I wish modern incarnations of Trek would bring the SF authors back into the fold.
Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
- Thread starter Harvey
- Start date
Speaking as an SF author, I agree. Not just Trek, but other SFTV. The Twilight Zone had Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and George Clayton Johnson, as well as adapting notable SF/fantasy stories like "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life." The Outer Limits had Harlan Ellison and others. But these days, you rarely see SF prose authors involved with SFTV. Robert L. Sawyer was peripherally involved with FlashForward (very loosely based on his novel), but only peripherally. Stargate Universe had John Scalzi as its scientific consultant, but as far as I recall, he never wrote an episode.
I think in those days many SF authors moved to California specifically to break into film and TV, and thus attracted others -- Matheson came out when "The Shrinking Man" sold. Ellison moved there when the Hitchcock show bought his "Memos From Purgatory." Robert Bloch and Charles Beaumont, I'm not sure how they landed there, but my point is that they helped others. Ellison stayed with Beaumont briefly when he arrived in 1962, that sort of thing.
On Trek, I think Ellison got a lot of SF authors an in before he fell out with GR.
Sir Rhosis
On Trek, I think Ellison got a lot of SF authors an in before he fell out with GR.
Sir Rhosis
Not really fact-checking anything this week, but something fun from the archives:
http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-reluctant-astronauts.html
http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-reluctant-astronauts.html
http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-few-thoughts-on-these-are-voyages-tos.html
This week, my thoughts on the revised and expanded edition of These Are The Voyages. Not a complete review (since I don't have the book), but some comments and fact-checking based upon the sample pages at Amazon (and reading the first edition).
This week, my thoughts on the revised and expanded edition of These Are The Voyages. Not a complete review (since I don't have the book), but some comments and fact-checking based upon the sample pages at Amazon (and reading the first edition).
Liz Montgomery wearing Theiss? Excuse me, I have to go daydream for a while.
Just imagine some of the other 1960s hotties Theiss never got his hands (or clothes) on.
For some reason, this is showing up on my RSS feed as inverted text -- white letters on black "strips" against the white background. All your previous posts have just shown up in the default black-text-on-white format of my RSS viewer.
By the way, since this has long since become the thread about Star Trek Fact Check rather than specifically Inside Star Trek, should the thread title be changed? (And should blog titles be italicized?)
It certainly has gotten away from the original intent of the thread, hasn't it? If a mod wants to change the title, I wouldn't be opposed.
I do have more to write about the Solow/Justman book at some point, but finding time to put words to paper (and to wrangle all the archival stuff together) has been a challenge.
As for the text appearing like that, it's an artifact of some formatting issues I was having going from Word to Blogger. I'll try and get around to fixing it later today.
As for italicizing blog titles, I think the rules there haven't been fully defined yet. I've seen quotes suggested by some resources, and italics by others. I think italics look best, though.
I do have more to write about the Solow/Justman book at some point, but finding time to put words to paper (and to wrangle all the archival stuff together) has been a challenge.
As for the text appearing like that, it's an artifact of some formatting issues I was having going from Word to Blogger. I'll try and get around to fixing it later today.
As for italicizing blog titles, I think the rules there haven't been fully defined yet. I've seen quotes suggested by some resources, and italics by others. I think italics look best, though.
Generally the rule seems to be to italicize the titles of complete works -- novels, magazines, journals, movies, TV series -- and to use quotes for the titles of shorter works or portions of a larger work -- short stories, articles, individual comic-book issues or TV episodes. So if we extended that to blogs, I guess the blog title would be italicized like a magazine title, and the posts' titles would be in quotes like magazine articles.
I can't tell, though, since I don't know how to reload/refresh an RSS file my browser's already downloaded. I guess I'll find out when the next post goes up.
Neither do I. I use it, but I don't particularly understand it.
Enterprise at least had the Reeves-Stevens write a couple episodes, fwiw. They were staff writers as opposed to solicited scripts like TOS did. I think the change had more to do with a change in how Trek episodes were written. They stopped accepting scripts from outsiders for the most part after TNG.
Actually they maintained a remarkably open submissions policy, allowing anyone to submit scripts without even needing an agent (so long as they signed a release first), throughout DS9 and VGR as well as TNG. I know because I got to pitch to both DS9 and VGR courtesy of the policy. It was only with ENT that they ended the practice.
But the nature of the industry as a whole changed to become more driven by writing staffs. On TOS, the in-house staff was basically one showrunner, one writer-producer, and one story editor, but the later shows typically had staffs of five or six people. So there were fewer openings for freelancers, even with an open submission policy.
Though I must say it was certainly plausible it could have ended during VOY. As soon as Michael Piller, the driving force behind the open submissions, wasn't involved I could see it just quietly being dropped.
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