Farewell, Vonda N. McIntyre (From the Books)

Science fiction and fantasy author Vonda N. McIntyre has died.

I feel that I've done McIntyre a disservice all these years. I've read a lot of her work, but none beyond her well-known tie-in books in the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. But on the other hand, she wrote all those books voluntarily and she wrote some of them so well that they stand up even outside their tie-in status. And what's so bad about tie-in work, anyway? There's a reason the Trek and Wars franchises are so well-established. I do own a couple of McIntyre's non-Trek books, and I should probably make reading them a higher priority.

One novel of hers that I especially liked was her original Trek novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, in which she told the story of how the very first voyage of the starship Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk went. This novel posed a number of challenges for McIntyre: she couldn't rely on the tried-and-true relationship tropes of Trek. Kirk and McCoy were already good friends at this point, but neither knew the Enterprise's Vulcan science officer; there couldn't be any hint here of "I have been, and always shall be, your friend." McIntyre also wrote a Lt. Sulu who didn't even want to be on the Enterprise, and Commander Montgomery Scott who was so skeptical of his new Captain and so possessive of "his" ship that he nearly let his attitude force Captain Kirk to order his transfer off the finest ship in Starfleet.

Another thing McIntyre did in this book is to show that Kirk's ascent to commanding the Enterprise wasn't just a straight-line thing that involved no sacrifice at all. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which McIntyre novelized, established that there was one woman in Kirk's past life who was much more than a momentary conquest. Dr. Carol Marcus might have been the love of his life, and she was the only one (that we ever knew of) to bear James T. Kirk's child. So in Enterprise, Vonda McIntyre wrote a wonderful scene in which Kirk is torn between his dream of command and a woman he loves. It's the kind of amazing character writing at which McIntyre excelled. She made you care about these characters. Her writing is full of scenes like this, and now I have to wonder even more what magic she was able to conjure with characters of her very own.

Here's the scene.

Carol turned, uncharacteristically flustered. "Jim--!"

"Hello, Carol." He stopped. He wanted to say everything to her, or he wanted to say nothing. He wanted to make love with her, or he wanted never to see her again.

"Talk to you later," Dr. Eng said, and made a diplomatic exit.

"How are you feeling, Jim?"

He ignored the question. His heart beat hard. "It's wonderful to see you. I have to leave soon. Can we...I'd like to talk to you. Would you have a drink with me?"

"I don't feel like having a drink," she said. "But I will go for a walk with you."

Jim paused beside Gary, still hoping he might awaken. [That's Gary Mitchell, Kirk's best friend who was his First Office in the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before," before his character died.] "Get well, my friend," Jim said, and left Ms. Chapel the note to give him when he regained consciousness.

They did not have to discuss where to go. Jim and Carol walked toward their park.

Without meaning to, exactly, Jim kept brushing against Carol. His shoulder touched her shoulder; his fingers touched the back of her hand. At first she moved aside.

"Oh--" Carol said impatiently the third time Jim touched her. She took his hand and held it. "We are still friends, I hope."

"I hope so too," Jim said. He tried to pretend the electric tingle of physical attraction no longer existed between them, but he found it impossible to deceive himself that much. Being near Carol made Jim feel as if a powerful current case a web over both of them, exchanging and intensifying every passion.

"Are you sleeping any better?" Carol said.

Jim hesitated between the truth and a lie. "I'm sleeping fine," he said.

Carol gave him a quizzical glance, and he knew he had hesitated too long. She had held him too many times, when the nightmare slapped him awake in the darkest hours of the morning.

"If you want to talk about it...." she said.

"No. I don't want to talk about it," he said in a clipped tone. [This all happens in the aftermath of a bad incident that left Kirk emotionally scarred.]..."No," he said again, more gently. "I don't want to talk about it."

Still holding hands, they reached the small park and set out along the path that circled the lake. Ducks swam alongside them, quacking for a handout.

"We always forget to bring them anything," Carol said. "How many times have we walked here--we always meant to bring them some bread, but we never did."

"We had...other things on our minds."

"Yes."

"Carol, there's got to be some way--!"

He cut off his words when he felt her tense.

"Such as what?" she said.

"We could--we could get married."

She looked at him; for a moment he thought she was going to burst out laughing.

"What?" she said.

"Let's get married. We could transport to Spacedock. Admiral Noguchi could perform the ceremony."

"But why marriage, for heaven's sake?"

"That's the way we do it in my family," Jim said stiffly.

"Not in mine," Carol said. "And anyway, it still wouldn't work."

"It's worked for quite a number of generations," Jim said, though in the case of his own parents the statement stretched the truth. "Carol, I love you. You love me. You're the person I'd most want to be with if I were stranded on a desert planet. We have fun together--remember when we went to the dock and snuck on board the Enterprise for our own private tour--" At her expression, he stopped. "It's true."

"Yes," she said. "It's true. And I've missed you. The house is awfully quiet without you."

"Then you'll do it?"

"No. We talked about this too many times. No matter what we do, it wouldn't make any difference. I can't be with you and you can't stay with me."

"But I could. I could transfer to headquarters--"

"Jim..." She turned to face him. She held both his hands and looked into his eyes. "I remember how you felt when you found out you're getting command of the Enterprise. Do you think anyone who loved you would want to take that away from you? Do you think you could love anyone who tried?"

"I love you," he said. "I don't want to lose you."

"I don't want to lose you, either. But I lost you before I ever met you. I can get used to the quiet. I can't get used to having you back for a few weeks at a time and losing you over and over and over again."

He kept seeking a different solution, but the pattern led him in circles and he could find no way out.

"I know you're right," he said, miserable. "I just..."

Tears silvered Carol's dark blue eyes.

They kissed each other, one last time. She held him. He laid his head on her shoulder with his face turned away, because he, too, was near tears.

"I love you too, Jim," she said. "But we don't live on a desert planet."

That's how you write a heartbreaking farewell scene...and it comes very early in the book, before we even see Captain Kirk on the bridge of his new ship. McIntyre knew how to set the emotional stage for her stories.

I really do owe her a reading with newer eyes....

At least THAT happened in 2017!

Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself, tweeted my name.

Here's how it happened.

