The Barnes and Noble Collection Editions series has a special treat for Trek fans for the show’s 50th anniversary year. On April 29, they will release the Star Trek: The Classic Episodes anthology, a 720 page volume of James Blish and J. A. Lawrence’s episode novelizations of the Original Series. Here is what Barnes and Noble had to say about the project:
Our editorial team had been wanting for some time to add a Star Trek-themed title to our collectible editions line and when we realized that 2016 would mark the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek television series we saw a golden opportunity. The book’s editor remembered reading as a teenager the twelve Star Trek collections published between 1967 and 1977 for which science fiction writer James Blish adapted the scripts for all of the episodes from the original series as short stories.
Working with our partners at Penguin Random House, who published the original story collections, we chose the forty-five episodes that we thought Star Trek fans would instantly recognize as classics: “The Menagerie” and “The City on the Edge of Forever,” both of whose scripts won science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award; “The Trouble with Tribbles”; “The Doomsday Machine;” and episodes that had originally been scripted by Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, David Gerrold, and other leading science fiction writers. CBS generously provided our design team with the artwork that adorns the book’s bonded-leather case, and production stills of the cast and the USS Enterprise that we use for endpapers. The result is a book that we hope will thrill Star Trek fans and pay tribute to a landmark of our popular culture.
StarTrek.com has the book’s introduction up for everyone to take a peek at. It’s funny how bundling up the prose of Star Trek gives the same impression as a compendium of The Lord of the Rings: that of a vast saga.
