Author Archive

25 Days of TNG, Day 13: 10 Things That Don’t Hold Up

When Gene Roddenberry and his team first put Star Trek on the air, there was no way he could know just how far Moore’s Law would take us. How could he have any conceptualization of what computers, cell phones, tablets, and cars would be like 300 years in the future?

He couldn’t. No one can know the future, not for certain.

Trek returned to TV twenty years later, in 1987, and though everything was highly upgraded, there were still technological advancements that were completely unexpected that have since made TNG into something of a dinosaur. Here are ten of them.

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25 Days of TNG, Day 11: Anachronisms and the Stifling of Creativity

Wil Wheaton, writing for TVSquad in 2006 (later to be reprinted in Memories of the Future), made this comment about “The Last Outpost”:

Data says Ferengi are like traders, and explains this with the most obvious contemporary reference: Yankee traders from 18th century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 400 year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you’re stuck in traffic on the freeway, and you say, “Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope!”

Because of the changing nature of pop culture and fashion, it’s very difficult to include contemporary references in fiction. Some people do it very well — Seth McFarlane, the writers of Psych and Warehouse 13, Joss Whedon — and some don’t. Others just avoid it altogether — for example, Laurell K. Hamilton is very cagey about exactly what type of phone Anita Blake uses. There are positives and negatives to both; catching an old rerun of Family Guy will remind you just what didn’t hold up a mere ten years ago.

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25 Days of TNG, Day 10: The Best and Worst of Season 4

Season Four had some pretty high-concept, hard-hitting episodes. It also introduced a war that apparently everyone in the Trek universe either missed, ignored, or forgot about. And it sent Wesley off to Starfleet Academy, so if you weren’t a fan, you were probably thrilled.

But, of course, the big news was that Picard wasn’t dead and Shelby wasn’t sticking around. I’ll talk about that in my top episodes list when we get there. For now… Season Four.

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25 Days of TNG, Day 8: The Best and Worst of Season 3

After the debacle that was Season Two (and the writer’s strike), it really amazed me just how strong TNG came back with the third season. Despite a somewhat-iffy premiere (the baseball references did nothing at all for me), the next ten or so episodes reminded us how good Star Trek can be. Though Five is probably my favorite season, Three is a close runner-up.

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Book Review: “Apollo’s Outcasts” by Allen Steele

Every time I read a YA novel, I wonder why all novels don’t move at the same pace. I’m not missing anything in the YA genre — the characters are just as developed, the action is just as action-y, and the story is just as engrossing. I just don’t have to slog through hundreds of extra pages of tangential plotlines and lovingly-rendered character descriptions to get to the good stuff.

And I think that adequately describes Allen Steele’s new YA sci-fi adventure, Apollo’s Outcasts, which will be published this November by Prometheus Books: for the most part, everything extraneous has been trimmed away, leaving a tightly-written, fast-paced novel that I quite enjoyed.

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