Explaining Fan Behavior: Why some things get devotion

Here's a question: why do some fictional worlds and properties attract incredibly devoted fans? I mean, some do, and others don't.

There are many, many reasons a fandom becomes big or assumes the form it ultimately does, including a combination of luck and visibility...although that's not quite what I asked. What is it about the properties themselves? What do they all have in common?

According to the unofficial history of Star Trek by Bob Justman, the first Star Trek convention was far from a spontaneous gathering. It was run by Gene Roddenberry himself and he rustled people in from all over. In other words, part of the reason Trek fans are so big and organized is (partially) because of talented huckster Gene Roddenberry's talent for self-promotion.

Lord of the Rings was a low seller in a niche genre that didn't even have a name yet for an entire decade, released at the same time as now-forgotten Thomas Burnett Swann's Minotaur books or Mervyn Peake... until LotR was rediscovered by the 1960s counterculture. The hippies found the story's themes of hostility to modernism, love of nature, and longing for an imaginary past were all right up their style.

Star Wars had the good luck to be a big studio distributed movie, so millions of butts were going to be in chairs to watch it no matter what. But it success is not just because of that. Part of the reason it was a big hit, a phenom we're still talking about now, was it was the right story at the right time. The Western was now passé, previously the #1 action genre and the single greatest American source of stories about ourselves and our self-concept as a country, as well as our battles of good versus evil. The entire 1970s were filled with grim, adult, director driven movies. Star Wars was a battle of good versus evil not seen since Errol Flynn stopped swashbuckling, with fairytale characters like a wizard and pirate. It was, in short, the right kind of story at the right moment.

And on a lighter note, part of the reason furry fandom is so oddly sex crazed and gay friendly, is because the first furry conventions in the early 1980s were put together by a flamboyantly gay swinger/S&M lover who actually invited just released prisoners from jail to show up! This jailhouse gay and S&M attracted others into the same scene, repulsed others that didn't care for it, and in general set the tone for years later.

Okay, okay, back to my original question: why do some fictional worlds inspire so much devotion and others don't? What do they all have in common that get people to still think about them?  After all, the hippies came and went, but Lord of the Rings is still around, and there are still kids in high schools today writing notes in Dwarf runes.

If you look at the really BIG fan groups out there, like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and the Marvel and DC Universes, you find that people are so obsessive about them because these worlds have built up enough detail that it's possible they're engrossing and "full" enough to capture the attention.

The more real a story feels, the more engaged you are. Just like significant descriptive details in a book bring a scene to life, the richer and more developed a world is, the more minutiae fans can collect like stamps, the more devoted your fans will be.

Here's a secret: hardcore fans like their world and devote so much time to it because they think it's real. 

…Okay, that's obviously not literally true, except for a tiny handful of seriously mentally ill people.

But really involving worlds and stories are set in places that make you FEEL like they're real, have verisimilitude, that the stories don't end the instant the book is closed or the movie ends. There's plenty going on to make you think about it later on, or talk about it with friends aneven have fights over nitpick details, and curiosity over some of its unexplained mysteries. This is why fictional worlds can be such an engrossing diversion. This is why people get very curious and so very passionate.

We fans do this not because we think the story is literally real, but because we like suspension of disbelief. Because when people tell us a story, we want to believe it. That's the difference between a liar and a storyteller: people are by default suspicious of liars, but want to believe a story.

This is also why adaptations can sometimes be frustrating for fans. Because we believe there is a reality behind these characters and worlds that do not vary or change. A reality that is independent of the free market, cultural, and business forces that take place in our own world.

Even disagreements and fights between fans are based on the idea characters are independent of us readers/viewers, solid and concrete. People have disagreements about whether Spider-Man would or wouldn't behave a certain way. This disagreement is only possible at all because everyone agrees there is a "correct" way for Spider-Man to act.

Okay, now, here, we've reached the first of definition of continuity:

Continuity (or canon) is just another word for verisimilitude, a consistency that makes the world feel more real, by making the world feel as if it continues beyond the boundary of the specific narrow focus of any one single story.

An individual story, by definition, have a laser pinprick focus and economy. Stories can't be "about" everything. Look at a map of Middle Earth and see how much of the place our heroes actually DIDN'T go, even in a story as sprawling as Lord of the Rings.

The purpose of continuity and consistent canon is to dispel the artifice of stories, that a world is not just a series of empty plywood "Potemkin villages" that live when tourists pass by and are yanked down just behind us when we leave.

This is why Sherlock Holmes fans are so fascinated by the tantalizing hints Sir Conan Doyle dropped about cases only mentioned in passing we never got to actually read about. Because it implies Sherlock Holmes and Watson are alive, are doing things when we're not looking. They have a reality independent of what they're doing when the "camera" is on them.

"It's just a story"

Contrary to popular belief, being a fan, even a detail oriented one, is a good thing for the same reason any hobby not pursued to the exclusion of responsibilities is a good thing: because you get out what you put in. Cool detachment eliminates the entire point of a whole story, where you want to be passionate and care about what's going on.

