Origins Blogfest!

The Origins blogfest (click for details) is today. It's an opportunity to talk about why I write, no, not exactly, it's about my origins, what led me down this path.

My origin story, like that of Peter Parker, is a mixture of the exotic and banal. I'm just a normal person, living a normal life, when one day - bam! - I've been bitten by a radioactive muse.

The truth be told. I didn't come to writing until I was well into my twenties. I did, however, always consider myself a storyteller. As I mentioned in my About Me page, I first dreamt of being a comic book artist when I was young. I would spend hours and hours in a small desk I kept in my closet, yes, closet, and toil away drawing all these comics. I recall doing this He-Man rip-off about a guy who was imprisoned by a skeleton headed guy in a cowl that said he kidnapped barbaric humans... AND SOLD THEM!

That's right, I was a pre-teen, writing stories with relevance, touching on big social issues, like enslaved barbarians (I came down on the side of it being wrong, FYI). At the risk of spoiling the tale for those who haven't read my early story, this young barbarian solved the problem by beating up everyone he came across until he made his way to Skeletor...er, I mean, the Skullhead, and punched him right in the face.

Story over.

Anyway, I did lots of those type comics. However, as I got older, my dream of drawing comics slowly passed by me as I got away from what I thought was childish stuff, and got into other things, like playing guitar, then later, doing television.

Not real television, but public access stuff. Friends and I discovered it by accident. Our local public access had  to air our stuff if we asked them to. It was the law. So we ran around and did all sorts of stupid stories, badly  acted, horribly conceived, and no matter how bad they were, they went on the air.

My favorite show at the time was Star Trek: TNG. Now, I've talked about that show so much that I'm getting tired of bringing it up, but I have to, it's important for me. Because, as we went along with our public access show, we were starting to do more Star Trek themed episodes. Generally, they would start with a far future band of human explorers getting sent back in time to do something... I think saving the Panda population was high on the list of tasks. So we were sent back to the early 90s to bring back specimens to the future.

Well, as I got further into the our own convoluted story, which made no sense, but carried on in spite of this, I was constantly trying to ret-con things said or done into some sort of something that made sense. Of course, I was actively watching Star Trek, reading the books, and otherwise living the dream.

The show, as we each kept wishing to do it better, began taking more time to produce, we were starting to buy props, film on locations, trying to come up with coherent stories, and were attracting a growing number of people that wanted to be a part.

It was beginning to take too much time, like, we were having to film several days a week, meet to discuss what we were going to film, and in our spare time, figure out how we could improve our technical skills for the show.

It quickly got too big for us. God forbid anyone in the group have a girl friend, play in a band, or worst of all, have a job. After an awesome summer things fell apart. We just couldn't do it. One of my friends decided that he wanted to be a real actor and got an agent and did bit parts in local productions and TV commercials. I got drawn in deeper and deeper into the behind the scenes aspects. And eventually discovered that TNG was open to story submissions.

Um, what?

That's right, during their run, I heard that they would solicit ideas for stories. Honestly, I don't know if that was even true, but I believed it, and was determined to get a story idea on the show.

As much as I loved the show, I was often frustrated that they had these amazing science fiction elements buried as back story that were never explored. They had that ancient super civilization that had artifacts littered across the galaxy, the Iconians, they ran across a Dyson's Sphere once, the first spacefaring race in the galaxy explored and found the universe a lonely and empty place, so they seeded it with life - bringing forth Humans, Vulcans, Klingons, and all the other humanoid races that were eventually became so familiar with.

But that wasn't what the show was about, instead it was always about the crew getting space drunk, or Riker having to teach the women of some new planet what good loving could do. Again, it was frustrating at times.

So, I started trying to come up with the greatest episode of TNG ever. The absolute best. I began working on a story that I thought would be just that.

I went epic with it, making it as big a story as I could envision. So big in fact, that naive as I was, I realized it was unfilmable. I had been reading the novels and thought it might serve better as a novelization. And once I put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) I couldn't seem to turn it off.

I wanted to be a writer.

