An important resource for any aspiring Starfleet officer, Dayton Ward’s long-awaited Kirk Fu Manual: A Guide to Starfleet’s Most Feared Martial Art — with art by Christian Cornia — is the latest in a series of whimsical Star Trek releases that aims to have fun with some beloved features of the franchise.

And what is more fun in Star Trek than the uniquely singular style of Captain James T. Kirk? Despite Starfleet and the Enterprise crew’s lofty mission and progressive ideology, sometimes the only way to resolve a problem is with a good old-fashioned scrap.

Kirk never shied away from a fight, and you don’t have to either with the benefit of his fighting form. Presented as an in-universe Starfleet Academy training manual, with a helping heap of tongue-in-cheek irreverence, the Kirk Fu Manual presents “excerpts from Kirk’s own notes and personal logs” to teach you how to survive the final frontier.

The book presents a series of Kirk fighting moves, pairing prose about Kirk’s missions, and where and why he chose to deploy each move, with double page spreads providing a series of diagram instructions about how to replicate the moves at home, not that you probably should… only in combat with a Gorn!

Despite being a fun – and delightfully absurd – book, Ward still takes the task of capturing the voice of Captain Kirk very well. And that’s what ultimately makes the Kirk Fu Manual work so well, which is that it knows when to have fun and it knows when to play it straight. The introductions to each “move” are thoughtful considerations by Kirk on combat, and reflections upon some of his missions.

There’s actually a lot of interesting introspection here from Kirk about his adventures on the show. Star Trek novels do a great job of examining the inner life of this character during new adventures, but we don’t get a lot of chances to double back to Original Series episodes and get more of a view of Kirk’s philosophy. And so that’s very much appreciated, given that it adds depth to the piece overall.

But seriousness aside, where the Kirk Fu Manual really shines is in each of Kirk’s signature moves. The titles of each are genuinely funny – my personal favorite being the “Box Lunch” move, where Kirk bashes his opponent simultaneously on either side of their head.

And the illustrations are fun and vibrant. It’s also a nice touch that, in the series of diagrams on each move, Kirk ends up with a ripped shirt in the last image of each series. That’s a fun touch. The descriptions of each move are also a joy to read, where they could have been purely functional or leaned on the illustration to do the work. And there are some cool surprises and nice touches that I won’t spoil here, but the last two-page spread is probably my favorite of the book!

Overall, the Kirk Fu Manual is another delightful addition to your Star Trek library, mixing a joyful reverence for the source material with whimsy to provide Star Trek fans with something a bit different from your usual reference material.

But despite that, the book also allows fans to do what every Star Trek non-fiction book does, which is deepen their love and appreciation for the franchise a little more.