Category: Science Fiction

Literature

Hand Made Art

I’ve been going over the last few chapters I wrote by hand.  Ink pen, by a picture window, sunlight pouring in.  For some reason, with some projects, this works when I’m trying to make things real.  It doesn’t finish the process by any means, but when I take the time to break my paragraphs down and rewrite them in longhand, it seems to draw me into the world I’m describing.  Word choice becomes more precise because, dammit, it’s actually difficult to write this way, physically.  I never recall as a kid getting tired of writing with a pen (although I’m sure I must have when I got stuck with one of those godawful punishments “you will write a hundred time ‘I will not be contrary to the teacher’s arbitrariness.”) but I do now.

When I get done with this part, I bring everything back to the computer and start entering the corrections, which then trigger other corrections and reimaginings.  I’ve solve a couple of plot points this way.

And, of course, when the whole book is done, I print it out for Donna to hack to bits and this she does by hand with a red ink pen.  It all starts over, but by that point I have a coherent narrative and all this is just making if live and breathe.

What gets fascinating sometimes is to be working on a description—for instance, my hero is fleeing for his life just now across the surface of the moon (yes, our moon, which is a place I never thought I’d set any of my fiction, because the moon had been used to the point of cliche so long ago, but there it is) and I have to place him visually in situ.  This demands a peculiar kind of attention.  I must put myself there and describe how it is.  Which is, in some ways, impossible—I’ve never been there—but we do it all the time.  I do, anyway.  You gather enough information about your locale or what have you and then distill it into a kind of gestalt that stands for direct experience.

This is art.

When you do it right, people will be just as drawn into it—hopefully with considerably less effort—the way you were in the process of constructing it.

This is art.

Seeing.  Making others see.  And feel, that’s there, too.  Coming away at the end with the perception of having been somewhere new.

This is…

You get the idea.

Science Fiction

Bothersome Details

I have come at last to the section of the new novel that I’ve been looking forward to writing for some time.  The appearance of the eponymous object referred to in the title, the ship which will take my hero on his great adventure, and though I have been anticipating this part for all this time I neglected to do one little thing.

Figure out what the damn thing looks like.

This is not a small—nor uncommon—problem.  I mean, I imagined this scene where the hero is confronted by the ship he needs, appearing as if by magic.  An important ship in more ways than just as transportation.  This is the Argo, the Golden Hind, the Chimera, the Santa Maria, Nautilus all rolled into one.  But while I imagined where it came from and the hero’s reaction to it and all the wonderful things it has to do…

I didn’t imagine its appearance.

So now I’m sitting her toying with all manner of design, just to make it unique and feeling just a bit chagrined.  I would like to be like those writers who, when they hit a snag like this, can just plug a placeholder in and go on.  But I’ve never been able to do that.  It has to be at least close to what it will end up being.

Ah me.  At least I know how big the damn thing needs to be.  I think.

career

Serendipity do dah

Through purest serendipity, there will be a conference on Germaine de Stael here in St. Louis in May.  About five years ago I started working on an alternate history set in 1923 French America.  The conceit is that Napoleon never sold Louisiana to the United States, but managed to keep it.  There are several reasons for this, a few of them historically legitimate, but it is a science fiction novel after all.  In the course of researching the whole Napoleonic era, I stumbled on this woman, de Stael, and came to regard her as a phenom.  She was one of the few people toward whom Napoleon seems to have shown actual fear and the only woman, as far as I can tell, and I became intrigued.  I found one—count it, ONE—biography, an old thing from the Fifties by a writer whose specialty was the Napoleonic period, and it gave me enough to expand my single novel into a trilogy, the last volume of which I intend to be almost entirely historical.

Needless to say, this would entail considerably more research.  The plan was to sell the trilogy as a package to a house big enough to pay me well enough that I could embark on the research and do justice to the matter.  Alas, I’m still waiting for that sale and now publishing is in something of a tailspin, etc etc etc.

