Part of Series
Here for the first time in hardcover are 19 of the most exciting episodes that ever appeared on the award-winning Star Trek television series. Novelized by the renowned science fiction writer James Blish, each of these stories is a little gem with a permanent sparkle, and their combination a collector's item. Eerie, frightening, mysterious, humorous and heartwarming, The Star Trek Reader II is a mind-bending journey to the outer reaches of the imagination. In The Devil in the Dark, we meet the unforgettable Horta, a shaggy, acid-secreting animal whose proteins are based on silicon instead of carbon—with shocking results. When finally cornered after terrorizing a group of miners, the Horta tells (in a voice that sounds like pebbles in a can) a tale of heartbreak and suffering understood only by Spock through the Vulcan mind-lock. In Obsession, the reader is bewitched by an illusive creature that hovers between matter and energy; after killing in a most ghastly way, it escapes into another dimension. And in Charlie's Law, we meet a space orphan, an ordinary looking seventeen-year-old whose desperate adolescent needs combine dangerously with a superhuman ability—making him perhaps the worst monster ever encountered by the crew of the Enterprise. In Hugo Award-winning Menagerie, we see how the crew members fight one of the most subtle weapons ever devised—illusion. But in Dagger of the Mind, we see, poignantly revealed, an even more powerful weapon-loneliness. In The Enterprise Incident, the crew seriously questions Captain Kirk's sanity, whose bizarre behavior ranges from blatantly violating Romulan territory to tossing an ethnic slur at Mr. Spock. A Vulcanoid woman commander finds a way to soothe Spocks' ruffled ego—if he has one. These and thirteen mroe episodes—many of them selected by the fans themselves—vividly demonstrate why the slogan Star Trek lives! will go on forever. JAMES BLISH was a biologist as well as a prolific writer who wrote more than twenty-seven novels including the Hugo Award-winning, A Case of Conscience. Includes the following stories: "Charlie's Law" "Dagger of the Mind" The Unreal McCoy" "Balance of Terror" "The Naked Time" "Miri" "The Conscience of the King" "All Our Yesterdays" "The Devil in the Dark" "Journey to Babel" "The Menagerie" "The Enterprise Incident" "A Piece of the Action" "Return to Tomorrow" "The Ultimate Computer" "That Which Survives" "Obsession" "The Return of the Archons" "The Immunity Syndrome"
Author
James Benjamin Blish was an American author of fantasy and science fiction. Blish also wrote literary criticism of science fiction using the pen-name William Atheling Jr. In the late 1930's to the early 1940's, Blish was a member of the Futurians. Blish trained as a biologist at Rutgers and Columbia University, and spent 1942–1944 as a medical technician in the U.S. Army. After the war he became the science editor for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. His first published story appeared in 1940, and his writing career progressed until he gave up his job to become a professional writer. He is credited with coining the term gas giant, in the story "Solar Plexus" as it appeared in the anthology Beyond Human Ken, edited by Judith Merril. (The story was originally published in 1941, but that version did not contain the term; Blish apparently added it in a rewrite done for the anthology, which was first published in 1952.) Blish was married to the literary agent Virginia Kidd from 1947 to 1963. From 1962 to 1968, he worked for the Tobacco Institute. Between 1967 and his death from lung cancer in 1975, Blish became the first author to write short story collections based upon the classic TV series Star Trek. In total, Blish wrote 11 volumes of short stories adapted from episodes of the 1960s TV series, as well as an original novel, Spock Must Die! in 1970 — the first original novel for adult readers based upon the series (since then hundreds more have been published). He died midway through writing Star Trek 12; his wife, J.A. Lawrence, completed the book, and later completed the adaptations in the volume Mudd's Angels. Blish lived in Milford, Pennsylvania at Arrowhead until the mid-1960s. In 1968, Blish emigrated to England, and lived in Oxford until his death in 1975. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, near the grave of Kenneth Grahame. His name in Greek is Τζέημς Μπλις"
