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Myriad Universes

Myriad Universes: Serafin’s Survivors and Shadows in the Garden

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Given Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s steadily climbing ratings and popularity, it was only natural that DC would bring the series back to the world of comics for a second volume and greenlight a monthly tie-in comic to go along with its television counterpart. In much the same way then that “Encounter at Farpoint” was the pilot for the series prior, it could be said that DC’s 1987 miniseries was a pilot for this book line. And indeed, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation would go on to be so successful it actually outlasted the show it was based on, running well into 1996. It probably could’ve run indefinitely had Paramount not pulled DC’s license in lieu of its ill-advised mid-90s “Paramount Comics” partnership with Marvel.

And furthermore, this series comprises an absolutely *massive* chunk of my personal history with Star Trek: The Next Generation, so there’s simply no way I couldn’t cover it, or indeed no way I could not have it be the dominant form of spin-off media this project explores.

This being comics, one thing that differentiates four-colour Star Trek: The Next Generation from fuzzy VHS Star Trek: The Next Generation, even at this stage, is an overt focus on serialization. While the stories tend to have the same scope of an average TV episode (though there are exceptions), they also tend to be spaced much further apart, sometimes running for months at a time. The two stories we’re looking at today, “Serafin’s Survivors” and its conclusion “Shadows in the Garden”, actually comprise issues 5 and 6 of the monthly series: The line proper began back in the second season and did a few stories set in that period that began to lay the groundwork for what it would become later on, but I chose to start with the third season material because, much as is the case on TV, this era sees the show in a time of transition, slowly evolving into the form it will be most remembered for.

One of the biggest transitions this series makes from the first volume is the addition of Michael Jan Friedman as head writer, who goes on to not unimpressively pen pretty much every single Star Trek: The Next Generation thing DC puts out. He comes in with volume 2 so this isn’t his debut, but it’s his positionality and approach to conceptualizing these characters and this setting that will define a lot of what we’re going to say about this book. We’ll get into that, but first I want to open by saying “Serafin’s Survivors”/“Shadows in the Garden” isn’t actually a personal favourite of mine from Friedman’s run: It’s got a few nice bits here and there, but it isn’t anything amazingly special, is more than a little rocky in some places and not batting at the level I know this series is capable of when it’s going at full tilt.…

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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: The Next Generation FASA Role-Playing Game

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Here’s another one of those things that crop up every now and again that, while I’m sort of obligated to cover them, I’m a bit out of my depth and don’t really have any business talking about them.

I never played tabletop RPGs growing up. To this day, I have still never touched a tabletop RPG. Actually, I’m not even entirely certain *how* you play tabletop RPGs, though I have a basic, functional understanding of what they are and what they do, mostly through tracing the lineage of video game RPGs and because my work and interests mean I tend to rub elbows with Nerd Culture with some amount of frequency. But the fact remains that this is still something wholly and entirely outside of the wheelhouse of my personal experience. I’ll freely admit I don’t “get” these and never have.

From what I can gather, the primary draw of these types of things is that they’re a form of generative storytelling set in a shared and recognisable universe, and that I *definitely* understand. I think I’ve always been some kind of natural-born performer, and when I was a kid one of the things my friends and I liked to do was pretend that we were our favourite characters and act out our own imaginary stories in the backyard. We would play it as almost a sort of writer’s jam session, coming up with a basic prompt and then just sort of freewheeling it from there: Somebody would randomly shout out some big plot twist, and we would all have to immediately deliver a reaction based on what we understood of our character and how we thought he or she would react-Thinking back on it, it was basically a crude version of improv theatre, considering we were basically actors ad-libbing the entire play. I would guess more or less every kid did some version of this when they were young, though I don’t know how many of them privileged the freeform improvisation aspects of the game to the extent we did.

