Ballantine Books; $7.95 (1975)

When I was about 10 years old, I went into my local library in Thurmont, Maryland and found the only two Star Trek items they had. This began a years-long cycle of checking out these and other Trek items as they came in. Thurmont was a small rural town at the time with a small library but these gems from their collection were, to me, like being able to beam into the future anytime you wanted.

The first was a record album that featured covers of the theme from Star Trek along with the themes from Planet of the Apes TV series, the George Reeves Superman series from the 1950s, and the theme from the 1966 Batman series. To say the mix was eclectic is an understatement and as an adult having worked in licensed production development, how this album came to be was and still is a puzzle to me.

The second item was A Star Trek Catalog, written by Gerry Turnbull in 1979. It was one of the first episode guides for the original series as well as featuring new interviews with Gene Roddenberry, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and others. What jumped out at me, though, was a reproduction of a page from the subject of this retro review – the Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph Designs, published in 1975.

This was the first of what became a large and successful sub-genre of licensed printed material that suggested the world depicted in Star Trek was a real place somewhere out there.  With the pages within taking a subjective view of the 22nd century world it depicted, it was a captivating book, especially for a kid who lived in a farming community during the Cold War and dreamed not only of a future world at peace but also of one that could be hosed down and where no grass needed to be mowed and no firewood had to be chopped.

Published in 1975 by Ballantine, The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual is one of the first licensed products to tie directly into one of the most famous episodes of the original series, “Tomorrow is Yesterday.”

In that episode, the Enterprise and its crew are thrown back in time to 1969 where the famous ship is mistaken for a UFO. Through a series of unfortunate or accidental encounters, the longer the ship and crew are there, the more contamination of the timeline they cause. Of course, Kirk, Spock, and the crew are able to come up with a solution that not only allows them to return to their own time but also eliminate all evidence of their presence – or so they thought.

The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual was created and packaged as if it had been an accidental data dump that occurred when the USS Enterprise computer automatically transmitted the “data sheets” from the manual into the mainframe at a US Air Force Base featured in the episode. The manual posits that pages were discovered years later and were quickly determined to be a hoax (thereby eliminating timeline contamination) with the material eventually finding its way to Franz Joseph. Again, a cool concept, especially to a rural 10-year old farm kid whose head was firmly among the stars.

From there, though, the book goes into amazing detail, with schematics and drawings of ships, equipment, uniforms, and even the governing documents of the United Federation of Planets! I poured over this book for decades, enjoying not only the technical expertise of its execution (which I didn’t fully appreciate but did try to emulate with my own designs) but also getting lost in world that it said could exist if we could follow the instructions it contained for creating it.

– Mark L. Haynes

Guest contributor Mark L. Haynes is a writer-producer in Hollywood, California. He is the creator of the intellectual property behind the dramatic audio podcast Hindsight: The Day Before. His comic book credits include Battlestar Galactica, 24, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe, among others. He’s also a former Gemstone staffer.