Today is an auspicious day in the annals of spaceflight. Fifty-five years ago the first artificial satellite, the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1, was launched into orbit. Eight years ago SpaceShipOne made its its second competitive flight, winning the Ansari X Prize. Three hundred and fifty-one years from now, the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) will be commissioned into service, and given that synchronicity I feel like it's a good day to talk about Star Trek.
It's been quiet on that front recently, really. Aside from the upcoming movie Star Trek into Darkness--and here I thought they would have gone with something like Star Trek: To Boldly Go--there's nothing on the horizon. During the course of the last seven years, there's been two hours of new Star Trek produced; twice as much was made in the week from May 26 to June 2, 1999, when Deep Space 9 was airing its final episodes and Voyager was becoming the only active series. From 1987 to 2005, there was always a series in production. Star Trek dominated televised science fiction, and today that whole category seems to be in suspension except for things like Doctor Who... and that's space fantasy, anyway.
A few days ago I encountered an interview with Ronald D. Moore, one of the people responsible for Deep Space 9 unfolding how it did, where he talks about the movies being unable to cover quite the same ground or ask the same questions as the television shows because of their nature as movies. Generally, people don't go to the movies for things like that.
I'll agree that there is a niche for a new Star Trek series out there--and I think it should be approached in a rather different way than all the previous series have. I think that should Star Trek return to the airwaves, it should do so as an anthology series: call it Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
What would it mean, having an anthology series? You wouldn't have a series that followed the same crew, the same ship, week in and week out. You wouldn't have the flagship of the Federation running into all the spatial anomalies and saving the galaxy time and time again. The stories would follow different ships, different crews, different people--not necessarily only once, of course, but the camera would no longer be bolted to a single bridge.
This would be a boon for storytelling, since it vastly opens up the possibilites that can be explored. Rather than searching for situations to affect the characters as they've been established--something that can get pretty damn crazy after a few years of running time--characters can be tailor-made to fit the situation that they're going up against... or, alternatively, to not fit it. There's plenty of dramatic hay to be made out of putting an unprepared character in a difficult situation, and seeing how they react to it.
More importantly, the stakes can be higher--the stakes for the characters, that is. One of the reasons Star Trek relied so heavily on technobabble for its plot resolutions, I feel, was because it was the easy way out. Making a difficult decision or taking the best of the bad roads might be dramatically interesting, but it upsets the status quo. Far better, in that respect, for Geordi to save the ship by reversing the polarity on the phase inducers and generating an anti-tachyon beam to destabilize the anomaly, rather than something that would result in the characters picking up scars. In an anthology series, the entire balance changes; every episode, we're meeting new people. The audience isn't as attached to them as they are to Kirk and Spock and Picard and Worf and so on.
To put it bluntly, they can die and it won't matter as much. There's no applecart to upset; what happens to one crew won't necessarily affect another. It would make things more interesting. Everyone knew that Voyager would get home--that doesn't have to be the case for some other starship that lacks a seven-year commitment.
It would be something that hasn't been done before in Star Trek, an opportunity to breathe new life into the franchise. I think, myself, that it would be worthwhile for the ones in charge to consider.
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Star Trek's Creative Stagnancy
When I was young, Star Trek was not only my gateway to science fiction - aside from a few books like Ender's Game or Escape from Splatterbang, it was essentially coterminous with the entire idea of science fiction. In Central Ontario in the early 1990s, before the ubiquity of the internet and the cultural universalization of what had once been the domain of the strange and timid nerd, it was easy to fall into that pattern; when it came to televised science fiction, Star Trek was pretty much the only game in town--resulting in an audience concentration that enabled things such as CityTV booking out the SkyDome in 1994 to screen the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That wouldn't necessarily happen today; after eighteen years, the fans have diffused.
Honestly, it's for the best. In many respects, Star Trek can be seen as "beginner's science fiction," an easily approachable, entry-level gateway to everything that lies beyond. A similar thing happened fifty years ago: when the pilot of the original Star Trek was screened at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in 1966, science fiction fandom was vastly, vastly smaller and more insular than it is today. After Star Trek hit the airwaves, sf conventions were deluged by new fans who had been introduced to this entire new world of possibilities. At the time, of course, there were concerns that the tide of new fans would swamp the structures that had existed up until then; David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek, written in 1973, gives a good look into the concerns of the time. Still, it didn't end up becoming a dry run of Usenet's Endless September; many of the new fans integrated themselves into the existing structure, and Star Trek provided another avenue for people to become aware of this thing called "science fiction."