That's why I've always thought there's something oddly inhuman, so defeating to the entire purpose of fiction of any kind, with people who respond to certain kinds of criticisms with, "who cares, it's just a story. Consistency doesn't matter because it's all fictional in the end." It shows a kind of brutal cynicism I don't like, that whoever said it doesn't feel the world is real. It's all a put up job. If it isn't real, why get engrossed or involved?

Why care?

I don't get that argument. If you don't care, why read a story at all? Why read a series long term?

This is also why fans find continuity glitches so galling. They tatter and undermine the suspension of disbelief fiction needs and imply something doesn't have verisimilitude. They create a "trust" issue.

This is also why fans are fascinated by cross-overs. The fact that Spider-Man can swing on the rooftops of Marvel Manhattan and cross paths with Daredevil going the other way makes the Marvel Universe feel more real.

Why Do Fans Like the Obscure?

This is also why fans get tickled pink when obscure characters and minutiae show up, why Star Trek fans smile a bit when a Next Generation episode mentions the Tholians in passing, or when people are delighted to see a minor character like Stingray or D-Man in the background of an Avengers mission.

Those of us that aren't children know, but only at an intellectual level, that stories aren't real, and are artifices with a very narrow focus, that the Tholians were just created to be bad guys for one episode way back when in the old show, and Stingray was an Avenger only used in one story that needed an underwater guy, and that a good portion of super-villains, especially unpopular ones, will never be seen much again after their first story.

Mentioning obscuros again dispels that artifice we're intellectually aware is there ("this is just a story"), and reminds us, to our joy, that the world is real, that these characters are still around and doing something even when we're not looking. The Tholians are out there, somewhere, up to mischief. Stingray can be called up at any time by the Avengers when needed.

In short, the world goes from something we like to something we believe. 

And that's the difference between just liking something, and being a fan.

File-Sharing as a Culture-Preserver: the case of the FASA Star Trek Combat Simulator

From the perspective of somebody with a background in digital archiving, copyright is a squatter's right, defined by the ability to deny content to others.

The overwhelming majority of works are not Harry Potter, still sold, published, and making money. Most materials under copyright are not reprinted, not available, not distributed, with the rights no longer belonging to those responsible for its creation. But if an archivist tried to digitize it and make any of it available to their patrons without permission…wham! Infringement lawsuit.

This is a real problem because of the paucity of the public domain, which as a result of lengthy copyright durations, excludes nearly the entire history of motion pictures and music; in other words, the entire culture of the 20th Century. 

The interests of digital archivists responsible for making information and materials available, and the interests of copyright holders, are directly at odds with each other.

 

This is very strange, because computer technology has advanced to the point that information and content are infinitely reproducible via computers. To use a Star Trek metaphor (both for accuracy and to get everybody in the right mood) a computer is like a food replicator. With enough power, it can make infinite copies.

 To quote lawyer/advocate Eben Moglen, who may or may not have been a Star Trek fan:

"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? 

If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere. 

I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion."

"Copyright maximalists" who take the most extreme and controlling view of the function of copyright, try to phrase copyright as a moral issue, and make an overly simplistic comparison of copyright infringement to "stealing" a physical object, and argue that downloading is denying compensation to the creators.

 

This doesn't work because there's no 1:1 comparison between a downloaded copy and a lost sale. By that logic, a checked out library book equals a lost sale, and lending a book to a friend is a lost sale. Most of us discovered our favorite books not because we bought them outright but because someone lent them to us. In that sense, online copying serves the same function lending a book to a friend does: discovery. 

As Cory Doctorow put it: the greatest enemy of creators isn't copying, but obscurity.

The "file sharing is stealing" argument gets even stranger when, in the case of some copywritten works, it makes you ask, "stealing from who?" 

A perfect example would be the FASA Star Trek Starfleet Tactical Combat Simulator game, made under license by the game company FASA, printed between 1981 and 1989. The STCS occupies a strange niche between wargame simulation, board game, and roleplaying game, where, on a hex map, players take the role of competing starships battling each other.

These days, not only does FASA no longer exist, but it lost the license to print Star Trek materials. In other words, there is no way I could ever directly compensate the makers of the FASA Star Trek game, mostly because FASA ceased to exist. They no longer have the license and the materials are out of print. I could buy the game secondhand on ebay or find some dog-eared copy at an old game store, but in either case, FASA would receive no money for the same reason textbook publishers don't receive money for the sale of used books.

At the same time, I am very pleased to have found copies online of the FASA books and I have run the game with some friends and printed counters on a dry-erase hex grid. To put my discovery into context, keep in mind that I am not exactly this game's target audience. As someone who was not alive when the game was originally published and in its heyday, I first discovered and picked up a copy of the rule set because it was possible to do so online. 

To my great delight, there are still some people keeping the Star Trek: Space Combat Simulation Game alive, almost entirely those who remember its heyday back in the 1980s. For instance, visit this website for the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator Database and Archive. The STCS archive explains its purpose like this:

Think of the STSTCSOLD&A as a nature preserve, designed to harbor a vanishing species of pencil and paper amusement. In a world now dominated by advanced computer games, the STSTCS is a beloved relic, akin to classic automobiles or vintage wine. In creating the OLD&A I am doing something similar to restoring a car, combining new parts with an old chassis, repainting the body panels and polishing the glass. As with most car restoration, the entire OLD&A project is a labour of affection, done solely for the sheer satisfaction of the thing. With my STSTCS game books slowly falling into shreds, I hope to preserve the essence of the STSTCS in a medium that cannot be dulled, dimmed, smudged, ripped, or otherwise folded and spindled by time. I also hope to bring a new generation of Trek fans into the Old World of gaming where mental activity, not processor speed, powers the action.

