(courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)
I am not one of those consumers of books and movies and TV shows that recoils in horror whenever a story or a set of characters which originated in one medium make the leap to another.
In fact, watching these people or a much enjoyed narrative find new form and fresh expression is a real joy since it grants you the rare privilege and pleasure of seeing the story from a completely different angle and in ways that add, if it’s done well, even more value to something you already love.
A great example of how good this alternate creative expression can be for a franchise is found in a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds novelisation, The High Country by John Jackson Miller, a bestselling New York Times author who is well adept at taking a visually-based franchise and giving it life on the written page.
He manages in this novel to execute that most wondrous of things – making it feel as if you are watching an episode of the show, bringing key characters to life in ways that you immediately recognise while simultaneously adding to them in a way that feels fresh and welcomingly vital.
The High Country sees four key member of the Enterprise’s crew – Captain Pike (played by Anson Mount), First Office Una Chin-Riley (played by Rebecca Romijn), cadet Nyota Uhura (Celia Gooding) and Science Officer Spock (Ethan Peck) – crashland on a planet after their experimental shuttle shuts down where they find themselves in a messed up First Contact situation.
Captain Pike has not yet awakened.
And when he did, he regretted it. Immediately.
Now, if you know your Star Trek, and the odds are you do if you reading a book of one of its series, you will be well aware that First Contact is something that comes up with a huge raft of protocols, none of which are supposed to be trangressed.
The big caveat is that First Contact isn’t supposed to happen with a pre-warp civilisation, but that bedrock part of the process is rent asunder when the four members of the away team, through a glitch explained in the novel, find themselves separated and having to navigate life in a world that owes a great deal to Wild West America.
If this sounds like something the franchise has done a million times before, you’d be partly right; Star Trek writers LOVE going all cowboy on the storylines, partly because they’re cheap to film since most studios have a Wild West lurking somewhere in their backlot, but also because it serves up a stark contrast between a modern, highly-technological society and its more primitive antecedent manifestation.
What The High Country does a little differently is how complex it makes this story, serving up some truly imaginative world-building and exploring how a planet this unusual came to be.
The explanation will make anyone who loves the franchise’s ability to go to some truly wild and interesting places very happy indeed with The High Country not everything it seems on the surface.
So, setting taken care of, and it’s a doozy, what emerges in this highly readable novel is an exploration of what happens when a utopian ideal becomes such a pressing orthodox priority that what was good about it morphs into something dark, imprisoning and stultifying.
Even more than that, The High Country explores with a pleasing mix of nuanced thoughtfulness and swashbuckling adventurism what the implications might be for the galaxy at large of a planet which places its own survival ahead of anyone’s elses, without having regard for what might happen if they only consider themselves and the sanctity of their way of life.
It’s a thrilling mix of ideas and gung-ho action and it works an absolute treat, staying true to Strange New Worlds as a show and Star Trek as an overall franchise while asking some very cool questions indeed and serving up some fascinatingly immersive answers.
This is how a franchise adaptation should happen – giving you more of what you love but also going to the kinds of thoughtfully dense and details rich places that only a novel can manage because it has way more narrative runway than a standard 45-minute TV episode.
The High Country manages that with aplomb and part of the joy of reading it is the time the novel can take to explore how the four characters, especially Pike and Riley feel about certain people and things and how Pike in particular has to deal with a unique collision of a widely divergent past and present.
‘We have to keep him. Keep him safe!’
‘Okay, Lucky Lantern. We’ll take it.’ Enterprise’s first officer paused and looked kindly upon it. ‘I guess it saved your life.’
It is the luxury of extended novelistic storytelling that really works for The High Country; Miller is able to let the more intimate moments and the big epic ideas scenes really breathe and express themselves in ways that add considerable emotional heft and heavyweight thinking respectively to the story while unleashing Star Trek‘s propensity for nuanced edge-of-your-seat narratives to really go to town.
It’s a happy mix and in the hands of some as clearly talented as Miller, it comes to full bloom, delivering up in this instance what feels like a movie-length episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds that a deliciously rewarding sprawling blockbuster feel to it.
It is proof positive that crossing from one medium to another can be a very good thing, and while some people hate the idea of something birthed in one form of storytelling finding expression in another – in this case, those who hate books being anything other than books; not this reviewer – let’s have some fun I say and see where the adaptation takes us! – The High Country shows how good this can be in expert hands.
There is much to love about The High Country and its propensity for storytelling that feels wondrously big and comfortingly intimate all at once, but perhaps the biggest thing is that it delivers on that most important of bases – it takes what was great in one medium, preserves and builds on that brilliantly well in another, and serves up more of what we love in a whole new way that delights at every turn.