Anyway, I started making notes for the second volume anyway and decided to see if there were any blogs on the subject.  Plenty, but mostly about de Stael’s views on romance—de Stael ran a salon and collected around her quite an impressive circle of intimates and there was a lot of diddling and dallying going on.  (One of her closest friends was Juliet Recamier, a great beauty and apparently one of the Major Teases of Europe.)

One blog leapt out—from an academic, Karyna Szmurlo—announcing an international conference on de Stael.  I contacted her and she responded kindly, suggesting I attend.  Since it will be held at Washington University—practically my back yard—I am going.  I have subsequently discoverd a small uptick in the popularity of Germaine de Stael, with several new biographies and at least one novel, all published pretty much since I started this project (trust me, they weren’t around when I was looking) with one or two exceptions.  Serendipity indeed.  Check the schedule.  Heavyweight academic.  I doubt I will learn as much there, on the spot, as I will if I can make a couple of good contacts.

Of course, the major work in this area won’t take place on my part for a couple years yet—the second volume is still to be set in the 1920’s, but it will inbtroduce de Stael on stage (yes, I said it was SF, didn’t I?)—but I don’t think that will be a problem.  The trilogy will sell or it won’t, no matter when I finish it.  Naturally I’d prefer that it sell.  Naturally.

Literature

Nebulas

It is a bright award, a tower of lucite with a galaxy suspended in the upper half and a gold plaque on the lower with a name a title and a year.  A Nebula Award.  I’ve held two of them in my hands and I’d like to have one of my own.

Alas, it is likely not to be.  I fly too far below the radar of those who vote on such things.

Be that as it may, as a member of SFWA, I always vote.  I do try to vote for the best piece of work on the ballot and it’s always gratifying when it turns out that I’ve read enough stories and books to have somewhat of an informed opinion.  I just now finished voting and I feel righteous.  A good friend of mine has something on the ballot and I hope she wins, I do.  The story in question is stunningly brilliant, of course—my friends tend to be better than I am and I happen to think I’m pretty good, which means they’re fucking brilliant.  And that always makes even nicer, to be able to vote for quality and sentimental reasons.

I’d like to win a Hugo Award, too, but that seems even less likely, as one must sell enough copies of one’s book to those who nominate and vote on those, and I fly even farther below their radar.  I will say this—while occasionally some titles of dubious merit have landed on the shortlists of both awards, I’ve rarely found a book or story nominated for either that was a complete waste of time.  Between them they make good recommended reading lists.

So here is a hope for good fortune to my friend.  May she get the lucite tower and the bright galaxy.  She’s earned it.

(psst!  That’s Kelley Eskridge, a novella called  Dangerous Space.  Treat yourself, go read it.)

career

Anniversary…of sorts

I dug up an old diary a few months ago.  From time to time I’ve tried to keep one of these, sometimes going so far as to try for journal status, but I just can’t seem to sustain it.  So there are these relics lying about that occasionally unearth that give me a glimpse into what daily weirdness I was into back in 19—

The 20th Century.   That’s when I did a great deal of this sort of thing.  I suppose ultimately that my own life bores me while I’m living it.  Or maybe I’m too busy living it to record it.  Whatever.  But this one is from 1988, which was a Very Important Year for me.

Here is the entry for February 20.

Paul’s Books—Billy Budd, DesCartes, ets.  Gravois Bootery.  Gym,

Well, well, well!  Call me a red-tailed gibbon!  Clarion—the fools—accepted me.  They have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for.  Nor do I.

Twenty-one years ago (yesterday, technically, but I didn’t have time to write this till today) I received my acceptance from Clarion.  As you may see from the link, they’re in San Diego now, but then it was in Michigan, MSU specifically, in East Lansing.  It was a very nerve-wracking time.  I’d sold exactly four short stories up till then, one of which had been to a pro magazine, fetching a handsome check, but never saw publication because the magazine went belly-up.  (Actually, the story was eventually published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but in an altered version.)  I was getting desperate.  I didn’t know why I couldn’t sell.  So I applied to Clarion, figuring that if they rejected me I’d give up.

They took me.  I went, I learned, I started selling stories.  Now it is 21 years later.

