Where Star Trek Shipyards is an in-universe library looking at the hundreds of ships of the franchise, Star Trek Designing Starships is a library about the creators and creative process behind those ships. The fifth volume of the encyclopedia of Star Trek ship design has arrived as publisher Hero Collector continues its series after volumes on the starships Enterprise,Voyager, the Kelvin timeline ships, and Discovery. The human adventure continues in Star Trek Designing Starships: Deep Space Nine and Beyond. It’s available now here at Amazon. As with the publisher’s previous books, Star Trek Designing Starships is known for its colorful, high quality illustrations in a coffee table-style hardcover edition, providing a near-exhaustive library to the array of the franchise’s highly-detailed spacecraft.
For nearly 55 years sci-fi fans have been watching and re-watching Star Trek’s original series and rebuilding futuristic components from the show in their own homes. In the 1960s it was easier, as many of the components that defined the early look of Star Trek were simply “found objects”–items existing in the real world that could be repurposed to create a vision of the future. Midcentury Modernism was the artistic movement that coincided with the inception of the worldbuilding for Star Trek, and fans Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire chronicled some of the Star Trek creators’ use of those designs in their new coffee table book,Star Trek: Designing the Future–How Midcentury Modernism Shaped Our View of the Future. Take a look at a preview of this introduction to the artistic movement and the early Star Trek design aesthetic below, courtesy of publisher Insight Editions.
After delivering a dozen Star Trekbooks, fiction and non-fiction, authors Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann are back in the franchise, this time covering the entire first two seasons of CBS All Access’s Star Trek: Discovery in their new book The Art of Star Trek: Discovery. This is the latest concept art and film production book in a franchise of some of the best printed TV and film retrospectives. Star Trek: Discovery, which led the newest chapter in the television Star Trek Universe (followed by Short Treks, Picard and Lower Decks), follows the exploits of Vulcan-raised science officer Michael Burnham and the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery as they boldly go where no one has gone before. This book covers every corner of the series in an attractive hardcover full of great photographs.
Actor Vic Mignogna, who has played Star Trek’s Captain Kirk on the fan-made series Star Trek Continues, has taken on an enormous task in his latest project, narrating the mammoth behind-the-scenes look at classic television and creator/producer Gene Roddenberry in an audio play adaptation of the Saturn Award-winning These Are the Voyages–ST: TOS Season One–nearly 29 hours in all. Master researcher and TV historian Marc Cushman has meticulously crafted several volumes detailing the Golden Age of Television, including four volumes (and fifth on the way) of Star Trek history. With the new audiobook, Cushman has assembled nearly 100 voice actors, including several Star Trek insiders quoted in the book, who returned to voice their contributions from Cushman’s first book in his series. Among the voices you’ll hear writer Dorothy Fontana, writer Ronald D. Moore, actor Clint Howard, casting director Joe D’Agosta, actor Sean Kenney, and director Ralph Senensky, plus sons of Leonard Nimoy (Adam) and James Doohan (Chris) voicing their fathers’ quoted material, and other surprises, like Mythbusters co-host and Star Trek Continues actor Grant Imahara as the voice of George Takei. The result is a fantastic way to kick back and enjoy the long-lost past and inner-workings of your favorite 1960s sci-fi series.
Marc Cushman’s adaptation of his own work, with Susan Osborn, smartly distills his lengthy first volume into the key narrative elements–Gene Roddenberry’s arrival in Hollywood, the development of Star Trek, Roddenberry’s assemblage of creators, directors, producers, writers, and actors for his series, and the episode by episode chronicle of the ups and downs of season one. Mignogna is a fantastic choice to walk the audience along, a mix of 1930s radioplay storyteller and Ken Burns’ award-winning series of documentaries. For anyone afraid of embarking on a lengthy 658-page non-fiction book, this is your answer.
Actor Vic Mignogna with Star Trek repeat guest actor Clint Howard.
Voice actor Ralph Miller really nails the talkative and often irritable Gene Roddenberry. The less-known players in the story often provide the most interesting performances, men and women reproducing 1960s inflections and accents in a myriad of types believably well. The dialogue in the book has a more lively feel and effect when spoken. As an example, Gene Roddenberry and Matt Jefferies’ discussions (originally via written correspondence) over details of military components to be incorporated into the series sets provides for some humor in the drama. Listeners will really get a good picture of these two negotiating over who was better able to sign-off on the look of the practical, visual bits of the series. And the production values are spot on–These Are the Voyages–ST: TOS Season One is a well-produced, entertaining work full of trivia for Star Trek fans and classic TV buffs, presented in an unusual, unexpected way.
For Star Trek fans, since the 1990s the first place to look to dig into the artistry of the sets, props, and costumes was the book The Art of Star Trek, by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the ultimate art reference for decades of Star Trek productions. It explored the concept art and creative works from the original Trek series through the seventh film in the series, Star Trek Generations. Herbert Solow’s Star Trek Sketchbook and John Eaves’ Star Trek The Movies Sketchbook supplemented these books further and in 2016 Terry Erdmann and Paula M. Block’s Star Trek Costumes honed in on an end-to-end look at costumes spanning the franchise up to that date. In 2016 CBS re-branded the three most recent films “the Kelvin Timeline,” since the storyline splintered from the original series events beginning with the destruction of the USS Kelvin in the 2009 Star Trek film (formerly the “alternate reality” or J.J. Abrams trilogy). Separate and different from typical “behind the scenes” books, the volume of Star Trek reference material (and the large fanbase) allowed for these many, detailed looks into the creative process. Many of these books and much more can be found in our 2011 survey of Trek books found here and here. Bringing us closer to the present, the first look into the artwork of the Kelvin timeline was Mark Cotta Vaz’s Star Trek: The Art of the Film and last year’s Star Trek Beyond: The Makeup Artistry of Joel Harlow, but fans now have access to a broader look at the artwork behind all three Kelvin timeline movies: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond, in Jeff Bond’s new book, The Art of Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline.
Star Trek fans will find The Art of Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline a must-read and a natural extension, or sequel of sorts, to Reeves-Stevens’ original art overview. With chapters on each of the three films, expanding on the material from Cotta Vaz’s book, this new volume provides insight into the reboot and updates to the starship Enterprise, the bridge set, and Starfleet and alien costumes, and great attention is given to the concept art that resulted in the strange new worlds in these films. Best of all is access to interviews with concept artists John Eaves, Ryan Church, James Clyne, John Goodson, Sean Hargreaves, visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett, visual effects art director Alex Jaeger, makeup supervisor Joel Harlow, production designer Scott Chambliss, supervising art director Ramsey Avery, creature designer Neville Page, art director Yanick Dusseault, production designer Thomas A. Sanders, visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang, Star Trek Beyond costume designer Sanja Hays, actors Zachary Quinto and Benedict Cumberbatch, and Star Trek Beyond director Justin Lin. The artists’ environmental, planetary, and geological concept work in many instances is the quality of final production matte paintings.
Those who already have read Cotta Vaz’s book on the art of the 2009 film will be happy to see this book provides photographs and discussion of ideas not covered before. Fans of Sanja Hays’ costume designs in Star Trek Insurrection get to see how Hays approached returning to the concepts of both Starfleet and aliens of new civilizations in Star Trek Beyond. And although he is not interviewed for the book, costume designer Michael Kaplan’s costume designs can be found across the book’s coverage of the first two films.