It began with, surprisingly enough, William Shatner:

I think @starwars has officially jumped the shark. 😳🙄 Wasn’t @HamillHimself supposed to be in this movie? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/HFiA56hlS3

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) October 10, 2017

Mark Hamill, cited by Mr. Shatner, replied:

I think @WilliamShatner has officially jumped the snark.😜😇 You've got your BORGS, Bill- I've got my PORGS, OK? 😎 #TheFarceIsStrongInShatner https://t.co/W28T3sixr3

— @HamillHimself (@HamillHimself) October 10, 2017

Funny reply! Until, that is, a Star Trek geek from the Buffalo, NY area felt the need to point out that Mr. Shatner never faced the Borg on Star Trek. They came along for Patrick Stewart's tenure as Enterprise captain.

Sayeth the Trek geek from Buffalo:

The Borg? That was Patrick Stewart, NOT Mr. Shatner! Come ON, Mr. Hamill!!!

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) October 10, 2017

And then, replyeth Mr. Hamill:

That tweet was from someone who once flunked a #StarWars trivia quiz. Why would I do any better w/ #StarTrek minutia? Come ON, Mr. Sedinger!

— @HamillHimself (@HamillHimself) October 10, 2017

Squeee! Proof for eternity that for a period of time--who cares if it was mere seconds long--Mark Hamill was aware of my existence!

I, of course, couldn't allow Mr. Hamill the last word, so:

Well, might as well bring a third franchise into the mix.... :) pic.twitter.com/Q8Yfcy0jc3

— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) October 10, 2017

And as of this writing, there we stand.

Sometimes the future is kind of cool, in amidst the moments of existential dread and the ongoing awareness that everything is terrible.

"Let me help" (Thoughts on "The City on the Edge of Forever", on its 50th anniversary)

Edith Keeler: And you, um, don't want to talk about it? Why? Oh. Did you... did you do something wrong? Are you afraid of something? Whatever it is, let me help.

Capt. Kirk: "Let me help." A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you."

Fifty years ago today, "The City on the Edge of Forever" aired for the first time. This episode of Star Trek is, for me, not only the best episode of any Trek series ever filmed, but it's also the best Trek story of all time. It's one of the great science fiction stories, one of the great science fiction romances, one of the great time travel stories, and its ending packs one of the greatest gut-punches ever.

If you've never seen it...you should. Really. The story doesn't really require a huge amount of knowledge of Trek. The Enterprise is investigating strange "ripples in time" that are emanating from a particular planet, and during one such jolt, Dr. McCoy accidentally injects himself with an enormous overdose of a drug that drives him temporarily insane. He flees to the planet surface, and Kirk follows, with Spock and some others. They find themselves in the ruins of an ancient city, with one functioning artifact remaining: a giant portal which is actually a portal through time itself. McCoy, still mad, jumps through and into history, and suddenly the members of the landing party realize that the Enterprise is gone. McCoy has changed history so that the Federation never happened.

With no choice but to try and put things right, Kirk and Spock follow, and find themselves in 1930s New York City. While trying to figure out what McCoy did and where he is, they enter the employ of a woman named Edith Keeler, a visionary who runs a soup kitchen. Kirk falls in love with her...only to have Spock discover that what McCoy did was prevent Edith Keeler from dying in a car accident. If she survives, she lives to found a peace movement that prevents America's entry into World War II, allowing the Nazis to win and take over the world.

Spock: Jim, Edith Keeler must die.

The story unfolds so organically that the episode feels longer, heftier, than its 50-minute or so running time. The episode feels large, and yet all of its key moments play out on an intimate stage, such as when Jim Kirk and Edith are walking along the street at night and Kirk tells Edith some things about the future, things that don't even strike her as strange to be hearing from this man she's just met. And the way she sizes up Kirk and Spock's relationship:

Edith Keeler: [to Kirk] I still have a few questions I'd to ask about you two. Oh, and don't give me that "Questions about little old us?" look. You know as well as I do how out of place you two are around here.

Spock: Interesting. Where would you estimate we belong, Miss Keeler?

Edith Keeler: [to Spock] You? At his side, as if you've always been there and always will. [to Kirk] And you... you belong... in another place. I don't know where or how... I'll figure it out eventually.

Spock: [to Kirk] I'll finish with the furnace.

Edith Keeler: [to Kirk] "Captain." Even when he doesn't say it, he does.

"The City on the Edge of Forever" involves relatively little action. It relies on its character work, showing us that Kirk is falling in love with Edith Keeler before Spock's discovery that she is the key focal point around which history will pivot. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Joan Collins likewise turn in amazing work in this episode. Collins's Edith Keeler is probably the woman in James T. Kirk's history, the one he could not save even though he desperately wanted to. Her death is the memory that he will carry with him forever. Shatner sells every single minute of this, never once over-emoting, never once going too far. His Kirk doesn't just fall for a pretty woman. Shatner portrays a Kirk who has just discovered, hundreds of years in his past, a kindred spirit. He has found someone whom he can understand and who can understand him. And when he realizes that he may well have to stand by as she dies...Shatner's portrayal of a man torn on both sides of the awfullest of dilemmas is so stark, so aching, that it always moves me nearly to tears.

And then the moment arrives.

The script's other masterstroke is that Spock can't determine when the awful event will occur. There is no "She dies on November 12, 1937." This isn't like Stephen King's (masterful) 11-22-1963, when we know exactly when the events are going to occur. Kirk has no idea it's happening, even as we do. He sees her coming back across the street. He starts out to help her...and then he stops. He knows. The moment is upon him, and it unfolds as quickly as it has to. No slow-motion here, no long-held gazes. It comes so quickly that for us, the viewers, it's almost like--what? Was that it? Oh my God, that was it. Over, that quickly.

But Kirk not only had to let Edith die, his choice -- his only choice -- was more awful than that. Because Dr. McCoy was there too, and he didn't know. They had just found him, seconds before, and now McCoy too is watching Edith Keeler walk into the path of the truck. Kirk can't just stand aside, or stand still, and watch Edith die, because if the script allowed him that much, he'd be able to say later, "I couldn't have saved her. She was too far away."

The script doesn't pull its punches. It doesn't give Jim Kirk that one possible out, that one possible way he can morally justify it all to himself.

Jim Kirk doesn't just passively allow Edith Keeler to die. Jim Kirk grabs McCoy and holds him back. Jim Kirk stops McCoy from saving her.

Kirk's choice is an active one.

McCoy doesn't know this. He doesn't know any of it. He only knows that he could have saved her. His voice fills with rage.

McCoy: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?

And then Spock, summing it up so logically, so heart-breakingly, in a line that no actor other than Leonard Nimoy could have delivered:

Spock: He knows, Doctor. He knows.