I’ve just finished a substantial rewrite on a novella, per request.  It’s such a thorough rewrite that it might as well be a new story.  If the editors in question take it, it will be my first new sale in a few years.  But working on it has served to remind me, viscerally, why I like writing so much.  So I’m jazzed again.  I’ll try to maintain it through more stories and a new novel or two.

So happy anniversary to me.  Clarion made a difference.  It’s a good date.

career

New Words

I’ve been working on a novella lately and this past week I found myself fully immersed in it.  I found the groove, so to speak, and have been barreling ahead with considerable glee.  It’s the thing about writing I most love and the thing that hasn’t been there for several months, not since I finished my historical and mailed it off in May.  Even before that it was sporadic.

But I’ve slipped into the stream on this one and I owe it to a couple of perceptive editorial remarks from the people to whom I’d like to sell it.  That part I haven’t had for years now.  The last time I receive decent editorial feedback was from the folks at BenBella, who published Remains.  They did a thorough and remarkable job editing that book and made it better than my original.

I haven’t placed much of anything in the last few years.  My numbers really suck for most of my novels and because of the tracking system now in place everyone knows it.  I’m thinking that one of these months I will pass into the oblivion of being deleted from the system, so I might get a fresh start.  But I am running out of patience for that.

One of the things I’ve had enormous difficulty with since about 2004 is short fiction.  Just haven’t been able to finish a short story.  My hope with this novella is that the block will break and I can start doing short stories again.

I tend to think in Big Ideas, and generally a short story doesn’t have the carrying capacity for them, so they kind of wallow and sink before I can bring them into dock.  This novella does has a Big Idea, but at 25,000 words it had the size to carry it.  I hope so, anyway.  I have half a dozen short stories at least in various stages of completion and I would like to have the mental space to finish them and get them out.

But for the moment, I’m having fun with a new story.  Stayed tuned.

Life

Attic Thoughts

Doing the Shelfari thing has been both fun and frustrating.  I always prided myself on my memory, but it amazes me to discover just how porous it really is.  Titles keep occurring to me at odd moments now that I’ve got my hard drive working on all this recall.  Plus the annoyance of remembering titles but being unable to recall having actually read the book.

For instance, there is a host of books which were required reading in high school that I may well have gotten out of reading because I had read so much other material that the extra credit book reports forgave my lapses re the syllabus.  A Separate Peace for instance.  I know there was a session on it my sophomore year, but I don’t think I actually read it.  There are others.  And many of them I do not own anymore, so I can’t browse them (at least at the moment) to see if that triggers the memory.

Then there are novels I know very well I read but don’t have a single line from them.  Most of these are in the “classics” category.  For example, I know I read Madame Bovary but…and I have that one and as I go through it, my mind is a blank.  Willa Cather is the same way.

On the one hand, this is kind of thrilling, because it means I can reread those novels as if they were brand new to my experience.  On the other hand, do I really want to?  I have read Henry James, I know I have.  Turn of the Screw to be sure, but only the wispiest traces remain in memory.  I was left with such a foul taste from him, though, that I doubt I would want to revisit him.  There are others in that category.  Gogol.  Dostoevsky.  Solzhenitzin.  The Russians are less because I found them impenetrable than simply bleak and depressing.

On still another hand, I’ve been recalling books I had totally forgotten about until I put my mind to remembering them.  The Mary Stewart Merlin trilogy, for one thing, which I remember now with great fondness, but which hadn’t crossed my mind in 25 years.

The shelf is now over 1600.  I’ll probably ardently pursue titles until I hit 2000, then lay off for a time.  Even that would leave a great deal unremarked.  I don’t find that too shabby at all.

But perusing the lists, it is so clear where my preference lay.  It is predominantly science fiction.  No surprise, really.  But there are some classics of SF that I haven’t read, either.  A Canticle For Liebowitz, Alas, Babylon, The Left Hand of Darkness…these books are now or once were on my physical book shelf, but I simply never got around to reading them.

