Canon and History in the STAR TREK Universe

05 April 2063: Getting closer all the time....
(SOURCE: https://wall.alphacoders.com/big.php?i=498337]

One of the tasks with which any historian must grapple in constructing a narrative of the past is determination what source materials are available and how reliable are the facts they provide. Many different factors must be considered, including the proximity of the source to the event, whether it constitutes a “primary source” providing contemporary first-hand knowledge unfaded by the passage of time and unmediated by subsequent accounts and influences, or, alternatively, whether the evidence is to be considered “secondary,” providing a more distant perspective based on assessment of such primary sources. In both cases – primary as well as secondary – one must consider in what ways the recording of the account may have been motivated by an agenda – unconscious or acknowledged – which determined inclusion or emphasis of certain facts and deemphasis or even exclusion of other facts which may, objectively, be critical in creating an accurate reconstruction of the events as they happened.

The Noble Lineage of Ships Named Enterprise

I thought about naming this post “Ring Around the Starship,” because that’s kind of where this most recent obsessio– – er, project – began….

Genesis of this Project

Around the beginning of May, while browsing the Internet I came upon this intriguing product for sale:

Sold on Etsy, by “Blue Fire Engraving,” for $35
[at the time of this writing [LINK]). 

Sold on Etsy, by “Blue Fire Engraving,” for $35 [at the time of this writing [LINK]). I considered purchasing it but hesitated, not just because of the price for another piece of wall art my wife would probably not let me hang in the “public” parts of the house but also because I immediately perceived there to be at least one glaring omission. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), a “ships wall” is depicted as part of the recreation deck of the newly refitted U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701. Among a series of ships on that wall was a memorable ship which is absent from the plaque. A quick Internet search confirmed my memory via the article, “Enterprise Lineages on Display,” at the web site Ex Astris Scientia [LINK]. Five pictures depict in sequence:

• A sailing ship.
• An aircraft carrier “of the World War II era.”
• The U.S. Space Shuttle.
• A ship sporting a long central hull with two large rings near the stern, identified in the article as the “XCV 330 … actually based on an early design by Matt Jefferies that could have become the Enterprise NCC-1701.”
• The pre-refit Constitution class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701.

Star Trek: Vanguard – and a lot of other stuff

Periodically, I return to obsessions I thought I left far in my past. I have been a fan of Star Trek since soon after the original series went off the air and into syndication. Born at the end of 1961, I think I was just barely too young to get caught up in it during the original airings, which began in September 1966 and ended in June 1969. I would therefore have been four years old when it debuted and seven when it went off. Moreover, my obsession with space really began with the Apollo 11 moon landing on 20 July 1969 – ironically within weeks of Star Trek being cancelled. Just as I do remember flashes of earlier manned space missions (most clearly, Christmas Eve 1968, popping firecrackers with my older cousins outside my grandmother’s house, my uncle commenting that there were astronauts circling the moon right then – Apollo 8), so do I recall flashes of earlier Star Trek episodes on TV, but not clearly enough to know what episodes they might have been.

Star Wars, Episode [IV/VII]: [A New Hope/The Force Awakens] ([1977/2015])

Directed by [George Lucas/J. J. Abrams]

Perhaps Episode VII should have been named The Same Old Hope…. While there are admittedly a couple of stretches in the parallel, by and large this adaptation from Ross Douthat’s piece in the New York Times online [LINK] is dead on:

You’ve got an orphaned Force adept unaware of [his/her] powers living on a desert planet near an old man played by a famous British actor who probably holds secrets to [his/her] past; [he/she] then meets up with a droid carrying secret plans that its [Rebel/Resistance] owner hid inside it just before [he/she] was captured and tortured by [the Empire/the First Order]. You’ve got teams of stormtroopers scouring said planet in search of those plans, killing innocents along the way. You’ve got an evil general who wants to rely on a planet-destroying superweapon instead of the Force and who’s in a rivalry with a mysterious cloaked figure for the trust of a strange deformed [Emperor/Supreme Leader]. You’ve got the stop at a cantina-style watering hole filled with smugglers and crooks. You’ve got the destruction of [a] planet(s) crucial to the [Rebel/Resistance] effort midway through the movie, and then you’ve got the threatened destruction of a [Rebel/Resistance] base on a verdant planet by the same superweapon, which can only be averted by an X-Wing attack on a single weak point. You’ve got a confrontation between the cloaked figure (actually, decloaked by this point in the story) and an older, wiser force for good who knew him intimately before he fell, which ends with the older wiser figure being killed while our young hero[ine] looks on in horror. And then you’ve got the X-Wing attack itself, which succeeds in blowing up the entire enemy super-base literally seconds before the superweapon is scheduled to fire on the base where [Princess/General] Leia and a group of [Rebel/Resistance] leaders are watching the attack unfold.

