Reviews
I hoped for more from this book than I got, unfortunately. I picked it up on a whim and I'm not going to be keeping the book. I found that what I enjoyed from the movie was mostly there. The characters were true to form, the plot elements stayed in line, the world and it's complexities remained the same. Some of the script was even fleshed out in ways that were really interesting to me - you get more dialogue and more backstory in a lot of different instances, particularly in the cases of Kirk and Spock. But. The author also changed a lot. You would think when novelizing a book that you would make sure to include all of the lines in the movie - and yet some of the most important lines that lead other characters to the right conclusions were absent. For example, what Uhura says in her bedroom (and that whole scene for that matter) was completely different. Rather than saying she picked up an emergency transmission from an escapee from a Klingon prison planet, she says something four times as complicated and doesn't really insinuate the same thing. She does drop that there were Klingon casualties involved, but it's a Klingon fleet instead of a prison planet. And she seems to indicate she wasn't the only one who intercepted the transmission, whereas the movie implies that she's the only one who did. And the banter in that scene? It's entirely different. Gaila doesn't profess her love to Kirk at all. It's regularly different in little ways all over the book. The differences were slight, but markedly different. I would have enjoyed the book more if it had taken the script of the movie, novelized it directly, and then expanded on that without changing the exact words used. Without the right script, I felt like going in with a pen and marking in the correct lines. It definitely could have used some correcting.