So much to look forward to.  I can’t afford to die till I’m a hundred at this rate.

culture

Cadigan, Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan is a masterful storyteller.  One of her strengths is background nuance.  You know, filling in the bits and pieces of a world so that it stands up on its own and walks convincingly?  Layered on top of that are plots and characters that are among the most idiosyncratic and memorable in science fiction.

Besides which, she can be so damn funny, which science fiction sorely lacks.

Anyway, rather than post another blistering bit about the soon-to-over Bush presidency (and yes, I did watch his farewell speech and all I can say is, “Wasn’t that mercifully short?”) I thought I’d put out this link to an interview with the estimable Ms. Cadigan.

culture

The End of Hell

Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno.  We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars.  I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.

There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity.  All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.  (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms.  He is talking about Reality, not denominations.)  Ice is everywhere, there is a brief description of the center of the earth being the point where all weight is drawn equally.  Time stops.

Dante seems to have grasped the notion that Absolutes embody extreme conditions, that the core of absolute evil will be a thing where the normal laws of motion, of sight and sound, of behavior all exhibit impossible manifestations.  All is in suspension.

Imagine cutting your finger.  Imagine the razor edge of a blade sliding through the flesh.  Now imagine that moment, frozen in time, always being the single sensation you experience, constantly, without beginning or end.  Eternity.  Pretty bad.  Now imagine being constantly eaten.

Now consider:  Dante’s theme is that all these people have done this to themselves.  Satan didn’t put them here, hasn’t manufactured these punishments.  The inhabits did it all on their own.  They are trapped in their own constructions.

To escape, all they have to do is imagine a way out of their own concepts and then accept it.

They can’t.

That is the blade through the flesh, tautologically locked into a continuous feedback loop.

Dante was not, furthermore, positing that the “truth” these folks turned their back on has much of anything to do with god or ecclesiastical law.  It is entirely to do with their concepts of what constitutes Reality.  By Reality, we mean that which we do in the world.

What has become clear through 34 cantos is that Dante was concerned not with the tropes of his poem, but with the realities of the denizens he introduces as he and Virgil descend toward Malebolgia.  This is not a religious work.  In this sense, it more closely approaches science fiction than fantasy.  The ghost in the machine which dominated the lives and decision-making of all these souls permeates the narrative like a Turing Test, set to determine which are aware, which are not, and which are aware of the alternatives and refuse to accept them.  Like some pernicious form of nano technology, these people have built their own torments.  Inferno is a parody of the Earth, of life, stripped down and fine-tuned to give the inhabitants what they have acted like they’ve wanted.  Traps, cul-de-sacs, isolation chambers, pain generators…

And the curious element that recurs throughout is how little they pay attention to anything outside their own small place in the pit.  Many resent Dante coming into their midst, seeing them, but then seem to forget about them as soon as Virgil takes Dante onward.

Inferno is a piece of psychology.  And the lowest pit is reserved for betrayers who used the excuse of the greater good in order to turn on a friend or leader.

Dante was a believer in self-retribution.  No matter what fate these folks suffered in life—and many landed in prison or were murdered or otherwise brought to ugly ends—the ultimate punishment is always the damnation of their own inability to see past their own corruption.  It is that which condemns them, which sequesters them.  You get the deep feeling that any of them could leave if they could just see.  But they can’t.  They are morally blind.

Some seem to prefer where they are.  They do not want to be “saved.”

Extending this, it would seem that Dante was of the (then heretical) opinion that achieving Paradise was something within our own grasp simply by making a choice.

Choice.  The ultimate punishment exhibited in Hell is Satan’s own.  He had questioned god’s decision to give humanity free will.  He argued that if given the authority he could guarantee humanity’s worship of god, that he would make the ideal boss.  He apparently didn’t get the whole notion of free will.  And in the end he reins over (or under) a realm occupied by people incapable of choosing any other path than the utterly solipsistic one  that brought them here.  He is stuck in the hole, plugging the way between what is now Hell and Purgatory, eternally in the presence of people who are there because they simply lack the capacity to be anywhere else.  They are chained to their devotions.

