Literature / The Autobiography of James T. Kirk

To boldly go.

Don't let them promote you. Don't let them transfer you. Don't let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship because while you're there, you can make a difference.

— James T. Kirk, 2371

The Autobiography of James T. Kirk, part of the Star Trek Autobiographies series and Star Trek franchise, chronicles the Starfleet captain's life (2233–2293^note presumed dead, 2371^note actually died after time-travel), in his own words. From his birth on the USS Kelvin, his youth spent on Tarsus IV, his time in the Starfleet Academy, his meteoric rise through the ranks of Starfleet, and his illustrious career at the helm of the Enterprise, this in-world memoir uncovers Captain Kirk.

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This autobiography provides examples of the following tropes:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Kirk thinks the transporter in “The Enemy Within” “decided to have some fun” with the concept of good and evil.
• The Alcoholic: Kirk admits that in the months after the tragedy aboard the Farragut, he spent almost every day Drowning His Sorrows and rarely went to bed sober.
• Amputation Stops Spread: When Gary catches a toxic dart in the arm (to save Kirk), Bones uses his phaser to cut the arm off. Fortunately, the phaser cauterizes the wound, and Bones then cleans out the poison and reattaches the arm.
• Arc Welding: While the movies took Kirk’s fears of being useless without command, being old and being alone, and ran with them, the book also starts his breakdown early, putting it in season three and not just the first movie.
• The Atoner: After what happened on the Farrugut, Kirk is set to marry Carol. Unfortunately, he has the opportunity to serve on another ship helping people, and he really wants to atone for what he feels he’s done. Guess what wins out.
• Bait-and-Switch: After Kirk reported Finney for negligence on the Republic and became alienated as a whistleblower, Captain Garrovick informed him that he would be transferred off-ship. Kirk's first assumption was that Garrovick wanted to be rid of him — until he learned that Garrovick was being given command of the much more prestigious Farragut and was bringing Kirk with him as a reward for doing his duty.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The combination of all the trauma in season three, and believing his own press, makes Kirk think he wants to be Admiral, and resorts to doing crazier shit (it’s said that the “Enterprise Incident” is just an exaggerated version of how he actually felt) so he can get more attention and praise from Starfleet.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: A common trend with Kirk. As an example, he’s not sure about Spock until Spock shows him empathy about Gary, and then they become the friends everyone knows and loves.
• Big Brother Worship: From when he’s two years old, baby Jim craves his big brother’s love and attention, and Sam is mostly just annoyed by him.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Kirk calls Spock’s wedding, to borrow a term, “fascinating” before it all goes to hell.
• Brick Joke: Bones tells Kirk at the end of “Amok Time” that they’ll get away with committing fraud and will never see T’Pau again. In “The Voyage Home”, T’Pau and Kirk do meet again, and all she says to him is that he’s put on weight.
• The Bully: Academy era Kirk is studious, not entirely all there and eager to please, and so Finney (before they become friends) and Finnegan take turns torturing him.
• Call-Forward:
  • Gill calls out Kirk admiring Khan the same way that Spock will, and Kirk explains that it’s like the railroad, something to admire but led to awful cost.
  • Cadet Kirk calls Gary Mitchell everything he’s not: charming, gregarious, rough and a little reckless.
  • Talking about Dimorous, not-officially-Captain-yet Kirk tells West and Cartwright that it’s his duty to not violate the Prime Directive even when lives are at stake, disappointing both of them.
  • Kirk calls Bones by his nickname after the latter has to amputate Gary’s arm (but can reattach it), and he’s disgusted, never wanting to be called that again.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: After Bones saves Kirk’s life during Spock's pon farr, our favourite martyr tells him it might have been simpler to just let him die as they’d just committed fraud on the Vulcan government.
• Canon Discontinuity: The book calls Star Trek V: The Final Frontier a movie of Kirk and company’s lives created on the planet of Space Romans, although it does give (the good bits) credit, calling the portrayal of “I need my pain” Kirk, Half-Breed Discrimination Spock and “just wanted to help his father” Bones spot-on.