When copywritten material is totally lost, you're not just losing the material, but the culture around that material begins to disappear. Preserving materials is like preserving a culture. Mystery Science Theater 3000 can't obtain the rights to reprint some of the movies they licensed to spoof, so a longstanding piece of advice by Mike Nelson to his fans is to "keep on circulating the tapes." It's copyright infringement, sure, but it keeps a huge chunk of a fandom alive and saved from total oblivion. There are hundreds of episodes of Doctor Who that were thoughtlessly erased by accident by the BBC in the 1960s, which are only preserved now because fans saw fit to audio record the episodes as they watched.

Despite all that, the STCS Archive keeps away the one thing that really would play a role in new players rediscovering the game, which allowed a person not present at its heyday to get involved and become an active participant in the community.

Sadly, the one item most fans want most is the one item I cannot provide. At least half of all the letters I get are from relatively new and/or returning Trek fans who are just finding out about the game, or are rediscovering the game after a long time away from it. In both cases, people are desperate to try and get their hands on the game rules themselves, either because they never owned a copy of the game or because they were foolish enough to get rid of the game at some point in the past. While I would love nothing more than to provide each and every fan with a verbatim transcript of the entire STSTCS rules book, it came to my attention in 2001 that a third party purchased the rights to the rule system that the STSTCS is based upon. This third party is jealously guarding these rules and has already contacted other, older STSTCS sites in an effort to get them to take down any and all portions of the rules that have been posted on the web. So far nobody has been hauled into court, but I don't want to be a trendsetter in this regard so I am steering clear of this known legal iceberg.

That was written, by the way, in 2001, when FASA stopped printing and started licensing their intellectual properties (including famous pen and paper RPGs like Shadowrun). Since then, the company in question, which incidentally did not even create the rules and game system itself, has done absolutely nothing with the property. Does anyone still doubt me when I say copyright is at times a squatter's right?

This strategy is even more shortsighted when one considers that the future of any business model in the digital age is to directly create a personal relationship with fans, communicate with them, and give them a reason to buy. What possible reason could there be to get litigious with those who might be your greatest customers?

This is a shame, because if the FASA game was reprinted I would absolutely pay real money to buy a copy now that I know it exists. For one thing, rules are easier to consult at a gaming table if they're in printed book form, and it would be great to have "official" playtested game statistics to represent Next Generation and later era starships (due to the timeframe of FASA, only the original series is really well represented and detailed). Also, there haven't been any new FASA miniatures made since the 1980s, something people will pay for because there is a real scarcity, not an artificial one.


Because I got my hands on STCS files, a customer now exists in me (and my friends) that didn't exist before, and I am proud to talk about and promote the STCS.  

What does all of this mean for digital archivists and information science professionals? Only good things, if they understand their changing role and required skill set. Institutions, like academic libraries and historical databases, should stop thinking about building their "collections," considering the spread apart, decentralized nature of modern content on the internet, and instead emphasize the reference skills of their own IS professionals to get patrons in touch with what they want, wherever it is and wherever it can be found.

The end result of all this is that file-sharing can play a role in preserving culture from oblivion, and expose new audiences much more thoroughly than inflexible squatting can. Somewhere out there, the teenage or 20-something Star Trek fan who will end up becoming the biggest fan and ultimately paying customer for the FASA STCS is only a click away from having his mind blown.

The Trill would make great Star Trek bad guys

I always thought it was a mistake to make the Vulcans the heavies in Enterprise. The writers did it, I suspect, for the worst possible reason: rationalism is very threatening to a lot of people.

By that same token, you know one Star Trek race I suspect is either secretly evil and has potential to be a great bad guy race...or at the absolute least, is a concept with a real dark underside the series hasn't really explored yet?

The Trill.

Hear me out, here.

What was your first, visceral, initial reaction on hearing about the joined Trill race? Isn't the idea of surrendering a portion of your personality, memories and will to an immortal superintelligent parasite that lives inside of you, which needs you to get around, a little…well, creepy? We're told over and over by main characters like Dax and others about how being home to a symbiote is an honor over which there's a lot of competition, but isn't it entirely possible the initial, visceral reaction is correct?

Let me put it another way. Would you want to be a Trill host?

Trill society, as we discovered in the Deep Space Nine episode "Equilibrium," is fundamentally based on a lie, and a lie that as yet, hasn't been exposed. According to the Symbiosis Commission, only one in a thousand humanoid Trills is suitable for joining, and they're usually chosen from that race's overachievers and geniuses. Yet the truth, as discovered in "Equilibrium," is that over 50% of the humanoid Trill could work as hosts. In fact, in a pinch, when the Dax symbiote was near death, the eminently unsuitable Ezri, as the only humanoid Trill nearby, had to become joined after a 15 minute lecture by a non-Trill doctor.