To be fair, I did enjoy it, but there was little new here. Just the original film recycled for a new generation, with some critical elements retooled to the sensibilities of said new generation. Maybe that’s what was needed. Perhaps most importantly, given the misbegotten mess that Lucas himself made of the film franchise, this first post-Lucas offering did look and feel a lot more like “real” Star Wars than the “prequels” that came between. Hopefully with that being accomplished, Episode VII may serve as a springboard for Episodes VIII ff. to actually add something to the mythos.

Cheers, and Thanks for reading!

Star Trek Continues (2013 ff.)

Executive Produced by Vic Mignogna

I’ve been on a bit of a Star Trek kick, first inspired by my picking up the excellent Autobiography of James T. Kirk [LINK] but subsequently energized by my chance discovery a couple of weeks ago, of this tour de force.

I knew in kind of a vague way that there were various amateur fan-productions of Star Trek series available on-line. I avoided them. But then, a blog I follow occasionally through Facebook (American Catholic [LINK]) took notice of the latest episode. On a lark, I followed the link and watched the first few minutes of that newest offering – and was blown away! I immediately shared the episode, appending the exuberant comment, “This is GREAT ... Episode 05! ... I think I just found a new way to waste time -- I've not seen 01-04! ‪#‎BetterthanAbrams.”

The Autobiography of James T. Kirk (2015)

“Edited by” David A. Goodman

I will lead with the most important point: This is indeed the first-person narrative of the life  of the original series James T. Kirk, not the alternate-timeline doppelganger that is featured in the newer movies.

That having been established, this is an enjoyable book. It’s not great, but quite interesting. It’s not really a fleshed-out faux “autobiography.” It might better be termed “memoirs.” It’s constructed as a series of short vignettes, most of them several pages long but organized into about a dozen chapters (unnamed) spanning the 23^rd-c. lifetime of James Tiberius Kirk, most famous as the captain of the Starship Enterprise. There is a great deal of overlap with episodes of the original Star Trek television series and the subsequent motion pictures, but a great deal of “new” material on Kirk’s youth and linking the events chronicled in the TV/movie canon. What I found most interesting was the insight that is given into the mind of the heroic captain, who comes off in his own mind as a decidedly unheroic figure, filled with self-doubt and remorse for many of the actions that were celebrated in those stories, many of them necessary in the situations in which he found himself, but which he so often wishes could have been different and recognizes were driven – especially in the later episodes and even afterward – by an incredible hubris that had sometimes devastating effects on those around him. On the other hand, we do get a sense of the sterling character that inspired the great love and loyalty evidenced by his crew and friends. All-in-all, we get a very different view of Kirk that makes him a more realistic character than I think I’ve ever experienced him to be.

The Martian (2015)

Directed by Ridley Scott, based on the book by Andy Weir

Disco is dead for a reason. I fear it is about to make a comeback of sorts, however, given its prominence in this wonderful movie about a near-future “Robinson Crusoe on Mars.” Everyone, I’m sure, knows the basic plot, based on the previews alone: One of the six first astronauts to walk the surface of the red planet is believed killed in a freak accident during an emergency evacuation – but he survives, stranded, with only a fraction of the supplies he will need to survive the four years before another manned mission could possibly reach him, given the realities of orbital mechanics. He has no choice but to start “sciencing the shit” out of his hopeless situation. What results is, as was the book, an amazing, uplifting tale of human endurance, innovation, cooperation, and ultimate triumph that I’m not going to make any more detailed comments on than that, except for these few:

Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets and Beyond (BBC 2004)

Space Ship Pegasus at Europa

Directed by Joseph Ahearne

Even though it never made it into my "currently-reading" sidebar, and I haven't blogged about it yet, I just got finished reading Andy Weir's The Martian, soon to be a major motion-picture starring Matt Damon. In case I don't get around to blogging it soon or ever, it is amazing! Really good, essentially contemporary hard-science fiction is so rare; I enjoyed the hell out of it, and the trailers for the movie look like they are going to follow the story almost slavishly. (There's one thing I spotted in the trailer that leads me to think they're going to change something about the main character's background to up the emotional ante, so to speak.) Anyway, when I finished it, I was wanting more, and I thought about an old faux-documentary I saw about a decade ago about a "Grand Tour" of the Solar System, and a few minutes' research found it, the subject two-part faux-documentary from BBC. I downloaded it from Youtube, put it on my portable hard drive, and USB'd it to the BluRay player, and voila!, it plays just like a DVD!

