Always a treat - not sure how many times I've read this, but it made for a great read while visiting WDW! ( )

Duane makes me like McCoy a lot - although he was never my favorite of the core three.

This review was originally posted here at Anime Radius.

There are benefits, of course, to being a writer of tie-in novels for a science-fiction series. You get to play with your favorite characters in a story that is of your own creation, for one. There is also no limitation on what kind of scenarios you can dream of as opposed to in the show – which means no budget limitations, so the planets and aliens and other myriad things can be as fantastic and expensive-looking as you can muster them to be. One can only imagine the excitement of writers like Laurence Yep and J.M. Dillard when they realized the expansive Trekverse was open for development via the written word in ways the television series could not due to technological limits.

With Doctor’s Orders, Diane Duane has presented us with a story that could have very well been the plot of a TOS episode, were it not for the fact that it is so unfilmable. The CGI capacities to create on screen such creatures as the ;At or the Ornae are only now being fully realized; they were only a fleeting pipe dream back when Trek was on TV. It is through Duane’s captivating and intricately detailed writing that we can see the ;At and the Ornae and the Lahit fully in our minds, in ways our television set can’t really deliver. Obviously, Duane enjoys writing about the brave new world that is Flyspeck, letting us see it through the eyes of the Enterprise crew, who like us are new to the ways of Flyspeck’s people and must start from scratch. In some places, however, Duane’s love affair with her own creations threaten to overshadow the Trek crew, but she knows when to tone the ecological exploits down a notch when it becomes clear that characters must be put first.

As for those characters? When it comes to the crew, it is McCoy who is truly the star of the show, whether manning Sickbay or taking control of the helm of the ship. Duane does a great job at displaying Doctor McCoy in all his grumpy irritated self, while still staying the same clever-minded country doctor that has made him such an invaluable asset on board the Enterprise for so long. It’s McCoy’s unique ways of dealing with both Starfleet and the Klingons during the crisis that makes those specific scenes so gosh darn fun to read. His foil in is the narrative is Kirk, who is still the charming and witty hero fans remember from the series; regrettably, the story calls for Kirk to fade into the background for a good deal of time so McCoy can have a chance to shine in the captain’s chair – still, when we catch up with James, he handles his unusual situation in a very typical Kirkesque manner (which I won’t spoil, as it will give the fun away). The rest of the Enterprise crew is there, and although they are much in tune character-wise, they serve more as a backdrop for the main story. Note: if you really hate it when authors spell out character’s accents phonetically, you will find Chekov’s dialogue to be less headache-inducing than you’d imagine. Other than addressing Kirk as “Keptin” and the whole v-to-w thing (and claiming yet another thing as a “Russian inwention”), it’s the first time I’ve seen Chekov’s Russian accent spelt out in such a way that it doesn’t grate on the nerves.

Overall, there’s one word that can sum up Doctor’s Orders and it is fun. Everything is so much fun to read – the action, the adventure, McCoy as Captain, exploring the new planet, everything! Even with all the anthro-technobabble flying about from practically every character’s mouth, it never weights down the story or keeps it from being interesting. Is the notion of introducing a new planet into the Federation new? Not really. But when Duane gets her hands on it, and gets to throw poor Bones into a whopper of a mess in the process, what you end up with is a great read for any like-minded Trek fan. ( )

I like this a bit more each time I read it. ( )

This book was just the riot of laughs it promised to be. I will read it again and again. ( )