It is now January 5th.  2009.  We have witnessed the meltdown of everything we thought was a successful business model in this country—in the world—and there are no doubt people who have lost everything who don’t understand what brought them to this hill.  They had choices along the way to stop taking profits and invest in something real, but they couldn’t get off the ride.  Someone else, they assumed, would pay the price.  Well, someone else did.  But so did they.

Metaphorically, I find the parallels fascinating.  It’s almost tempting enough for me to attempt a fantasy to take advantage of the insight.  But then again, it’s not that deep of an insight.

What I will be interested in is what lies ahead, in Purgatorio.  Will it be peopled by the collateral damage of all the machinations of those in Hell?

Meantime, I’m writing a new science fiction novel.

culture

Roddenberry

JANUARY 4, 2009Public Memorial Service for the Late “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett Roddenberry

Cast Members and Fans Come Out to Celebrate and Remember Roddenberry’s Life

WHO:
Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, son of Gene & Majel Roddenberry and CEO of Roddenberry Productions, will host cast members, family, friends and fans to celebrate the life of his late mother. Fans are invited to come and pay their respects with the family and share their fondest memories of the late Trek icon.

WHAT:
Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry will hold a public memorial service for his late mother. Family, cast members, friends and fans will have an opportunity to remember the legendary “First Lady of Star Trek.” Fans are encouraged to share their favorite memory of Majel from her numerous roles in Star Trek. Expected to attend include members of Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and many others.

WHERE:
Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills
6300 Forest Lawn Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90068

WHEN:
Sunday, January 4, 2009
9:00 a.m. Press Check-in
10:00 a.m. Memorial to start

CONTACT:
Sean Rossall
BWR Public Relations
310.210.7586
srossall@bwr-la.com

The above is the public announcement from BWR Public Relations.

This is not new news that Majel Barret Roddenberry passed away recently after fighting Leukemia.  Like other icons of my youth, the original Star Trek cast and crew are passing on.  We have a new movie about to premier and after four decades of it, Star Trek has gone from movement to myth to parody to cliche and back again.

I liked the idea of Number One, the original “emotionless” crew member of the Enterprise Majel Barret played in the first pilot, The Cage.  (I thought she looked better as a brunette, too.)  I would have liked to see that.  Television history says the studio told Roddenberry to get rid of her because they couldn’t buy the idea of a woman being second in command of a starship.  Perhaps some of them felt it was too close to home, where undoubtedly many of them found themselves in marriages with women who were not only second in command, but often in charge in fact if not name.  But I don’t buy that story.  The studio after all was DesiLu, which was run by a woman (Lucille Ball) who would very well have known better.  Maybe even she decided that the general public wouldn’t buy it, but I would have bet she’d have taken the chance to try it, especially on a “sci-fi show” that no one was supposed to take seriously anyway.

No, what I believe is that no one could buy the idea of an emotionally in-control, intellectually oriented woman who was suppsoed to have more brains than even the captain.  That I believe the studio execs might have balked at.  Maybe if Gene had suggested that she had a thing for the captain, he could have sold it.

But that would have been a cop-out.

Below is an essay I wrote about Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek in the wake of Gene’s death.  I believe it bears repeating, if for no other reason than Majel was integral to the ultimate success of what he started.

The world can be a very off-putting place, especially to a kid who can’t seem to catch on to the rules.  Rules are very important.  We’re impressed with that fact from infancy.  If you don’t follow the rules, bad things happen.  If you can’t because you don’t know what they are…well, as the saying goes, ignorance is no excuse: bad things happen.  Not only that, but it’s all your fault.  Something is wrong with you.  Everybody else seems to know the rules, why don’t you?

For that kid—and there are many more such kids than we’re willing to admit—the world is a baffling, often malignant place.  Sometimes stepping outside of it is the only way to start to make sense of it.  Science fiction is very good at enabling that process.  Through the medium of extrapolatory fictions, future worlds, alien vistas, and an implicit faith that things ought to and can make sense, this world can be made less confusing, brought into some perspective that eluded us before, enabling us to cope a little bit better.

