Introducing the Nerd Word of the Day

Image by Dunechaser via Flickr

In what can only be categorized as an act of insane hubris, I've decided that the Written Weird is going to in fact host a follow-up to my late, lamented Geek Trivia column called the Nerd Word of the Day. It will be a small hybird of my previous trivia work and my glossary of science fiction words.

My initial goal is to make these entries brief, timely, snarky--and to do them every weekday. Whether I can pull that off remains to be seen, but if ever I was to do a sequel to Geek Trivia, this would be it. It should start tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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On the impossibility of reading enough books

Cover of Fathom

Because you're all just dying to know, I'm already behind on my resolution to read 25 books this year. To date, I have polished off the following in 2009:

• Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. (Review - plugs some holes in The Last Colony, fun if you've read the other Old Man's War stuff)
  
• Fathom by Cherie Priest. (Review - atmospheric, but a little plot-light for my taste; enjoyed Four and Twenty Blackbirds much more)
  
• The Rainbow Connection by Ian Harac. (Review - He's my friend and he's funny and this book reminds me how much so)
• 1633 by Eric Flint and David Weber. (Review - More dense than 1632, and ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger; left me wanting much more, including a copy of the roleplaying game)
  
• Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card. (Review - Best thing I've read by Card since Ender's Game, if only half as good as his magnum opus)

I also read about a quarter of Hal Duncan's Vellum before bailing out. Suffice it to say, I'm reading at about half the necessary pace. Somebody needs to cure this pesky need for sleep.

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The new Star Trek movie is the best possible Trek film--which is why they shouldn't make another one.

Image via WikipediaYes, I saw the Trek reboot on Saturday. Yes I liked it. No, it wasn't perfect, but that's not just me being a fanboy or an impossible-to-please critic (though I am both of those things). The movie had flaws, but they were outweighed by one inimitable factor that the film had in spades--and which almost every other Trek movie in the last 20 years has lacked--fun.

The new Star Trek is fun. It's funny. It has action. The characters are designed to be likable and interesting, not just allegories for whatever social group or psychological foil was necessary to drive the plot. There was no larger message about tolerance or human potential, it was just about the popcorn and the whiz-bang spectacle.

That, quite frankly, is the best we can hope for from a mainstream Star Trek movie. It's also why no mainstream movie can ever do justice to Star Trek.

I'm not talking about the bad science or the bad tactics or the plot holes (and more and more plot holes) you could fly a Klingon warbird through--those have been staples of all versions of Trek and, to a larger extent, nearly all filmic science fiction since day one. I'm also not talking about the inevitable (or imagined) knee-jerk fan backlash against anyone new taking on the classic Trek roles. I'm talking about what Star Trek stands for, and what is missing from this Trek movie--a moral.

Star Trek has always been a morality play dressed in sci-fi drag. The lessons were sometimes ham-fisted or cloying or maudlin, but there were lessons. Even as bad as Voyager and Enterprise got--and they got really bad--they still fumbled towards a moral or a theme in almost every episode (the dreadful series finales notwithstanding).

In the new Star Trek, the closest we get to a moral or a comment on the human condition is Spock's outrage at how racist the "logical" Vulcan leadership seems to be against humans and halfbreeds, or the notion that Kirk shouldn't let his father's death be an excuse for wasting his potential. These appear more as character inflections than social commentary.

Put more damningly, the new Star Trek is of closer kin to Independence Day than to "City on the Edge of Forever." That makes a real gee-whiz fun action ride, but nothing really approaching art. Many, many Trek episodes stand as some of the finest hours of television ever produced. No one would ever make the same claim about a Trek movie, except perhaps Wrath of Khan, which is really just a tightly scripted Moby Dick pastiche.

In fact, I'd argued that making Trek serve a mainstream cinematic audience is what killed it (and it certainly killed the Borg). Trek is at its best when it isn't trying to please such a wide swath of the viewing public, and is content--or, rather, not content unless--to tackle why and how the extraordinary artifice of science fiction can illuminate and instruct our own contemporary experience. That's the job of a television series, which has 20 or so hours every year to tell a succession of small or large stories focusing on one or more characters, as each best befits the moral and artistic goals of the show.