But it’s this very experience that makes it difficult for me to completely *get* tabletop RPGs. To me, they just look too complicated: You’ve got a weighty tome (sometimes several) with all kinds of tables, charts and statistics that’s supposed mathematically define every single little bit of worldbuilding, which strikes me as running contrary to the generative anarchism of the experience. My regular issues about reducing culture, personality and human behaviour down to numbers aside, it’s forcing what to me seems like an unnecessary structural middleman onto the instinctual compulsion of writing stories. Although, I suppose I *can* see how basing your actions and plot twists around die rolls or playing cards or whatever might be preferable to hinging everything on the whims of your friends, who might suddenly decide to sink the ship or call in a massive Borg invasion fleet or something.

Another thing I never really understood about these games is that, from my admittedly paltry and limited experience with them, they seem to emphasize the world-building minutiae more than the characters: The books I’ve skimmed all talk about building characters from the ground up around pre-existing narrative roles, skillsets and character classes, and while that makes sense for something like Dungeons and Dragons I can’t see it working at all with a property like Star Trek.…

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Myriad Universes: DC Star Trek: The Next Generation Volume 1

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As we discussed last time, much of the initial tie-in merchandise and spin-off works based on Star Trek: The Next Generation were created before the actual show was so that they could actually tie in to things. This poses an interesting case when discussing things that are actual textual narratives, as it means the authors are working with prototypical assumptions about the characters and setting, and are as a result operating from the exact same position of uncertainty as the people working on the show itself are.

DC’s first Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book, a six issue limited series that ran from Fall, 1987 until Summer, 1988, is one such work. The first issue, “…Where No One Has Gone Before!”, was quite obviously penned before “Encounter at Farpoint” had aired (as you can probably guess just from the title) and is endlessly fascinating because of it: The characters are all drawn from broad-strokes assumptions about what they’d be like, presumably because the creative team only had access to Gene Roddenberry’s writer’s guide. Captain Picard suffers the most from this, being even grouchier, angrier and more stringent than he was early on in the show, although the series does do a decent job balancing this out with a sense of hardened isolation and introspection he feels brought on from his years of experience in deep space. Commander Riker, by contrast, tends to alternate between being barely visible and forgettable to being a generic heroic Star Trek lead.

The other characters, however, are eminently more interesting: Deanna Troi is more prominent, commanding and fleshed out than I think she ever is until season six of the show (well, discounting for the moment her development in the later DC comics, that is): Perhaps owing to DC being a publisher mostly known for superhero books, Deanna is treated as an essential member of the team whose psychic powers, which are far, far more powerful than they are on the show (think Professor X but without the telekinesis) prove absolutely critical on more than one occasion. She also gets a whole lot of speeches, and brings every other character down to rights at least once over the course of the series. Data, meanwhile is fascinating because he is quite overtly emotional, and *extremely so*: He gets emotionally overwhelmed at every little thing (he’s even sad to have “adrenal pumps”), both positively, or at least inoffensively, in the first issue to dangerously negatively in issues four and five.

Die-hard fans might recoil with shock and horror at this, but let’s stop an actually think about Data for a moment. Is it ever actually said anywhere at any point in the first season, in particular this early on in the year, that Data is emotionless? Sure, he doesn’t understand a lot, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel anything. At the very least if Brent Spiner is supposed to be playing an emotionless character he does an abjectly terrible job of it, because Data is permanently smirky and wry for the entire year.…

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Myriad Universes: The Wormhole Connection

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I don’t even need to come up with a Pop Christian reading. Just look at it.

It’s important not to understate the importance of the launch of DC’s first Star Trek comic line. For the entirety of its existence up to this point (and not counting the handful of US and UK newspaper comic strips that cropped up in the 1970s), Star Trek had been represented in sequential art form by Gold Key, a company basically run by about four people and with the somewhat dubious reputation of putting out all the licensed tie-in stuff simply to cash in on the brands of the day, regardless of quality (though they did have the rights to distribute Carl Bark’s Duck stories in the US and gave Mark Evanier one of his first writing gigs on their Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! book, which has to count for something). And while there were some genuine gems in the Gold Key series, there is something of a sense that this was a book that existed pretty much because it had to and oftentimes felt like just another product in the Star Trek brand.