• Career Versus Family:
  • Jim’s mom makes a mess of things (like he would later with Carol and David), not wanting to give up her career, not thinking things through with her husband, not really wanting to be a parent either.
  • Kirk tries so hard to not repeat what his mother did, and promises Carol he’d be there for her and have his career and make it work. He fails.
• The Chains of Commanding: Made most explicit when Kirk falls in love with Edith, and finally free for a moment of all the responsibilities and duty of command while also feeling safe with her, he deludes himself that he can stay in this period and keep her alive.
• Children Are Innocent: Nine year old Kirk doesn’t really care about the problems of the galaxy, and just wants to stay in his childhood home. Tarsus IV forces him to grow up too fast, and a Starfleet ship sending supplies ties his whole identity to wanting to be in space and help others like he was helped.
• Christianity is Catholic: Inverted — when Spock tells Kirk that Angela Martine wants her wedding to Robert Tomlinson to be a Catholic ceremony, Kirk asks how that differs from Christian.
• Classified Information: In order to keep others from encountering the Guardian of Forever, Kirk has his editor insert false coordinates for its location. The editor then explains that Starfleet found a subtle clue in that falsehood that might indicate its real location, so they had him redact the false coordinates while allowing him to explain Kirk's intentions.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Academy era Kirk looks like a fashion model (there’s a print of his graduation photo) and does have girlfriends (that he always manages to push away out of trauma), but calls himself not charming, is a little lost and they tend to take control in a way he’s fine with.
• Cool Uncle: Tried and failed. Seeing his family for the first time in years, Kirk feels very awkward and wants to shove down his trauma, so ten-year-old Peter he finds easiest to talk to. But eventually it gets too much for him and he bails.
• Condescending Compassion: Bones and Kirk don’t start off well, Bones being older and thinking a twenty-seven-year-old Captain isn’t ready for the job, but Kirk figures out later that being a Sour Supporter is Bones’ way of caring.
• Connected All Along:
  • The supply ship that is sent to Tarsus is the original Enterprise 1701, cementing Jim's feeling that it's his saviour.
  • Kirk witnessed the tragedy that led to the Kolvoord Starburst being forbidden at the Academy (and saw his former roommate die).
• Deal with the Devil: Kirk realises immediately what a stupid thing he’s done by blackmailing Nogura so he can be a Captain again, and knows he’ll pay a price, lampshading the trope.
• Death of a Child: Kirk meets Koloth in the beginning of his last year at the academy, at Axanar where there are smoking charred remains of children, which Koloth is unsympathetic towards, and Kirk immediately hates Klingons.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Spock is treated like shit in the expanded “The City On The Edge Of Forever”, as a landlord doesn’t want someone who looks Chinese in his lodgings, and Edith has to convince him that Spock won’t talk to any women or children.
• Didn't Think This Through; Jim’s parents ignored all the red flags, including him being her instructor and both officers on separate career journeys, and got married, leading to an Awful Wedded Life.
• Diving Save: While escaping from Dimorous, Gary Mitchell pushes Kirk out of the way of a poisoned dart, taking said dart in his arm and saving Kirk's life at the near-expense of his own.
• Drowning My Sorrows; After the vampire monster, the only way Kirk can go to sleep is through being drunk, and even then it’s a bad sleep.
• Eating Lunch Alone: After reporting Finney, Kirk is isolated from everyone, including the chief engineer who thinks he made him look bad, and has to eat food alone in the rec room.
• Evil Versus Evil: It’s a sign of Kirk being an Unreliable Narrator, and his massive trauma over Tarsus, but he says he became evil in seducing Lenore, who he assumes is feeling the same loneliness and grief as he is.
• Failed a Spot Check: Dr Piper (the guy Bones replaced) retires not long after Gary dies, feeling like he failed not noticing Gary’s mental health.