What's more, Trill history suggests a furtive secretiveness that could suggest a malevolent purpose - or at the very least, they're not exactly totally honest with their allies. The Trill had contact with and knowledge of the Federation, yet the Federation had absolutely no idea the Trill were a joined race at all until Beverly Crusher had to save Odan, the first Trill we ever saw (that we know of) in "The Host."

Consider this: Dax was alive and kicking all throughout the history of the Federation, and in one funny moment  she even implied she had sex with Doctor McCoy when he was a med school student. "Well, he certainly had hands like a surgeon…" 

Curzon Dax, at one point, was even the Federation ambassador to the Klingons.

Yet, the fact the Trill had a unique symbiotic relationship was totally unknown to a genius medical researcher like Beverly Crusher, who had a history of working with aliens. Odan himself in "The Host" only revealed it in a moment of absolute desperation when he was about to die. He didn't tell the Enterprise crew about it, and kept the matter a secret even though being a Trill was the explanation for a life-threatening condition (he couldn't be transported). In short, Odan kept being a Trill a secret for some unknown reason.

All this doesn't mean the Trill are evil, it does mean though, that the Trill have not entirely been forthcoming and honest all the time.

It may be possible we have encountered the Trill before TNG's "The Host." There was one eerie episode that stood out from the entire first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where evil insectoid, superintelligent worms able to bond with humanoids tried to take over Starfleet Command in secret.

This episode was all the more shocking because its scary resolution implied a follow-up that just never happened. We never got an explanation for who the parasites were, their ultimate goals, and what happened to them.

(In real life, this is because the original concept for the Borg were as insectoid hive-minders. Because the Borg became cybernetic for budget reasons, this original intro was unfortunately orphaned and forgotten.)

One of my favorite explanations for the insectoid parasites was they were advanced scouts for the Dominion.

Is it possible the possession aliens from "Conspiracy" were actually a version of Trill symbiotes?

Granted, the Puppet Master aliens are very different from the Trill, but then again the Trill have subraces. For instance, some die when beamed up and down, whereas Jadzia never had a problem.

The similarities between the Trill and the Conspiracy-aliens are numerous enough even non-Canon novels have mentioned this.

By the way, I did my best to avoid mentioning some of the key divergences between "The Host" Trill and DS9 Trill, because it was obvious in the TNG episode they were still trying to iron out the kinks of what the Trill are, including something that might be the strongest case for my "Trill are evil" argument: in "The Host," the Odan symbiont is the only thing responsible for the personality of the final being.

(This cool/rare image, by the way, is an early makeup test of Terry Farrell in "The Host" type TNG Trill makeup.)

Bear in mind I'm not saying all Trill are evil infiltrators or that Jadzia Dax was a sleeper agent or anything like that. I am saying as a whole, there's something kind of malevolent about the concept of the Trill that would lend themselves to being natural bad guys, and there is also a feeling we've never gotten the whole story.

And look at it this way: a future project that uses the Trills in a big way as heavies would be the greatest gift ever given to convention cosplay girls, who love the heck out of the Trill spot body makeup. 

Star Trek aliens I'd like to see more of

As a result of the fact Star Trek is a television show, a low information density medium, we often end up not learning much about any of the alien races and their culture. Sure, the Klingons got their "Heart of Glory," where we learned exactly how they thought, how they looked at the world and behaved, but there are many other races that didn't receive that kind of characterization or development. For instance, despite their regular and persistent use, I don't think the Romulans have ever received their "Heart of Glory." This, despite the fact they have been a part of the Star Trek universe from the beginning (they've actually been around slightly longer than the Klingons!) and were the main villains of two movies.


1. Deltans


It's easy to overlook the Deltans, because they never made any appearances beyond their initial one. For one thing, the idea was modified and became the Betazoids for TNG. Second, they are associated with "The Motion Picture," a very unpopular part of Trek lore.

But the Deltans are interesting and shouldn't be discarded. For one thing, they are a culture that considers humans to be "sexually immature." What exactly does this mean? What would a "sexually mature" society, one that has "grown up" about sex, actually be like?

Consider: there are a ton of euphemisms in our language for sex and sexual body parts (penises, breasts), and also for death. This isn't a coincidence, since cultures always create a myriad of terms to not directly discuss something they're not comfortable with.

As fundamentally sensual beings, the Deltans were actually very different from Betazoids. For one thing, according to the Gene Roddenberry novelization, Kirk always periodically imagined Ilia naked uncontrollably, for instance. No wonder they had to take a vow of celibacy!



2. Zakdorn



We first see the Zakdorn in "Peak Performance," and we learn almost everything we know about them from that episode: they're considered the greatest natural tactical minds in the universe, yet they haven't been in an actual combat for a very long time, because their reputation prevents possible aggressors from attacking them.

Mr. Worf contemptuously said, "If it isn't tested, their reputation is meaningless." Perhaps Worf is right, but I would have liked to see.

It's hard to say what the Zakdorn are actually like, or what a "garden variety" Zakdorn temperment is, as we've only really seen two: one was the swishy, excitable, arrogant Kolrami from "Peak Performance," and the other was a completely heterosexual junkyard owner in "Unification" that seemed like he was perpetually on Valium. Kolrami was able to defeat Data at a game like Stratagema because there were only a limited number of moves possible and Kolrami could antipate them all...however, when Data redefined his objective (to just fight to a draw) the game continued perpetually because Kolrami couldn't figure out his opponent's intentions.