One thing about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that has always bothered me was the idea of the Kobayashi Maru test, the idea that a false scenario could somehow test a cadet's approach to a situation in which there is no possible "victory". In that movie, Kirk openly says "I don't believe in the no-win scenario," and later on, after Spock's death, he says that he has never really faced death. But in "The City on the Edge of Forever", he faces both a no-win scenario, and he faces death. The idea that Kirk can later on claim otherwise has always seemed deeply false to me. Maybe he's blocked the memory of Edith Keeler? Maybe it's so painful that he doesn't admit it in either case? Certainly Kirk never mentioned her again in any filmed episode or movie, which isn't that surprising given the tendency of teevee shows back in that period to not mention previous events much. But the story here, this love between starship captain and soup-kitchen owner three hundred years before his time, is so iconic, and it carries so much weight, that it's almost offensive to me to think that a James T. Kirk can exist who isn't carrying her memory around. Maybe better, then, if in reply to his son David's accusation that he never has faced death, Jim Kirk were to say, "There was one. She died saving us all, too."

But then, you can't have too many mentions, either. Trek would never again visit that City on the Edge of Forever, except in one episode of the animated series, and with good reason. No story involving the Guardian of Forever could possibly stand up to comparison with this one. Trek would not eschew time travel, by any means, but this particular means was left as a singular part of Trek mythology. I wonder if any Next Generation writers were tempted to visit it. I'm glad they didn't. It is interesting, though, that Jean-Luc Picard would get his own kind of iconic time-travel story in "The Inner Light", as would Benjamin Sisko in "The Visitor".

James T. Kirk is an explorer at heart, and an adventurer. But his experiences in the past, via the Guardian of Forever, have a profound effect on him. At episode's end, when he and Spock and McCoy return to the present with everything restored, the Guardian appeals to that part of his soul, offering to guide him and the others through history. What an offer to someone whose life is charged with boldly going! And yet, all Kirk can muster in that moment is a gruff, "Let's get the hell out of here."

"The City on the Edge of Forever" is the kind of story I dream of writing. For a single one-hour episode of a teevee show to hit so many emotional highs and lows? To linger in the memory as it does? I wonder if, as they were shooting it -- maybe at the first table read -- anyone either thought or muttered, "They'll still be talking about this one in fifty years."

Who knows? If my health permits, I'll still be talking about this episode when it hits one hundred.

STAR TREK and me

And you people, you're all astronauts on...some kind of star trek?

--Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact

Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s...amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)

Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.

It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.

"Let me help." A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those three words even over "I love you."

--James T. Kirk, "The City on the Edge of Forever"

Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.

Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)

I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.

MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?

SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows.

--”The City on the Edge of Forever”

As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)

I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.

I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.

Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go...but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.

I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.

Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail.

--Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.

If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

--Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation

And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.

The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)

CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain?

KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right...and straight on ‘til morning.

--Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager...which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.

But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like "The Devil in the Dark," "The Doomsday Machine," "A Piece of the Action," "The Best of Both Worlds," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Tapestry," "The Visitor"? Who knows...but I look forward to finding out.

Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.

They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this, but I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities - the potential for knowledge and advancement - is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her.

--James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”

Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.

And now, this.

Love, Logic, and Why I Don't Write Dystopia: Some Rambling Thoughts on the Occasion of Leonard Nimoy's Passing

When The Wife and I were on our honeymoon, one of the stops was the Boston Museum of Science. I'm always a fan of science museums. During our visit, we saw a movie in their OmniMax theater. I don't remember what the movie was, to be honest, but I do recall a bit at the beginning of the show, when the lights dimmed and a voice sounded over the speakers, which said something like this:

Good afternoon! The movie will begin shortly, but before it does, we need to properly calibrate our theater's sound systems for use. To do this, we have enlisted the aid of a person who grew up in this very neighborhood. You may find his voice familiar.

This was followed by a beat of silence, and then another voice said:

Hello. Who put the BOMP in the BOMP shoo BOMP shoo BOMP; who put the RAM in the RAMALAMADINGDONG.

The second voice, the "local kid made good", was Leonard Nimoy's. I think most folks in the audience recognized that voice before he actually said "This is Leonard Nimoy"; his voice was, actually, one of the most familiar I ever knew. Gravelly and distinguished, that voice was, and Nimoy knew how to use it, which words to emphasize and where to pause just ever-so-slightly for effect.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware of Leonard Nimoy on some level. More precisely, I should say that I don't remember a time when I didn't know who Mr. Spock was. I remember Star Trek episodes very early on, all the way back to the first house I ever lived in. Trek was my sister's thing, but I remember vague images from it. The most specific one I have is at the end of an episode called "Friday's Child", when, at the end, all is well and the female guest star's character has given birth, and observing Dr. McCoy making baby talk to the kid, Spock asks why baby talk is a thing at all.

A lot can be said about Nimoy and Spock, and a lot has been said about Nimoy and Spock over the years. Most fascinating to me was Spock's arc through the six "Original Crew" movies, from his attempt in The Motion Picture to purge himself of emotion to his own resolution of the "Kobayashi Maru" test to his rescue to his work to put his own brain back together (interesting that no fewer than three major Trek stories, one episode and two movies, devoted large amounts of time to putting Spock's brain and mind back together), and finally to the confident, competent officer we saw in The Undiscovered Country. In that film, when Kirk and McCoy get in serious trouble and are arrested, Spock just calmly assumes command and immediately begins the investigation to find the evidence to free them. Through that film, Spock acts with a calm acceptance that the truth will come out, that they will find the evidence, and that they will find it by searching for it calmly and logically. It is of a piece with his line in the film about the need for faith, to trust that "the Universe will unfold as it should".

My personal favorite Spock moment comes at the end of what is certainly one of the very best Trek episodes ever, "The City on the Edge of Forever". Knowing that if he allows Edith Keeler to live, the future will change and Starfleet and the Federation will never happen, Kirk stops McCoy from pulling her out of the path of the oncoming car. McCoy rages at Kirk:

"You deliberately stopped me. Jim! I could have saved her! Do you know what you just did?!"

And Spock -- ever calm, ever logical, ever accepting of what must be -- simply says:

"He knows, Doctor. He knows."

Nimoy knows that he can't express sadness in that line. He cannot express heartbreak or the awfulness of the choice that Kirk has just had to make, and all the same, Nimoy conveys that Spock knows these things. He knows these things, he knows that they are real, and he does not belittle them in any way.

