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Books

Close encounters on the starship Enterprise

William Shatner boldly goes into the details of his 50-year friendship with Leonard Nimoy — and his profound sadness over their final estrangement

5 March 2016

9:00 AM

5 March 2016

9:00 AM

Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek Marcus Berkmann

Little, Brown, pp.320, £13.99, ISBN: 9781408706831

Leonard: My Fifty-year Friendship with a Remarkable Man William Shatner, with David Fisher

Sidgwick & Jackson, pp.288, £18.99, ISBN: 9780283072529

For a show with a self-proclaimed ‘five-year mission’, Star Trek hasn’t done badly. Gene Roddenberry’s ‘Wagon train to the stars’ is celebrating its 50th anniversary, although, as Marcus Berkmann’s entertaining and irreverent history points out, things could have been very different. Roddenberry’s initial idea was for a troupe of disparate 19th-century adventurers to explore the undiscovered corners of the New World in a grand airborne dirigible.

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'Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek', £11.49 and 'Leonard: My Fifty-year Friendship with a Remarkable Man', £15.99 are available from the Spectator Bookshop, Tel: 08430 600033

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