This is not to say DC’s book is any less of a product or a tie-in, it absolutely is, but the climate is a little bit different in 1984 than it was in 1967. While Gold Key was attempting to promote a show that first wasn’t exactly setting the Nielson ratings ablaze, and then technically didn’t even exist as it puttered around in syndicated reruns for the next ten years. DC is coasting off of a successful movie and a wildly successful movie and launches right when a third movie is about to premier (a fact which is not without its problems, as I’ll talk about later). With Star Trek big business at the box office now, Paramount began to clamp down on their tie-in line and invoked a much stricter sense of quality control over what went out under the Star Trek name, and that shows here, for better and for worse.

The first thing that’s noticeable about this line is that it overtly follows the events of the last movie. Previous Star Trek comic stories have been standalone affairs that simply evoked the structure of the TV series without directly referencing onscreen events (a few nods in the Gold Key stories Doug Drexler worked on aside). This story, however, is explicitly designed to fit in with established canon, which is interesting as Star Trek doesn’t actually have an established canon yet, considering Gene Roddenberry and Richard Arnold wouldn’t give their famous interview until the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This is likely due in part to the book’s editor and head writer, Mike W. Barr, who is a veteran comics writer and first generation Star Trek fan, and this issue marks some of his earliest Trek comic work. This introduces a new sort of status quo for Star Trek comics: From here on out, as long as new Star Trek is being filmed, the comics will forever be playing catch-up and trying to slot themselves into the gaps between “canon” stories, with mixed levels of success.…

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Myriad Universes: The Wristwatch Plantation

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The Wristwatch Plantation

My initial plan here was to follow up both iterations of Star Trek Phase II with a look at the Star Trek comic strip that ran in US newspapers from 1979 to 1983. There are a number of reasons why I wanted to do this, chief among them was that, given its time frame, it would have given me a very nice “third season” of Phase II, putting that show on about equal footing with the Original Series in terms of episode count (or at least episodes *worth* counting) and neatly providing a gap between the first Star Trek movie (which wasn’t actually a movie) and the next two (which were).

Also though, I was really intrigued to learn that, for the majority of its existence, the strip was handled by none other than Sharman DiVono, a television and animation veteran who, along with creator Mark Evanier, was the head writer and co-showrunner of Garfield and Friends, which happens to be one of my favourite television shows of all time. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of a Star Trek overseen by DiVono, and I fully expected to see and be delighted by how she’d apply her wry postmodern humour to the Star Trek universe. But, once I started to prep for this section by reading a few of the strip’s story arcs, I quickly discovered they weren’t actually anything to write home about. They all seemed like quite bog standard and uninspiring pulp action serials set in the Star Trek setting, nothing I had come to expect of DiVono’s work on Garfield was present and, most worrying of all, the first two arcs were beginning to give “Savage Syndrome” a run for its money in terms of offensive depictions of teleological evolution and “primitivism”. Maybe I can blame that on DiVono’s co-writers.

So, because I was nearing the end of my patience as it was (in hindsight, it was a bad sign that I couldn’t come up with anything terribly interesting to say about the actually quite solid and enjoyable “World Enough and Time” and “Enemy: Starfleet”, I decided to scrap that plan, and none of you *really* want to read about mediocre tie-in comics for another month any more than I want to write about them. But, there was one arc I knew I had to cover regardless of what I did with the rest of the strip, because between January and July, 1982, DiVono teamed up with Larry Niven to give us an epic, sprawling return to the Kzinti and the Known Universe with “The Wristwatch Plantation”. Perhaps predictably, judging by how “The Slaver Weapon” turned out, this is just as much of a pulp serial as the rest of the strip’s arcs were, but this is a good one.

But before I leap into the story, I want to take a little time to talk about the strip itself, as this is probably the only time we’re going to engage with it and there are several noteworthy things about it apart from DiVono herself and the rather changeable quality: First of all, I was very, very impressed with Ron Harris’ artwork: Star Trek looks extremely good for a newspaper comic strip, with detailed.…

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Myriad Universes: The Star Fleet Universe

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The idea of doing licensed products for Star Trek in the gap between the Animated Series and the film series was, let’s admit it, a strange one. It’s not like today, where any genre fiction work is seen as a potential massively lucrative (and desperately needed) franchise and is milked for everything it’s worth from the moment it hits the scene no matter how paper-thin the source material is or how niche the fanbase. Back then, there were definitely properties that made money and were popular and those that weren’t, and you didn’t tend to get merchandise out of properties that weren’t.