The Great Martian War: 1913-1917 (2013)

Directed by Mike Slee

As you may have gathered, I’m sometimes ‘way behind the times in watching things, even things I want to see, sometimes things I have queued up to see – such as this, which has been sitting on my TiVo for at least a couple of weeks since it aired on BBC-America.  Turns out, however, I’m even further behind than that, seeing as I discover now that this movie actually debuted last year on The History Channel.  Actually, the fact that I missed it there is not that surprising to me.  Even though – more probably, because – I’m a historian, I actually watch very little of The History Channel.  Yes, there’s some good stuff on there.  There’s also some very bad stuff.  (That’s besides the ridiculous stuff like Ancient Aliens and the uh-why-is-this-on-The-History-Channel? stuff like Ice Road Truckers.)  And of course, it seems that the closer the subject matter is to something of scholarly historical interest to me, the more superficial and downright mangled their treatment of it is.  So I just don’t watch very much.  And hence The Great Martian War flew entirely beneath my radar last year.

Guardians of the Galaxy (Marvel Studios, 2014)

Directed by Peter Gunn

I am Groot.

I am Groot.

I am Groot.

I am Groot.

…

We are Groot.

Tales of Honor #2 (Image Comics-Top Cow, 2014)

Continuing a five-issue adaptation of On Basilisk Station, by David Weber.

There's not a whole lot I can say about this second issue that I didn't say about the first [LINK]. My overall assessment remains the same, that it holds up very well as a graphic novel adaptation of the introductory volume to David Weber's ever-expanding Honorverse, told through the memories of the main character, Honor Harrington, looking back on her first starship command from captivity and probable execution as a war criminal. I will emphasise that script-writer Matt Hawkins seems to know the Honorverse like the back of his hand and by this narrative device provides a unique perspective that makes this a refreshingly original version of a story I've read and reread in Weber's original prose. It is not simply a straight illustrated retelling of the original “tale of Honor,” but manages to be something that both contributes to this longtime aficionado’s appreciation of the Honorverse and is, in my opinion, accessible to someone unfamiliar with the world and characters. I hope there are comics fans who will be turned on to the novels by this new presentation, although I've seen no sales data and have no idea how these first couple of issues have done. My hope is, very well.

Treecat Wars (A Star Kingdom Novel, 2013)

By David Weber and Jane Lindskold

This is the third in the series ancillary and remotely prequel to David Weber's ever-expanding Honor Harrington series of interstellar war and politics. It is a more direct sequel to the second young-adult “Star Kingdom Novel,” Fire Season [link], than was the latter to the first volume, A Beautiful Friendship [link]. This will be a short post since I don't have a whole lot to say about this book that wouldn't be repeating what I said about the other two. I love virtually anything set in Weber's Honorverse, and this story continues the tale of Honor Harrington's several-centuries' great-grandmother Stephanie as she continues to grow through her 'teen years, dealing with consequences of her discovery of the treecats of her new homeworld Sphinx as well as the various issues facing any normal teen-aged girl.

The major themes introduced in the first two books continue to be worked out in this volume: 1) the continuing conflict between humans of the Manticoran Star Kingdom as well as the wider galaxy as to whether to regard the treecats simply as incredibly clever animals or as sentient beings with “human” rights – and if the latter, what should be the relationship and interaction between humans and their “more primitive” neighbors?; and 2) new conflict between treecat clans stressed to the point of crisis by the ecological catastrophe of the recent “fire season,” with autumn advancing and Sphinx's long, hard winter approaching swiftly. But this time, except for at the very beginning and the very end, the story is told in parallel narratives as Stephanie and her friend Karl are dispatched by the Sphinx Forestry Service to receive three months forestry training at the University on Manticore, a rare opportunity for interns who are not full forestry agents – but which means that Stephanie is separated by the gulf between neighboring worlds from her new boyfriend Anders … who remains on Sphinx with the group of xenoanthropologists headed by his father but finds circumstances compelling him to spend a great deal of time in the company of Stephanie's best friend Jessica with predictable (even were it not broadcast on the inside front cover text) results. Once again, it's a well-written and engaging tale that weaves another thread into the growing tapestry of Weber's fictional universe.

Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!

The Weekend of the Doctor

Well, I do not remember the premier of Doctor Who fifty years ago today.  For one thing, it was only in England, and for another, I was only two years and five days old!  And, honestly, I'm only a very recent "convert" to Doctor Who fandom.  I was vaguely aware of the property maybe as early as the 1970s, when reruns ran here in the States on PBS, but it was only during my college years in the early 1980s that I knew anyone who actually watched the show, and under his influence I made a brief effort to get into it.  That attempt was fostered by the fact that the new Doctor at the time was Peter Davison (fifth from the left above), whom I already liked from his role as Tristan Farnon on All Creatures Great and Small, a show that I watched -- again in reruns on PBS -- with my father, who was a huge fan of James 'Erriot (giving it the proper Yorkshire accent my father always mimicked with reference to the show).  Nonetheless, the show really did nothing for me and I drifted away from it fairly quickly.  Frankly, the primitive special effects were a major reason, I admit.  It was only a few years ago, with the premier of Matt Smith (far right) as the latest Doctor, that I gave the show a chance again, and this time I was hooked, and have been ever since.  I even went back and watched Christopher Eccleston's tenure (third from right) on Netflix, as well as some of David Tennant (second from right).  But mainly I have gotten far more interested in the property as a whole, although I've not sought out and watched any of the "classic" episodes.  It's a bit overwhelming -- Where to start?

Gravity (2013)

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

This has been a busy semester so far, filled both with professional duties and with personal stuff. I'm quite a ways behind in blogging, but I'm going to try to get caught up. I may end up having to resort to a “Quick Hits” post for some, but I really want to give this movie its own separate consideration, albeit not very long or in depth.

Last weekend, on the second day of its general release, my wife and I went to the matinee showing of Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. I'm always up for a realistic near-future space movie, and based on the previews I saw over the past few weeks, I could tell that this one would be about as realistic as they come, right up there with Apollo 13, and that if anything would be worth subjecting myself to 3D (a format I can usually do without) it would be Gravity. And the billed actors were enough to get my wife to go with me.

Caliphate (2008)

By Tom Kratman

I'll put up a warning for those who perhaps would prefer to read no further. This post will probably be accounted, as has been the book, as “Islamophobic.” So be it. As, I believe, may be inferred from my long-ago post commemorating the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 [link], I have some pretty strong views regarding how pathetically weak has been our reaction as a civilization to what became obvious that day is a ongoing war between two largely incompatible cultures. It is a conflict that we have little hope of surviving without recognizing the reality of the situation. After the initial shock of that day wore off, and our subsequent national rallying petered out into partisan bickering, our chances have diminished, and continue to do so at an alarming rate. I wish it were not so.

Beginnings (Worlds of Honor #6, 2013)

By David Weber with Charles E. Gannon, Timothy Zahn, and Joelle Presby

One of the greatest things about David Weber's Honor Harrington franchise is his incredible generosity in allowing others to play in the wonderfully (and increasingly intricate) sandbox he has created over the past two decades. Whole books and sub-series have been written – with his oversight, to be sure – by other great science fiction authors. This is in addition to the very actively involved consulting group BuNine which recently gave us The Honorverse Companion [link]. It all adds to the rich breadth and depth of the world in which Honor Harrington's own story is being told. This sharing of the Honorverse began as early as 1998 with the appearance of More Than Honor, which contained three novellae and short stories in addition to an extensive infodump regarding the background, history, and theoretical science of “The Universe of Honor Harrington.” That collection was followed by several more released with varying frequency over the next fifteen years, with stories written by a variety of authors both known and unknown to me – Weber himself always contributes, joined by such as David Drake, Timothy Zahn, Jane Linskjold, and S. M. Stirling – culminating in this, the sixth. Sure, the stories have been of varying quality and relevance, but they are always entertaining and more often than not, even when written by other than Weber, introduce characters and background that will show up and play integral roles in his own “main” narrative. None are to be missed by fans of the Honorverse.

In this volume we get, as usual, a mixture of novellae and short stories – I'm not sure where to drawn the line – two of which are by Weber himself. And as Weber's contribution to the very first volume gave birth a decade and a half later to the Star Kingdom series of Young Adult Novels, so does at least one of the other stories herein serve as a springboard for an ancillary series to come. As will be seen, I hope, in my short little discussions below, the overall title of this volume, Beginnings, is well-chosen.

