Personally, I like Penda better. Love Of Freedom (Penda Uhura) makes more sense to me than Star Of Freedom (Nyota Uhura) does. But that's just me.
Uhura's Birthplace?
- Thread starter DEWLine
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I'm definitely in the Nyota camp. "Nyota Uhura" just has a better rhythm to me. "Penda Uhura" is okay, though. It's not as hideous as "Walter Sulu" was.
Cool idea!
Ha! You just reminded me of George Takei's appearance at the spring Star Trek convention in Denver in 1990. I asked him what Sulu's given name was, if GR had indeed told him, because several fanzine writers had given him some rather implausible choices, of which Walter was actually one of the better ones.
He said GR had told him, circa 1968, that he had wanted Sulu's name to be Hikaru, and that George had always considered that to be canon.
Hikaru it is then! Now that's settled! 
JB
JB
If Penda Uhura had of been announced in the sixties or the movies we'd be none the wiser though would we of Nyota?
JB
JB
Huh. I've never heard that. I've always heard that Vonda McIntyre came up with it in The Entropy Effect in 1980, mainly because Sulu had a romantic subplot and she couldn't imagine his lover only calling him by his last name.
I wonder if this is yet another instance of Roddenberry taking credit for something that someone else came up with in Trek. The guy's track record is so bad in that regard that I now take any claims of him having created something beyond the initial characters and concept with several tons of salt.
I doubt it. I got this tidbit from George Takei himself, and I had no reason to doubt him. Especially when he was answering me in front of about 3500 people, and knew it would get around.
That's usually how it works.
Stories often grow in the telling.
Good heavens, thank you for reminding me of The Entropy Effect. What a magical book. I need to find that and reread it, particularly since one of my three New Year's resolutions is to start reading again. Also - Greg will know - what's the one from the WOK era with some evil Romulan (?) telling Saavik, "Look up, little cat, and see the stars?" Another one I thought was a masterpiece. Back on topic . . . .
Me too. Although I think she also wrote somewhere (Best of Trek? Perhaps this was another female writer) something like "Uhura's first name is inarguably Penda," and that didn't take. I personally prefer Nyota and wish they'd worked it into one of the movies.
See the evolution of the Nichelle Nichols/MLK Jr. story over the years, for instance.
Thats what I thought too and according to this thats what happened :
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Hikaru_Sulu#Background_information
but according to Takei GR was responsible for the name.
Takei gives the same origin for the name Hikaru but assigns it to GR rather than McIntyre.
You'd think if GR created the name it would have been on some document from him perhaps in TAS for example or in the movies before McIntyre's book in the 80s.
Anybody seen anything to prove it either way?
No, but Hikaru is a very common Japanese name, both for male and female. Maybe they both came up with it independently and didn't hear about it from the other until after the fact...
No, the ECON is China and the various nations allied with it. This is confirmed in the audio commentary on ST:FC's dvd/bluray.
(And supported by the courtroom scenes in TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint".)
Nice one. And quick OT question, did ECON stand for Eastern Coalition of Nations? I never understood that bit of shouted dialogue by Alfred Woodard in FC and have not seen Farpoint or any S1 ep of TNG in about 30 years.
If Roddenberry wanted Sulu to have a first name circa 1968, why doesn't a first name — any first name — show up in a single piece of paperwork generated during the production of the original television series?
And if a name was established in 1968, why did it take until 1981 for it to show up in print? Vonda McIntyre says that she invented the name for Star Trek: The Entropy Effect.
So, for the scenario that Takei suggests to be accurate, it would mean that Roddenberry came up with the name, but never wrote it down or told anyone about it, and that Vonda McIntyre happened to come up with the exact same name independently, and only after it appeared in her book did it start being used elsewhere.
Yeah, he's giving Roddenberry undeserved credit on this one.
Or the Animated Series or THE MOTION PICTURE.
By an interesting coincidence Penda was also the name of an Anglo-Saxon King of Mercia in England who died in 655.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda_of_Mercia
I find it funny to imagine a combination of Uhura and what I think an Anglo-Saxon king would have looked like, so I have always favored Penda as Uhura's name.
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