This seems to be the way to defeat the Zakdorn, despite their very scary tactical edge: their weakness isn't so much that they are startled by unexpected tactics, which doesn't seem like a problem they'd have, but rather, their ability to out-think enemies comes from understanding their motives. If you can "fake out" a Zakdorn, or make them think you want something other than what you really want, you could probably out-think them.

One possible opportunity to use the Zakdorn emerged during Deep Space Nine: what if the Zakdorn, like the Breen and Cardassians, defected to become members of the Dominion? Now that would have been terrifying, to have the Dominion charging into battle led by the greatest strategic minds. For that matter, where were the Zakdorn, anyway? You'd imagine the Federation would have asked for their help in the greatest military problem in Federation history.

One thing I loved about Deep Space Nine was the feeling that during the Dominion War, there was a feeling a million things were going on at the same time. For the first time, the Trek universe acquired scope. This was in contrast to Voyager, where I never really believed in the Delta Quadrant; it was like the space Voyager passed through ceased to exist after they left!

One of the more impressive opportunities not pursued was the conquest of Betazed. I mean, here's a famous planet known for being sensualist and sexy, and they've been taken over by a group as ruthless as the Dominion. Surely there's a story there...



3. Tholians


The Tholians, like the Breen, were mentioned far more than they actually appeared. Which is a shame, because they're a fascinating opportunity, a "villain" race with a pedigree going back to the Original Series. This is extremely rare, because the overwhelming number of recurring alien races the original Trek gave us were usually pretty ridiculous looking, to the point where later incarnations of Trek went out of their way to not use or even mention them.

Take the Andorians, for instance. The writers of TNG deliberately stated in no uncertain terms on a number of occasions that there were no Andorians on the Galaxy-class Enterprise. There was even an interview with a head writer on TNG, when asked if any Andorians would show up on TNG, "Sorry, we don't do antennae on this show." I certainly don't mourn the loss of the Andorians, and in fact I'm a little baffled by their use in Enterprise. No matter how much goodwill one has towards the original series, no matter how much fondness or admiration, it will not change the fact that the Andorians look absolutely silly. A lesson on the dangers of nostalgia that many members of other fandoms have yet to learn, but I digress.

As for the Tholians, not only did they have a great look (or at least they were suggested to look really strange), they were sincerely menacing and mysterious, and had the good luck to appear in one of the most memorable episodes of the original series. The Tholians are, further, something very, very rare in Star Trek: an alien race that truly is alien. At times it seems that the "alien races" are just substitute human cultures. One critique of the Star Trek universe is, like the universes of Foundation or Dune, it could be rewritten so that all the alien races are different human civilizations spread across the universe, and very little of the Trek universe would have to be changed.

Often, real-world human cultures were used as the basis for Star Trek aliens: the Klingons are equal parts Japanese and Norse, and the Ferengi are even explicitly compared to 19th Century Yankee traders. While the Romulans derive their names from Rome, their culture is more like the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th Century, a world ruled in equal parts by the military and the secret police.

The exception are the Borg, who have a radically different basis that is only possible by science fiction, who are much more what alien races are like in written, serious science fiction.

One of my favorite ideas for the Tholians came from Peter David's New Frontier Trek novels. The Tholians experience time in a nonlinear fashion, radically different from other species. For instance, when the Tholians attack a ship without obvious provocation, it may be not be because of something they have done, but something that they are going to do in the future.

Incidentally, I always thought the "updated" makeup designs in Enterprise looked silly. The CGI "Jurassic Park" Gorn, for instance, looked especially laughable. But in the case of Tholians, they was nothing short of spectacular. My reaction was "oh, so that's what they looked like, all along!"


4. Nausicaans

The Nausicaans made quite an impression when they showed up in "Tapestry" as the silent, brooding bruisers that stabbed Picard from the back and caused him to need his artificial heart. They were something that few Trek villains often become: truly intimidating, able to arouse fear. It would be fascinating to see them again. It was often mentioned in later series that the Nausicaans were used as hired thugs, bodyguards and muscle for criminal operations, a role that somehow suits them perfectly.

In fact, it's really very strange we haven't seen these guys much, considering how powerful their debut was, and how hard-up TNG was for new enemies. All but one of their appearances (just let me get to that) featured the same Nausicaan hardcore mystique: my personal favorite was the scene in Quark's bar where the Nausicaans amused themselves by throwing darts at the chest of one of their own (who it should be said, took it like a champ)!

Yes, I am aware there was an episode of Enterprise that featured the Nausicaans, but like everything Enterprise, it took the potential of these new villains and squandered it. For one thing, they colored the Nausicaans pink and made them much smaller! Even the makeup was different; they looked much more like ridiculous parrotmen.


5. Bynars


What was really amazing was, the Bynars were pushed forward in a lot of early TNG promotional material as one of the new aliens created for the series, along with the Betazoids and Ferengi.

This makes their absence all the more puzzling from every episode except their debut. I mean, they couldn't just have a few Bynar pairs running around in a toolbelt fixing things in corridor shots, on starbases or ships? They couldn't put a couple Bynars in a Federation Council chamber or diplomacy room? (Yes, I'm aware it was never technically stated the Bynars were Federation members, but still.)

