The Quest for Good Trek
I’m heading off to CraftBoston - I’ll be the one whom crowds are following like sheep - but first a few words on my recent Quest for Trek:
I tried to watch Insurrection last night, but the basketball game ran over and Channel 7 cancelled it. Channel 38 has likewise cancelled all Voyager reruns. There is no Trek in Boston, unless you’re of the opinion that Enterprise is Trek. I am not.
At least there’s fiction, right? In a moment of moral weakness, I got a pay-per-fic Trek book out of the library (one of the new Khan ones, if you must know) because it sounded marginally interesting. I slogged through a few pages, but the prose was too wooden to bear straight after a Walter Jon Williams book. You could see it as Shatner’s acting immortalized in print, or you could just walk away.
I wish I didn’t have to keep walking away.
There’s always fanfic, great, immortal, BNF fanfic, right? I could go fishing in the Trekiverse archives for winners of years past. (After just twenty months, my first three stories posted to ASC have been archived: Assimilation, One Line, Two Dimples and the filk Chakotay. It’s a sign that I’m almost two years old.) But to tell the truth (somebody’s got to), I still haven’t finished Talking Stick/Circle. And honestly, now, how many people do you know who’ve actually read Talking Stick/Circle? Sure, pick any fan off the street and she’ll have heard of Talking Stick/Circle; she’ll confess that she ought to read it one of these days. Lori, in order to do her zendom review of TS/C, had to go read the thing herself, more power to her. The point being, that a Big Name is just a name and is no guarantee that anyone’s reading your fic anymore a week after it was posted, never mind once it’s faded into legend.