House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (2013)

By David Weber with BuNine

2013 is a big year for fans of the Honorverse series of military space opera novels. Earlier this year came Shadow of Freedom (link); already out at the time of this writing (and in fact I've already started reading it) is the sixth volume of short stories and novellas written by David Weber and friends, entitled Beginnings; and with autumn will come the third of the new “Young Adult” Star Kingdom novels, Treecat Wars. This present volume, House of Steel, was, according to an afterword, conceived in conjunction with the twenty-year anniversary of the first appearance of Honor Harrington, On Basilisk Station in 1992, and contains as about a third of its length a substantial novella featuring the father of the current Manticoran Queen Elizabeth III, King Roger III, with the balance comprising a long-awaited in-universe guide to the Star Empire of Manticore, its staunch ally the Protectorate of Grayson, and their respective militaries that figure so prominently in the series.

Shadow of Freedom (A New Honorverse Novel, 2013)

By David Weber

From the front flap of the dust jacket:

“Invitation to a Party

“(Bring Your Own Warships)

“Wrong number? There are two sides to every quarrel … unless there are more.

“Admiral Michelle Henke, Queen Elizabeth of Manticore's first cousin and Honor Harrington's best frie[n]d,* has just handed the 'invincible' Solarian League Navy the most humiliating, one sided defeat in its almost thousand year history in defense of the people of the [Manticoran] Star Empire's Talbott Quadrant. But the League is the most powerful star nation in the history of humanity. Its navy is going to be back – and this time with thousands of superdreadnoughts.

“Yet she also knows scores of other star systems – some independent, some controlled by puppet regimes, and some simply conquered outright by the Solarian Office of Frontier Security – lie in the Solarian League's grip along its frontier with the Talbott Quadrant. The entire frontier has begun to seethe with unrest as combat spreads from the initial confrontation, and Michelle sympathizes with the oppressed populations wanting only to be free of their hated masters.

“She has only so many ships, which can be in only so many places at a time. She can't possibly justify diverting any of her limited, outnumbered strength to the liberation of other planets when she has worlds of her own to defend from a vengeful League.

“She knows that … and she doesn't care. She comes from a family that believes some things are far more important than simply playing it safe. Mike Henke will find a way to win.

“And anyone who gets in her way will regret it.”

Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

Directed by J. J. Abrams

Abrams' reimagining of the Star Trek franchise continues into its second movie and again successfully balances the needs of the many (fans of the original series) against the needs of the … well, not few, nigh on fifty years on from its first appearance, but rather the other many (non-fans of the original series, whether because they are too young to remember it and are familiar only with its several successor series and films, or – and yes, these do exist – because they just flat-out didn't care for the original series or its several successor series and films). Which is to say he makes a film that both fulfills the requirements of a 21^st-century summer blockbuster and deals with deeper issues of duty and morality along the way as did many or most of the episodes of the original series. Moreover, characters and events well known to those of us familiar with the original canon continue to appear and play themselves out in new and unexpected ways, both in the antagonist ultimately turning out to be “the most dangerous opponent [the original crew] ever faced” and the requisite cameo by “Old Spock” dancing around his own resolve not to give “Young Spock” information about his (the latter's) own future. Finally, there was the haunting twist on perhaps the most traumatic (in the lives of the characters) events of the original stories. All in all it was a thoroughly entertaining couple of hours that left me pleased and with something akin to a feeling of revisiting old friends that I have known all my life..

Armageddon – 2419 A.D. (1928) and The Airlords of Han (1929)

Oddly enough, this cover to Amazing Stories
for August 1928 depicts not “Buck Rogers” but
rather E. E. “Doc” Smith's The Skylark of Space.

By Philip Francis Nowlan (originally published in Amazing Stories, August 1928 and March 1929, reprinted many times since, usually together)

I was a huge fan of the “original” Buck Rogers as a child, my parents having given me a huge coffee-table sized collection of almost random comic strips, both dailies and Sundays, The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1969) 'round about 1970 or so. It was without a doubt the very first collected comic material that I ever owned. And I loved it, spent many glorious hours reading and rereading it, until the big, heavy door-stop of a book (which I still have) nearly fell to pieces. (The first few years of the dailies are available here.)