• Fatal Flaw: As in the show proper, Kirk’s need to pretend nothing bad has happened to him, or because of him. He transfers Janice Rand to another ship out of guilt, and tells Bones he should have transferred Finney too. Bones, long-suffering confidant that he is, tells him off, but Kirk admits he doesn’t want to listen.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Gary Mitchell and Kirk become True Companions after Gary looks after Kirk through risking it on a flying mission, making what happens later all the sadder.
• Foreshadowing:
  • On the way to Tarsus IV, Tom Leighton’s mother (one of the victims of the massacre) always tries to make sure that Kirk is getting enough to eat.
  • Kirk asks Gary if he ever wants command and a ship of his own, Gary replies that giving him unlimited power is a very bad idea.
  • Around the time of The Motion Picture, relations with Klingons are starting to break down, and officials like Cartwright are pushing for more security around the border, despite how that makes Klingons do the same.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • When Kirk meets Spock for the first time, he’s jealous because Spock worked with Pike for a decade, and worked with Carol, while he can’t see her and Garrovick died within a few years.
  • As much as Kirk likes Amanda, there’s an implication that he wishes his own mother was more like her, calling her completely maternal, loving and protective of her son, while his mom tried but was Maternally Challenged.
• Gilded Cage: The office Kirk has as admiral has a view of Alcatraz, something he comes to see as fitting.
• Guilt Complex: The amount of people whose lives Kirk thinks he’s ruined (and some he actually did) mount up through the book.
• Happy Marriage Charade: Jim’s mother and father aren’t actually happy together, Winona wanting a career and George being old fashioned and not affectionate, but try to pretend for the kids.
• Harmful to Minors: Beyond Tarsus, Jim also saves a Tellarite by pulling him out of the ship (while terrified, seeing his first dead body and being yelled at), preventing an intergalactic incident.
• Heel Realization: When being released from a penal colony after faking his death, pinning it on Kirk, and almost destroying Enterprise, Finney admits to Kirk that he is messed up in the head and everything he did was wrong.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: McCoy does the foreword and Spock does the epilogue, and they’re both affectionately annoyed at the trail of self hate running through the book.
• Hope Bringer: One of the reasons why Kirk falls in love with Edith, who keeps her optimism in situations that even he and Spock feel hopeless in.
• Hope Spot:
  • Kirk’s part ends a day before he goes on the Star Trek: Generations ship tour, acknowledging he’s never going to get over being Married to the Job or hating retirement, but planning to go on another mission outside of Starfleet with a Dysfunction Junction who just wants to help.
  • After two years of promising he’ll be there and not, Kirk thinks he can have Carol and David on the Hotspur, and marry Carol. Unfortunately she’s been disappointed too many times, and has had enough.
  • Kirk notes that Tom Leighton was traumatised over Tarsus, but his recent marriage had made him feel better, and there seems to be hope for happiness.
• Humans Are Special: Subverted, as after “Errand Of Mercy”, an embarrassed Kirk has to tell other officers what happened, and they all wanted to believe in humanity being superior like he did.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder:
  • McCoy starts the foreword by saying "I'm a doctor, not a writer."
  • When Kirk (who hasn’t seen his child in two years) wants David on the ship, McCoy tells him he’s a doctor, not a babysitter.
• Irony: The first time Kirk meets Spock, he finds his appearance frightening and doesn’t see them becoming friends.
• It's All About Me: While Kirk does genuinely love David, he hasn’t seen him in person for two years and he’s looking forward to the unconditional love when he’s aboard the ship, which should tell you that he’s more like his mother than he wants to admit.
• Just Ignore It: As it’s such a coping mechanism for Kirk in canon, it comes up a lot for him, one example being disgusted with himself for what happened in “The Enemy Within” and trying to pretend it never happened.
• Kicked Upstairs:
  • Pike's promotion from The Captain of the Enterprise to Fleet Captain was Admiral Nogura's way to keep him off the front lines, since he's less militaristic than officers like Matthew Decker.
