Uhura's Song: The Best Star Trek Episode you Never Saw

Back the 80s and 90s I was so into Star Trek that I read the hell out of the paperback novels. None of them were canon, although it's kind of cool to note that both Uhura's first name ("Nyota") and Sulu's first name ("Hikaru") came entirely from Star Trek paperback novels and were eventually canonized into the movies!

Recently, I decided to reread some of my old favorites and see if they held up. Some do, some... less so. But after re-reading a dozen of my old favorites, I just had to come here to highly recommend that anyone who loves Star Trek: TOS needs to read Uhura's Song by Janet Kagan. Weirdly, Kagan never wrote another Star Trek book again, despite this one being so well-beloved... and only wrote one other novel, ever. It's astounding because she demonstrated incredible world-building and ability to write characters and dialogue in this novel. In a real loss to the Star Trek community, her two follow-up sequels to Uhura's Song were denied by the publisher as they had a policy in place at the time that authors could not publish sequels using their own original characters. And so, much to my great sadness, nobody will ever hear about Brightspot, Jinx, or Dr. Evan Wilson... ever again.

You can read a summary on your own, so rather than spoil anything for you, I'll just say that this book is wonderfully Uhura-centric (it's the novel that popularized her first name as "Nyota!"), features incredible worldbuilding around a race of sentient, humanoid felines with adorable names like "Brightspot" "Too Long Tail" "Jinx" and "Left Ear" and has at it's core a medical mystery that continues to stymie and unravel piece by piece right up to the surprising twist ending.

Part of the reason this book is so damned good is that Kagan really gets her characters. Kirk is his warm, charming, Kirklike self -- but she absolutely nails his formality, quick decision-making, and marraige to the Enterprise as well (there's a bit here that pays off about calling people by the names they like best for themselves, and why for him it's not "Jim"). Spock is completely in character and has his usual excellent relationships with Kirk and Bones, but we get to see his relationship with Uhura much more than we normally do, and it's absolutly heartwarming. All the other characters come off great, too, and here: I'll say it -- I've never liked or cared about Chekov more than I did in this book. That's right: this characterization of him is much superior to anything we get in the actual series. Same goes for Uhura herself (although it's been lovely getting to know her in ST: SNW).

The writing is so descriptive and excellent that I can 100% see this in my head as a classic TOS episode. The 1960s budget would never cover it, but it has the same vibe and banter and mystery (and themes around bigotry and forgiveness) that you would expect from any of your favorite Trek episodes.

I'm going out of my way to tell you almost nothing about this story so you can experience it for yourself, bu take my word for it: if you love TOS and have been craving the feeling of watching a never-before-seen episode with all your favorite characters and an outstanding story, you'd be doing yourself a mighty disservice if you didn't find yourself a used copy of this old-ass book somewhere and read it ASAP. And I'm not pulling your tail. =) You'll be sad when it's over, especially realizing, as I said, that nobody ever gets to see the loveable new characters created in this novel ever again.