TOS #10 Web of the Romulans by M.S. Murdock Review Thread

[tomswift2002]

Published: June 1983 (Physical)/September 2000 (digital)
Publisher: Timescape/Pocket Books/Paperjacks

Plot: Following the events of Tomorrow Is Yesterday the computer of the Enterprise falls in love with Captain Kirk! Meanwhile, the Romulans are suffering from a bad virus and try to drag the Federation into a war by allowing the Enterprise to be victorious in a battle near a planet that holds the cure to the virus.

Review: Before even starting to read this book, I wonder if the author was maybe trying to do a trilogy the Enterprise computer gone crazy with Tomorrow is Yesterday, The Practical Joker & Web of the Romulans. Of course I don't know if they knew about the animated series in 1983, or if they had seen it, since it wasn't as readily available is TOS and TMP were at that time.

Apparently, according to a November 1986 Starlog interview, Robert Greenburger mentioned that Web of the Romulans was the first original Trek novel to reach the bestsellers lists in the US. I guess the novelizations for TOS, TAS, TMP and TWOK had maybe hit the bestsellers lists, but Web of the Romulans was the first original Trek novel to hit the bestsellers lists. (Also, as of 2025, from what I can see, no one's posted any review threads on Web of the Romulans until now!)

 

[Christopher]

Published: June 1983 (Physical)/September 2000 (digital)
Publisher: Timescape/Pocket Books/Paperjacks

Plot: Following the events of Tomorrow Is Yesterday the computer of the Enterprise falls in love with Captain Kirk!

And yet somehow Chekov is part of the bridge crew, and I think there's a line about cloaking devices that requires it to take place after "The Enterprise Incident." Michael Jan Friedman's Double, Double would do the same thing, telling a story that was set immediately after "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" yet also featured Chekov and made reference to third-season events involving the Romulans.

Review: Before even starting to read this book, I wonder if the author was maybe trying to do a trilogy the Enterprise computer gone crazy with Tomorrow is Yesterday, The Practical Joker & Web of the Romulans.

The computer hardly went crazy in TiY; it had simply had its voice synthesizer tweaked to sound sultry and say "dear" after every sentence. It's quite a leap from that to having it become sentient and insanely stalkerish. One more reason why this was a really silly novel, and not in a good way.

Of course I don't know if they knew about the animated series in 1983, or if they had seen it, since it wasn't as readily available is TOS and TMP were at that time.

I don't think it was exactly obscure; it may have been infrequently syndicated, but it was covered thoroughly in The Star Trek Concordance, one of the definitive reference works of the era, and the Star Trek Log novelizations were still in print. But there were a number of authors who hadn't seen it or who chose to disregard it.

 

[Stevil2001]

And yet somehow Chekov is part of the bridge crew, and I think there's a line about cloaking devices that requires it to take place after "The Enterprise Incident." Michael Jan Friedman's Double, Double would do the same thing, telling a story that was set immediately after "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" yet also featured Chekov and made reference to third-season events involving the Romulans.

If you grow up watching Star Trek in syndication, the there's no order to the show, it just kind of happens all at once. Chekov's always in the crew, there are just episodes Chekov just doesn't happen to be in.

 

[Christopher]

If you grow up watching Star Trek in syndication, the there's no order to the show, it just kind of happens all at once. Chekov's always in the crew, there are just episodes Chekov just doesn't happen to be in.

Depends on the syndication package and era. When I was a kid in the '70s, they aired fairly randomly, but by the '80s when these books came out, the syndication packages pretty consistently used production order, so the only time they'd be out of order was when it looped back to the second pilot after "Turnabout Intruder." Also, of course, there were books with episode guides. The Concordance used airdate order and the Compendium used production order, but they both clearly specified which seasons the episodes were from, as did the episode guides in The Making of Star Trek, The World of Star Trek, and others.

On the other hand, continuity was often seen as a more flexible thing in those days than it tends to be today, so it's possible the authors made a conscious choice to tell "timeless" stories that blended elements from different seasons. But it was a weird choice, because Trek fans were always exceptionally picky about continuity details even back then.

 

[tomswift2002]

And yet somehow Chekov is part of the bridge crew, and I think there's a line about cloaking devices that requires it to take place after "The Enterprise Incident." Michael Jan Friedman's Double, Double would do the same thing, telling a story that was set immediately after "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" yet also featured Chekov and made reference to third-season events involving the Romulans.

[/QUOTE]
That’s according to the timeline in “Voyages of the Imagination” and Memory Beta which chalk those errors up to the same issue Nathan Archer’s “Valhalla” had regarding the Defiant. Editorial screwed up. But they both place WOTR right after “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” because of the computer.

The computer hardly went crazy in TiY; it had simply had its voice synthesizer tweaked to sound sultry and say "dear" after every sentence. It's quite a leap from that to having it become sentient and insanely stalkerish. One more reason why this was a really silly novel, and not in a good way.