They may move on, but on the whole Star Trek itself remains behind. When I finally started branching out into things that weren't based on an idea by Gene Roddenberry, it was like the gates of the world had swung open. At its core, Star Trek is fundamentally limited by fifty years of precedent--a dense kudzu of stories that often contradict each other, and restrict possibilities.
That chair looks like it's got lots of possibilities for comfort, though.
Honestly, looking back on it now, at times Star Trek just seems fundamentally uncreative. I know that this is mostly a result of how television has changed in the last twenty-five years; after its debut in 1987, almost every episode of The Next Generation was effectively self-contained, and when there was a two-parter with the "Previously on Star Trek: The Next Generation" trailer, you knew you were in for something out of the ordinary. Being unable to build on what you've built previously, except for minor callbacks like Picard's Ressikan flute that don't require any prior familiarity anyway, means that everything has to be simple.
For me, what really sums up this sort of attitude is, for me, the way it deals with planets. Only a handful of worlds in Star Trek actually have their own names, and even then they're almost always derived from the people that live there--Vulcans come from Vulcan, Cardassians come from Cardassia, Ferengi come from Ferenginar, humans come from Huma, and so forth. Klingons come from Qo'noS, which is the only departure from the pattern I can think of. Otherwise, the tactic is always "Star Name, Orbital Position." So humans would instead come from Sol III, and so on. It doesn't matter whether it's a colony just starting out or the sprawling homeworld of a species that numbers in the billions. It strikes me as a sort of creative sterility. After all, by the time of The Next Generation the writers had almost moved away from the senseless Greek letter combinations that were in vogue in the 1960s, aside from insipidities like the "Alpha Omicron system." They still had to come up with the name of the star anyway--why not just apply it to the planet of interest, instead?
It's certainly more natural. In fact, as I got older that was one of the factors that attracted me to Star Wars: the fact that all the planets had their own names! Like they were important in and of themselves, that people lived there that weren't satisfied with living on the Eastern Continent of Beta Whatsis IV! This was particularly true in the Expanded Universe novels, which I got into through the Thrawn trilogy--a trilogy written by Timothy Zahn, someone who'd already found success in science fiction writing, and who brought those sensibilities to the Star Wars universe.
Honestly, after fifty years that sort of thing is what Star Trek is in dire need of: a re-evaluation, a re-opening, more possibilities for creativity to flow in unanticipated directions.
Honestly, it's for the best. In many respects, Star Trek can be seen as "beginner's science fiction," an easily approachable, entry-level gateway to everything that lies beyond. A similar thing happened fifty years ago: when the pilot of the original Star Trek was screened at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in 1966, science fiction fandom was vastly, vastly smaller and more insular than it is today. After Star Trek hit the airwaves, sf conventions were deluged by new fans who had been introduced to this entire new world of possibilities. At the time, of course, there were concerns that the tide of new fans would swamp the structures that had existed up until then; David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek, written in 1973, gives a good look into the concerns of the time. Still, it didn't end up becoming a dry run of Usenet's Endless September; many of the new fans integrated themselves into the existing structure, and Star Trek provided another avenue for people to become aware of this thing called "science fiction."
They may move on, but on the whole Star Trek itself remains behind. When I finally started branching out into things that weren't based on an idea by Gene Roddenberry, it was like the gates of the world had swung open. At its core, Star Trek is fundamentally limited by fifty years of precedent--a dense kudzu of stories that often contradict each other, and restrict possibilities.
That chair looks like it's got lots of possibilities for comfort, though.Honestly, looking back on it now, at times Star Trek just seems fundamentally uncreative. I know that this is mostly a result of how television has changed in the last twenty-five years; after its debut in 1987, almost every episode of The Next Generation was effectively self-contained, and when there was a two-parter with the "Previously on Star Trek: The Next Generation" trailer, you knew you were in for something out of the ordinary. Being unable to build on what you've built previously, except for minor callbacks like Picard's Ressikan flute that don't require any prior familiarity anyway, means that everything has to be simple.
