The Fire and the Rose

The Fire and the Rose is a Pocket TOS novel – the second novel in the Crucible trilogy – written by David R. George III. Published by Pocket Books, it was first released in .
== Summary ==
;From the book jacket:
:IN A SINGLE MOMENT… the lives of three men will be forever changed. In that split second, defined paradoxically by both salvation and loss, they will destroy the world and then restore it. Much has come before, and much more would come after, but nothing would color their lives more than that one, isolated incident on the edge of forever.
:IN A SINGLE MOMENT… Spock, displaced in time, watches his closest friend heed his advice by allowing the love of his life to die in a tragic accident, thereby preserving Earth's history. Returning to the present, however, Spock confronts other such crises, and chooses instead to willfully alter the past. Challenged by the thorny demands of his logic, he will have to find a way to face his conflicting decisions.
:IN A SINGLE MOMENT… that stays with Spock, he preserved the timeline at the cost of Jim Kirk's happiness. Now, the death of that friend will cause Spock to reexamine the fundamental choices he has made for his own life. Unwilling to accept his feelings of loss and regret, he will seek what has previously eluded him: complete mastery of his emotions. But while his quest for perfect geometry of total logic will move him beyond his remorse, another loss will bring him full circle to once more face the fire he has never embraced.
== Background information ==
* Author George's original plan for this novel had been to explore Spock's embrace of the Vulcan reunification movement; however, he quickly realized that such a novel would predominantly take place in the Next Generation timeframe, which did not fit with the concept of the trilogy as celebrating The Original Series. (The Fire and the Rose foreword)
* Instead, George began to explore Spock's reasons for undertaking the kolinahr ritual after the end of the five-year mission – centering around his commitment to maintaining the timeline in and the apparent contradiction with Spock's own actions in – and developed the idea that similar reasons arising from Kirk's apparent death in could lead him to attempt the ritual a second time. As George noted: "Faced with his friend's death, perhaps the recollection of Spock's failure to even try to save the love of Kirk's life might resurface and push him to emotional distraction, perhaps even to the point where he would decide that he could no longer live with such intense feelings." George also knew that it would be important to explore the conflict within Spock between emotion and logic, which would help guide the character deconstruction central to the Crucible concept. (The Star to Every Wandering afterword)
* An extract from this novel appeared in .
* The title of the novel is from a poem, , by . The section of the poem forms part of the book's epigraph. The poem was part of what inspired George to approach Spock in the way he did in the novel. (The Star to Every Wandering afterword)
== Characters ==
;Spock:
;Sarek:
;Amanda Grayson:
;Leonard McCoy:
;James T. Kirk:
;Edith Keeler:
;Federation President Ra-ghoretreii
;Ambassador Tremontaine
;Commander Thelin:
;T'Vora
== References ==
kolinahr
== External link ==
* 
de:Das Feuer und die Rose
Fire and the Rose