Mudd's Angels (Star Trek)

This is one of those lighter type of episodes that shows throw at you now and again to change the pace. In this book the appearances of Harry Mudd throw things into uproar, given he is an intergalactic con-artist, smoothing talking character, and charismatic dude. A bit of playing around with the fuel supply causes some fun.

This book is really three stories in one volume. The first two are novelizations of the two Original Series Star Trek episodes that featured Harry Mudd: "Mudd's Women" and "I, Mudd." The third is an original story by J.A. Lawrence entitled, "The Business as Usual, During Altercations," which picks up where "I, Mudd" left off. Mudd's "angels" are the women, both human and android, in the stories.Classic Trekkers will recall how, at the end of "I, Mudd", con man Mudd was left marooned on a planet full of androids, including hundreds of replicas of his nagging wife, Stella. In "Business as Usual," Harry has managed to get off the planet and is selling the more attractive androids (but not the Stella series!) to lonely miners, in order to corner the market on dilithium crystals. This leaves the Federation stuck without a supply of this all-important fuel. It's the Enterprise to the rescue, of course, as Captain Kirk and crew outwit Harry Mudd once again. The book is part of an out-of-print series that was published by Bantam back in 1978, before Pocket Books got a monopoly on Star Trek novels. Bantam re-issued its series in the early 1990s, then they went out of print again. There are plenty of used copies of both editions around, though, so check out ...

This book is waaay out of print. It was most recently reprinted as Mudd's Enterprise, which is also out of print, but they might bring it in again soon. This is the novilization of the two original series Mudd episodes plus an origional novella. Fascinating.