Star Trek itself fell into an interesting space on this spectrum: It was certainly well-known, but, as far as an entire generation of people were concerned (and momentarily discounting the few die-hard fans who had remained obsessed with the show all this time), it was likely a show they hazily remembered that hadn’t been relevant in almost a decade. But there was also that contingent of new viewers who were just now getting exposed to the show through the syndicated reruns: This was the first exposure to Star Trek they had, and they didn’t have things like Mr. Spock’s Songs from Space anymore. This alone probably explains the longevity of things like the Gold Key comic series and the Pocket Books tie-in novel line, but it also led to some things that were, in retrospect, a little weird. Considering the audience Star Trek had was now firmly established as a niche one, and given the backdrop of the late-1970s this is happening against, what we wound up with was a situation where there was clearly a fanbase that could be served, but one that was comparatively small enough to justify not actually making serving it a serious priority.

Because this was happening in the days before a Disney-style obsession with brand uniformity took over the mindset of ever single producer and executive in the entertainment industry such that every sci-fi property has to be closely monitored and kept “official” (partially out of necessity it must be stressed: Hollywood, and really the entire industry, is in a deeply perilous position as of this writing), we get really odd and fun little artefacts like Star Trek: The New Voyages, which was a rather unprecedented direct contact between a very small production team and the fanfiction community, which is something that plainly couldn’t happen today. Should Marvel or Lucasfilm (both really Disney) or Doctor Who (really the BBC) attempt something like that for any of their properties today, it would first have to be fed through about a million different marketing committees and sub-committees before being hastily abandoned for fear the fics wouldn’t be “on message” (which, in the case of The New Voyages, they *absolutely* weren’t, and that was *wonderful*).

But Star Trek’s weird liminal position allows for things like this: In those days, if you wanted to license a Star Trek work, you wrote up one dude at Paramount studios, told him or her what your idea was, and they’d say “Sure.…

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Myriad Universes: Doug Drexler’s comic work

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This post exists mostly to introduce someone who will go on to play an important role in the future of Star Trek. Doug Drexler is a versatile visual artist and passionate Trekker who has been, at multiple points in his career, a makeup artist, a set designer, an illustrator, a graphic designer, a dedicated archivist for Star Trek’s production history and, briefly in 1977, a comic book creator.

A first generation fan, Drexler briefly ran a Star Trek boutique in New York City in the mid-70s before authoring and editing some early magazines and technical reference works and, after sneaking onto the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, made a promise to himself that he would be involved in the franchise professionally some day. It took Drexler awhile to fulfill his dream, though: He spent the early 1980s doing makeup work for movies like Amityville 3-D and C.H.U.D. and while he struck up a correspondence and friendship with Michael Westmore during the pre-production of Star Trek: The Next Generation, he was unable to secure a job on staff.

Drexler eventually won an Academy Award for his work on Dick Tracy in 1990, after which he stunned Westmore by going back to the TNG office and asking for a position, as Oscar winners don’t typically go out of their way to take a dramatic pay cut jobbing for TV. Drexler worked in the Next Generation makeup department for the rest of its run, before seizing the opportunity to pursue his true calling, graphic design, by jumping into the art department for the newly announced Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When the time came, Drexler moved over to Star Trek Voyager, and finally Enterprise. After Star Trek wrapped for good, Drexler for many years maintained a blog called Drex Files, an invaluable source for behind-the-scenes anecdotes and information. He’s also known for his work on the yearly Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar.

It was during his time in New York that Drexler came in contact with the production team on Gold Key’s by this point staggeringly long-running Star Trek comic book. Drexler wasn’t terribly pleased with the quality of the book, and the exchange led him to supervise and consult on two issues of the series: The September and October 1977 issues, to be exact: “This Tree Bears Bitter Fruit” and “Sweet Smell of Evil”. Well, if nothing else we can say Drexler certainly has a firm grasp of what makes a good Star Trek title. Actually, we can say the same about the rest of these stories: As one might expect of a passionately dedicated fan with professional aspirations, Drexler’s stories are, by and large, solid executions of familiar, standard Original Series story structures.