  • It’s a little tortured, but the book has the first time Kirk is promoted it’s genuine, but he grabs the Enterprise back (along with being Captain) for another five-year mission, which doesn’t go great and the Enterprise is seen as a sinking ship. So after he retires out of protest, because his crew can’t get opportunities thanks to being associated with him, he’s then promoted again mostly to just get him out of the way.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: There are multiple jokes pointing to the fictional nature of the story.
  • In the introduction, McCoy mentions how unlikely it is that Kirk was at the center of so many historic events, adding, "And I don't know whether it was divine providence, luck, or the mythical Great Bird of the Galaxy that determined the man who would be in the center seat of the Starship Enterprise..."
  • Kirk remarks on how nice the first M-class planet he visited outside Earth looked: "It could have been invokedSouthern California."
  • When Kirk first sees the Romulan commander in "Balance of Terror", he thinks that the commander looks like he could be Spock's father. Mark Lenard, who played the commander, became more well-known as Spock's father Sarek.
• Like Father, Like Son: Winona Kirk breaks the rules for love (though in her case George Kirk was a teacher she wanted), likes rock climbing, and promises to be there for her son but isn’t, like Jim does with his own son.
• Living Emotional Crutch: When Bones first comes on the Enterprise, Kirk is relieved, calling him a security blanket.
• Lonely at the Top: When Kirk becomes Captain of the Hotspur, it’s the start of tying his identity to the ship he’s on, not letting himself exist outside of her. Even worse when he takes command of the Enterprise as he’s relieving Pike and is torn between having everyone like him and being a good captain.
• Married to the Job:
  • Kirk of course, but he admits he Has a Type of girlfriend who is devoted to her own job, and that gives him an excuse to keep an emotional distance.
  • After Edith, Kirk retreats even harder into his job (except for friendships with Bones and Spock) and looks down on any relationships that try to form in his crew. Pushing Palomas into rejecting Apollo (while he understands the temptation) is what makes her resign her commission.
• The Masochism Tango: Kirk doesn’t initially grasp the whole travelling through time thing of “The Naked Time”, more confused at how he can commit himself entirely… to a ship.
• Midseason Upgrade: The movie refit gets lampshaded, with Starfleet wanting better ships but to keep the Enterprise name as essentially propaganda.
• A Million Is a Statistic: While the work in 30s America is terrible, Kirk starts to feel the most at peace he’s ever been with Edith, and disconnects from everyone in the future.
• Mistaken Ethnicity: When Kirk first meets Pavel Chekov, the young ensign assumes that Kirk’s ancestors were Bulgarian communists, and is visibly disappointed when he learns otherwise. Kirk thinks it's Actually Pretty Funny.
• My Greatest Failure: Kirk has a lot of regrets, but he calls what he did with Khan the greatest mistake of his career.
• New Old Flame: Kirk meets Carol again after what happened on the Farragut (and he’s been drinking/depressed), after they had a brief casual fling at the academy. This time she gets pregnant and it falls apart because he can’t be there.
• Never Be Hurt Again: Aside from being Married to the Job, the book gives another interpretation for why Kirk’s relationships tend to die, Tarsus makes him unable to trust people caring about him, and the swaggering is a front for his insecurity (which we knew already).
• The Not-So-Harmless Punishment: After the Kobayashi Maru test, Kirk graduates near the top of his class, but is still put on a shitty ship doing milk runs. The real karmic punishment of course is Finney accusing him of betrayal and ending the friendship.
• One-Steve Limit: Played With, as "Finney" and "Finnegan" sound similar enough that Kirk gets them confused on his first day at the Academy, leading to them both going Drill Sergeant Nasty on him.
• I Resemble That Remark!: All Kirk can come up with after hearing that he’s a stack of books on legs is that it’s not particularly clever as an insult.
