Greatly Belated Book Review: The Eye of the Beholder

The Eye of the Beholder is a novel "adapted from" an episode of the Star Trek cartoon by Alan Dean Foster from back in the day.

Why the quotes?

Well, the first half of the novel or so follows the episode rather closely. It alters some details-the Lactrans, enormous elephant-slugs, are made more inscrutable in appearance (the originals had eyes, while Foster's version not only lacked eyes but could not easily be identified as having a front or back end) and the dialogue is more sophisticated and occasionally explains things more thoroughly and better-but all in all, it isn't altered too extensively.

The first clue things are about to go far afield comes when the resolution of the episode should be arriving, and instead things take a widely deviant turn. (Spoilers ahoy, in case you couldn't guess.) The plot of the original episode is that the Lactrans, elephantine sluglike creatures with powerful telepathy and incredibly fast minds, mistake members of the Enterprise crew (and some other humans) for animals, and stick them in a zoo exhibit. In the episode, the revelation that humanity has starships is enough to cause the Lactrans to let them go free, but this isn't quite the case in the book.

You see, in the book, they regret their error, but they also want to acquire an extremely elusive animal from somewhere else for their zoo, and so they've requested assistance from the Enterprise to do so. (The Lactrans claim they no longer have starships; the Enterprise crew finds this dubious, but the Lactrans are highly resistant to phasers, immensely strong, and could fry their brains with telepathy, and also have advanced devices that they could use to battle the Enterprise, so they don't belabor the point.) The animal is called a jawanda, and the Lactrans admit that even they don't know how to catch the creature, which they fail to describe.

This leads them to set out for a world called Boqu, a world that the Lactrans, who abandoned space travel ages ago, admit they do not know for a fact still exists. It confuses them, because there's no star on their charts in the direction they're sent-not in the bounds of the galaxy, anyway. They eventually find a tiny, dim star along their path that wasn't on the charts, and here's where things really get interesting.

See, the Boqus of Boqu would be happy to help catch a jawanda (although they are shocked by the mere idea of it), but they're all really sick. So sick that they're going to die out if someone doesn't find a cure for their mysterious ailment fast. Unfortunately, they're silicon-based lifeforms, and the Enterprise doesn't have a doctor of that sort. (Spoiler: It gets resolved fairly quickly.)

Then, the Boqus reveal why they were shocked: The reason the Boqus could trap a jawanda is because they had to invent a means of keeping the jawandas away... from their star. Because jawandas are enormous creatures from the intergalactic void that feed on radiation, and Boqu's sun is one of the only active stars small enough that it wouldn't trap a jawanda in its gravitational pull. (Jawandas were a cause of frequent extremely violent climate change on Boqu, until the Boqus drove them away.)

And how could such creatures be driven away or caught? By using a gravity manipulating device made up of six of Boqu's moons.

They find a jawanda the size of North America. Note that this refers to surface area. The jawanda is extremely flat in order to maximize its surface area to absorb radiation with; the creature they meet up close was too vast to see at that distance, but also no more than a millimeter thick, and could be torn by the force of human muscle, although it healed from such injuries with great rapidity.

They successfully catch said jawanda, and begin to take it back towards the galaxy and Lactra, when suddenly they realize that more jawandas are chasing them because of the jawanda's distress calls. The Boqus scientist with them nervously notes that "their" jawanda is probably a juvenile; Boqus records indicate that there were jawandas that were "five times the size of Earth."

Things get kind of urgent after that, especially when they spot a jawanda whose size is estimated to be capable of engulfing the Sun.

This is a fun and inventive story, although it's not flawless.

First, it doesn't mesh perfectly with pre-existing (even by that point) Star Trek continuity. It's impossible to travel outside of the galaxy thanks to the Galactic Barrier; while it wouldn't have helped with their medicine, they had in fact met silicon-based life forms previously despite their exclamations that they hadn't; and the characters' goggling at the first jawanda's size seemed quite silly considering some other creatures that the very same crew had met on occasions that were intended to be previous. These are things I can pull off the top of my head, and I'm not even a big Star Trek fan. Foster can be forgiven these, as there's no guarantee that he had seen all of those episodes, and besides, it would ruin his situations that he plotted. (It helps that Foster is one of my favorite authors, having ghost-written, written, and adapted hundreds of books for dozens of franchises and series, including the original Star Wars novelization, The Black Hole [the Disney one, not the one I reviewed], The Last Starfighter, the live-action Transformers, and several Dinotopia novels. That's not even getting into his original works, of which I have read a few.) Personally, I think his version of the story would have worked quite well adapted into an original, non-Star Trek version.

The second major problem comes from the behavior of the jawandas. We know that the Lactrans didn't like the idea of keeping sapient beings for their zoo, but there were repeated objections to the idea that the admittedly incredibly simple yet vast jawandas could be anything more than fairly mindless animals. They probably reproduced via fission, and they had no discernible equivalent to a central nervous system. But one called for help, and others responded. Creatures so large that also lived in an area so vast that they could only be tracked and pursued at warp speeds had a behavior equivalent to a rescue behavior.

What could prey on a jawanda? Not much, aside from those critters I linked the articles of, but it doesn't seem like jawandas would have the capacity to combat such things. Why would they need to be social anyway? There were presumably millions of the things, and one's survival couldn't have been that important. I'm more inclined to think that the jawandas were reacting so because they were fairly intelligent, and weren't afraid of anything but large gravity wells. Intelligent enough to try to help a "child," and to care even though it didn't affect them directly.

Folks, that's altruism. The jawandas struck me as being simple but sapient, perhaps on the level of a whale or an elephant instead of a human, but still quite smart. The juvenile jawanda eventually gave up when it realized that the other jawandas weren't going to save it. The Lactrans probably wouldn't want a jawanda "in" their zoo if they knew it was that intelligent.

And so there you go. I want to see a sequel where someone frees the jawanda. (I don't really believe in freeing whales and such from their captivity; humans can protect and aid them, and ultimately help preserve their species. There's nothing that the Lactrans could do for the jawandas as a species.)

Of course, that's not going to happen...

I did enjoy the book, though. It's fun, and makes up for a rather condescending episode of the cartoon.

-Signing off.