I am currently putting the finishing touches on my next short story that will be posted as a serial starting next week. In the meantime, a little personal background…
It all started with Star Trek. TOS Star Trek.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty.
Old school.
I can’t even tell you why or what circumstances as a child compelled me to start watching Star Trek. I was around 7 years old and, suffice to say, it has always, for all intents and purposes, been a part of my life. I loved it so much as a kid that I remember pitching a fit in a hardware store begging my Dad to hurry up because Star Trek was going to be on soon and I had to be back home in time to watch it.
Obviously this was long before tv shows were on demand. Back then you either saw it as it aired, or waited a week to see the next episode. I am guessing it was around 1975.
As a kid I was drawn to the adventure. The cool uniforms, the gear, as well as the characters who populated that universe. My grandmother made me a “Scotty” uniform that included a badge I ordered from a Trek fan catalogue, some gold braid, black cloth (for the cool collar) and a red sweatshirt. I had the AMT Star Trek Adventure set with the poorly designed Phaser, Tricorder, and Communicator that, to my young fan heart, was the coolest thing in the world. Both the AMT Enterprise and Klingon ship models hung from my ceiling with fishing line. I had the Mego figures (still do) and the wildly inaccurate bridge play set.
The bridge set, sadly, disintegrated over time and was lost to the local landfill.
By a wide margin, however, there is one piece of Trek fandom that has stuck in my mind over the decades.
Using the 1975 Starfleet Technical Manual as a reference my friend and fellow Trek geek, Pat Matthews, constructed a full size navigation console out of cardboard with show accurate control panels and a retractable targeting scanner. It was incredible! This prop, that used marbles and construction paper for buttons, was our centrepiece when acting out or own Start Trek adventures.
To cap it all off, on one of our many family summer trips, we headed to the Smithsonian Space and Air Museum. Despite being surrounded by actual space history, all I wanted to see was the model of the Enterprise hanging upstairs at the entrance to one of the many galleries. I was in awe, and took some very crappy pictures with my very crappy camera that I cherished for years.
A funny side note: I had thought the deflector dish was red up until the moment I saw the original model hanging there with a gold dish! I showed my aforementioned crappy pictures to Pat once I got back. The next time I was over at his place he had, apparently wanting his AMT Enterprise to be screen accurate, re-painted the deflector dish gold.
1970’s era televisions didn’t have the greatest color fidelity.
As I entered junior high my draw towards all things sci-fi grew to include books. I went on to drink in the works of Bradbury, Asimov, Burroughs, and Tolkien, just to name a few. Decades later, as an adult re-watching Star Trek, I came to admire the writing, the relationships between the characters, and the inner conflicts they would all wrestle with.
My love of Star Trek continues to this day. I still have my engineering badge, ordered from that flimsy newsprint Star Trek catalogue in the 70’s, tucked away in a safe spot. A prop phaser adorns a bookshelf in my studio as well as a host of memorabilia collected over the years safely stored away in bins. I routinely watch the original Star Trek episodes, and they never get old. They are just as packed full of adventure, heart, and terrifyingly accurate social commentary as they were back then.
What is my point?
This is where this all started for me. My love of science fiction, writing and telling stories. With Star Trek. In my view a lot of televised, and some written, science fiction over the years was, and is, heavily influenced by Roddenberry’s vision.
Mine included, which will become apparent over the next several months.
So stay tuned as we continue what Star Trek started and boldly go where no one had gone before.