• Parental Sexuality Squick: Mama Kirk tells her son that his dad was a Hot Teacher and she wanted to break all the rules by being with him. Jim doesn’t want to know any further details.
• Parents as People: George and Winona Kirk aren’t abusive, but not the classical Good Parents either. They try their best, and Jim appreciates them more as he gets older, but they shouldn’t have gotten married, Winona is Maternally Challenged and George comes off scary and non-affectionate to a small child.
• Passing the Torch: Kirk’s famous “don’t let them promote you” speech to Picard is the tagline of the book, and he gets one of his own from Pike, telling him the job will rip your guts out, and his family on the ship will either die or be replaced. Not long after, Kirk has to kill Gary Mitchell.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Howard Kaplan is the Chief Engineer of two starships, but is only shown doing the bare minimum of engineering. On the Republic, Kirk and Finney joke that Assistant Chief Scott does the actual work so that Kaplan can spend more time sleeping; on the Hotspur, his lax maintenance causes the ship to run through her dilithium crystals far too quickly, and he doesn't notify Kirk about the problem until their last crystal is starting to fracture.
• Pride Before a Fall:
  • Eleven year old Jim Kirk is excited about saving a Tellarite and innocently wants to go to Starfleet, which his dad dissuades him about. Then comes Tarsus. Played with in that he still wants to go to Starfleet, but now he wants to make that his whole identity because he’s so unhappy.
  • At the end of “Space Seed”, Kirk calls himself out for thinking he could make a civilised decision involving Khan, and that it wouldn’t come back to bite him in the ass.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: As kids, Sam is “calm and logical”, while Jim always tries to get a rise out of him with his “big emotions”.
• Religion Is Wrong: He doesn’t voice it, but Kirk is disparaging at how people can find comfort in religion, except for when he’s relating to being a Martyr Without a Cause. He also hopes that Edith Keeler isn’t a nun.
• Replacement Goldfish: Kirk meets a few younger men that remind him of the son he can’t see (including Ensign Garrovick, who has the same first name as Kirk's son), but the most explicit is Will Decker, whose father committed suicide and whom Kirk sweeps up after Spock returns to Vulcan.
• Replacement Scrappy: In-universe, while it doesn’t last long, the crew members aren’t happy with Kirk (especially as he’s so young) replacing Pike, and again when the charming Gary dies, replaced by slightly scary Spock.
• The Resenter: Finney is angry at his own daughter for having Kirk’s name, and believes that neither she or his wife actually love him because of what Kirk supposedly did to him.
• Sex for Solace: After Carol essentially leaves him, Kirk starts seeking comfort in sex and relationships that don’t last, while still keeping most of his identity on his ship.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Kirk admits that his Captain's Log entry after the battle with the planet killer slightly falsified the death of Commodore Decker so it wouldn't look like the suicide it was. He's highly confident that Starfleet won't punish him for doing so. The fact that his autobiography is released after his (assumed) death makes it a moot point. (A Freeze-Frame Bonus in the season 2 premiere of Star Trek: Picard reveals that Decker was indeed remembered as a hero, in pretty much the way that Kirk describes him in his log.)
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: After their accidental time-travel at the end of "The Naked Time", Kirk and Spock realize that they can go back to Psi 2000 and rescue the science team - which they do, just in the nick of time.
  Some days we’d had our losses, but some days we had our wins.
• Shirtless Scene: More sad and embarrassing than sexy, but when Kirk reports his friend Finney, Ben drags Kirk out from sleeping underneath the stairs (where his “quarters” are) and yells at him while he’s shirtless and everyone is watching.
• Shout-Out: To other books in the Trek Novel Verse, mostly to do with Kirk getting chipped away from the Broken Hero he is in the series to the Tragic Hero he is in the movies.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Kirk is initially annoyed by Martine and Tomlinson being giggly over each other, and figures out they remind him of how his (shouldn’t have got married) parents must have been.
• So Proud of You: His mom is off somewhere, but Kirk calls his dad when he’s made Captain of the Enterprise at 29 years old, and his tough, scary dad mists up and says how proud he is.
