Spock Plays Chess with Paladin

cover art by Boris Vallejo

Recently, I was in the mood to read a Star Trek novel. I know from experience that this is a very hit-or-miss proposition. There have been so many ST novels published over the last few years that it's quite impossible to grab one at random and take it for granted that it will be good. There have been a number of bad novels, or at least novels that I didn't care for on a personal level.

So I posted  on a ST Facebook group and asked for fellow fans to reply with recommendations, along with the reason why they liked a particular novel. As soon as someone mentioned the plot of 1985's Ishmael, written by Barbara Hambly, I knew I had to read that one.

Spock has sneaked aboard a Klingon ship to investigate suspicions of some sort of anti-Federation shenanigans. He's captured, put through a Mind-Sifter (see the original series episode "Errand of Mercy") and left with almost total amnesia. Despite this, he manages to escape. But the Klingon ship has, in the meantime, has gone through a time warp and is orbiting Earth in the year 1867. Their mission is to kill a particular human, which will start a domino-effect that will leave the Earth open to alien conquest before the Federation is formed.

Spock ends up on Earth working as an accountant for a guy who owns a sawmill near Seattle. The guy's name is Aaron Stempel--and this is where the book really gets fun.

Stemple is one of the main characters from a Western titled Here Comes the Brides that ran on ABC from 1968 to 1970, overlapping with Star Trek. Mark Lenard played the role of Aaron Stempel on that series. Lenard, as all good geeks know, also played Spock's father Sarak in both the original ST series, several Next Generation episodes and several of the movies. He also played a Romulan commander in the original series episode "Balance of Terror" and a Klingon in the first ST movie. To add to his geek cred, he was the gorilla military commander Urko in the 1974 live action TV series version of Planet of the Apes.

So Here Comes the Brides lets him play a human. In this series, he is a sawmill owner who wants to gain ownership of a lumber-rich mountain. The three brothers who own the mountain have recently imported thirty women (a rare commodity at the time) as potential wives for the local men. Stempel bets the brothers that they cannot find husbands for all the women in a set period of time. He gets the mountain if they fail.



I haven't seen the series, but my understanding is that Stempel is the antagonist early on, but by the show's second season had mellowed out and become at least a slightly nicer person. According to the novel Ishmael, this is in large part because of Spock's influence on his life. Ishmael, by the way, is the name Spock uses when pretended to be Stempel's nephew (hiding his ears behind a long haircut) while desperately trying to remember his own past. He knows he's an alien, but he doesn't know he's displaced in time or what his purpose is. He doesn't know that two Klingon assassins are trying to track down Stempel with the intent of killing him.

Meanwhile, back in the 23rd Century, Spock is presumed dead. But he was able to leave clues behind that allow Kirk and Company to do some detective work and gradually figure out what the Klingons are up to.

The novel's plot (though probably not fitting cleanly into regular ST canon) is very well-constructed, with a reasonable explanation for why Stempel is a key to history gradually explained to us. It is Spock's interaction with the various Here Comes the Brides characters that really gives the novel its sense of fun, though. Without his memory, Spock allows himself to become emotionally attached to his new friends (while still remaining something of a "cold fish" in their eyes--he's never completely out of character). As I mentioned, I've never watched Brides, but the author does a good job of explaining the backstory and catching me up. She is obviously a fan who gives life and likability to all the characters, while using Spock's growing friendship with Stempel to realistically influence the sawmill owner into eventually making more ethically-sound decisions.

Hambly has a ball with the novel in other ways. There are references to Poul Anderson's Hokas and unnamed cameos by characters from Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Bonanza, and Maverick, as well as a few I probably missed. Spock also gets to play chess (and win) against Paladin, the protagonist from Have Gun, Will Travel. It's all great fun--a plot that sounds like it should be fan fiction, but written with the skill of a professional novelist.