Since I've no memories at all of a time before Star Trek, it's fair to say that it -- along with Star Wars, obviously -- are the biggest influences of mine in terms of my notion of what the world will look like, hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Will we always face problems and struggles and very real difficulties? Absolutely. But I don't believe in dystopia. I cannot, will not believe that there is a future in the offing when the world is wrecked and everything is in ashes and only a very few are living well while the rest of humanity exists in dimly-lit squalor. I cannot, will not believe that, and that's why I cannot, will not write it.

I believe that whatever difficulties and challenges we eventually face, we will do it from a brightly-lit viewpoint where it's always clear how far we've already come. I believe that when we take to the stars, our ships will be beautiful and that they will explore with grace, and that we will confront our futures with logic and science as well as warmth and a twinkle in the eye that's always there.

Why do I believe those things? In large part, because of a teevee show and some movies that Leonard Nimoy starred in.

After his long and prosperous life, Leonard Nimoy now belongs to the past. But he'll always be a part of my future...my "Undiscovered Country".

Where no cookie has gone before!

The Great Bird herself, the mighty starship Enterprise.

Made of gingerbread and stuff.

This is the handiwork of a place called the Blackmarket Bakery. And it is awesome.

If at first you Khan't succeed....

Over at Tor.com, Emily Asher-Perrin suggests a way to make Khan's presence in Star Trek Into Darkness make more sense.

There are 72 other super humans who Khan calls “family.” They were of all backgrounds and talents, an entire pantheon of super peoples. If one of them was woken up, not knowing when it was or what he would be asked to do, isn’t it possible that he might lie? That he might tell a powerful military leader in Starfleet that he was Khan Noonien Singh? We know that Khan’s exploits were legendary—of all these genetically engineered people, he was considered to be the Attila, the Alexander, the Caesar. Pretending to be him would likely buy you more respect, more time to figure out what was going on. It would be a smart move that could keep your people alive. The sort of move that a super man might employ when woken from a deep freeze a few hundred years in the future.

I have to admit that I'm starting to feel a little sorry for STID. From what I can see, conventional opinion in geek circles is starting to settle on this being quite possibly the single worst Trek film ever. Earlier this week saw the 25th anniversary of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which has always been roundly hated (although not by me). In every discussion I've seen of that anniversary, though, almost immediately someone suggests that STID was worse. And yes, I had a lot of problems with the script. But yeesh, the film was at least well-made; I find watching it enjoyable, which is something I certainly can't say for Star Trek Nemesis.

But back to Ms. Asher-Perrin's retconning of STID. Of course, its success hinges on the writers wanting things to make sense, and in two of these scripts, we now know that "making sense" isn't something that matters all that much to Orci or Kurtzman (not to mention Damon Lindelof, who is singularly incapable of writing anything that makes a modicum of sense).

If it turned out that this man was not Khan, then all of his behaviors in the film would suddenly ring more true. Here is an individual, damaged by his circumstances and alone, afraid of losing the only people like him in the universe. He is lashing out against everyone who used him or cornered him. Without the weight of Khan’s original (very different) incarnation hanging over him, this character can be his own thing. And all that wishy-washy indecision that led to the stunt secrecy surrounding his identity in the first place could be put to bed. And we wouldn’t suddenly have to wonder how an alternate reality could change the ethnicity of a character born hundreds of years before the skewed timeline.

I suppose...but then, Ms. Asher-Perrin wraps up with this:

But better yet, we would also know that Khan was still out there… somewhere. And that would always be hanging over our heads, a perfectly poised hammer ready for whenever he was needed.

See, here's my problem with this: the inflation of Khan into the supervillain of all of Star Trek -- or, at least, this generation of Trek. Thanks to one notable episode of the original series and one very good movie, Khan has somehow become elevated to basically being Moriarty to Kirk's Holmes, or Blofeld to Kirk's James Bond. And that's just wrong. These filmmakers clearly see Khan as Kirk's ultimate nemesis, but Kirk -- and Trek isn't about defeating the villain-of-the-week. Sometimes it can be about that, but not always, and ever since Wrath of Khan, Trek seems to be fixated on this idea of "who will the villain be", right down to bringing in illustrious actors to play the villains each time out.

That's my problem with this bit of retconning: it would keep Khan out there as a potential bomb to go off. How long could these writers, who have shown zero understanding of Star Trek other than as single movie as a source of memes and tropes to be mined.

Rule of Acquisition #109

Playing with the new app and filters III, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi are established as having a culture so built around business and the pursuit of wealth that they are governed by a series of aphorisms called the "Rules of Acquisition". I always like #109:

Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

I agree. The hell with dignity. I'll take the pie in the face every time.

Star Trek Into Frustration

Well, despite my initial intentions to not see the new Star Trek movie until the DVD came out, a number of factors intervened: the fact that we went on vacation (and seeing a movie on vacation is always fun), and The Daughter's crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. So, off we went to see the movie. I expected that my reaction would be similar to that I had for the first one, and sure enough, it was. I loved watching it. It's a tremendously entertaining movie, expertly paced, wonderfully shot, beautifully acted. It scratched my ever-present itch for Explodey Spaceshippy Goodness, just like the last one.

And it frustrated the hell out of me on the script end, just like the last one.

On the design end, this bunch of filmmakers is getting so much right. I love the look of the world they're in; I love that it's not 'dystopia as far as the eye can see', as is so often the case in SF these days. I love the look of the ships, and I don't even mind JJ Abrams's somewhat-infamous lens flares. This movie, as much as the last one, looks the part, and it does a really nice way of bringing those old 1960s-era costume designs into a future in a way that doesn't look completely ridiculous.

Also, the cast continues to be superb. About the only weak link I've found thus far is the fellow who plays Sulu, and really, how could you tell, given how little he has to do? This group has real honest-to-God chemistry, and watching them interact is most of the fun.

So why is the script so maddening?

Let's just get my little "Star Trek fanboy" complaints out of the way first. I know, I know, "This ain't your daddy's Star Trek!" But the producers keep saying that basically, yes, it is; it's the exact same universe, but time went in a different direction, so different stuff happens. So as nifty as the visual is, I can't get behind the Enterprise hiding at the bottom of an ocean. I can't get behind starships going to warp speed while in a planetary atmosphere. (They did this in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home as well, and yes, it bugged me then, too.) And I can't get behind two starships having a firefight while in warp.

And...Khan.

