For many, many years, I considered Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Log series the best writing I knew. I can still remember reading this, the first one (and still the best, I think) on the bus on the way back from school in Dallas when I was ten years old in the fall of 1974. The scripts for the animated shows were quite good (I just bought the animated shows on DVD for Collin & Parker and I'll post on those later) but Foster's adaptations, which were enlarged and enhanced versions of the episodes, were unparalleled. I had read some of the James Blish adaptations of the original series, and they wer short, cardboard versions of the stories. Foster's, on the other hand, were detailed, eloquent narratives, filled with minutiae and metaphors, many of which I didn't get originally, but which affected my reading immensely.
On rereading this first on this week (one episode every couple of nights) I was first of all surprised at how much of the stories I remembered - every page had a metaphor or a quote or a joke that I remembered. There was a lot I didn't, but still, to say it's an old friend would be a significant understatement. That having been said, it wasn't quite as good as I recalled. Good writing, to be sure, but the interaction between the characters wasn't quite right - after watching the movies closely over the past few weeks I have been impressed with how well the characters interact, and generally speaking how well the movies handled that (which I'm coming to learn really is the essence of the Star Trek universe, not the starships and gadgets, which is what I was attracted to when I watched them originally). Speaking of which, the reason I was attracted to them in the first place was, I now realize, Foster's prose about the Enterprise's titanic warp engines, or the "great starship" - language that took the starship itself from a prop in a sci-fi cartoon to a legend in its own right.
But back to the books themselves. Foster did a phenomenal job with the stories, but the characters do sometimes strike a false note - but I realize now that when he was writing the books all he had were the original episodes, which weren't available on tape yet, and had just stopped running four years before. In the interim we've had 34 years of analysis of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy trilogy, innumerable books. movies, and reruns. It's perhaps not surprising that the characters he puts in are slightly - noticeably even - different from what I've come to expect. Not that they're not correct - they just sound a little different to me from what I'm expecting - and I note that watching the original episodes for the first time in over 25 years recently, they're not surprising me at all with the relationship (just with the quality of the acting - I had no idea Nimoy and Shatrner were this good).
Bottom line is that this is still my favorite ST book from my favorite SF author. But now I know why I liked the Star Wars novel so much when it came out three years after this - we now know that Foster wrote it as well.