For me, what really sums up this sort of attitude is, for me, the way it deals with planets. Only a handful of worlds in Star Trek actually have their own names, and even then they're almost always derived from the people that live there--Vulcans come from Vulcan, Cardassians come from Cardassia, Ferengi come from Ferenginar, humans come from Huma, and so forth. Klingons come from Qo'noS, which is the only departure from the pattern I can think of. Otherwise, the tactic is always "Star Name, Orbital Position." So humans would instead come from Sol III, and so on. It doesn't matter whether it's a colony just starting out or the sprawling homeworld of a species that numbers in the billions. It strikes me as a sort of creative sterility. After all, by the time of The Next Generation the writers had almost moved away from the senseless Greek letter combinations that were in vogue in the 1960s, aside from insipidities like the "Alpha Omicron system." They still had to come up with the name of the star anyway--why not just apply it to the planet of interest, instead?
It's certainly more natural. In fact, as I got older that was one of the factors that attracted me to Star Wars: the fact that all the planets had their own names! Like they were important in and of themselves, that people lived there that weren't satisfied with living on the Eastern Continent of Beta Whatsis IV! This was particularly true in the Expanded Universe novels, which I got into through the Thrawn trilogy--a trilogy written by Timothy Zahn, someone who'd already found success in science fiction writing, and who brought those sensibilities to the Star Wars universe.
Honestly, after fifty years that sort of thing is what Star Trek is in dire need of: a re-evaluation, a re-opening, more possibilities for creativity to flow in unanticipated directions.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Short SF Review #22: When Planets Collide
"Star Trek: When Planets Collide," author(s) unknown
Appeared in Gold Key's STAR TREK #6, December 1969
"There are our space bogies--and still on collision course! Mr. Spock... what if they should hit...?"
"At their estimated point of contact, the results would be catastrophic, Scotty! The shock waves upon impact alone would pitch many of the Alpho planets out of orbit... to burn in space!"
I know it should be obvious to everyone with even a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter, but it still bears repeating: if you're looking for actual science that makes sense, rather than buzzword particles invented by some writer because the plot needs to be resolved somehow and all that liquor isn't going to drink itself, you're not going to find it in Star Trek. While the franchise did act as a gateway for me and many others into the greater world of science fiction, the facile way in which it portrays scientific and physical phenomena can be stunting; it was only in the last couple of years that I began to understand and appreciate how spaceflight actually works.
Compared to comic books, Star Trek flowed from the pen of Carl Sagan. This is particularly true when the comic books in question are Star Trek comic books. Beginning in the late 1960s, shortly after the cancellation of the original series and tapping into the groundswell of Star Trek fandom that arose with the show's syndication, Gold Key Comics published more than sixty issues of licensed Star Trek comics - and in those pages that hid behind covers made of photo collages that rarely had any relationship to the story within, Star Trek's casual disregard for scientific rigor collided with the completely out-there, ridiculous, anything-goes stuff that comics have been, and continue to be, known for. I mean, I've been told that the Flash's costume is made out of pure speed. Speed isn't even a thing.
Nevertheless - Star Trek comics were made in the 1960s, and in part because they were crazy as hell they were, and remain, entertaining to some degree. Much of the rest of the entertainment value comes from the fact that they're so bad, they're good, in part because of the vast liberties taken by the comic writers and artists from Gene Roddenberry's source material. I mean, these are comics where the Enterprise is regularly depicted as a stereotypical rocketship with flame spewing from the warp nacelles, where Captain Kirk is given to exclamations like "great galloping galaxies" and "howling comets," and where the resolution of the very first story was of the Enterprise scouring a planet of life. Now that's the Starfleet way!
Those meteorites have punctured the bridge, and space air is leaking in! Goggles on, everyone! (Comic page TM & © 2008 CBS Studios. All rights reserved.)
Stardate 23:00.9 - the Enterprise is zooming around in the Alpho Galaxy when its "TV space scanner" picks up two planets on a collision course. I'm not sure what the writer of this particular story meant by "galaxy," whether it was just an issue of people back then tending not to distinguish between "galaxy" and "solar system" - roughly equivalent to not drawing a distinction between the neighborhood you live in and the continent you live on. (Not that it makes much sense either way. "Planets... in the galaxy and orbiting Alpho!" Spock says, incredulously.) For some reason that is not explored whatsoever, the collision of these planets wold be a Pretty Bad Thing and so the Enterprise blasts for the closer planet on full rocket thrust across the thousands of... *sigh* galaxy miles to investigate.
When I say "investigate," of course, I mean "blow up." Because that's how Kirk rolls, you know. Kirk and Spock and Mr. Scott beam down to the planet from a room that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the transporter room shown in the television show, and are immediately attacked! The planet is inhabited, despite appearances - what a twist! Can Captain Kirk convince his captors that he's come to save them, not destroy them?
