Unspoken Truth

Unspoken Truth will be a Star Trek: The Original Series novel by Margaret Wander Bonanno, published by Pocket Books in 2010. The book will focus on Saavik following the opening scenes of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when she remained on. The book will also build upon Saavik's backstory as established in the 1990 novel The Pandora Principle.

Publisher's description

 * From an interview with the author:
 * "It starts with the scene in The Voyage Home where Saavik and Amanda are watching the Bounty take off for Earth and the trial of the Enterprise Seven. Saavik is more or less at loose ends, a bit shell-shocked from recent events, and trying to decide what to do with the rest of her life. She signs up for what she hopes will be a quiet mission on a science vessel cataloguing plants on a distant world, and ends up fighting for her sanity and her life against forces from her past trying to lay claim to both. It's a bit of a murder mystery, a bit of a spy novel, with a love affair tossed in for seasoning. Have to leave you with that for the moment, I'm afraid."

Summary
'''Also from the above interview
 * Besides her appearances in the movies, Saavik has also appeared elsewhere in Trek literature, which leads to the question of where Margaret turned to when working on her interpretation of the character. "I'm relying somewhat on Carolyn Clowes' excellent novel The Pandora Principle," she reveals. "In the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, Vonda McIntyre makes passing reference to Saavik's being half-Romulan and an orphan from a planet called Hellguard, but isn't able to go into a lot of detail. Clowes takes that concept much further, showing us a feral child surviving on a hostile world when the Romulans abandon it. I'm paying homage to that in a number of flashbacks, tweaking it a bit to fit my story.


 * "Simultaneously," she adds, "I'm trying my best to stay true to the onscreen Saavik, but leaning more toward Robin Curtis rather than Kirstie Alley in both appearance and performance, and here's why: Vulcans may say they have no emotions, but that's only one of many unspoken truths. The emotions are there; they're just constantly held in check. Add Romulan heritage to that, and you've got a simmering volcano, which cannot allow itself to erupt. That's what I saw in Robin's performance, and that's what can be explored in a novel, through internal monologues, that can only be hinted at onscreen."