There are four major complaints people have about Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

1. It's fucking boring.
2. It has the exact same plot as one of the episodes of the show.
3. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is a pretentious name for a movie.
4. That hot-ass bald chick never shows us her tits.

Numbers 1, 3, and 4 are pretty legitimate (especially 4), but number 2 is just bullshit nitpicking because almost every episode of the old show had the exact same plot. Seriously, how many different times did they meet God and he turned out to be a huge dick? At least twelve. Frankly I think if the movie had had a new plot all the Trekettes would've rioted in the streets.

So is Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Novel any better? As a matter of fact, yes. For one thing, it doesn't putz around like the movie does- you can read the whole book in the time it takes the movie to show us the goddamned Enterprise from thirty different angles. Then there's all the weird footnotes. This was written by the guy who invented Star Trek,* and he uses the footnotes to like casually throw in all this insane shit, my favorite being the part where he actually brings up the whole Kirk/Spock gay lovers thing! I swear to fucking God I'm not kidding- it's right there on page 22. Towards the end he gets a little too excited and starts putting completely random words in quotes and italics, and if you read it in your head the way it's written it starts to sound like an over-stimulated retarded person describing the fire truck he just saw. (At some point this guy got the bum's rush and they wouldn't let him work on Star Trek anymore, which is too bad because he's obviously a total spaz and I'd love to know what he would've come up with next.) The only bad part is the very end: after the book tells us a hundred times that the evil space probe the good guys are fighting is looking for a machine, not a person, they give it a person anyway and it doesn't even notice. Thanks for once again respecting my intelligence, Star Trek. Fuck you.

*Actually he based it on the movie script, which was based on a story some third cat wrote, which if you ask me means he didn't really write it at all, but whatever.