Amanda…Grayson? And her career
- Thread starter VSAFaculty
- Start date
Based upon what?
Stone was doing his job. The evidence against Kirk was solid and he was required to convene a trial. Kirk had opportunity to defend. He did. He won. Stone accepted the verdict. Case closed.
They were both only Commodores (and not the singing group).Stocker, well he almost caused a war with the Romulans and nearly lost the Enterprise, so, not a sound commander and not promoted. YMMV
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Stocker was not a command officer. That was made plain in the dialog. He was an administrator. And not for anything, it's not like "Admiral" is an easy rank that is the expected next step. It's much harder than becoming an Eagle Scout. Training, grooming, military and leadership track record, connections, and a metric ton of other things are required. And it's not a disgrace to never reach so high a rank. It's reserved for the most elite career military.
Star Trek, and mostly fandom, promotes TOS characters to the top without thinking it through ('oh you were part of Kirk's crew? You're an admiral!"). Admiral's Uhura and Chekov probably never would have happened...
I do appreciate that viewpoint in MASH is that some flag officers get there because they are not much better at anything else. Potter often comments on that aspect.
<shrug> I've never owned the Concordance. I haven't really seen the need, since I've owned several editions of Allan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium since the mid-'80s.
Hey, I'm fine with the standard four-character abbreviations of the 60 Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories. Those all make sense and are easily understandable at a glance. The Bjo Trimble abbreviations are not. And I'm not going to waste any brain space memorizing that confusing mess when I can just type out the episode title instead and have everyone know what I'm talking about.
And how the heck are the Trimble episode abbreviations "official"? I don't think I've ever seen them used in any officially commissioned ST reference material.
The Concordance was an encyclopedia as well as an episode guide. It was the standard such work until the Okuda books (which did not include material from TAS).
I wonder if the fanfic assumption that Amanda Grayson invented the Universal Translator originates in Jean Lorrah's fanfic. Her fanfic novel Night of the Twin Moons and its sequel Full Moon Rising, both published in the 1970's, were for a long time considered (by fanficcers) to include the definitive interpretation/backstory of Sarek and Amanda. Her version of Amanda was a linguist, and a professor of linguistics, who met Sarek while he was stationed on Earth and she was researching the Vulcan language. And Lorrah's Amanda did invent (or maybe co-invent? It's been a long time since I read the books) the Universal Translator. The reason Lorrah gave as to why the Enterprise crew didn't recognize Amanda for that is that she was credited by her professional name, A.M. Grayson, while the crew knew her as "Mrs. Sarek."
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I meant official in a colloquial sense. You have to understand the context of the age: in 1976, the studio wasn't curating an "official" franchise. Paramount wasn't serious about controlled or coordinated content. It was a time when the fans owned fandom.
The Concordance was an organized attempt to lay out, within reason at that point, all there was to know in the aired episodes. It blazed a trail that nobody else was walking, and for a good stretch of time it was the only whole-series resource filling that role.
I recall Harve Bennett asked Bjo Trimble for a copy of the Concordance when he was producing Star Trek III, or thereabouts. She sent him her last copy. How "official" did it have to be? It wasn't some random book. It was a widely distributed work of detailed Star Trek information, and the filmmakers themselves had nothing better to dip into.
That’s probably what it is, then. I never read NTM. Really didn’t want to.
Yeah, I'm aware. Me never owning a copy was not a value judgement on the book. It's just a reflection of when I came up in ST fandom. I'm not opposed to owning it if I ever find a used copy for a decent price.
So... official in a way that doesn't mean official, then?
Again, I'm aware of the book's significance.
By the mid '80s to mid '90s, it pretty much was. Largely because it was out of print and was no longer the only game in town.
I may not be remembering correctly, and I can't remember the book, but one of the books said she was on the team of linguists working on the Universal Translator. Spock also says something about her being embarrassed about a mistranslation of a word (someone else here might remember the term). She wasn't as precise as she should have been and had been trying to get it corrected for years.
One of the Jean Lorrah books set on Vulcan says that she and Sarek's brother were both linguists--graduate students, maybe?--on Terra (he was studying Terran languages, and she Vulcan and affiliated languages) and that Sarek's brother was the person who introduced them. We can't forget, also, that Skon, Sarek's father, translated Surak's teachings into Standard/English.
I don't remember the book title either, but her mistranslation had to do with saying "Vulcans lack emotion" when it should have been "Vulcans suppress emotion". Leading to in universe misunderstanding about Vulcans.
Where was Quality Control?
I don't think we need to place so much focus on every character being so exceptional that they changed the universe. She's an awesome character just as a former school teacher who married a Vulcan IMO as long as she is written well. I thought the version in SNW channelled plenty of Jane Wyatt's sass.
I thought the Ut mistranslated passion 's mastery as lack of emotions. Do not remember the novel it was in.
I think that it was Spock's World by Diane Duane.
found it, pages 93 and 99. After she met Sarek, but before Spock, she was on the translation committee. Instead of Suppression of emotions or lack of emotion it should have been "Passion's Mastery".
I’ll always have the Jane Wyatt version in my head.
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