Do you really need to ask that? I mean, as I write this I'm not even finished reading the thing, and it's still plenty obvious. This is Captain James T. Kirk we're talking about. Therefore, anticipating the plots of Armageddon and Deep Impact thirty years in advance, Kirk and Spock and a few others who I can't tell who they're supposed to be because only Kirk and Spock bear any resemblance whatsoever to their actors beam down to the second planet and start melting mountains in order to place the atomic charges at just the right places to avert disaster.
But... as Spock says, in perhaps one of his most in-character moments ever, "Great Zounds!" The second planet is also inhabited! I bet you didn't see that one coming. I mean, what's a hamfisted adventure story without a wholly artificial conflict based on convenient coincidences, anyway? Not to worry! Spock knows about a supernova remnant that radiates "a repelling force of the tenth magnitude!" Can the Enterprise use this last chance to save the two inhabited worlds - when it's restricted to a speed of 110,000 miles per second while towing the fragment? Not bloody likely, but come on! These guys obviously know nothing about how space works. So just go with it!
Does it work? Honestly, I wouldn't have been totally surprised if it hadn't. This is, after all, a comic series where the first solution was genocide. Does the comic work? That depends on how you approach it. It barely hews to the source material, it's insulting to the intelligence, and the conflict is purely artificial, engineered to make things as "exciting" as possible and failing miserably. So, it's as good as an average episode of Voyager. Heyoooooo!
ANDREW'S RATING: 0.5/5. In general, these comics are best appreciated the same way that Joel, Mike, and the bots appreciated movies.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
Appeared in Gold Key's STAR TREK #6, December 1969
"There are our space bogies--and still on collision course! Mr. Spock... what if they should hit...?"
"At their estimated point of contact, the results would be catastrophic, Scotty! The shock waves upon impact alone would pitch many of the Alpho planets out of orbit... to burn in space!"
I know it should be obvious to everyone with even a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter, but it still bears repeating: if you're looking for actual science that makes sense, rather than buzzword particles invented by some writer because the plot needs to be resolved somehow and all that liquor isn't going to drink itself, you're not going to find it in Star Trek. While the franchise did act as a gateway for me and many others into the greater world of science fiction, the facile way in which it portrays scientific and physical phenomena can be stunting; it was only in the last couple of years that I began to understand and appreciate how spaceflight actually works.
Compared to comic books, Star Trek flowed from the pen of Carl Sagan. This is particularly true when the comic books in question are Star Trek comic books. Beginning in the late 1960s, shortly after the cancellation of the original series and tapping into the groundswell of Star Trek fandom that arose with the show's syndication, Gold Key Comics published more than sixty issues of licensed Star Trek comics - and in those pages that hid behind covers made of photo collages that rarely had any relationship to the story within, Star Trek's casual disregard for scientific rigor collided with the completely out-there, ridiculous, anything-goes stuff that comics have been, and continue to be, known for. I mean, I've been told that the Flash's costume is made out of pure speed. Speed isn't even a thing.
Nevertheless - Star Trek comics were made in the 1960s, and in part because they were crazy as hell they were, and remain, entertaining to some degree. Much of the rest of the entertainment value comes from the fact that they're so bad, they're good, in part because of the vast liberties taken by the comic writers and artists from Gene Roddenberry's source material. I mean, these are comics where the Enterprise is regularly depicted as a stereotypical rocketship with flame spewing from the warp nacelles, where Captain Kirk is given to exclamations like "great galloping galaxies" and "howling comets," and where the resolution of the very first story was of the Enterprise scouring a planet of life. Now that's the Starfleet way!
Those meteorites have punctured the bridge, and space air is leaking in! Goggles on, everyone! (Comic page TM & © 2008 CBS Studios. All rights reserved.) Stardate 23:00.9 - the Enterprise is zooming around in the Alpho Galaxy when its "TV space scanner" picks up two planets on a collision course. I'm not sure what the writer of this particular story meant by "galaxy," whether it was just an issue of people back then tending not to distinguish between "galaxy" and "solar system" - roughly equivalent to not drawing a distinction between the neighborhood you live in and the continent you live on. (Not that it makes much sense either way. "Planets... in the galaxy and orbiting Alpho!" Spock says, incredulously.) For some reason that is not explored whatsoever, the collision of these planets wold be a Pretty Bad Thing and so the Enterprise blasts for the closer planet on full rocket thrust across the thousands of... *sigh* galaxy miles to investigate.