“This Tree Bears Bitter Fruit” concerns the Enterprise stumbling upon a trio of giant capsules of pure energy in deep space that resemble seed pods. After whacking the ship with a pulse of energy the temporarily drains the power systems, the crew pursues the pods to Beta Niobe III, where they reveal themselves to be energy beings seemingly motivated by pure destruction.…

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Myriad Universes: Star Trek: The New Voyages

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At first glance, something like Star Trek: The New Voyages might raise a few red flags. It’s a two-volume (though more were planned) fanfiction compilation professionally published under the Bantam Star Trek line edited by Gene Roddenberry and convention regulars Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath. Immediately, one wants to angrily declare that fanfiction does not require professional validation and is a perfectly legitimate art form in its own right and something like this is only going to lead to a slippery slope where fanfic writers will be competing with each other for places in an artificially constructed hierarchy of credentials.

But in practice, that’s not how Star Trek: The New Voyages reads at all (…at least at first, but we’ll get to that). Instead, this is, rather heartwarmingly, nothing short of an unabashedly warm embrace by the Star Trek production team of the fanfiction community and a firm declaration that this is who Star Trek is really for and with whom the future of the franchise ultimately lies. Gene Roddenberry’s introduction to the first volume is quite simply one of my favourite things he’s ever written: Naturally, he positions himself as the creator from whom all of Star Trek springs from and claims the Original Series was “…not a one-man job, although it was something very personal to me-my own statement of who and what this species of ours really is, where we are now and something of where we may be going”. This is somewhat difficult to swallow knowing about the contributions of Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana and Roddenberry’s own off-the-record statements about how Star Trek is really “just mini Biblical tales”, but hey, it’s Roddenberry and we expect him to say something like this. What we, or at least I, did *not* expect Roddenberry to say is what comes after.

“We were particularly amazed when thousands, then tens of thousands of people began creating their own personal Star Trek adventures. Stories, and paintings, and sculptures, and cookbooks. And songs, and poems, and fashions. And more. The list is still growing. It took some time for us to fully understand and appreciate what these people were saying. Eventually we realized that there is no more profound way in which people could express what Star Trek has meant to them than by creating their own very personal Star Trek things.

Because I am a writer, it was their Star Trek stories that especially gratified me. I have seen these writings in dog-eared notebooks of fans who didn’t look old enough to spell ‘cat.’ I have seen them in meticulously produced fanzines, complete with excellent artwork. Some of it has even been done by professional writers, and much of it has come from those clearly on their way to becoming professional writers. Best of all, all of it was plainly done with love.

Good writing is always a very personal thing and comes from the writer’s deepest self. Star Trek was that kind of writing for me, and it moves me profoundly that it has also become so much a part of the inner self of so many other people.

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Myriad Universes: Alan Dean Foster and Ballantine Star Trek

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What’s the most immediately interesting about Alan Dean Foster’s Star Trek Logs novelizations of the Animated Series for Ballantine Books from my perspective is how neatly they fit into Star Trek’s own evolving and shifting position in culture during this period.

When we talked about James Blish, I mentioned that the choice of having him novelize the Original Series was indicative of Star Trek’s at-the-time tentative connection to Golden Age science fiction. While his novelizations seemed marketed to the Hard SF crowd (and certainly looked the part), there was always a lingering uncertainty that this was what Star Trek really was and that these were the sort of people it should be exclusively marketed towards. This was embodied in Blish himself though his paradoxical and counterintuitive connection with the sci-fi writers’ group the Futurians, who bizarrely seemed to think they could bring about a Trotskyist revolution by going through Pfizer and Boeing. Blish and the Futurians, like Star Trek itself, were compelled equally by both extremely right-wing and extremely left-wing forces.

