The Trek Continues: More Memoirs of a Rocket Scientist (Treks Beyond The Great Potato Book 2)

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Jason Anderson

Some lives resist summary. A retired aerospace engineer with nineteen patents who co-wrote one of the most beloved episodes of the original Star Trek, navigated deadly white water rapids in Ethiopia during a civil war, had near-death encounters with crocodiles in Africa, and surfed Southern California between all of it. Reading The Trek Continues is the experience of keeping up with someone whose capacity for living has never once slowed down to match the pace of ordinary biography.

This second volume picks up exactly where the award-winning first book left off, and the momentum is fully intact. The stories gathered here have the same quality that made readers love the first collection: the sense that they are absolutely true, that no amount of invention could have improved them, and that the man telling them has somehow extracted maximum adventure from every situation he has ever found himself in. Near-death experiences land with the matter-of-fact weight of someone who has had enough of them to develop perspective. The behind-the-scenes details of the Tholian Web night and its surprising legacy give Star Trek fans something genuinely new to hold onto.

But what elevates this memoir above pure adventure writing is Sarah. Richards began writing these stories because of her loss, and her presence runs through the book the way a river runs through a landscape, shaping everything around it without always being visible. His reflections on love and grief and the specific kind of resilience that comes from losing someone central to your whole story are handled with a warmth and directness that catches you off guard precisely when the previous chapter had you laughing about something involving crocodiles. That tonal range is very hard to achieve and feels completely natural here.

Hector the miracle dog and the phenomenal cats make appearances. Extraordinary people keep showing up, as they apparently always have.

For readers who loved the first volume, this one delivers everything they came back for. For anyone new to the series, start at the beginning and clear your schedule.

About the Author

Chester L. Richards

Chester (Chet) L. Richards retired aerospace engineer, and inventor (19 patents), views life as a series of adventures. After narrowly escaping serious injury from The Great Potato, on a lark, he co-authored a spec script for Star Trek with friend Judy Burns when they were college students. The story, "The Tholian Web," became one of the series’ most popular episodes. Veteran writer Bob Duncan advised the young man, “You should write….Write your passions.” But I have nothing to say, Chet thought. He decided the real message was to fill his life with adventures. And he did — adventures in surfing, learning and performing music, travel to exotic places for river rafting, the work as a rocket scientist. Along the way, he’s always met fascinating characters. He did write — essays (over 50 have been published so far). But it was the loss of Sarah, the love of his life, that caused Chet to write his first book of stories. At the house in Thousand Oaks they once shared, the hair-raising adventures Sarah loved continue to occur, though as the author says, he no longer has much hair....