When I say "investigate," of course, I mean "blow up." Because that's how Kirk rolls, you know. Kirk and Spock and Mr. Scott beam down to the planet from a room that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the transporter room shown in the television show, and are immediately attacked! The planet is inhabited, despite appearances - what a twist! Can Captain Kirk convince his captors that he's come to save them, not destroy them?
Do you really need to ask that? I mean, as I write this I'm not even finished reading the thing, and it's still plenty obvious. This is Captain James T. Kirk we're talking about. Therefore, anticipating the plots of Armageddon and Deep Impact thirty years in advance, Kirk and Spock and a few others who I can't tell who they're supposed to be because only Kirk and Spock bear any resemblance whatsoever to their actors beam down to the second planet and start melting mountains in order to place the atomic charges at just the right places to avert disaster.
But... as Spock says, in perhaps one of his most in-character moments ever, "Great Zounds!" The second planet is also inhabited! I bet you didn't see that one coming. I mean, what's a hamfisted adventure story without a wholly artificial conflict based on convenient coincidences, anyway? Not to worry! Spock knows about a supernova remnant that radiates "a repelling force of the tenth magnitude!" Can the Enterprise use this last chance to save the two inhabited worlds - when it's restricted to a speed of 110,000 miles per second while towing the fragment? Not bloody likely, but come on! These guys obviously know nothing about how space works. So just go with it!
Does it work? Honestly, I wouldn't have been totally surprised if it hadn't. This is, after all, a comic series where the first solution was genocide. Does the comic work? That depends on how you approach it. It barely hews to the source material, it's insulting to the intelligence, and the conflict is purely artificial, engineered to make things as "exciting" as possible and failing miserably. So, it's as good as an average episode of Voyager. Heyoooooo!
ANDREW'S RATING: 0.5/5. In general, these comics are best appreciated the same way that Joel, Mike, and the bots appreciated movies.
Previous Short SF Reviews:
- #21: "You Source of Tears" (Andrew Barton)
- #20: "The Helix" (Gerard Rejskind)
- #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
- #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
- #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
- #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
- #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
- #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
- #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
- #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
- #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
- #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
- #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
- #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
- #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
- #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
- #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
- #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
- #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
- #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
- #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)
Sunday, January 29, 2012
I Was A Preteen Star Trek Hat Kid
You never forget your first - convention, that is. Back in the day, before the ubiquity of the internet linked fan communities from coast to coast and continent to continent, conventions were the prime mixers of fans and the places where fandoms were anchored. I didn't get the chance to attend Rustycon 29 in Seattle last week like I'd intended, thanks to western Washington being choked with snow, but on this grey and dismal New Westminster Sunday I thought I'd write a bit about my first convention, or at least the little of it that I can remember.
Today it's called Polaris, but twenty years ago it was known as Toronto Trek, being Toronto's preeminent Star Trek convention. In retrospect it's no surprise that this was my first intersection with the convention sphere; it was only because of my age and situation that the next time I crossed paths with that world wouldn't be until ten years later at Anime North. It was one of the many Star Trek conventions that had sprung up in the twenty years following the first such convention, back in 1972, when the syndication of the original series had allowed Star Trek fandom to retain its vitality. My mother took me there, and considering that we had shelves of Star Trek tie-in novels that constituted my first real look at the science fiction genre as well as the entire original run of Star Trek on those Columbia House VHS tapes, there's nothing surprising about that either.
let's see what this galaxy-class starship can do when it's in the middle of a hollywood warehouse
I don't recall very much about the convention itself. This would have been in the summer of 1993 or 1994, making me eleven years old at the most, and with both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine fresh on the airwaves, it was energetic. I recall that it was busy, and there were a lot of cast and crew from the series in attendance. What I recall most strongly was a "stump-the-audience" event, because I won it.
The way it worked, to my recollection, was this - if you were in the audience, you could stand up and ask a trivia question related to Star Trek, and if nobody could answer it you won a prize. I'm not sure how much advance notice I had of the way it worked, but it was enough to formulate a plan: win by asking the most obscure question I could find. Fortunately, for that, I had the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. I'd read it again and again at home so I already had a fair idea of where to go, and I still remember the question I came up with when the event runners called on me.