Gene Roddenberry was one of the most visible practitioners of this process.  For millions of kids—of all ages, 3 to 83—he was a sensible voice speaking in the midst of chaos.  Now that he is gone we wait to see if his voice will continue its patient plea for reason and optimism, whether he meant anything more than a source of entertainment for the masses and profits for the corporations.

Millions of words have by now been written about Star Trek—what it is, how it evolved, why it works.  The attention it has elicited seems disproportionate for “mere” entertainment.  What was it, after all, but a clever revamping of television westerns in a science fiction guise?  The Frontier (the final one, we are told), the Federation (law and order), and the marshal and his deputies (Kirk, Spock, McCoy).  What was the big deal?  There were other sf series that never came close to having the impact Star Trek did.  We had Lost In Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, The Invaders—many of them had longer runs than Star Trek, but not one of them produced the cultural impact Roddenberry’s little “wagon train to the stars” achieved.  Why?

Among the thousands of different reasons, all of which came together in the years since the series aired, there are a few important ones, reasons without which the show would have been just another sci-fi series, like all the rest, assigned to the trash heap of discarded images from our pasts.
Roddenberry designed his show for adults.  Regardless how individual episodes came across, there was an underlying maturity to the concept that came across even through the most turgidly asinine scripts.  If there is any proof to this, look at the success of the new series.  The basic architecture Roddenberry cobbled together originally has not changed, yet it still supports itself admirably.  In fact it works better in support of the more intellectual scripts.  It worked in the original series, it worked in the films, and it is working in the new show.  None of the other television SF shows were so designed.  All of them were fairly standard Hollywood concepts that targeted the seven year old, even though disguised in formats apparently for adults.  The kids weren’t fooled and the adult audiences, while entertained, found nothing of lasting value.  Star Trek was designed to appeal to the adult in all of us, and Roddenberry did not underestimate the intellect of his audience —of any age.

The universe of Star Trek is a functioning model.  You watch the show, you know without being told that somewhere people are getting up, going to work, building homes, carrying on their lives, all in a world that hangs together with the same kind of cohesion as the one we inhabit.  This is art.  This is a level of communication hard to achieve even in shows set in the here and now.  As a result, the series might well have been set anywhere in the Federation, on any ship, on a station, a world, with any array of characters, and it would have worked.  Watching, you knew that.  Kirk, Spock, and McCoy did not comprise the universe of Star Trek, they inhabited it.  Compare that to any of the other sci-fi offerings of Hollywood.  The characters comprised the universe, laws unto themselves, with no connection to a larger universe.  Oh, perhaps a line or two referring to such a universe, but all sense of casuistry was utterly ignored.  Such series offered escapism without rationale, with nothing to believe in.  Empty.

Which leads to one of the most significant aspects of the phenomenon.  One of the hallmarks of a truly fine work of art, especially literature and by extension drama, is its ability to take us out of ourselves and transport us elsewhere in such a way that, while we’re on the ride, we do not question the mode of travel.  This is the escapist quality of stories.  Great art does this without severing the connection with the given world.  In fact great art gives us a new perspective to bring back to this world when we’ve finished the ride.  It enables us to see our world in a way we had not or could not before.  The best science fiction does this in a marvelously unique way.  Star Trek does this.  It is this that sets it apart.

I will not argue that any one episode of Star Trek is great art, although a few might be so described.  Several are quite definitely pretty shoddy.  But as a body of work it achieves the status of great art.

None of this was particularly meaningful to me as a boy watching the first voyages of the Enterprise.  I was eleven when the show premiered.  I had an interest in science fiction, but not a passion.  I was as much enamored of cowboys and soldiers as of spacemen.  I liked the collection of sf series then available, but I also liked the westerns and a couple of police shows and the war series.  I was also a boy scout, I took music lessons, and had various other interests.

