Saturday, September 30, 2006

Boarding the Enterprise Is Easy Enough--It's the Journey That's Tricky
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Love it, loathe it or think of it as that annoying weekend guest who's too drunk to care that you have to go to work the next morning and you're too polite to kick him down the stairs-- one fact remains abundantly clear: Star Trek is a prime linchpin in the history of pop culture. The show that boldly took us "where no man has gone before"--political correctness not having been invented yet-- turned forty years old in Septermber..
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Pause a moment to consider that this means at the very least, a generation and a half have never known a world without Star Trek. Even among baby boomers, scant few can claim their lives have not in one way or another crossed paths with some sort of Trekkian influence. And those who do claim otherwise are most likely lying.
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While I never considered myself a "Trekkie," I'll readily admit that David Gerrold's book on the making of "The Trouble with Tribbles" taught me the fundamentals of script formatting. He became a bit of an influence on me, more because of his audacity in getting his script actually produced than in the fact that it went on to be the most popular episode of the original series.
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Gerrold's latest endeavor, in collaboaration with Hugo Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer, is serving as editor of Boarding the Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles and the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Whew! Despite the unwieldly title, Boarding the Enterprise is a tidy collection of essays centering on the original series and its impact on popular culture. The seventeen articles included here represent a spectrum of thought ranging from straightforward analysis to giddy quasi-philosophy. Mostly, it's an entertaining light read.
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What distinguishes Boarding the Enterprise from the countless other histories and analyses surrounding Star Trek is its sly wink approach to the material. Take, for instance,Lawrence Watt-Evans' piece, "Lost Secrets of Pre-War Human Technology,"a witty bit of satire that attempts to logically explain why the Enterprise was bereft of circuit breakers and seat belts, among other niceties we take for granted. In "What Have You Done With Spock's Brain?" Don DeBrandt deconstructs the myth of Spock's vaunted logic. Scientist Robert A. Metzger makes a compelling case that the most essential character in Star Trek was not Kirk or Spock, but Scotty, and for reasons not blatantly apparent, in "Exaggerate With Extreme Prejudice."
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Other articles focus more on the Star Trek phenomenon in its historical context, both in socio-political terms, and its place in TV evolution and science fiction as a whole. Eric Greene equates the show as a metaphor for sixties upheaval in "The Prime Question" andin "We Find the One Quite Adequate," Michael A. Burstein discusses the ambiguous religious mores of the 23rd century. Both articles stretch their theses a bit too much to reach their conclusions, though.
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It's when Boarding the Enterprise stays within the "forty years and still relevant" theme that the book is at its best. Norman Spinrad much more eloquently illustrates Star Trek's importance than either of the aforementioned articles in "Star Trek in the Real World." And David Gerrold's forward, "The Trouble With Trek" points outs the flaws of fandom's blind devotion to the series.
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Completely unauthorized, and proud of it, Boarding the Enterprise will undoubtedly fuel unwarranted debate among hardcore trekkies. For the rest of us, it rekindles fond memories of a show that, for better or worse, shaped our perceptions of how the universe should work. Boarding the Enterprise is alternately insightful, amusing and nostalgic. Most importantly, it's always entertaining.