Alan Dean Foster however, is a different breed of writer altogether. In fact, it could be argued he stands right at the precipice of the point where New Age science fiction, Forteana and fantasy meld into the blockbuster giant of a genre we’re familiar with today. Foster’s major sci-fi work, and probably what got him the gig in the first place, is the Humanx Collective, a constructed, self-contained universe of stories about a progressive representative democracy encompassing multiple planetary civilizations of which humanity is a member, so I wonder where we’ve heard that before. The primary difference between the Humanx Collective and the Federation, however, is that the former body is in many ways defined by its two founding members, humanity and the Thranx, an insectoid people, and this relationship is a symbiotic one. As a result, there’s a lot more cultural diffusion in Foster’s stories than in Star Trek, and this allows for a depiction of how cultures morph and grow over time as they interact with each other.

Foster’s also something of a message writer, and a lot of his stories have a very strong environmentalist bent to them. Unlike someone like Gene Roddenberry though (or André Franquin for that matter), Foster doesn’t tend to have his protagonists come sailing in to tell all the Bad Polluters what they’re doing wrong, but instead demonstrates how a lack of respect for nature will ultimately lead to the undoing of any people who foolishly make the mistake of selfishly exploiting their environment. Apart from just being a message I can’t find any fault with, this also puts Foster very firmly into the tradition and concerns of the environmental age, which is quite fitting for 1974 and 1975. What’s also great about Foster’s staunch environmentalism is how it demonstrates so effortlessly that science fiction, and in particular science fiction about space travel, can remain relevant without relying on being propaganda for massive state-sponsored displays of Cold War imperialism. It’s a closing argument for our “Space Oddity” concern that our stories of space travel are doomed to become relics of the 1950s.…

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Myriad Universes: James Blish and Bantam Star Trek

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Nowadays, fandom-at-large tends to balk at the idea of a version of a Star Trek episode existing in another medium. It’s inconceivable to many in an age of Netflix, BitTorrent and Blu-ray season box sets to think that the televised story might not be the most memorable and recognisable version of it. But, in an era when television was still just starting to shed its reputation for being disposable entertainment and before commonly available home video recording technology, the only way for fans to archive their favourite episode were from their translation and recreation into other media.

Thus, the concept of the television novelization is a particularly historical, and historically significant, aspect of media studies inexorably dated to this era, and largely this era alone: Indeed, the 1970s are essentially the last point in the history of TV where novelizations play a significant role: The first Betamax VCRs came out in 1975 with VHS coming the next year, and by 1978 both types of devices were mass-production, at which point the age of the novelization was for all intents and purposes over. Which is perhaps fitting for our purposes, as the Bantam Books series of Star Trek novelizations by James Blish is a strange beast even by novelization standards. Like its parent show, Blish’s novelizations oftentimes felt like a leftover relic from a previous age, and their peak and subsequent decline in the early-to-mid 1970s in many way mirrors the twists and turns of Star Trek itself during this period.

The choice of James Blish to take on adapting Star Trek for mass-market paperback is at once curious and also somewhat telling. Blish was already an accomplished science fiction author and had been publishing stories decades before he began his association with the franchise. He was also, as you might perhaps expect, firmly and resolutely in the Golden Age tradition: Blish’s background was in biology and after training at Rutgers and Columbia University, he became a medtech in the army during World War II. Afterwards, he became chief science editor for Pfizer. Before that, he was a member of the Futurians who were in fact not, as I initially suspected, the time travellers from the far future who sent a mutated King Ghidorah to fight Super Godzilla in Tokyo in 1991, but were actually a group of sci-fi fans-turned writers who got their start in the Greater New York Science Fiction Club. Outside of Star Trek, Blish is most known for his Cities in Flight series, which depicts a future where anti-aging drugs and antigravity devices are commonplace, and space travel has progressed to the point where entire cities can be propelled through the stars on their own volition, and his “Pantropy Trilogy” of short stories, exploring how humans might be biologically augmented to survive in extraterrestrial environments, thus removing the need for planetary terraforming.

At first glance then Blish appears to be possibly the most bog-standard Golden Age-style science fiction writer we’ve seen since Isaac Asimov. His biography does, in fact, seem to paint him as almost stereotypically so: If one were to come up with a list of qualities that might comprise a model Golden Age writer, well, Blish ticks pretty much all of the boxes.…

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