I was also one of those kids who had an inordinate amount of difficulty making sense of the world around me.  I didn’t know the rules, I didn’t function well within my peer group.  I suppose you might have described me as awkward.  That’s the term used most often about adolescents who, because of hormonal changes and the subsequent shift of social expectations, clumsily stagger through high school to early adulthood.  But there are many who are awkward because they just don’t know what is expected.  They watch those around them and see the ones who learn the rules and acquire the enviable ability to integrate with their social circle with little or no clumsiness and pain and wonder what secret formula is involved, what set of passwords one evokes, and where to go to learn this arcane data.  They have difficulty socializing.  Some manage anyway, eventually achieving an adeptness at it even though they may not quite understand what is actually going on.  Others never quite get the hang of it, but as they grows up it becomes less and less an issue.  Some never fit in.  During these awkward periods, most of them are loners.  I was one of those.

I didn’t like sports.  I didn’t understand much about cars.  In 1967 I didn’t care much for pop music, including the Beatles.  I had trouble talking to other boys my age, it was impossible to talk to girls.  As a result my social interactions were limited and progressively more difficult to understand.  I also didn’t like school, although I was a bookworm.  While I had friends, they were not close and they as often regarded me as alien, the way I regarded them.
To me this was normal.  Confusion was just something you lived with.  Nothing made sense.  It is very difficult to convey the impact something like Star Trek had on someone like me.  I know I had trouble explaining it to anyone.  But Star Trek took hold of my imagination immediately.  Here was a world that made sense.  Things happened here for reasons and the reasons were discoverable and understandable.  It didn’t matter that it was a fantasy, it was the process that was important.  Star Trek ultimately taught me that the world has a rationale.

No big surprise, that conclusion.  But I wasn’t learning it from any other source, not in a way that made any difference.  Not in a way that suggested the future would be better.

And for many people the entire phenomenon must have appeared utterly bizarre.  I know in my case my father never quite understood.  After one season he had a son who was, for all appearances, a cult convert to a tv show.  I was one of those who went door to door in ’68 with a petition to NBC to forestall its cancellation.  I couldn’t explain it to him any better than I could explain it to my peers.  I didn’t understand it myself.

When Star Trek was cancelled I was in high school.  Other things vied for my attention and Star Trek took a back seat to the balance of my adolescence.
Except…

I went to one of the first Trek conventions in St. Louis.  It wasn’t like the present day ones.  It was a few hours in an auditorium listening to Roddenberry and George Takei speak about the show and about the future and an airing of the uncut pilot, The Cage.  I remember Roddenberry telling us that we were impatient for the future, that we were ready for the 23rd Century Now.  I felt that was true.

When the rumors of a film began circulating I tried my hand at a script.  It even went off in the mail.  I never heard back, but I didn’t know how such things worked then.

When the first movie did come out I stood in line in the cold to see it.
My own writing, while not in the Star Trek mold, has certainly been influenced by it.  I think I would have become a science fiction writer anyway, but probably not the same sort.  Because Roddenberry had done such a good job constructing his universe (stealing from the best), Star Trek taught me some very basic concepts of interconnectedness, taught in a way that provided a key to the understanding of how fiction works as examination of the human condition.

In terms of understanding how the world works, well…I still don’t understand it.  But that’s all right now.  I understand why I don’t, and that’s enough to be at peace with myself at least.  I understand more than I did and I credit the difference in perspective sf provides with enabling me to understand and providing me the tool—my writing—to keep exploring.  Star Trek, as a world, as a concept, as a way of hoping and dreaming and planning, gave me that.
That’s a hell of a gift to give someone.

It seems hard to believe sometimes that the original Star Trek was canceled because it simply didn’t have the ratings.  Yes, the networks killed it.  In these days of cable and Tivo, it’s hard to realize how important time slots were back then.  When they moved the series from Thursday night to Friday night, it was a deathknell.  You couldn’t time-shift your viewing then.  Friday nights, everyone knew, were the nights most people went out to dinner or movies or nightclubs or anywhere.  Friday nights were for dating, not watching SF on tv.

So the year ends with another tall ship being set to sail out into the bay, to be torched from arrows shot by those left behind, a Viking funeral at least in imagination for one of those who gave us a future to believe in.  Over the top?  Maybe.  But we build the worlds we dream.  We should have good dreams.  Majel Barret Roddenberry gave us some.