Just Finished Reading VOR by James Blish

James Blish was a science fiction writer mainly known for his popular Star Trek books that helped keep fan enthusiasm high for the original series after its cancellation in 1968.  He also wrote his own original sci-fi novels and was a critic of others' works.  I hadn't read anything of his until my sister Anita recently handed me a copy of his 1958 novel VOR, which my father had bought decades before...and presumably read..."way back then"...and happened to get passed on down the family line.  And so I read it, although the brittle pages had a tendency to break off in my hands...

The immediate reaction I got from VOR is that Blish wrote it quickly to get it out to the publisher, make some quick dough, and pay his bills.  Its premise is the landing in rural Michigan of a highly radioactive, overheated alien spaceship that instantly scorches the ground and contaminates it for miles around.  The military and government agencies converge on the site and discover the alien, who is the source of the intense radioactivity and whose insides are hotter than the sun.  Marty Petrucelli is a reserve airman who was a war hero but now refuses to fly...and his beautiful young wife Pat has grown distant to him and closer to his rival on the nearby base, Al Strickland.  This love triangle annoyed me to no small degree because it was such an unnecessary distraction from the main story and also depicted the people involved as being awfully shallow and unlikable.  In any event, the alien allows itself to be questioned and is discovered to respond to colors: it refers to its own "name" with the colors violet, orange, and red: hence the designation "VOR".   Why did it come to Earth?  VOR has one adamant response: it wants to be killed...but how does one kill something that on one hand seems invulnerable and on the other might well destroy the Earth with its internal energy were that successful?  The dilemma leads one of the scientists, Kovorsky, to discern the true goal of the alien's mission as well as how to get rid of it without ending life on Earth...but naturally our reluctant hero Marty will first have to get in a plane and fly again...

This "war hero refuses to fly again" scenario sounds like the script from the movie Airplane, which I just discovered was a parody of an earlier 1950s movie with that same cornball scenario...who knows, maybe Blish got his idea from that same movie. And the manner in which the story is resolved in the end sounds like something that Captain Kirk said to get rid of the dangerous probe Nomad in the Star Trek episode The Changeling.  I wasn't too happy with VOR, and apparently most others weren't either...my dad certainly never mentioned it...and it's not one of James Blish's more known works.  If this book happens to fall into your lap and you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time, you might just consider reading it...assuming the pages don't fall apart in your hands.  Otherwise, I'd just give it a pass...