The reason I like the Bynars is because they have a truly alien culture and biology as opposed to just being Japanese Samurai or Communists in outer space. They view all information in terms of 0 or 1. All of them are linked to a massive computer network on their planet, and they live as identical pairs that complete each other's sentences, and even their names are in binary code. Surely something can be done with a race that unique.

Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: Star Trek

As this is a pop culture and adventure fiction blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the biggest pop culture and adventure fiction event of summer 2009, the STAR TREK movie.

The long and the short of it was that it was pretty darn good. For J.J. Abrams and his writing staff to devote time and effort to setting this movie up as an "alternate timeline" with an actual relationship to traditional Star Trek (as opposed to just a cold reset-button pushing) was a pretty classy decision that respected Trek. I didn't realize this at the time, obviously, but I later read that they even put an effort to keep the stardates in this film consistent with the stardates in the original series. What's more, the movie had a sense of humor and the characters were recognizably themselves...everyone felt "on."

My favorite character from the series, Dr. McCoy, was played with a snap and teeth by Karl Urban, who plays him as a cynical, sarcastic guy and easily the most entertaining member of the crew. Chris Pine does a bang-up job as a Captain Kirk, though I always thought Shatner was a campy, hammy actor, sort of like Adam West only without the comic timing, so he had pretty small shoes to fill there.

In the wake of all the branched-off Trek series like Enterprise and Voyager that just exhausted everyone, it was easy to forget exactly what it was that made Star Trek so great in the first place: the characters. People like the characters and root for them. I've often wondered why Star Trek had such a downright unreally huge set of fans, when other shows from its era (even science fiction shows) have mostly been forgotten (for instance, who today watches, or even remembers, the Ron Ely Tarzan, which premiered the same evening that Trek did?). I think part of it had to have been the great chemistry the actors had, the friendship and warmth and sense of cameraderie. Experiencing this sort of feeling, even vicariously, can be very, very powerful to lots of young people. As Fry put it in FUTURAMA, "Growing up, I didn't have any friends, but STAR TREK made me feel like I did."

Roger Ebert wrote a great review of Star Trek Nemesis where he wrote about how just plain tired all this stuff had gotten. One example he used was the damn forcefield around the Enterprise, where every battle seemed to involve someone counting down the percentage ("shields at 30%!") and how they had to reroute power from the sides to the forward deflector shields or whatever the hell. In this movie, Star Trek is actually exciting: space battles cause explosions and fireball death, and instead of just shaking the camera, cracks form in the metal of the ship itself. Even Warp Speed feels new: the jump effect, in addition to the "thump" sound, actually made the standard jump visually intriguing for the first time. One of my personal favorite effects, and a deliberate throwback to the original series, was the scale-placement of a tiny USS Enterprise near huge, monstrous spaceships and other objects to emphasize the Enterprise's comparative smallness.

The movie was obviously written by a fan. They remembered Sulu was a skilled fencer with a love of swashbuckling, and give him a great sword to boot. They remember that Christopher Pike was the first Enterprise Captain, or Uhura's little silver earring that she wore as a part of her communications duties. A red-shirted crewman gets vaporized as a part of the landing party. They even have a few gags based on Kirk's middle name being Tiberius (a gift given by the Animated Series, incidentally, but more on that later).

It was great they had Uhura as a competent, smart character that actually plays a role in the story as opposed to being a glorified secretary.

The one casting choice that disappointed me was the one I was the most excited about in the beginning, namely Zachary Quinto (Sylar!) as Spock. I didn't realize it until Leonard Nimoy himself showed up, but Quinto lacks Spock's deep voice that lent gravitas to the character, as well as Nimoy's oddball creepiness that made him a natural for unsolved mystery show host duties. Instead of the contained rage that made Nimoy so successful, Quinto more openly expressed emotion to the point where Spock felt more uptight than self-controlled. Worse, except for one great scene at the beginning, Spock just didn't feel all that alienated and lonely: whereas he often stood apart from the Enterprise's mostly human crew if not actively resented (have a look at at "The Galileo Seven"), here Spock is a mostly respected mentor-figure.

The other actor I didn't much care for was Simon Pegg. While the very skilled Karl Urban made a real attempt to duplicate McCoy faithfully, and all the other characters from Pine to Quinto made an attempt to play their characters consistently with their previous characterizations, Simon Pegg went off in a totally different direction that was so "movie comic relief" that he didn't feel like Scotty at all.

The narrative conceit of time travel creating a new timeline felt hoary and overdone, but at least it energized the series with a real sense anything could happen. The movie was truly unpredictable. The one character I fingered as a dead man walking was Christopher Pike...and astonishingly, he actually lives to the end. Christopher Pike lived and Vulcan was destroyed, which is the exact reverse of what I expected would happen.

(I usually try to keep these spoiler-free, but I'm doing this review late so everybody that has an interest in seeing it has probably seen it by now.)

One of the great rules of writing tie-in novels was that you couldn't actually destroy anything important. The decision to blow up Vulcan midway through the film was shocking, because I thought the planet wasn't in danger.