I'll leave it to greater minds than mine to determine whether Trek succeeding is good for science fiction as as a whole, but I will say that this Trek succeeding on the big screen could have disastrous consequences for the Trek franchise itself. It could turn Trek into solely a movie phenomenon, and widescreen is often a shallow medium. It seems financially unlikely that Paramount could afford to cast the current movie versions of Kirk, Spock et al as TV stars in a new Trek series, which is a loss. Trek belongs on television. (I'd argue the reverse is true of Star Wars; it functions best as a mainstream widescreen thrillride, and crumbles when stretched to navel-gaze at its own origins with prequels or TV series.)

The new Star Trek cast is fantastic, and the public's newfound demand for their takes on the characters will likely preclude an new Trek on TV. That means the look and feel and faces of the old Star Trek weren't the only casualties of this fun-and-fizzy new Trek reboot--so was Star Trek's heart. And that is a loss indeed.

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The Onion: Trekkies bash new Star Trek film as 'fun, watchable'

I have seen the future of my Star Trek premiere pre-party this weekend, and this is it.

There are days I'm convinced that The Onion is written by half-stoned journalism drop-outs from the future, and there are days I think it's written by my own subconscious. This is both of those days.

But hey, even if you are a Trek-basher who doubts the powers of J.J. Abrams or the premise of an Academy-era prequel--I'm looking at you, Stephen Colbert--just remember, it could always be worse. How worse? This worse.

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

(Hat tip to SFSignal, Wil Wheaton and Chris Roberson for collectively pointing this out to me.)

Showdown: Star Trek alien or gourmet cheese?

Image by williac via Flickr

It's time for another geek showdown, where I list off 20 or so unlikely terms and you guess which of two antithetical but bizarrely similar categories each entry belongs to. This week, just in time for the new Star Trek flick, we give you a matchup of Trek alien races and real-world gourmet cheeses. The descriptions for each are in "invisible" text after each entry, just highlight the area to figure out which is cheese, and which is just a cheesy use of make-up.

1. Bolian - The blue-skinned dudes with a single ridge running down their faces; played waiters and barbers on NextGen.
2. Caprino - Italian goat cheese.
3. Quark- Russian version of ricotta cheese.
4. Breen - Evil race that team up with Cardassia and the Dominion during DS9's Dominion War seasons. Helmets kinda look like the one Princess Leia wore when she pretended to be a bounty hunder in Return of the Jedi.
5. Sbrinz - Swiss version of Parmesan cheese.
6. Gorn - Slow-moving lizard dudes that Captain Kirk beat by building a homemade cannon out of rocks and sticks.
7. Sakura - Japan's only famous cheese, made using cherry leaves.
8. Nausicaan - Predator-faced mercenaries famous for stabbing Capt. Picard in the heart when he was just out of Starfleet Academy.
9. Briori- Alien race from Voyager that famously kidnapped Amelia Earhart.
10. Benzite- Grey-faced aliens from NextGen that have smoky little humidifiers sticking out from their chests, and made a habit of befriending Wesley Crusher.
11. Tyrolean Grey - Famously stinky Austrian cheese with sticky grey or black centers.
12. Brunali - Remember that baby Borg, Icheb, that Seven of Nine saved and adopted and made into Wesley Crusher 2.0 on Voyager? He was Brunali.
13. Rokpol - Polish blue cheese.
14. Caitian - Feline species made famous by the hottie Uhura-wannabe M'Ress from the original Trek animated series.
15. Edo - Remember the planet of half-naked hotties that wanted to execute Wesley Crusher for stepping on a garden? They were Edo.
16. Kobali- Alien race from Voyager that reproduces by reanimating corpses from other species.
17. Valdeon - Spanish blue cheese.
18. Menk - Neanderthal-esque race from the episode of Enterprise where Dr. Phlox sort of invented the Prime Directive--by letting another race die of plague.
19. Coon - Australian Cheddar.
20. Tamarian - The race that spoke only in metaphors from NextGen, and gave us the nerd catchphrases "Darmok at Tanagra" and "Shaka, when the walls fell."

Note: Bonus points if you notice the Prime Directive joke hidden in the cheese-versus-aliens pattern.

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