• Sore Loser: Treated sympathetically, as Tarsus has made Starfleet his lifeline, but failing the Kobayashi Maru test is seen as a personal insult on Kirk’s part, to the point where “I couldn’t live with the failure”, foreshadowing just how badly he’ll take losing and cope by being in denial in the future.
• Surpassed the Teacher: In a way — when Kirk served on the Republic, Scotty became a mentor to him while everyone else alienated him. When Kirk then took command of Enterprise, he made Scotty his chief engineer. It's implied that this was his way of repaying Scotty for looking out for him when nobody else would.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In “The City on the Edge of Forever”, both Spock and Kirk are treated terribly; Spock gets racism for looking “Chinese”, and Kirk has to work every degrading job he can find to make ends meet. Despite this, and smelling awful/never getting enough to eat, Kirk feels peace and happiness for the first time in his life, distancing himself from the future.
• Take That!: A minor one to Star Trek (2009) and how it made Kirk a hotheaded dick because he grew up without a dad; original flavour Kirk mentions how he’s told Spock that his father was inspiration for Starfleet, but it’s actually more complicated than that, also spending more time on his mother’s influence, rather than just ignoring her.
• Tempting Fate: After almost losing someone in his command on Neural, Kirk calls it his worst experience in Starfleet so far and can’t imagine anything worse. As he says, “fate would soon punish me for my lack of vision”.
• There Are No Therapists: Kirk goes through a lot of trauma, and his mother uses him as a therapist after Tarsus IV. The only therapy he gets is after Farrugut while drinking a lot, a bar owner who lets him vent and reintroduces him to Carol.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Kirk is not excited to learn that the Records Officer on the Enterprise is Ben Finney, who still holds a grudge over what happened on the Republic.
• Toxic Friend Influence: When it’s time to reprogram the Kobayashi Maru test, Finney calls it Mitchell’s influence as Kirk would never be this reckless before. Considering it made Kirk more of a Determinator, more accurate would be Positive Friend Influence.
• Unequal Pairing: The reason why Kirk refuses to act on his feelings for Janice, it leads to an awful relationship when one person has that much power over another.
• Ungrateful Bastard: After Kirk reports Finney for negligence, Finney accuses Kirk of deliberately sabotaging his career despite Finney looking after him.
• Unreliable Narrator: The autobiography is written from Kirk himself, a sixty old man with faulty memories, things he doesn’t want to talk about and a lot of regrets. There’ll often be editor notes correcting it.
• The Un-Reveal: Kirk never learns the whole story about Dimorous, as Admiral Nogura scrubs all evidence of whatever happened.
• Verbal Backspace: The unsent letter that Kirk sends to David includes lines that he’s tried to delete, including one part where he says he’s lucky to have the Enterprise, instead trying to assure himself that he’s earned it.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: From their very first meeting, Bones and Spock make with the Snark-to-Snark Combat, and Kirk finds it entertaining.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: Finnegan's parting shot at Kirk involved replacing his pants with a pair that were several sizes too big.
• What a Piece of Junk: The Baton Rouge-class ships that Kirk served on early in his career used to be state-of-the-art; they were still operational and effective in their milieu, but just barely. By the time Kirk took command of Enterprise, they were being decommissioned.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: At the end of “Space Seed”, Bones, Spock and Khan all know, but Marla and Kirk at the time think it’s a romantic, heroic ending that Kirk had helped to engineer.
• You Are in Command Now: Kirk’s first command wasn't the Enterprise; it was an older Baton Rouge-class ship called the Hotspur, where he took command after several senior officers were killed in battle.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Lampshaded. Kirk is so lost in Puppy Love for Edith that he misses Spock calling him “Jim”, which he notes later is usually a bad sign.
• You Look Familiar: Lampshaded in-universe when Kirk sees the Romulan Commander and says he could have been Spock’s father.

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