ommander Jon Thomas Korie is the driven second-in-command aboard the Star Wolf, a starship engaged in mankind's ongoing war against an offshoot of humanity known as the Morthans. Embittered by the apparent loss of his wife and child in a Morthan attack on a human world, he presses himself harder, and more pitilessly, than just about anybody else his fellow officers and crew have ever seen.
Despite an impressive service record, he has yet to be awarded a full command, and has instead provided support for a seemingly endless series of other captains, all of whom have either been killed, replaced or disgraced on Korie's watch. His current superior,
Captain Parsons, watches him with special interest as she leads the crew on a mission of mercy to rescue the occupants of a research vessel known as the Norway.
Unfortunately, the Norway has been contaminated by a biological weapon intended for possible use against the Morthans, and before long the landing party led by Korie is infected and unable to return.
Policy requires Parsons to abandon Korie and the landing party rather than endanger the rest of the crew. Her own sense of loyalty requires something else: and so she keeps her options open, knowing that this means the end of her career. ...
Constructing the anti-Star Trek
The Star Wolf series evolved out of David Gerrold's work on Star Trek, and in many ways functions as a detailed critique of everything he finds lacking in the earlier show. Star Wolf is not a series about benevolent explorers who just happen to be armed to the teeth; it's about soldiers operating under a strict military code who happen to be armed to the
teeth. In the world of Star Wolf, officers who follow their own rules are not lionized and rewarded, like Kirk and Picard; they are court-martialed and stripped of their commands.
And that's not all: the Star Wolf universe has room for homosexuals.
Blood and Fire started life as a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which not only introduced a pair of openly gay officers but used a deadly outbreak of "bloodworms" as a metaphor for AIDS. A lawyer for the series persuaded the producers that the script was "aesthetically displeasing" and should not be produced. Gerrold was trashed at
conventions for writing a script "so bad it had to be shelved." Over the years that followed, he salvaged the story by slating it for his own, yet-to-be-produced TV version of The Star Wolf. In the absence of that series, he novelized the story here.
Although the differences between the two universes necessitated changes, it's hard to see from the available evidence just what the Star Trek folk were so upset about. The plague aboard the Norway, as it appears here, is reminiscent of any number of similar crises from all the incarnations of Gene Roddenberry's creation. It doesn't evoke AIDS nearly as explicitly as the
producer paranoia would have us believe. The gay officers are a welcome, but minor, element in a story that gives equal weight to the interaction of a large number of other characters; the sexual aspect of their relationship, while heartfelt, is more talked about than shown. (It's largely there to give one character compelling reason to care deeply about the fate of another,
and, powerful as the resulting scenes are, it honestly doesn't go all that much further than Mom Seinfeld saying, "Not that there's anything wrong with that, Jerry.") Unless the Star Trek story went a lot further than this novel, the reaction to Gerrold's script played prissiness to a degree unworthy of a show that pays lip service to tolerance.
Under the circumstances, it's easy to share Gerrold's glee at including a scene where an officious computer named LENNIE, designed to think like a lawyer, is shut down when it begins a rant about "aesthetically displeasing" humans. Korie grouses: "A starship doesn't need a lawyer running things!" Evidently, neither does a TV show about a starship.
Blood and Fire begins with an intro by D.C. Fontana, and ends with an afterword by Gerrold, which between them cover the genesis of Star Wolf and the controversy over the Star Trek script that spawned this novel. They're fine specimens of SF history, but they wouldn't be worth the purchase price if the book weren't worth reading on its own terms. Fortunately, Blood and Fire is a fast-moving, entertaining read, with strong characters
whose actions have consequences for themselves and for others. The best subplot doesn't involve the homosexual pair at all, but rather an officer named Armstrong and the life epiphany he experiences in the aftermath of his relationship with a group of characters known as the Quillas. The most gratifying surprise is the novel's very last line.