I really don't know what the whole purpose of using Khan in this movie was, except to use Khan in a movie. It's very strange. Benedict Cumberbatch turns in a frankly wonderful performance of the scenery-chewing villain (although he's so flamboyantly chewing the scenery that I was disappointed that the film put him in an all-black costume, instead of clothing him more interestingly). But the script – but Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof – does absolutely none of its own heavy lifting. When we finally get to Cumberbatch's big reveal – "My name is KHAN!", complete with rumble in the soundtrack's bass – it's clear that Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof aren't interested in creating their own emotional space here. What they're after is mining the original. We're meant to feel something, some kind of dread, when we learn that we're dealing with KHAN here. But the script doesn't bother to earn that moment. The proper response there would be for Kirk to blink and say, "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"

Ultimately, the script for this movie is really lazy. It's lazy in the way it brings Khan in for no real reason other than that he comes with a built-in story that doesn't need to be explained or elucidated, and it's lazy in the way it converts Khan into a mad killing machine. The original Khan was a charismatic leader, almost a genetically-enhanced Hitler. He was megalomaniacal and wanted to rule a world that he made in his own image; we see none of that in this movie's Khan. He pays very brief lip service to his followers, but as they all spend the entire movie in suspended animation, that's all we know of that. There's no real sense to what, if anything, really drives Khan to do the things he does, other than a vague "I'm mad at the world!" kind of thing, which is pretty much what Eric Bana had as the bad guy in the last Trek movie. Of course, Cumberbatch is leaps-and-bounds better than Bana as an actor, so he's able to imbue his Khan with menace that Nero never had, but ultimately, it's a case of "So what?"

(Brief pause here to note that I've always had problems with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan on kind of the same basis. Yes, it's a great movie – although I do not think it the best of the Original Series movies, even though popular culture insists that it is – but I've always had trouble with the way it takes the interesting set-up of the original "Space Seed" episode, which ends with Khan and friends being left on a wild and untamed planet, and reduces it to, "Nothing came of that and now Khan is furious and insane". More interesting, I think, to see what kind of society Khan would have built if he'd had the chance. Wrath does pay lip service to this, when one of Khan's underlings tries to talk him out of his "Hunt down Jim Kirk" plan – "You have a ship! You have Genesis! You can have whatever you want!" – but that goes nowhere. Wrath uses a great villain to great effect, and yet I always feel that it was a wasted opportunity. Of course, this is hindsight, when back in 1982, if Wrath didn't do well, Trek as a whole would have likely died on the vine.)

I've heard Into Darkness praised for its subplot about the militarization of society and the rise of a security state, but I'm wondering – just what is the justification for all this? In the real world, real events happen that jolt society in those directions. Where is the 9-11 event in Star Trek Into Darkness? We don't know, so Admiral Marcus's plot ultimately boils down to more scenery-chewing villainy. Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof give us yet more villains whose motivations are barely enough to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning, much less wreak galactic havoc.

"This ain't your daddy's Star Trek!" Well, if that's the case, then why is the entire movie little more than a giant re-creation and inversion of the emotional beats at the end of The Wrath of Khan? Because that's what this movie is, to the point of recycling dialogue and visual cues. It's incredibly lazy writing, and it wastes all the strengths in this production. There's this odd air surrounding the Trek reboot that longtime Trek fans shouldn't criticize it because it's a reboot, because it's new, because it's made for people now who don't know anything about Trek as it was. That's pretty stupid and insulting, though; if not for all those years of Trek fans, there wouldn't be anything to reboot in the first place, and since these two films are so hell-bent on offering fan service that is almost entirely derived from The Wrath of Khan, it's extremely disingenuous for the producers to then claim "But it's a reboot!" Because it's not a reboot.

Battlestar Galactica is a reboot. You can argue about whether it's done well or not – I think it is, but I know others who aren't fans of it and prefer the original – but there is no connection at all between the 1978 show and the 2004 one. They aren't different timelines in the same universe, they're completely different shows, and they are about completely different things. Yes, the latter does have a few bits of fanservice here and there (the original theme of the 1978 show being the Caprica National Anthem, for example), but that's it. That's how you do a reboot. What Trek is doing is lazy tribute, which isn't the same thing.

And since they're not doing reboot but rather tribute, I can criticize them on getting so much stuff wrong. Like starships firing at warp or hiding underwater. And like continuing to get the central relationships of Trek completely wrong by once again insisting that it's "Kirk and Spock" and not "Kirk, Spock, and McCoy". God, that annoys the hell out of me. Dr. McCoy is just a supporting player this time around, only there to pop in with a useful plot bit a few times, such as his utterly inexplicable "Hmmm, I think I'll inject this dead tribble with this guy's blood!" experiment.

Which brings me to my biggest frustration: Orci, Kurtzman, and Lindelof don't seem to grasp for one second the implications of the science fiction world they are creating. Consider that at the end of this movie, we can (a) use the transporter to beam ourselves across thousands of light years (so why do we need ships anymore?), and (b) we can bring people back from the dead by injecting them with Khan's genetically-engineered blood. Either one of these would be a leap forward for our species in a way that would be like cavemen skipping over fire and the wheel and going straight to medieval architecture. But here, these are just plot points. (Yes, original Trek made similar mistakes – say, even if the Genesis project failed, there was still some awfully interesting stuff learned in the R&D phase, right? – but we're not talking about the sins of original Trek right now.)

So I guess I fall once again into the position of hoping that Trek continues with different writers. Damon Lindelof is a terrible writer, anyway – Prometheus was embarrassing, and Lindelof clearly has gone all-in with his belief that if you just never explain anything logically at all, lots of folks will take that as profundity – and Orci and Kurtzman aren't a hell of a lot better. Maybe they can be around for a dialog polish, but they continue to fail to understand their own characters and the universe they're working in, and they write plots more than character-driven stories.

I want a Trek where James T. Kirk has some agency, where he figures things out and takes control. I want a Trek where Spock doesn't take advantage of a guy's moment of death to give himself the ultimate snuff film. (Watch the scene where Pike dies and tell me that's not what's going on when Spock mind-melds with him, especially later on when Spock admits it. God, that was a skeevy moment.) I want a Trek where Vulcans aren't just a bunch of people repressing their emotions. I want a Trek where things happen in logical sequence arising out of what's gone before, as opposed to things happening because that's what's gotta happen next. I want a Trek where things like this don't happen:

KIRK dies. MCCOY is sad.

