One of my all-time favorite TNG episodes is Identity Crisis. Aside from featuring some of the best directing and cinematography on the show (coreographing and lighting that holodeck sequence, along with the handheld bits, took some serious chops), I always loved the way Geordi interacts and almost forms a team with the Enterprise computer to solve a complex puzzle. It certainly sparked my imagination as a kid and made a formative impression about how computers might factor into our lives one day, how we would interface with them and got me to thinking about how interfaces of that nature could work. TNG had a lot to do with me ending up in software/technology later on, and Identity Crisis is one of the prime examples of why.
Episodes like Interface and Real of Fear, by exploring things like telepresence and how people feel about transporters, are similar in a way. I guess these kinds of episodes that have some sort of abstract idea fish to fry often end up falling a bit short in the plot department, but I don't mind that if the things they touch on are interesting.
Can you think of anything similar in the TrekLit corpus? Not just (though certainly including) computer-heavy stories like Identity Crisis, but also generally stories that work as commentary on how people interact with and relate with particular technologies? To me exploring such themes was always a big part of Star Trek, but it feels like it's a bit underrepresented in TrekLit, probably because abstract ideas are a bit harder to market than human interest elements. There's SCE (yay!), but what about long-form works?
Episodes like Interface and Real of Fear, by exploring things like telepresence and how people feel about transporters, are similar in a way. I guess these kinds of episodes that have some sort of abstract idea fish to fry often end up falling a bit short in the plot department, but I don't mind that if the things they touch on are interesting.
Can you think of anything similar in the TrekLit corpus? Not just (though certainly including) computer-heavy stories like Identity Crisis, but also generally stories that work as commentary on how people interact with and relate with particular technologies? To me exploring such themes was always a big part of Star Trek, but it feels like it's a bit underrepresented in TrekLit, probably because abstract ideas are a bit harder to market than human interest elements. There's SCE (yay!), but what about long-form works?
.