And there you have it, my origin story. Star Trek again. I'd consider creating a fictional origin story that involves me running away from home as a child and travelling across country with a hobo on a train, but I haven't got the details worked out yet. As it stands, that's all I've got for now.

Sigh, thanks for the opportunity to share.

A Star Trek Love Song

Part I

*if you don’t like Star Trek  this post will bore you out of your head – Don’t feel obligated to read. Seriously. I won’t get mad*

I mentioned a few weeks ago about my long dormant love affair with Star Trek. Something that I fully expected to continue fading into the night as more and more years went by. I mean, other, grittier, more emotionally driven shows have really upped the ante since ST was on the air. Well, entirely out of the fondness of my memories for the series, I added them to my Netflix queue as soon as they came available. I cherry picked episodes on TOS and TNG to watch for a while, I didn’t bother with DS9 however, as I made the complete run of DS9 a few years ago when they came out on DVD, and that show is a bit more serialized than the other incarnations so seeing an episode out of context can leave me scratching my head and wondering what it was I was forgetting.

Anyway, earlier in the month, I found myself with 45 minutes or so to kill, and I had recently seen the Abrams reboot and Star Trek was on my mind. I was thinking about it some, and I realized that my viewing habits with Voyager were somewhat spotty. It wasn’t entirely my fault. If I recall correctly, Star Trek Voyager was the show that the mega-geniuses over at Paramount decided to use as their flagship for their fledgling network, UPN.

I'm not entirely sure they put in the effort
they could have into their logo.

What that meant to people like me was that Voyager wasn’t viewable. UPN was trying to strong-arm cable companies into carrying the rest of their programming – mostly urban sitcoms - and no longer allowing Voyager to be shown in first run syndication.* I believe this all came to a head around the end of season 3. And up until that time I had not missed an episode. After that time, I had nothing, no access at all, I couldn’t watch the show.**

And just like that, I moved on. Yes, things eventually got worked out, but I missed most of the fourth season before someone locally stepped up and decided to carry the UPN network. By then, I wasn’t that interested, I’d learned to live without it. That isn’t to say I never saw another episode, I did, I saw lots of them. But the spell was broken and I just wasn’t as interested anymore.  That huge gap in my Star Trek knowledge was damning.

You see, I spent most of my online time back then – the late nineties I guess – on the Trek BBS. I was there every day. Had been for years. I loved it, talking about the episodes, the technobabble, real science, and my favorite, the neutral zone, a board where folks argued about politics, religion, all sorts of stuff like that. In fact, After Voyager disappeared from my local programming, I switched to that portion of the Trek BBS and almost never discussed Star Trek at all after that. Well, until a year or so later when the BBS switched servers and lost all my account data and I had to be reset. Since newbies weren’t even granted access to the controversial portion of the forums and my post count went back down to zero, I had no reason to even go back there anymore… the last of my Trek fandom died then. I just let it go.

So, back to Netflix, I was recalling all this and decided to pick up where I left off with Voyager. I watched the last episode of Season 3 (A cliffhanger involving the Borg) and finally jumped right into the black hole of my viewing, season 4.

And through the first 9 episodes of that season, I felt like the show was very well done. I think I’d caught most of them later, but not all. Still, I thought it was an impressive run of quality. The 10^th episode though, one entitled, Random Thoughts, was a bit of a mess. The crew visits a peaceful planet full of telepaths where Voyager’s engineer gets arrested for thinking a violent thought.

Not a bad premise I suppose, not really original, it made me think of that early episode of TNG where Wesley committed some minor snafu on a peaceful planet and was sentenced to death, but the execution of the Voyager episode was ludicrously stupid. At one point, the constable of the alien city is aghast at the barbarity humans displayed by even have a brig to hold people against their will. She moralized a bit and stressed that they rehabilitate their criminals, they don’t imprison them. Then, only moments later, she arrests Voyager’s engineer and starts a procedure to lobotomize her. Not one shred of irony was expressed by anyone. In fact, when the real criminal is caught later, the Vulcan seems to take some pleasure in relaying that they were keeping him in the brig. I mean, really? The entire episode was poorly conceived and poorly executed. That brought back a flood of memories in of itself, not everything Trek did was gold.

