Spock Must Die! by James Blish.

118 pages.

Have you ever read a book so bad that it's good? That pretty much sums up Spock Must Die! My friend gave it to me as sort of a joke Christmas present, and I was intrigued--not only for the subject matter and suggestive title, but by the fact that it was written in 1969, scant months after the show was canceled. The intro is so sad--this guy actually thinks that by writing this, he will inspire the renewal of the show. I chuckled, with the bitter gift of hindsight. Also, holy crap, why can't I get paid to write and publish fanfiction? Because that's basically what this is.

Plot-wise, it's an intriguing concept: Spock gets accidentally duplicated in a transporter experiment, and it's up to Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty to figure out which one is the original. Oh, and there's Klingons trying to kill them and stuff. There are some amusing moments and interesting ideas about whether or not a replica can be considered a real person, but overall the book was a little flat. There wasn't a whole lot of insight into the emotional state of the characters. They just did things. Plus, this guy is just a terrible writer. I chuckled at several points, just like "Really?" This short book is chock-full of just plain weird analogies and really confusing sentence structure.

But what the hell, it's Star Trek, right? Of course right.

Anyway, definitely not a repeat read. I'll leave you with a lovely quote taken totally out of context that made me chuckle quite a bit. Enjoy trying to figure out in what context it could possibly mean anything other than what your first impression is bound to be. ;D

Kirk, to Spock: "...But there still exists another Spock, or rather a pseudo Spock, at large somewhere--and furthermore, he's wearing my ring, which I would have given to no other man in the universe."