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A review by sisyphus_dreams
The Questor Tapes by D.C. Fontana
4.0
How can I review this book impartially? It's the novelization of a Gene Roddenberry TV movie/pilot that I've been a fan of for a long time.
The pilot wasn't picked up, unfortunately. But The Questor Tapes remains an intriguing and deeply enjoyable movie. Veteran Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana did a fine job of novelizing the story of an android with incomplete programming, searching for the riddle of his existence with the help of a human friend - and with the usual Javert figure in pursuit.
As I said, I'm not sure what I would have thought of this book if I'd never seen the movie. But as a novelization, and compared to other novelizations that I've read, it works very well. Fontana must have worked from a late script, or even written the manuscript after the movie was filmed; there are none of those annoying omissions that so often mar novelizations which are based on early scripts.
There's humor, and moments of thoughtfulness. There's a quasi-religious element to the plot and some religious philosophizing that I find slightly irritating (and I'm not usually that sensitive to that sort of thing, believe it or not), but those were present in the original movie. All in all, a very enjoyable book.
The pilot wasn't picked up, unfortunately. But The Questor Tapes remains an intriguing and deeply enjoyable movie. Veteran Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana did a fine job of novelizing the story of an android with incomplete programming, searching for the riddle of his existence with the help of a human friend - and with the usual Javert figure in pursuit.
As I said, I'm not sure what I would have thought of this book if I'd never seen the movie. But as a novelization, and compared to other novelizations that I've read, it works very well. Fontana must have worked from a late script, or even written the manuscript after the movie was filmed; there are none of those annoying omissions that so often mar novelizations which are based on early scripts.
There's humor, and moments of thoughtfulness. There's a quasi-religious element to the plot and some religious philosophizing that I find slightly irritating (and I'm not usually that sensitive to that sort of thing, believe it or not), but those were present in the original movie. All in all, a very enjoyable book.