GARTH OF IZAR: The legend of Captain Garth, the hero of Axanar, has spread throughout the Federation. His exploits are required reading at Starfleet Academy -- where he became a hero of a future legend, James T. Kirk...
GARTH OF IZAR: Brutal injuries sustained on Antos IV forced the native Antosians to heal him by means of giving him their natural shape-changing abilities. But the cure proved worse than the disease, as Garth was driven insane...
GARTH OF IZAR: His madness apparently cured at the rehab colony on Elba II, Captain Garth has returned to service to mediate a crisis on Antos IV, with the aid of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise™. But has Garth truly put his insanity behind him, or will he renew his plans for conquest -- starting with the Antosians?
Fascinating concept, mediocre execution. We start with a fascinating question: In the original series episode, "Whom Gods Destroy", the villain of the piece was "Garth of Izar", a former starship captain then an inmate in a mental institution for the criminally insane. By the end of the episode, Kirk and the Enterprise have successfully delivered a new drug that is supposed to cure his insanity, and it shows every sign of working. SO....if he's been cured, and is no longer dangerous or insane, what do you do with him? Surely, the Federation and Starfleet have sufficiently progressive ideals that they would not continue to penalize a man for what he did while clinically insane after he's been cured, don't they? Not to mention, they wouldn't deprive themselves of the services of one of their best captains when it was no longer neccessary to do so, would they? So if the cure worked, and Garth was reinstated at full rank, how come we've never heard of him again?
This book does an excellent job of answering those very good questions. And other than the fact that for the first ten pages, they can't seem to make up their minds whether his most famous exploits were at the expense of the Klingons or the Romulans (a mistake that probably comes from having two authors working together, but which it is unforgivable that no one, authors or editors, caught before going to print) the book is reasonably if not spectacularly well-written.
Not a great Star Trek book, but a good one; an excellent idea, tolerably well-handled.
Dull And A Bit Confusing! The beginning of this novel consists of a disjointed dream by James Kirk in which the villan switches between Romulans and Klingons in midstream, although I have to say in defense of the writers than dreams often do not make much sense, so this can be explanined in that way. This novel is based on a character in the earlier original series, the authors state that this character rivals Khan in interest; I like at least one previous reviewer disagree. Overall, my impression of this novel was one of slight boredom as I read it, it just did'nt have that spark that the top Star Trek novels have, this is just pulp science fiction, average and run-of-the-mill. Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski are veteran Star Trek writers, and perhaps when two talented writers work together it kind of muddies the waters, with the result being a work that seems to be a result of tedious labor and not much inspiration. My favorite Star Trek novel is SPOCK'S WORLD, this novel is not nearly as good. However, if you are like me and partial to the original series it is nevertheless well worth reading.
Dull And A Bit Confusing! The beginning of this novel consists of a disjointed dream by James Kirk in which the villan switches between Romulans and Klingons in midstream, although I have to say in defense of the writers that dreams often do not make much sense, so this can be explained in that way. This novel is based on a character in the earlier original series, the authors state that this character rivals Khan in interest; I like at least one previous reviewer disagree. Overall, my impression of this novel was one of slight boredom as I read it, it just did'nt have that spark that the top Star Trek novels have, this is just pulp science fiction, average and run-of-the-mill. Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski are veteran Star Trek writers, and perhaps when two talented writers work together it kind of muddies the waters, with the result being a work that seems to be a result of tedious labor and not much inspiration. My favorite Star Trek novel is SPOCK'S WORLD, this novel is not nearly as good. However, if you are like me and partial to the original series it is nevertheless well worth reading.
ST-TOS: Garth of Izar Star Trek-The Original Series: Garth of Izar written by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski is a novel that continues the television episode "Whom Gods Destroy."
The legend of Captain Garth is known Federation-wide and his exploites are taught at Starfleet Academy and read by Captain James T. Kirk. Garth sustained some rather extensive injuries while on Antos IV. Antos IV is a planet of shape-shifters and after Garth sustained his injuries the tried to bring Garth back to his former health, but now he has shape-shifting abilites and the cure has proved to be worse than his injuries driving Garth to insanity.
Captain Garth is sent to Elba II due to the madness that the Antosians inadvertinatly passed to Garth while being treated. Now, Captain Garth has been "returned" to service after being treated for mental illness... and Garth has returned to mediate a crisis on Antos IV as Captain James T. Kirk and the Enterprise crew come to Garth's aid.
The book was well-written and I found it to be better than this duo of writers did on "Heart of the Son" TOS #83 and "Across the Universe" TOS #88. I found the storyline to be captivating and the reintroduction of Garth to be a strong character to balance the character of Kirk.
I enjoyed the book as it was a very quick read at 263 pages with a larger print made this book easy to read. This book is, so far, the best work by this pair of authors as found in the genre of TREK. I have always wanted to know of what became of Captain Garth from the television series and this book fills in that gap. We get a good fleshing ourt of the character of Garth.
Whom Gods Destroy ... they first make write bad sequels !!! As with most modern Star Trek writers I always worry when they decide to write a sequel to one of the original stories. This is because they rarely capture the style or fun of the show that started the Star Trek legend. These two authors to my mind have an erratic history with Star Trek as their first novel together, "Heart of the Sun", was a boring go nowhere story with no action whereas their second, "Across the Universe", was an exciting fast paced little adventure. Unfortunately this book is an uneven mix of the two. While there is a bit of excitement in it, the plot is an absurdly constructed mess, full of situational and logical errors. The dialogue is painfully bad at times and the mistakes and disjointed nature of the dream sequence at the beginning of the novel makes you question just how closely the two authors were in contact when they wrote it. As others readers have pointed out the authors can't seem to figure out if the adversaries are Romulans or Klingons !!! Though as every real Star Trek fan knows for the timeline to be consistent (*not that modern writers seem to give a damn about that sort of thing these days !!!), it would have to be the Klingons engaged in the battle. The other big problem with this story is again the rather dubious idea that it was inspired by an original series character who was so interesting the authors felt we should hear more about him. Well I completely disagree with the statement that "Captain Garth was only rivalled by Khan Noonien Singh as Kirk's greatest adversary". In fact he was just one of a long line of interesting characters who Kirk met during his career, a number of which have featured in various other novels, and personally I don't think that Garth was anywhere near the top of the list. I suspect that these two authors sat down one day and said ... "Hmm, who can we write about to give us a link back to Star Trek that hasn't already been covered" ... and thus this novel was born. Certainly I don't believe they captured the feel of the character, or delivered a particularly credible adventure with this novel. However once again the most disturbing thing about this book, and indeed the current generation of writers, is the lack of credit they give to past writers. As with Greg Cox, who wrote the atrociously bad novels about "Khan Noonien Singh" in 2001 and 2002, these two authors are full of praise for the actor who breathed life into the central character of their novel, who they claim was their inspiration, but give absolutely no recognition what so ever to to his creator. For the record, while Steve Ihnat played the character of "Garth of Izar", it was Lee Erwin and Jerry Sohl who conceived him and without them he simply wouldn't exist. This lack of respect for the original series writers is both disappointing and I suspect indicative of why so much modern Star Trek is weaker than its' predecessor. Current writers don't understand the in and outs of how the original stories were constructed and subsequently often fail to reproduce the sense of style and entertainment that they had. As for this novel it is a barely adequate excuse for yet another mediocre adventure.
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