As I recall Spock mentioned in that episode that the computer loved to giggle as well, and judging by his reaction, he also found it running illogically for a computer.

 

[Christopher]

That’s according to the timeline in “Voyages of the Imagination” and Memory Beta

No, it's according to my personal memory of actually reading the books when they came out, decades before either of those resources existed. I struggled back then to figure out how to incorporate them into my personal Trek continuity despite the inconsistency, though I eventually outgrew trying to force everything to fit. (With Double, Double, I tried putting it post-third season and glossed over the references putting it very shortly after "Little Girls," assuming that the second Brown android had somehow lain dormant for at least two years before returning, though I eventually decided that didn't work. With Web, I think I just assumed that they'd gone back to Cygnet XIV for reprogramming a second time years later.)

As I recall Spock mentioned in that episode that the computer loved to giggle as well, and judging by his reaction, he also found it running illogically for a computer.

Which was a sexist joke at the time -- that any computer programmed by women would have to work illogically and erratically. (Never mind that Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer, that most early computer programmers were women because it was seen as secretarial work, and that the word "computer" was originally a job title for women who did mathematical computations by hand before electronic computers were invented and named after them.) And Web took that sexist condescension and ran with it to a grotesque extreme, assuming that a female computer would not only be illogical, but dysfunctionally hyperemotional, love-crazed, and "hysterical."

 

[F. King Daniel]

If you grow up watching Star Trek in syndication, the there's no order to the show, it just kind of happens all at once. Chekov's always in the crew, there are just episodes Chekov just doesn't happen to be in.

This. Plus, if you grew up with books like Enterprise: The First Adventure he was explicitly there from the start.

 

[Christopher]

This. Plus, if you grew up with books like Enterprise: The First Adventure he was explicitly there from the start.

I question "books," because that's the only book that sets itself at the start and features Chekov. And the two under discussion are the only ones that purported to be set adjacent to specific first-season episodes, until The Janus Gate and the Errand trilogies came along. Yet at the same time, my recollection is that they both have references to third-season episodes like "The Enterprise Incident."

The norm for TOS novels was to take place after the entirety of TOS, naturally enough. It was always the default for novels to stay current with the series "present" at the time of their writing, rather than consciously jumping backward in the timeline. If you follow the progression of the TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT novels that came out during their respective series, they tended to move pretty steadily forward from season to season, although the DS9 novels got kind of stuck pre-Dominion War for a few years because of the difficulty of fitting novels into the increasingly serialized continuity of the show. If they ever went backward, it was probably because the novels' publication got delayed relative to the order in which they were written. And since nearly all TOS novels were written after TOS ended, it was naturally the norm to set them in the putative fourth or fifth years of the five-year mission. (Or later, e.g. in the early novels like The Romulan Way that seemed to assume a much longer mission pre-TMP and were explicitly set years after TOS.)

 

[Daddy Todd]

Murdock was a somewhat well-known Trek fan in the 80's -- as both a fan artist and a fan writer. Web Of The Romulans was an expansion of a fan story she published earlier in a fanzine. The original story was a follow-up to "Tomorrow is Yesterday" about Kirk battling his lovesick computer. All the stuff about Romulans was part of the expansion. I wish I could remember the name of the fanzine and story, but my work blocks Fanlore...

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

One more reason why this was a really silly novel, and not in a good way.

Which was a sexist joke at the time -- that any computer programmed by women would have to work illogically and erratically. (Never mind that Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer, that most early computer programmers were women because it was seen as secretarial work, and that the word "computer" was originally a job title for women who did mathematical computations by hand before electronic computers were invented and named after them.) And Web took that sexist condescension and ran with it to a grotesque extreme, assuming that a female computer would not only be illogical, but dysfunctionally hyperemotional, love-crazed, and "hysterical."

Don't mince words, @Christopher; what do you really think?

Of course, remember: this was a time when Marshak & Culbreath could still get published by an entity other than a vanity house.

 

[I am not Herbert]

I gave it an "Average," although if pressed I would say slightly above average. I was surprised how central the smitten computer was to the main plot, but at least making it so central/not merely a throwaway gag meant that the author wasn't going over the exact same ground as TiY. The badmiral unilaterally acting to start a war was probably already a well-worn trope even by 1983, if not in ST then at least in pop culture more generally (Jack D. Ripper, etc) and will probably feel overly familiar to the contemporary reader. But overall the book moved briskly and the crew interactions seemed well rendered. Felt like a mid-tier episode. Sometimes that's exactly what I'm in the mood for.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Sometimes, things that start out as throwaway morph into things crucial to the plot. Or to character development. Or both.

 

[Daddy Todd]

I wish I could remember the name of the fanzine and story

The seed story is “My Own True Love” in Dilithium Crystals #1.