"Where," I asked, "was the Starfleet Type 15 shuttlepod manufactured?" This was something that had never been stated on screen, ever, because really it's completely irrelevant, and in the days before on-the-fly smartphone access to Memory Alpha it would have had to come down to someone in the audience having memorized the section of the Technical Manual dealing with shuttlecraft and shuttlepods.
When the time ran out, no one had answered correctly - so I won! I had stumped the audience and I got to go up to the front to pick my prize. From what I remember and what was retold, there were two choices up there. The first was a complete soundtrack for the then-new Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on compact disc, and the second was a Deep Space Nine baseball hat.
So which one did I want, they asked?
"Umm... I don't think we have a CD player at home," I said. I certainly didn't, not at that point, but at that age I would have had only the vaguest notion of what a CD player even was - all the computer software I was familiar with at the time came on floppy disks, and when it came to music it was still the era of records and cassette tapes in my experience. "So I'll take the hat."
We did, of course, have a CD player at home. I was just totally unaware of that. I imagine that whoever ended up getting the CDs was thankful that I'd chosen the $10 hat instead. I don't know what happened to that hat - it disappeared sometime during the '90s, and I've never seen its like again.
Nevertheless, it was worth it. If nothing else, I suppose it was a significant learning experience for me - the first time, to my recollection, where I'd ever posed a question that a whole bunch of grownups couldn't answer. That's an incredibly empowering feeling for a kid, a big step on the road to independence and adulthood.
To answer the question: the Starbase 134 integration facility at Rigel VI.
Today it's called Polaris, but twenty years ago it was known as Toronto Trek, being Toronto's preeminent Star Trek convention. In retrospect it's no surprise that this was my first intersection with the convention sphere; it was only because of my age and situation that the next time I crossed paths with that world wouldn't be until ten years later at Anime North. It was one of the many Star Trek conventions that had sprung up in the twenty years following the first such convention, back in 1972, when the syndication of the original series had allowed Star Trek fandom to retain its vitality. My mother took me there, and considering that we had shelves of Star Trek tie-in novels that constituted my first real look at the science fiction genre as well as the entire original run of Star Trek on those Columbia House VHS tapes, there's nothing surprising about that either.
let's see what this galaxy-class starship can do when it's in the middle of a hollywood warehouseI don't recall very much about the convention itself. This would have been in the summer of 1993 or 1994, making me eleven years old at the most, and with both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine fresh on the airwaves, it was energetic. I recall that it was busy, and there were a lot of cast and crew from the series in attendance. What I recall most strongly was a "stump-the-audience" event, because I won it.
The way it worked, to my recollection, was this - if you were in the audience, you could stand up and ask a trivia question related to Star Trek, and if nobody could answer it you won a prize. I'm not sure how much advance notice I had of the way it worked, but it was enough to formulate a plan: win by asking the most obscure question I could find. Fortunately, for that, I had the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. I'd read it again and again at home so I already had a fair idea of where to go, and I still remember the question I came up with when the event runners called on me.
"Where," I asked, "was the Starfleet Type 15 shuttlepod manufactured?" This was something that had never been stated on screen, ever, because really it's completely irrelevant, and in the days before on-the-fly smartphone access to Memory Alpha it would have had to come down to someone in the audience having memorized the section of the Technical Manual dealing with shuttlecraft and shuttlepods.
When the time ran out, no one had answered correctly - so I won! I had stumped the audience and I got to go up to the front to pick my prize. From what I remember and what was retold, there were two choices up there. The first was a complete soundtrack for the then-new Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on compact disc, and the second was a Deep Space Nine baseball hat.
So which one did I want, they asked?
"Umm... I don't think we have a CD player at home," I said. I certainly didn't, not at that point, but at that age I would have had only the vaguest notion of what a CD player even was - all the computer software I was familiar with at the time came on floppy disks, and when it came to music it was still the era of records and cassette tapes in my experience. "So I'll take the hat."
We did, of course, have a CD player at home. I was just totally unaware of that. I imagine that whoever ended up getting the CDs was thankful that I'd chosen the $10 hat instead. I don't know what happened to that hat - it disappeared sometime during the '90s, and I've never seen its like again.
Nevertheless, it was worth it. If nothing else, I suppose it was a significant learning experience for me - the first time, to my recollection, where I'd ever posed a question that a whole bunch of grownups couldn't answer. That's an incredibly empowering feeling for a kid, a big step on the road to independence and adulthood.
To answer the question: the Starbase 134 integration facility at Rigel VI.
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