But then, in the best bit of resurrectional timing since Jesus himself, the dead tribble purrs.

MCCOY realizes how to bring KIRK back to life!

As much as I think Chris Pine does a great job with what he's given, I want an end to this idea of Kirk as adolescent screw-up with loads of potential if he could just realize it. I have seen that story literally hundreds of times. What was always interesting to me about James T. Kirk was that he excelled as a young man because he was more competent than anyone else. He wasn't some renegade maverick disregarding the rules; Jim Kirk was a genius who always figured out ways to make the rules work for him. These writers seem to think we need to see Kirk grow into his role, whereas the fact is, he was always there. I'm not sure I can see Chris Pine's Kirk ever giving this speech, and you know whose fault that is? It's not Chris Pine's.


Again: I love the cast, love the look, love the music. I even loved a lot of the dialog, and I find Spock's relationship with Uhura an intriguing element. Scotty was terrific this time out. There are a lot of elements in place on this version of Trek that are wonderful, so I pray that next time out, the script lives up to them instead of just putting them through the paces of a plot that basically boils down to fanservice.

They will be, oh, I don't know, TREKKING at some point, yes?

The new Star Trek movie has a title: Star Trek Into Darkness.

OK.

The new Star Trek movie also has a teasing synopsis:

After the crew of the Enterprise find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction.

And, the new Star Trek movie has a poster:

OK. Now, I haven't seen the movie yet, obviously. And I liked the last one, despite its nonsensical plot and complete mishandling of any characters not named Kirk, because it was a very slickly made entertainment with great-looking visuals, fun dialogue, and a frankly wonderful cast. But you know what this rebooted incarnation of Star Trek doesn't seem to have?

Star Trek.

Again, I haven't seen the movie, so it's entirely possible that it will be a very good film. But here's the thing: Star Trek was a lot of things over the years, even as it creatively petered out in the Enterprise and Star Trek Nemesis days. It was sometimes good old fashioned space opera. It was military science fiction. It was sociological SF. It was comedy. It gave us some of the best time travel stories ever. It produced an outstanding submarine thriller in The Wrath of Khan, and it did political allegory at times very well (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), and at times it did political allegory not very well at all (The Omega Glory). Star Trek told some of the best love stories I've ever seen, whether the love was romantic love ("The City on the Edge of Forever"), the love between friends ("The Empath", Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), or the love between fathers and sons ("The Visitor").

But what Star Trek never was, even in its most flamboyant journeys into explodey-spaceshippy-goodness ("Yesterday's Enterprise"), was a tent-pole action franchise. And between that title, that synopsis, and that poster, that sure as hell seems like what the current creative team is shaping up Star Trek to be. So I guess we'll see no more exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations, then? Will this crew at no point be boldly going much of anyplace at all, certainly not where no one has gone before? I mean, look at that poster. What are we looking at? The optimistic future? A future of science, and of exploration? Or are we looking on twisted, mangled wreckage with some bad-ass villain standing in the middle of it?

I know, I know. It's a reboot, so they're telling 'new stories'. But you can only take the concept of a reboot so far before it becomes unrecognizable. You can make Sherlock Holmes a modern-day detective, but you can't make him a tee-totaling policeman with a wife and kids. You can't call your movie a remake of Rashomon and only tell the story from one viewpoint. If your Romeo and your Juliet live at the end and get married, then they're not Romeo and Juliet.

And if the Enterprise crew is an action star split into seven people...then it might be a fun movie to watch, like the last one was. But it won't be Star Trek.

Wow! Look at all the strange new worlds and new civilizations!

Behold the single greatest piece of Star Trek fan art ever. (The more episodes of the Original Series you've seen and can remember, the more you'll appreciate the staggering awesomeness of this.)


Star Trek The Original Series by *dusty-abell on deviantART

Film Quote Friday

"Darmok" is one of the most memorable episodes, and for me a high point, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Enterprise makes contact with a people, the Tamarians, whose language has resisted all efforts at translation, to the point where not even the Universal Translator can make head nor tail of what they are saying. Their language appears to be based on random citations of stories, an extreme way of talking in metaphor and citing examples from a rich storytelling heritage to make one's point. As someone who often thinks in terms of stories I've read or seen and who frequently cites them in the case of arguing various points, this hits home for me.

In the episode, Captain Picard and Captain Dathon (of the other ship) go down to a planet surface to face a 'monster', to suffer a shared danger, which Dathon hopes will somehow forge a connection between them. It takes Picard a while to realize that Dathon's 'kidnapping' of Picard to the planet surface is intended as an act of friendship, and it takes him a bit longer to put together just what some of the Tamarian phrases mean. They do battle with the creature, and manage to fight it off...but Dathon is mortally wounded. At night, Picard and Dathon sit by a campfire. Dathon is clearly in great pain:

DATHON: Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

PICARD: Our situation is similar to theirs. I understand that. But I need to know more. You must tell me more about Darmok and Jalad. Tell me. You used the words, 'Temba, his arms wide' when you gave me the knife and the fire. Could that mean give? Temba, his arms wide. Darmok. Give me more about Darmok.

DATHON: Darmok on the ocean.

PICARD: Darmok. (draws on the soil) The ocean. Darmok on the ocean. A metaphor? For being alone? Isolated? Darmok on the ocean.

(Dathon writhes in pain)

PICARD: Are you alright?

DATHON: Kiazi's children, their faces wet.

PICARD: Temba, his arms open. Give me more about Darmok on the ocean.

DATHON: Tanagra on the ocean. Darmok at Tanagra.

PICARD: At Tanagra. A country? Tanagra on the ocean. An island. Temba, his arms wide.

DATHON: Jalad on the ocean. Jalad at Tanagra.

PICARD: Jalad at Tanagra. He went to the same island as Darmok. Darmok and Jalad Tanagra.

DATHON: The beast at Tanagra.

PICARD: The beast? There was a creature at Tanagra? Darmok and Jalad, the beast of Tanagra. They arrived separately. They struggled together against a common foe, the beast at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

DATHON: Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

PICARD: They left together. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

DATHON: The ocean. (another spasm) Zinda! His face black, his eyes red. Callimas at Bahar.

PICARD: You hoped this would happen, didn't you? You knew there was a dangerous creature on this planet and you knew from the tale of Darmok that a danger shared might sometimes bring two people together. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. You and me, here, at El-Adrel.

DATHON: Kira at Bashi. Temba, his arms wide.