All in all, STAR TREK reminded me of why I like this stuff in the first place. It actually got me scrambling to watch DVDs and list my favorite Trek moments.


GREATEST STAR TREK MOMENTS

1. "Haven"

Part of the reason the Troi-Riker relationship never went anywhere was because how little chemistry there was between Marina Sirtis and John Frakes. Don't get me wrong, both of them are skilled actors, but chemistry requires something unpredictable that those two just didn't have.

The reason I liked Haven was not because of the one thing about it that everyone remembers, namely the introduction of Lwaxana Troi. Lots of people found her annoying. I feel the same way, but that actually works for the character: she reminds me of some of my own relatives. The element of Haven I thought that worked the most was the story involving Wyatt teleporting over to the ship containing the last of the Tarellians, who were all dying of an infectious plague, in the hopes of curing them. I thought it was an extremely powerful ending, but more than that, has greater than normal potential for sequels. What happened to Wyatt and the Tarellians? Did he cure them? Did he die with them? What?

2. The Animated Series

What I always found surprising was that the Animated Series wasn't considered canon over at Paramount. Downright shocking, even, because it was a denial of reality: the animated series introduced valuable pieces of information that have been gospel as it gets ever since, from Spock's childhood (the city he grew up in has been mentioned frequently, as has Spock's pet giant teddy bear) to Robert T. April, to the idea that Tiberius was James Kirk's middle name.

The lack of canonicity of the Animated Series was in general, part of the overall shabby treatment that incarnation of Trek received. It was totally ignored and not even mentioned once, even in passing, in the 25th Anniversary Special and the 30th Anniversary celebration. Leonard Nimoy doesn't even mention it in I AM SPOCK. I have yet to read a single Trek behind-the-scenes book that had the decency to talk to Lou Scheimer about his contributions to the Star Trek legend. In general, the overall narrative among Star Trek fans is that the seventies was a "lost decade" where Trek only had syndicated reruns, conventions and no new material to slake their thirst for things Trek. An astonishing attitude, considering an entire series was produced in that era.

This view of Trek history, nothing more than chauvanism to a "mere cartoon," becomes even more startling when you consider the original cast played their original roles, the series was made under Gene Roddenberry's watch, and many scripts were written by original series writers like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana (and even science fiction great Larry Niven). All of them were writing and working at the best of their ability and produced brassy, thick science fiction of a kind not seen since the show's second season. What's more, the animated series featured Trek standbys like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, and the Guardian of Forever. The animated series obsessively duplicated the details of the bridge and the look of the ship, and created something near-identical to its visual look. For heaven's sake, this show was even set during the original 5-year mission. If this stuff isn't canon, then nothing is.

In some ways, this series is something of an improvement over the original Trek. For one thing, animation has an infinite special effects budget, and this series showed it: with monsters like the slug creatures that thought the Enterprise crew were pets, to the winged snake-god Kukulkan who looks like an airbrushed van design mixed with a peyote-hallucination (only in the seventies!) and other winged, fanged things that fly and slither on all-water planets and hostile volcanic ones. The episode set on the living, corpuscle-filled organic spaceship made the wobbly sand-filled sets of the original even more embarassing. I have no idea why the series is ignored: animation has a real ability to bring Star Trek to life in a way even live action can't.


3. My brother IRL-Trolls Wil Wheaton

According to the way he tells the story, around the early to mid nineties back when the family still lived in New York, my brother was taking a cab down Lexington Avenue. Because the traffic was intense, the car stopped frequently, and once stopped beside a couple movie theaters. Out of one of them, my brother saw Wil Wheaton, Wesley Crusher, the most hated character in the history of Star Trek, emerge from a movie theater with his date.

My brother unrolled the windows and cried, "Hey, Wil Wheaton!"

The little dweeb turned around and grinned, thrilled to be recognized, especially in front of a date.

To which my brother shortly after shouted "...you fucking putz!"



4. Maurishka Taliaferro

Maurishka Taliaferro, credited on-screen as Maurishka, may be one of the most historically significant guest-stars in Trek history. Maurishka was an exotic and successful model that was a huge fan of the series, who used her clout to get herself a role on the show itself, the relatively unmemorable Yeoman Zahra. What was even more amazing is, this was all the way back in Operation: Annihilate, the last episode of the very first season!

Maurishka was the first celebrity to use their clout to get a cameo role on Star Trek, a category that would later include Mick Fleetwood, Whoopi Goldberg, the Rock, and Tyler Perry.


5. Della van Hise's KILLING TIME

It's no secret that lots of the writers of the first wave of Star Trek novels got their start as writers of homoerotic slashfic. In fact, it's actually pretty amazing, since the writers of the series were overwhelmingly female. In fact, the term "Trekkie" originally started with writers of slash, a variation on "groupie." This, incidentally, is why many male fans prefer the more masculine "Trekker."

What was even most astonishing is that the first draft of Della van Hiise's manuscript was accidentally published, which was not only unintentionally, hilariously amateur in craft, but also sported tons of slash elements in an actual, mainstream novel: the warmth of Kirk and Spock's fingers as they mind-meld, and the stated idea that Kirk was Spock's true love. Creepy and hilarious, it is definitely one of the top Trek moments.



