William Shatner's TekWar

 

William Shatner’s TekWar   Back in the long ago when I was so young I thought William Shatner wrote the books—he didn’t, Ron Goulart did the actual writing—a science fiction novel with a hardboiled edge and criminous plot called TekWar appeared in bookstores under William Shatner’s byline. The year was 1989 and I was an underperforming high schooler—a sophomore, maybe?—with a predilection for reading wonderfully trashy fiction. An ailment that still bothers me, I guess. Anyway, I loved TekWar and anxiously awaited the release of each of the Tek novels. A total of nine were published between 1989 and 1997: TekWar (1989), TekLords (1991), TekLab (1991), Tek Vengeance (1993), Tek Secret (1993), Tek Power (1994), Tek Money (1995), Tek Kill (1996), and Tek Net (1997). I may have missed those last few titles on their original releases but I’m pretty sure I have all of them sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for me to get back to where I was (or is it where I once belonged?) and read every last one. So you know, the Tek books follow a former cop, Jake Cardigan, turned felon turned private eye as he walks the mean streets of Greater Los Angeles some two hundred years in the future. In 1994, a tv movie was made of the first book, TekWar, starring William Shatner and Greg Evigan, as Cardigan, and while I don’t know if I would still think it was marvelous, wonderful, edgy, cool, I sure did back then. Heck, Sheena Easton had a small role and I thought she was the cat’s meow. TekWar was followed by three more tv movies, all released in 1994—TekLords , TekLab, and TekJustice—and a short-lived tv series (1994-95). Their IMDb ratings range from 5.6 to 6.4; so they may not be quite as good as I remember— This groovy write-up from the January 28, 1994 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune is a fun reminisce of the movies. It was written by Ron Miller, and syndicated by Knight-Ridder. Sorry for the light copy, but it should be readable.