PICARD: My turn? No, I'm not much of a story teller. Besides, you wouldn't understand. Shaka. when the walls fell. Perhaps that doesn't matter. You want to hear it anyway. There's a story, a very ancient one, from Earth. I'll try and remember it. Gilgamesh, a king. Gilgamesh, a king, at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. They cried out aloud, send us a companion for our king. Spare us from his madness. Enkidu, a wild man from the forest, entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the street. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.

DATHON: At Uruk.

PICARD: The new friends went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail. Gilgamesh struck it with his sword.

DATHON: Gilgamesh.

PICARD: They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, 'he who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.

At this point, sadly, Dathon dies. It's a haunting moment in a terrific script, made all the better by Patrick Stewart and guest star Paul Winfield (as Dathon). It amuses me that they have Picard claim to not be a very good storyteller, and then he goes on to make even this Cliff's Notes version of the Epic of Gilgamesh riveting.

I've heard some fans over the years wonder why they never revisited the Tamarians on Trek. I'm not sure, but I do think that as good as the Trek writers were, they weren't always great science fiction writers, and to really be done well, the concept needed someone on the order of, say, a Vernor Vinge. The idea of a society whose collective memory has become so ingrained as to literally form the basis of its language is a fascinating one, and it would need to be done justice.

A to Z: Q

The obvious choice here is to talk about Q, but I couldn't decide which one. This Q?

Or this one?

Luckily, this is my personal blog, where the only rules that apply are the ones that I choose for myself, and which I can summarily set aside any time I want, so...let's talk about both Q's!

Our first Q is less well-known as Major Geoffrey Boothroyd. (The only time we ever hear his name in the James Bond movies is in The Spy Who Loved Me, when he holds a door open for Agent Anya Amasova, and she thanks him by name.) Q's first appearance was in From Russia With Love, when M informs Bond during his briefing that "Q branch has been working on something special for you." In walks our man, looking pretty young and spry back then, played by actor Desmond Llewellyn. He's got with him a briefcase that has trick catches that, if not opened properly, causes an explosive to go off; contains a rifle that's nicely broken down into a bunch of small pieces (this was 1962, well before X-ray machines at airports!); and fifty gold sovereigns. There had been a character in Dr. No simply referred to as "the armorer", who relieved Bond of his Baretta pistol (derisively calling it a fine gun "for a lady's handbag") and giving him his trademark Walther PPK, but the guy we would know as Q didn't come until the second movie.

But it was in the third Bond film, Goldfinger, that Q would become iconic. That's when he unveils his tricked-out Austin Martin DB-V, with machine guns in the headlights, spinning license plates, homing device trackers, and the ejector seat. It's too bad that the car doesn't end up amounting to much...but Q's attitude toward James Bond becomes clear when Bond says "You're joking!" in reference to the ejector seat, and Q replies, "I never joke about my work, 007."



Q was a fixture for most of the remaining Bond films. He wouldn't appear in Live and Let Die, but he'd be present for all the remaining films until Die Another Day; Q was revealed to be retiring in The World is Not Enough; he even introduced his successor, who was played by John Cleese, in an inspired bit of casting. There was a giant pall cast over the whole thing, though, when Desmond Llewellyn died in a car crash not long after TWINE came out.

The Daniel Craig films have not availed themselves of a Q character yet, which I hope is forthcoming, even if I also hope that the gadgets don't get too outlandish (the invisible car in Die Another Day was too hard to believe). Maybe in Skyfall; I don't know yet.

My favorite Q gadgets? I loved the exploding key ring in The Living Daylights, the wrist-activated blowgun of Moonraker, and the fountain pen filled with acid in Octopussy. And my favorite Q moment came in Licence to Kill. In that film, Q actually goes out into the field to assist 007, who has gone rogue. Now, all through Bond's career, Q has constantly complained that Bond never returns his gadgets in their original working condition. Late in the movie, though, Q is posing as a peasant sweeping a sidewalk when the bad guy drives by. Q alerts Bond via the little radio he has attached to the broomstick...and then, with his job done, he casually tosses the broom aside.

But...what about the other Q?

This Q showed up immediately on Star Trek: The Next Generation, right in the very first scene of the pilot, and he was originally depicted as a representative of a nearly omnipotent species that is deeply ambivalent toward humanity. Played with zeal every time he showed up with John de Lancie, Q put all of humanity on trial through the persons of Picard and the rest of the bridge crew. I think the character of Q went through evolution, though, as all characters do. Originally, Q was seen more as a trickster character, but then he became more of a gadfly through whom the Enterprise crew learned their deeper lessons about the universe and about life. Most of Q's episodes were highly memorable: it was Q who made the Borg aware of the Federation; it was Q who greeted Picard in the afterlife and somehow arranged for him to experience an astonishing life lesson.



I never liked Q as much when he started turning up on DS9 or Voyager, when the producers started to explore the entire 'Q Continuum' and the politics thereof, which had the unfortunate effect of turning Q into, well, another in a long series of alien races with their own concerns and whatnot. When he was by himself (for the most part), Q something unique unto himself.

A to Z: Klingons

So, let's talk for a few minutes about Klingons.

If one of the questions on Family Feud was ever "Name a fictional alien species", I have to think that Klingons have a pretty solid shot to be the number one answer. ("Let me see...Gungans!" BZZZZZZZT "And the Laramie family with a chance to steal!")

But why is this? Why are the Klingons so memorable?

The obvious first answer is in Star Trek's longevity. A thing doesn't remain a pop-culture concern for as long as Trek has without having some of its terminology enter the pop-cultural lexicon, and the Klingons were the main bad guys of the Original Series, so there's that. And more than that, a case could be made that the Klingons were the main alien species of the Original Series! More Klingons undoubtedly appeared on Star Trek TOS than Vulcans, and of the first ten Trek movies, there is exactly one in which no Klingons appear. (Wrath of Khan being the one – we see Klingon ships as part of the Kobayashi Maru test, but that's it.)

I think it's also easier to remember Klingons because they were often characterized as a group, more than as a race of specific individuals. Until Worf came along as a part of the Next Generation crew, we only saw a few Klingons at a time, and they never recurred (which was a shame – some of those early Klingons would have made great recurring characters, but recurring characters and stories just weren't the style back then). Klingons were, basically, the 'Indians' in Gene Roddenberry's space western that really wasn't much of a space western at all. It amazes me to this day that one of Roddenberry's concepts for pitching the show to the networks was "Wagon Train to the stars", a concept that fits Battlestar Galactica better, orders of magnitude better, than Trek. But the Klingons were the disposable villains who would pop up, make life difficult for Kirk and company, and then disappear again.