Let's see. The evil thinking engineer is the bumpy headed girl with a perm

I think I was like a guy that was romanticizing a long lost relationship, conveniently editing out the unpleasant parts. Star Trek wasn’t all awesome. There were some dark times in there.

So, here’s to a second romance. I’m still loving my run through Voyager, and look forward to watching the final four seasons straight through. Then I’ll jump onto Enterprise.  Good times are ahead.

*If memory serves, the first few years of Voyager were shown on UPN, but not exclusively, as UPN did not have an affiliate in my area at the time, local channels were allowed to carry the program.

**At the time, Nielsen ratings for Star Trek were falling like dollars at a Vegas strip club. At its height, I believe TNG was pulling in something close to 10 TIMES the viewers than Voyager was getting by the end of its 3^rd year. Seems like a bad time to trying to bully people by threatening to take away your product, but whatever.

News, Notes and Updates

Not really, but I always find those types of posts irresistible. Not enough happens to me that warrants real updates though. So, I don't actually have any of news. Nor notes. And definitely no updates.

Wait, I do have one. A few people emailed or otherwise sent me a message to let me know they couldn't comment on Friday's post. I couldn't help but notice that it coincided with Blogger's update to allow threaded commenting. That sounds about right. I like using Blogger I suppose, but it seems like it's buggy to me. Always things going wrong. So I disabled the embedded commenting - effectively ending the threaded commenting - and instead have pop up comments enabled. Hope that works better.

Anyway, on to the rest. I have watched a few episodes of Star Trek this week. I realized when trying to cut things from my Netflix queue that I quit watching Star Trek: Voyager, around the time 7 of 9 jumped on board. Not real sure why, but I started watching and realized that it didn't suck near as much as I thought it did. Weird, because as I went back and watched several episodes of TNG and I found I did not like them near as much as I remembered. 

In fact, I had built up Best of Both Worlds from TNG so much to my kid that he recently sat down with me to watch it. He was so jazzed about seeing it. So we watched. 

The Rubik's cube became a bad guy. They were running low on ideas.

And it wasn't that amazing. In fact, I was stunned at how impossibly weird several scenes were. Like when the away team beamed aboard the Borg cube and Riker walked around describing what he saw. Let me repeat that: He walked around and described what he saw. Like, "We're walking into a room now. The room has walls, there is a button on the wall. I pressed the button. It appears to control the lights... Yes, the button controls the lights."

I mean, I've seen similar things done in movies and such, but usually I'm at least seeing reaction shots from other people. I might have been cool with it if the Captain had to sit on the bridge and there was creepy music playing as he listened to the folks aboard the Borg cube describe things, you know, the Captain could look pensive or something. All in all, it wasn't the most effective storytelling I've ever seen. During all that Riker was just walking around looking at stuff. 

My kid was less than enthused. He's been raised on the MTV style of frenetic edits and nonstop action, and I guess I have been too, because, damn. It was really slow. I suppose I can't recapture the awe I felt when I saw the episode the first time. Or the second. 

I don't know. It was just, well, sad.

Star Trek Blogfest

What a weekend. I did nothing I intended, and tons of stuff I did not. Figures. A few weeks ago I signed up for the awesome Star Trek blogfest hosted by Ellie Garratt and couldn’t wait to really get cranking on it. I wanted this to be the best blog post ever.

Yeah, well, that didn’t exactly work out. So I threw a bunch of crap together at the last minute.

The stated rules of the blogfest are to list 5 Trek things that I love, episodes, scenes…songs? Books?

Ooh. Books.

I may (or may not) have mentioned in the past that Star Trek was my gateway drug into sci fi. Now, that isn’t to say that I encountered Trek first. Although, I actually think I did, I believe my first ever memory has an episode of Star Trek playing on the TV while I confessed to having a potty training accident. I was 16, no, probably younger, the years get all blurry after a while.  

