The New Yorker pointed me, about a year ago, to what has to be the most confusing book ever written. This weekend I finally got together enough gumption to buy Planet X, the Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men crossover book. You read that right, somehow the cast of ST:TNG, putzing about in the 24th century, manages to bump into the cast of the X-Men who are traditionally tied down to the much nearer future. There’s some sort of mutant alien planet or something.

Amazon’s description makes it seem exactly as unlikely as I would have expected:

On the planet Xhaldia, ordinary men and women are mutating into bizarre creatures with extraordinary powers. But is this a momentous evolutionary leap or an unparalleled catastrophe? The very fabric of Xhaldian society is threatened as fear and prejudice divide the transformed from their own kin.

Dispatched to cope with the growing crisis, Captain Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise™ receive some unexpected visitors from another reality — in the form of the group of mutant heroes known as the uncanny X-Men®. Storm, leader of the X-Men, offers their help in resolving a situation that is agonizingly similar to the human/mutant conflicts of their own time and space.

But when hostile aliens appear in orbit around Xhaldia to try and abduct the transformed for use as a superpowered force in an attack on the Federation, even the combined forces of the crew of Starfleet and the X-Men may be unable to prevent an inferno of death and destruction.

Starfleet’s finest crew and Earth’s greatest mutant heroes will need all their powers and abilities to save the Xhaldian people and stop a deadly threat to the Federation.

I often wish I could “receive some unexpected visitors from another reality” in order to solve my problems.

Obviously the biggest question is, what would happen if this book were made into a movie? Would Patrick Stewart play both Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Professor Charles Xavier? Man, I sure bet Riker would hate Wolverine… or something. This book seems like it was written on a dare at Comic-Con and subsequently published without anyone really considering the ludicrousness of the crossover proposition. This isn’t the Jetsons and the Flintstone we’re talking about here. I can’t wait to get to the page where Wolverine cuts his way out of a spaceship! You know it’s coming!

This book does provide some support for my long running theory that all characters in books and movies exist in the same single fictional universe. I finally have something to use in my lengthy essay’s footnotes!