TrekLit Connections is a series of columns from authors, artists, fans, and publishers in which I give them space to tell you in their own words why they’re so deeply involved in TrekLit. My goal is be able to have at least one of these up a month and would love to hear from you if you’d like to talk about your own TrekLit Connections, find the FAQ page on how to contact!
This time we’re hearing from J.W. Eubanks, author of my personal favorite reading of the entire Star Trek chronology at Deep Space Spines. Every post is witty and has cutting insights into the best and the worst that Treklit has to offer. You can find him on Blue Sky!
Life has a functionally infinite number of branching paths. The culture(s) we’re surrounded by, the decisions we make, and our individual personality quirks can bring their formidable combined powers to bear on leading us down some very peculiar roads. Sometimes, you might even end up on one that makes you think it would be a good idea to critically assess every Pocket Books Star Trek novel ever written in the order in which they were published.
Deep Space Spines was the result of me winding up on that road, a swirling nebula borne of a few different qualities and happenstances. I’ve always enjoyed inexpensive collections with low barriers to entry, and mass market paperbacks fit that bill, especially if you know where to look. I also try to look for the obscurities in a given field, the parts that get ignored. I remember seeing a (possibly apocryphal) statistic that only 2 percent of Star Trek fans read the novels, and a lot of Memory Alpha and Beta articles contain only the barest skeletons of information, so I thought it’d be nice for there to be more than a stub available out there for as many of them as possible. Lastly, reconnecting with Star Trek when I did ended up providing a nice respite from the hopelessness the political figures in power at the time so sadistically reveled in making people feel.
The site’s most primordial origins trace back to 1993, when I was just nine years old. Trekkies tend to go back to near-infancy when ruminating on their fandom, which is probably slightly unnecessary in this case. I don’t think I have to breathlessly describe playing with the Playmates Next Generation action figures. But as far as connecting with the writing of Star Trek, the first relevant seed was planted when I got the Judgment Rites PC game for Christmas in 1993. The original series aired in syndication, but I was too put off by the Sixties aesthetic to give it a fair shake. Judgment Rites changed all that. Less than a year later, while browsing the shelves at Hastings (RIP to the GOAT), I bought my first Star Trek novel, Doctor’s Orders by Diane Duane. That one set a bar that few have since cleared. I read about nine or ten TOS novels throughout late elementary and middle school, then quietly dropped the habit. I didn’t revisit them again until 2015, when I wrote about Doctor’s Orders for a free WordPress blog that no longer exists. I planned the post to be part of a series, which I called The Spinal Frontier. I wish now that I had left the site up, or at the very least Waybacked it, because the post was very much an alpha version of the
ones that appear on Deep Space Spines today.
The idea of reviewing Star Trek novels started knocking around in my brain again a couple years later, when I worked overnights in the post-adjudication wing of a juvenile detention facility. The residents there had already been sentenced and were going through a program that would expunge their records upon successful completion. They went to bed an hour before my shift started and woke up an hour after it ended, and I only interacted with them if they had to pee. It was nice work if you could get it; I was basically a bathroom valet with CPR training. We had to peek into their rooms once every 15 minutes to make sure they weren’t covering their heads, but aside from that, we had the rest of the night to self-actualize however we wanted, as long as we were quiet.
I used the time to reread some beloved Trek books and try out some new ones, and realized I was really getting a kick out of it. At some point, I started reading in order from the beginning of my own volition. Then my birthday rolled around, and I decided to use the gift cash from that to buy a domain. My wife came up with the name Deep Space Spines, and since I had nothing better, I ran with it. (Rebranding would be disastrous at this point, but a few years ago, I came up with Attention Bajoran Readers, and I still kinda like it better.)
Eight years later, I’m still reviewing Star Trek novels, though not at the breakneck pace the graveyard shift once enabled. Teaching doesn’t quite afford the same amount of spare time. Still, I continue to find joy in discovering novel character pairings, watching authors find clever ways to link events across timelines that were never meant to be connected, and of course never ceasing to be surprised that there are other people who are also into this weird little niche of mine.
I’ve built a few disparate bodies of work on the internet over the decade. Deep Space Spines may be the least known and viewed among them, but it is the one I am the proudest of. Every new review shines that much more light on a little-known and -explored facet of the Trekverse. And although Star Trek is far from free of flaws and problematic elements, it nevertheless feels better to put one’s faith in it and be a part of its community than many other series. It could very well take me the rest of my life to get through all the Trek tales Pocket Books published from 1979 to the present, but I’ve yet to lose the thrill of exploring strange new literary worlds.
