Crucible: Spock - The Fire and the Rose
David R. George III
Book Description (jacket text):
In a single moment
...the lives of three men will be forever changed. In that split second, defined paradoxically by both salvation and loss, they will destroy the world and then restore it. Much had come before, and much would come after, but nothing would color their lives more than that one, isolated instant on the edge of forever.
In a single moment
...
Spock, displaced in time, watches his closest friend heed his advice by allowing the love of his life to die in a traffic accident, thereby preserving Earth's history. Returning to the present, however, Spock confronts other such crises, and chooses instead to willfully alter the past. Challenged by the thorny demands of his logic, he will have to find a way to face his conflicting decisions.
In a single moment
...that stays with Spock, he preserved the timeline at the cost of Jim Kirk's happiness. Now, the death of that friend will cause Spock to reexamine the fundamental choices he has made for his own life. Unwilling to accept his feelings of loss and regret, he will seek that which has previously eluded him: complete mastery of his emotions. But while his quest for the perfect geometry of total logic will move him beyond his remorse, another loss will bring him full circle to once more face the fire he has never embraced.
Opinion:
"Crucible: Spock" is - after "Crucible: McCoy" - the second part of a trilogy "to celebrate 40 years of STAR TREK".
To tell it right away: the book is much better than its predecessor and it is not necessary to read "Crucible: McCoy" to understand the novel. There are a few points of contact but only few.
Again it is the TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" all focuses on. The author develops the hypothesis that there a crucial change takes place in the lives of McCoy, Spock and Kirk. The reference was even clearer in the McCoy part in form of the alternative time line. In this second part a tie is present only because of Spock's feelings of guilt.
However, again the story is divided into two parts: on the one hand the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" is retelled from Spock's point of view till the tragic end. On the other the story focuses on Spock, starting from the events that can be seen in the seventh Star Trek movie "Generations".
That way, as an advantage compared to the first book of the trilogy, a consistent course of events is reached, not a senseless alignment of moments that can already been seen in single episodes or movies. In fact, here, too, some retro respects are integrated but in a better way so that the result is not an anthology but a story with a real storyline resp. two.
Concerning the events on Earth's past of 1930, the renarration of the TOS episode is done appropriately - but the author was able to use a great original without the need to invent own pitfalls. In his acknowledgements, however, he "forgets" to mention the one who delivered him the material: Harlan Ellison, the episode's script author.
The events of the future are based mainly on own ideas of the author whereby it is possible to discuss the question whether the ideas are indeed new.
Spock becomes ambassador at first, only to join (again), after Kirk's (assumed) death, the Kolinahr, the Vulcan ritual to achieve total non-emotionalism. Spock's life as ambassador is mentioned in TNG, the Kolinahr was already a bad idea in "Star Trek - The Motion Picture". As a conclusion the result is not really new and portraits a Spock that does not want to fit into the known character.
Compared with the predecessor the page number is much lower what is a bit illogical since Spock's life span is, as a Vulcan, far higher than the one of the human McCoy. As a consequence the story ends far before the TNG era but there is enough time covered to ask the question after Pon Farr. Invented in TOS, the "Vulcan time of mating" takes place every seventh year. Not (anymore) for Spock, obviously, because that fact is not included in the book.
In all, it can be noted that the author knows how to write but he has no really good feeling for Star Trek and TOS. The latter is, however, the main ingredient when writing a Star Trek novel, especially when it is not intended to produce "an adventure of the week" but a story that integrates itself in the "canon". Plenty of hints that also include the animated series and require lots of knowledge from the reader are not enough.
