really the commentary on fanfiction vs. "professional" Trek canon - all in the introductions - is the best part. Amazing that so much focus is on getting Kirk and Spock laid - though in only one story is K/S really implied.

It's hard to put into words what this book brought to Star Trek fandom. It came out in March, 1976, just a few short months before Star Wars took us to strange, new galaxies. Until then there was nothing out there except what fans wrote themselves, and this book of short stories, probably the first published fan fiction in book form in the Star Trek universe, started a movement.

Who knew that ordinary fans could write about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov as though they were personal friends? Who could come up with the various ideas of shore leave on planets and leaving your communicator behind? Or the vicious nature of the Klingon's Mind Sifter?

The writing is strong, the characters are drawn from the many, many re-runs we watched during those dark times, and how the editors were able to select these and only these stories is a superhuman effort. Read this time as the first time as an adult, and I gained so, so much from that experience.

Happy 50th, Star Trek! ( )

I'm sure it wasn't intentional that this book was created by women, but it does show. The stories are mostly character driven, as we explore what impact different situations have on their emotions, personal development, and relationships. There's drama, and humor, but the emphasis is not on the thrills. I liked it. I hope I can find other works by the authors, especially by [a:Marcia Ericson|2966025|Marcia Ericson|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66-251a730d696018971ef4a443cdeaae05.jpg]. ( )

This anthology has come in for more than its share of disdain. I once saw an editor for the later published Strange New Worlds express contempt for it. These stories, after all, have a fanzine feel, several were first published in fanzines, as you might know seeing them mentioned in Star Trek Lives! the book about Trek fandom co-authored by Sondra Marshak. Strange New Worlds in contrast was a "writing contest" for those with less than three published stories, and saw itself as much more professional--they do it, after all for money. The things is, as someone once involved in online Trek fandom, I could tell them that a lot of the authors on the contents pages of Strange New Worlds--the best ones--wrote fanfic, often under a pseudonym online. Almost always, their fanfic was better than what got published. There is a kind of blandness, a reigned in feeling to much professionally published Trek fiction, that wasn't true early on when it was closer to it's fandom roots. Which is not to say that I don't love many stories to be found in Strange New Worlds, but I love these too, all of which I can remember just from the title decades after first reading. And with fans, you know they're actually going to get Kirk's middle name and eye-color right. These are written with love, and range from moving ("Ni Var" and "Mind Sifter") to hilarious ("Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" and "Face on the Barroom Floor"). I don't think the second anthology was nearly as strong but this one needs no apologies. Enjoy! I sure did. ( )

This is one of those used-book-store finds that I picked up for completeness's sake and didn't expect much of. But it was great fun. The book is a 1976 collection of eight TOS stories written by fans. The quality is high on both the levels of story and sentence-level writing--I'd go so far as to say that most of these stories meet or exceed the quality of the Trek books written by professionals for the series in later years. Like much self-published fan fiction, these stories are the sorts that generally couldn't be told on the show--either because the budget couldn't handle the effects that would have been needed, or the show format wouldn't support the story, or the story deals too much with characterization and not enough with action for the typical TOS outing. I think this aspect enriches these stories, and allows them to avoid one of the major pitfalls of some of those professionally-written later books--that feel that it is "just another episode," that it's been done before, that it's nothing special. These stories are something special, precisely because they do what the show couldn't. Highly recommended for any TOS fans whose favorite bits of the show are the character development and interactions. ( )