My Dinner With Trek
It’s a period that every nerd past a certain age has gone through, I think; like geek puberty, but something that isn’t necessarily linked to your teenage years nor upsetting amounts of acne (Well, not necessarily, at least). But there was a while, years (and, I realize sadly, decades) ago where I was completely hooked on Star Trek novels.
In my defense, this was around the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation, back when Star Trek was again something that was interesting and new and something that people were interested in (It seems to happen in 21-ish year waves, weirdly enough; Star Trek in 1966, The Next Generation in 1987, Star Trek the rebooted movie in 2009; someone should look into that). I wasn’t into every novel in the seemingly-endless series, I remember that; there were particular writers whose work I’d avoid, and particular writers whose books I’d pick up sight unseen and get excited about. Peter David was the king of that latter camp.
David’s novels were like examples of a Star Trek I’d never really seen; one that had more humor than the po-faced television series I watched every week (The Next Generation had many good points, but its comedy wasn’t one of them, let’s be honest) but also more of a sense of completeness and scale, in a way; the novels felt like events, like things of importance happened in them, in a way that the television episodes didn’t, and the original cast movies couldn’t, due to their own self-important re-emergence of William Shatner’s waistline and ego capsizing everything else.
From the novels, I followed David to the Star Trek comics, and from there, found the original Star Trek series, a show I’d never really paid much attention to before. I became, in my own teenage way, a Trekkie, but only stayed that way until 1991 or so, whenever The Next Generation‘s fourth season aired and I realized that somehow I’d stopped caring quite so much. Don’t get me wrong; I watched the show through the end, and even saw enough of Deep Space Nine to decide that it was the best one of all (I didn’t see more than two seasons; it’s one of those opinions that comes about through contrariness than anything else), but something was gone – I didn’t feel the same need to keep up with the continuing adventures of the Starship(s) Enterprise like I had done earlier.
That said, I still took the terrible shitness of Enterprise (Later Star Trek: Enterprise, as if anyone would see the addition of those two words and think, “That’s it! It’s a good show now!” mostly because, well, it wasn’t) personally. Some amount of Trekkie never dies, let’s face it.
Related posts:
Trek is played all week long on the Freeview channel Virgin1 – an hour of Enterprise, then Voyager, then DS9, on a massive loop. Beats the hell out of Loose Women and Bargain Hunt, if you’re in the house of an afternoon.
The books were great for all those train journeys I used to take, ten years back. Cambridge was a great place to get a cheap paperback, let me tell ya.
Original Trek, I hadn’t seen for yonks. I got the first series (in the new Remastered format) for my birthday, and even though it’s repetitive, even though it’s old-fashioned and cheesy, it is still the very very best.
Haven’t seen the new fillum, yet. Makes me really quite sad. Sure I’ll enjoy it, though, but it really makes me sad to think that these characters have been so readily and rapidly reduced to “parts.” Not to mention the terrible thought that nobody can concieve of a quasi-utopian humanist future that doesn’t come with a crenellated forehead. I dread the Oasis that grows out of this particular Beatles.
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