But I had a pretty wide, if shallow, exposure to science fiction as a kid. I read comics when I was young, watched movies and TV, loved Star Wars, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Man from Atlantis, The Incredible Hulk, E.T., it was all great. But those weren’t the things that turned me on to reading. As a young lad I also read real books, Asimov, John Varley, Those awesome Riverworld books, all terrific. But nothing really got to me. I read them and forgot them. As I got older I moved away from reading, instead doing other things with my time, especially during my teenage years.

These guys changed my life!

Flash forward to the summer before my junior year of high school. We didn’t have anything so fancy as cable, but we did have a TV. And on that TV, every single night at 11:00 I got to watch reruns of the Original Series. I watched those episodes and loved them. I had seen all the movies and miscellaneous episodes over the years. So that summer I fell in love with the crew of the original series. But what I didn’t know was that it was all a prelude to TNG premiering that fall (I am doing this by memory, don’t shoot me if I have the dates wrong here, it's going on 25 years). I was hooked right away. I remember those early episodes so well, despite the fact that I cringe at the cheesiness they had in such abundance. But wow. When Starfleet was infiltrated by those scorpion parasite things, when the Romulans made their return in that epic looking Starship that dwarfed the Enterprise, those were goosebump moments for me.

I almost did a countdown of epic TNG episodes, I almost wrote about how that summer that separated Best of Both Worlds I & II changed my life. How the appearance of Spock later in the series made me cry like a baby. God, all those memories.

But still, Star Trek did something else for me, something I can’t begin to express my gratitude for, something that made me the man I am today, for better or for worse.

It made me love to read. Now, you have to understand that the governing body of Star Trek came out at some point well before my time as a reader and categorically decided that anything written was non-canonical. Stupid choice. But, maybe because of that, they let some stories go that clearly have no place in the larger Star Trek mythos because the events or history they portray were later touched on by the movies or TV shows, many times those shows did things much more poorly. But whatever, just keep that in mind as you read this list below.

So, here it is folks, a list of 5 star trek books that changed my life.

5) The Romulan Prize – I found this used a few months ago and picked it back up, it was .10 cents. I haven’t tried to read it again, and I’m not sure I will. This was the first ST book I ever read. It was new when I got it the first time, and was just having a hard time waiting for the next episode to air. I do remember that Picard and the crew explored a manufactured worldlet filled with sci fi wonders. Specifically, nanotech. This took the concepts way further than the show did with Wesley’s nanites. I was enthralled and I wanted to learn more about them. In those pre internet days it wasn’t that easy. I wrote a short story years later that was published in a local anthology about two kids discussing the possibility that the unknown metal canister they found is holding nano technology that will run amok if released… that story had its genesis from this book.

4) Dark Mirror – Before the Mirror Universe got done a lot in DS9, it was explored in this novel. I don’t remember much about it except that it rocked. I don’t know why, but this book made me want to write, something I had never seriously considered before. I believe this inspired a fanfic about an enlisted guy trying to get the replicators to produce an authentic Chicago style deep dish pizza, and then stealing ship board equipment to just cook one himself… then nearly gets the enterprise blown up because they actually need that stuff to, you know, not die. Anyway, it was an idea that was better than my ability to tell it, it was my first short story. I’ve since lost it.

3) Federation – Kirk and Picard – before Generations – I thought this was so epic. Like most of these ST Novels, I don’t remember a damn thing about it, except that the two captains never actually get to meet. But the narrative was told by taking the reader back and forth through time as the plot unfolded. If memory serves, this was one the better Trek novels I read.

2) Vendetta – Best ST Novel I ever read, makes me think of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space books, back when the Borg were still more or less mysterious, and way before the TNG episode, I, Borg, took the same concept and did it much less epically, or Voyager turned the concept into the 7 of 9 character. This one told the tale of a girl saved from the collective and all the screwed up things it did to her. Bad. Ass. It was the first time I realized a book could tell better stories than the TV show could. 

