How do we deal with death? In real life, this is a complicated question indeed. In fiction, however, how a character deals with his or her own imminent demise can be an important plot device used to further a storyline or to expose a character. In Star Trek, dealing with one’s own imminent demise in a no-win scenario was used in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as a means to further inflate the already larger than life character of James T. Kirk.
In that film, Captain Kirk reveals that he is the only one to ever have beaten the infamous Kobayashi Maru test. A computer-simulated situation which is designed to have no possible victorious outcome, the Kobayashi Maru exam is meant to determine just how a cadet would react in such a circumstance. So how did Captain Kirk deal with the no-win scenario? By reprogramming the computer so that he could defeat it, of course.
And although we learn in the film that Kirk did this because he does not believe any scenario is ever unwinnable, the film doesn’t go into details. Unfortunately, neither does the novel The Kobayashi Maru by Julia Ecklar, despite the fact that this is the book’s entire premise.
The story takes place just after the events detailed in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Captain Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, Scott, and Dr. McCoy are traveling to rendezvous with the Enterprise after a mission aboard a shuttlecraft. On the way, the shuttle strikes a gravitic mine and is paralyzed, adrift in space without power or communications.
With some effort, Chief Engineer Scott restores limited power, and a hail is created that will hopefully be seen by the Enterprise. With nothing to do but sit and wait for a rescue, Kirk, Scott, Sulu, and Chekov each recount how they dealt with the Kobayashi Maru simulation.
As a plot device, this had great potential. Unfortunately, the book never lives up to expectations. That’s because the author, for some unknown reason, only pays a brief treatment to the actual test itself. She tries to flesh the book out with Academy tests of her own creation that I found to be exceedingly boring.
In Kirk’s case, for example, the author ignores entirely the method in which Kirk reprogrammed the computer simulation, and then spends only a scant few pages describing the results. In Sulu’s case, she spends a great deal of time on an unimaginative and outright dull political discussion that Sulu takes part in.
I struggled through this book, and its 255 pages seemed to be twice that length. Definitely not one of the better Trek novels, The Kobayashi Maru wastes a great potential storyline and leaves unexamined the very premise upon which it is founded. To quote Captain Kirk, how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life. Sadly, The Kobayashi Maru only briefly deals with either of those concepts.
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