6. "Who Watches the Watchers?"

One theme of Trek that I always responded to was the idea that religion and superstition was pretty much flim-flam holding mankind's potential back. Trek operated under the humanistic view: mankind isn't perfect but it's the best we've got and we have nearly limitless potential. This view was articulated over and over, but never so explicitly as in "Who Watches the Watchers," a TNG episode that was, in its way, far more shocking than even the "queer" episode with the genderless aliens.

This is the one where a Starfleet observation post is discovered by Bronze-Age aliens who believe Picard is an omnipotent god and turn to worship him. Picard shows them the error of their ways. There was even a moment where an anthropologist encouraged Picard to abandon the Mintakans to their rediscovery of religion. Picard's eloquent response?

"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"

Science Fiction Greats: David Gerrold

I find it hard to believe that one man could create both the loveable tribbles AND the Chthorr, who are nothing short of the stuff of nightmares.

I suppose at this point I'll have to give a shout-out to my bud Paul Chapman, currently in Tarpon Springs, Florida, who got me into David Gerrold out of Paul's interest in the WAR AGAINST THE CHTHORR novels. Sure, I read THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF before, and I knew who the guy was, but I wasn't a fan of his until the Chthorr books.

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF is in the category of unusual time travel stories along with Julian May's THE GOLDEN TORC. I've always enjoyed unusual takes on time travel, and this one posits a fascinating idea: eventually a guy travels through time enough to the point where he "folds himself," and multiple variations of himself exist through time.

It's worth noting that THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF was the direct inspiration for Roger Stern's "resurrection" of Kang the Conqueror (and Immortus). Stern refused to use any of the usual cheeseball techniques for bringing master villains to life, namely robots and clones, and instead borrowed a page from Gerrold: as a result of Kang's time travel escapades, there are dozens of different "variant" Kangs in existence, ruling different branches of the timestream. Thus, Kang really did die in the Old West (or at least that particular variant Kang did).

The CHTORR books have a particularly brainbending and terrifying idea behind them. It is a book series about alien invasion, particularly by formidable worm monsters called Chthorr, but the twist is that the invasion is ecological in nature, an entire biosphere attempting to replace earth life. Chthorr is a world where life is more hostile and lethally progressed evolutionarily speaking, and gradually parts of earth become more like the Chthorr homeworld, including its nasty flora and fauna that outperform our comparatively milder earth life with their toxic, polluting and carnivorous adaptations.

With the Chtorr worms, the question of what qualifies as sentience rears its head, a common science fiction theme also explored in H. Beam Piper's LITTLE FUZZY. One of the worst legacies of science fiction's early years is the tendency to anthropomorphize aliens, particularly in how they think. And, well, not to give any spoilers here, but the Chtorr worms don't think like humans, more like gods. They easily take their role as one of the most fascinating alien races in science fiction, along with Arthur C. Clarke's Overlords, Larry Niven's Puppeteers and Kzinti, and Alan Dean Foster's Thranx.

David Gerrold is best known for "The Trouble With Tribbles," but the one Star Trek script of his that I would most like to see, is one that was ultimately never made: "Blood and Fire," which was supposed to be in the Next Generation's first season. It dealt with the one topic that was taboo even for Trek: homosexuality, and featured an AIDS analogue, bloodworms, a disease so vile Starfleet orders are to kill patients infected with them. Gerrold himself is one of the few openly homosexual science fiction writers. "Blood and Fire" dealt with the way the treatment of fearful diseases creates a kind of anxious, ruthless inhumanity that lets us ignore suffering, which has always been a favorite topic of mine.

And the guy's still writing, too: I for one would love to see the next book in the Chtorr series. At least when it comes out, which at this rate sounds like sometime next century.

Seven of Nine is responsible for Obama!

I was just thinking about this the other day: professional superbabe Jeri Ryan is responsible for the candidacy of my good buddy Barry.

Jeri Ryan filed divorce papers from her husband, Senator Jack Ryan. Part of the reasons she gave for wanting a divorce was how creeped out she was that her hubby dragged her to a swinger's club, where according to her divorce papers, Jack Ryan wanted her to have sex with him in public, and the place had plenty of whips and torture devices along the wall. During the campaign, the divorce papers came to light, causing the incumbent Senator to drop out.

It should be remembered that Jeri's husband's re-election was, basically, a sure thing. He was a well-liked incumbent, and he was running against some nobody named Barack Obama.

Who did the GOP decide to run instead? The craziest man in America, ALAN "AWESOME" KEYES, that's who! The guy that was in the GOP primary something like five times without winning a single state. Alan "No Chance" Keyes.

Of course Obama won!

Barry Obama is nothing short of the luckiest man in world history. Running against Alan Keyes is like being GIVEN a Senate seat.

Here's something else that's interesting: Republicans in general have to answer to a base of religious, family-values types. Sex scandals alienate this base, and finish GOP candidates, which is not often true for Democrats. If Bill Clinton had been a Republican, Monica Lewinsky would have finished him.

Maybe that's no longer true, though. After all the gay sex scandals (Foley, Craig, et. al.) last year when the College Young Republican chief that seduced several students, you could hear a sigh of relief from Republicans everywhere. "A straight sex scandal? Oh, thank God!"