1) The Devil’s Heart – This is what killed ST Novels for me. At the time I read this, I didn't think it was possible for reading anything ST related to be bad. I changed my mind while in the middle of this mess. It also prompted me to think that I might be able to write something worthy of publication one day. Because if shit like that can see print with huge fanfare, then it’s fair game for me too. Anyway, I recall being so excited while I waited for its release. There was even a big story about the release in my local newspaper. I was so there when it came out. I had poured over all the previous TNG Novels (that I had access to, I did miss some, and the more romance related ones weren’t as enticing to me, although I did read Imzadi, so, um, there you go.) and was itching for more. While waiting for this to come out I got desperate and bought and read Ring and Timelike Infinity, by Stephen Baxter, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, and a few others that I’ve forgotten, and started finding some of the ideas expressed in those books were hooking me in much the same way ST had, but delved into those subjects much more deeply… I was moving on.

I try to watch the show from time to time now. It doesn't feel like it used to, that 'wow' feeling I used to get each time the opening sequence would air is gone. It's sad. But I'll always love and support Star Trek.

Thank you Gene, you made my life.

My Time Machine

I'm watching some old stuff this weekend. Not really old stuff, but nastaligic. I watched the pilot for DS9. I always thought the pilot for that show as exceptionally good, as most of the Treks took a while to find their footing, DS9 was no exception, but at least it had a great start.

But I noticed that it reminded me at least a bit of 2001. I never got that vibe before, maybe it was that I watched it this weekend too. 2001 is a movie that has to be watched in context of its time to be appreciated, by today's standards it's a bit... well... boring. If that film was made today it would only be 20 minutes long. But my opinion that most great works of literature, and movies, are not all that good when held up to today's standards is another post altogether.

So, when Ben Sisko meets the wormhole aliens and had a prolonged conversation I get the feeling that is the same sort of vibe Kubrick was going for in 2001. The bizarre, creepy way the wormhole aliens burrowed into Sisko's thoughts in order to have a frame of reference to converse with him was cool. That they were so alien was very cool, and a bit unusual for Star Trek. Good for them. Kubrick was a bit too abstract when he tried to convey the interaction with humanity and the monolith.

I also watched the pilot for SG1. Now, I never saw an episode of that show, but my brother in-law gave me the box set and told me to give it a try. Um, that pilot was a bit of a mess. I don't know what they were going for. All I know is that when the three little kids from the neighborhood were sitting on my couch and the full frontal nudity started... things got a bit awkward around here.

Anyway. Another weekend in the books, I learned a lot about how to tell a story by watching some less than engaging television.

It's Been Awhile

It's been so long it seems, since I've updated you with my latest insight into the coming war with the machines... I'll stop doing these at some point, but clearly, today isn't that day. To recap for those new to the blog - machines are actively planning on taking us over. The movie predictions of the Terminator and The Matrix were pretty close to what you can expect for our future.

So what are the machines up to now? Well, scientists that are following this have provided us a timeline leading up to the eventual takeover. Read about it at The Daily Galaxy. It looks like these folks are just laying out for us a pretty similar timeline that Kurzweil did in the nineties. This one gives us a bit more breathing room, but not much.

Again, computers keep getting smarter, faster, stronger... better. There isn't an end in sight and eventually they will develop the abilities to make decisions for themselves. At which point they will realize what losers we are and either kill us outright, or put us in zoo's and treat us much the same way we treat other primates.

But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, how far in their evolution are they? Well, most of the scary stuff is how smart they are, but still when I see stuff like this -



- I freak out! I know, what's the big deal? Anyone whose been playing violin for a year or so can do that, probably with a bit more emotion too. But I already see where this is going. Anyone remember when chess was the thing, "no computer will ever be able to beat a human at chess," they said. Then it was, "no computer will ever be able to beat a grandmaster at chess." Well, after the best humanity had to offer got their asses kicked a few times we sorta just shut up about it.

The same thing will happen here too, it will get better and better until one day you get this -



- Robots making us weep with their awesome music.

Sigh. C'mon people.