This continued in the movies, too. The main villain of The Search for Spock was Klingon Commander Kruge, who was played very nicely by Christopher Lloyd, and who might have been a decently memorable villain if not for the fact that he was following up Ricardo Montalban as Khan. There's another disposable Klingon bad guy in The Final Frontier -- I don't even remember his name, that's how memorable he was – and then, in The Undiscovered Country, the TOS-era crew finally engages the Klingons as more than villains of the week, but as complex individuals. How did that happen?

Well, in between Treks V and VI came TNG, which decided to deepen the canvas a bit when it came to the Klingons. They weren't boring villains of the week anymore; there was a weekly name attached to them. And with a spot in the regular cast, that meant installing a back story, which in turn meant finally delving into the nature of the Klingon society. TNG often did its best stuff in Klingon-culture related stories; instead of being the warlike goons of TOS, in TNG they were driven by honor more than drive for conquest. The Klingons of TNG came off as kind of a blend of Samurai and Vikings, if that makes sense. It was also interesting to me that as the Klingon Empire came to reach the limits it could reach without engaging in full-on war with other powers, their society turned its quest for honor in battle on itself, so for the rest of TNG and DS9, the Klingons were always engaged in a lot of violent interior politics and sometimes open warfare.

Of course, I can't write about the Klingons without also mentioning the physical change they went through. In TOS, Klingons were just human-looking people with demonic-looking eyebrows and uniforms of gray and black. In the opening scene of Trek: The Motion Picture, though, the Klingons were well and truly alien, with enormous spiny ridges up their bald heads. This change was never explained, really; I assume that the original thought was to just go ahead and use the film's large budget to re-do the Klingons in order to make them look a lot more alien, and that we were to just assume that the Klingons always did look like that and we were just supposed to accept the TOS Klingons as such.

But then, DS9 did its brilliant episode "Tribbles and Tribulations", which had Worf – looking like very much the spiny-head Klingon – having to be in the same room with the 'human' looking Klingons. When someone asks him about it, he simply says, "We do not like to talk about it." I'm sure this has been explained in some novel or some such, but I wouldn't know. (Heck, they may have explained it in Enterprise, but again, I wouldn't know.)

Anyway, long live the Klingons. Qapla'!

A to Z: Gagh!

There's an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Commander Riker takes part in an officer exchange program and goes to serve on a Klingon vessel for a time. As part of his effort to familiarize himself with Klingon food, he goes to Ten Forward and orders himself up a smorgasbord of Klingon food, all of which looks very odd. The most notable dish here is Gagh, which he later learns is "best eaten live". (When he looks askance at eating live Gagh, a Klingon japes, "Perhaps we can arrange for one of the females to breastfeed you!")



So what is Gagh, anyway? Well, the experts, Gagh is:

A Klingon delicacy of serpent worms (pronounced "gawk"). Connoisseurs of Klingon cuisine claim that gagh is best served very fresh — i.e. live.  But it is sometimes served stewed. Gagh is one of the most popular foods served aboard Klingon warships.

Apparently the chief appeal of Gagh is its unique mouthfeel as the live worms pass through your mouth and into your digestive tract to die. Awesome! (It also turns out that in Klingon, Gagh is spelled qagh, so I could have done this one under Q. I haven't yet pre-selected my Q entry for this series, so I've missed an opportunity!) But even vegans don't have to feel left out, as they can simulate Gagh thusly.

Which brings up the more interesting topic of fantasy and sci-fi food. Food is one of the best ways to convey an alien quality of any situation, which is why we're told that Klingons like to eat a dish of live worms because they like the feeling of slithery things going down their gullets. "Normal" food in science fiction? Never! There's not a whole lot of food in Star Wars, but there is "blue milk" at Luke's table on Tatooine. Jabba the Hutt likes to eat little beasties live, and so on. And Star Trek was forever giving us different alien foods, some of them live, like the eggs that the Cardassians like to eat, the ones that you crack open and see the embryo squirming about inside.

Of course, science fiction food used to be all about taking pills. You'd take a single pill and there's all your nutrition! Food would be a thing of the past in our technological future. And then you have food, real food, used as a way to suggest certain luxuries. Witness Firefly, when Shepherd Book's ability to cook with a few actual spices is welcomed warmly, and when he is able to partially guarantee passage on Serenity by giving Kaylee a single strawberry.

Fantasy food tends to be different. In fantasy, food is often where some of the magic happens. The Lord of the Rings gives us lembas, the Elven bread that can sustain a grown man for an entire day in a single bite. In the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, one of the main foods is aliantha, the berries of The Land, which provide sustenance in much the same way as lembas does. Magical foods abound, and turn out to be an outstanding way to get magic into the story without resorting to wizards and spells; the magic in food is a part of the fantasy world itself, and not a creation of the people in it. There's even food inside the computer, as TRON indicates, as the programs have to stop and drink some pure energy after escaping the Game Grid.

Guy Gavriel Kay's use of food is tied to themes of nationality, a common theme in his books. For example, in A Song for Arbonne, much is made of Cauvas Gold, a wine that is especially beloved in the land of Arbonne. And then there is George RR Martin, who provides a lot of descriptives for the foods served in A Song of Ice and Fire. There, food creates mood: when writing about highborn characters in their castles, he lovingly describes a lot of gourmet-sounding foods; on the other hand, when characters are out in the wilderness or among the 'smallfolk', the food is characterized as 'rustic', at best. So descriptive can Martin be of his food that there's a blog devoted to recreating it.

Why is food so central in storytelling? Because food is tied to so many prime emotions. Spirituality? Food is a central part of Christian ritual. Food's a part of football – just try throwing a Super Bowl party with little or no food. Food as love? There's your chocolate. Food as laughter? My beloved pie in the face. Food as horror? Well, what does Dracula need to live?

Food is also a gateway to character. Jean-Luc Picard has to have his tea (Earl Grey, hot). James Bond and his vodka martinis. When you think about it, food does an awful lot of heavy lifting in stories, doesn't it!

So next time you're watching a fantasy or SF show or reading a novel, pay attention to the food! And if you engage a story with little or no food in it, ask yourself if that world seems quite as real as others that tell us what their people are eating.

And you know...I'll bet with plenty of hot sauce, gagh would be just fine.