Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Pabulum and Protocol, Chapter 1, by Jemima Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a mid-sized starship must be in want of a husband.

However little known the feelings or views of such a woman may be on her first entering the quadrant, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the starship’s crew, that she is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their officers.

“My dear B’Elanna,” said her flyboy to her one day, “have you heard that Turbolift Two is broken again?”

Lieutenant Torres replied that she had not.

“But it is,” returned he; “for Ensign Lang has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Lieutenant Torres made no answer.

“Do not you want to know who is in it?” cried her husband impatiently.

“*You* want to tell me, and I have nothing better to do for the next fifty years.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Ensign Lang says that the turbolift was taken by a burly Maquis of grim aspect from the senior staff; that he left the messhall at 1300 hours bound for the holodeck, and was so fortunate as to share it with the Captain, who was on her way to the bridge; that they are now both trapped in the malfunctioning ‘lift until at least gamma shift.”

“Which Maquis might that be?”

“Chakotay!”

“Isn’t he with Seven of Nine?”

“Oh, no, my dear; perish the thought! A lonely Maquis of grim aspect; what a fine thing for our Captain!”

“How so? How can it affect her?”

“My dear B’Elanna,” replied her husband, “how can you be so pessimistic! You must know that I am thinking of her marrying him.”

“Is that her design in taking the turbolift?”

“Design! Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that she *may* fall in love with him, and therefore you must join the repair team and slow them down.”

“I see no occasion for that. You, Tuvok and Harry may go, or you may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still better; for, as you are as handsome as any of the crew, Captain Janeway might like you the best of the party.”

“My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have my share of charm, but I do not spread it around now. When a man has a Klingon for a wife, he is wise to give over thinking of other women.”

“In such cases, a Klingon woman does not hesitate to elimate her rivals.”

“But, my dear, you must indeed go and stop Captain Janeway before she climbs out of the turbolift shaft.”

“She would rip my head off, I assure you.”

“But consider your old friend Chakotay. Only think what an establishment it would be for him. The Doctor and Seven of Nine are determined to help, merely on that account, for in general, you know they brook no sabotage of Starfleet equipment. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to pull this off, if you do not.”

“You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Captain Janeway will be entirely convinced; and I will send a data PADD with you to assure her of my hearty consent to her marrying which ever she chooses of the Maquis; though I must throw in a good word for Ken Dalby.”

“I desire you will do no such thing. Dalby is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure he is not half so handsome as Ayala, nor half so good humoured as Chell. But you are always giving *him* the preference.”

“They have none of them much to recommend them,” replied she; “they are all gloomy and idealistic like other Maquis; but Dalby has something more of quickness than the others.”

“B’Elanna, how can you abuse your former crewmates in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no consideration of my betting pool exposure.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your pool. I have heard you mention it with consideration these seven years already.”

“Ah! you do not know what I suffer.”

“But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many Starfleet officers of childbearing age get trapped in the Delta Quadrant.”

“It will be no use to us if twenty such should come, since you will not strand them in turbolifts.”

“Depend upon it, flyboy, that when there are twenty I will strand them all.”

B’Elanna was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and temper, that the experience of seven long years had been insufficient to make her husband understand her character. *His* mind was less difficult to develop. He was a pilot of low tastes, juvenile idealism, and restless spirit. When he was bored, he fancied himself a matchmaker. The business of his life was hotshot piloting; its solace was holosuites and betting pools.

An answer to the famous ASC Die Seven Die challenge:

This contest is in no way my fault, though I have entered The Efficiency Expert already. The idea isn’t to kill off J or C literally, but to pair them off with someone else. I thought I would have more fic to enter (up to 3 stories allowed), but it turns out that many of my non-J/C pairing stories didn’t imply any J/C history (a contest requirement).

My C/7 episode addition series did have plenty of REO Speedwagon post-J/C bitterness, but that’s incomplete. Maybe I’ll complete it before the December contest deadline and enter it.

Inspired by both Seema and general exhaustion, I’m joining in the day of
blog silence tomorrow. It’s not because I need more time to watch the media
frenzy, or that I approve of media frenzy. I don’t have an anniversary blog
entry to cite, since I started blogging later in the month last September, and
only about sci-fi at first.

There just isn’t anything you can say about evil. No matter how much
media frenzy Americans whip up in our unique edutainment approach to coping,
and no matter how hard certain
non-Americans try to pin the whole thing on the victim, evil is an irreducible
thing. Neither ribbons nor excuses can make it disappear. Calling it boring is
not a deep statement on the banality of evil - saying they’ve been repeated too
often is just another attempt to evade the facts.

Evil doesn’t fade, though
it may be surpassed by fresh evils. Evil gains you, not a spot in heaven with
seventy-odd virgins, but a permanent place in the memory of man. Ignomy
is eternal. The
Spanish Inquisition didn’t kill all that many people (as a percentage of the
potential victim pool), but you recognized the term immediately, didn’t you? Five
hundred years haven’t been enough to rub that one out, so don’t bother
looking to forget evil just one year after the event.

(Yes, I know the Spanish Inquisition didn’t end formally until
1834, but that was
long after the heretic-roasting heyday upon which its reputation in Anglophone
countries rests.)

You may not have noticed that I was gone. People just disappear into
Connecticut and nobody asks any questions. Kind of like the Mafia and the Charles
River, but I digress. So I’m late, again, in announcing the update at
zendom in which Liz reviews and
interviews a famous HP fic and author.

I’ve always been unduly fond of editing, so I’m enjoying revising Colony.
I’m not sure I’ll be quite as excited when I get to those twenty or thirty missing
scenes, but so far, so good. I revised the first section (out of a former six
and current seven), and though the additions were a great improvement, I keep
having ambitious ideas about theme and supporting characters that will someday
mean working back through the beginning again.

I confess, I had one of those Really Bad Structural Ideas, which was to drop
every single name in Roll Call somewhere along the way. I’d only have to drop
an average of one name a scene. So far I’m breaking even, I think.
I’m also keeping close
track of the sexes of all my characters - when your first name is Crewman or,
alternately, Tazise, it’s hard to remember after a while.

Things will be simpler once I pair a few characters off. Then, if you know
one, you know the other one is the opposite gender. It’s not so much that
they’re heterosexual as that they’re only interested in reproduction. Babies!
Everywhere! But it’s not babyfic - babyfic doesn’t involve anything like the
massive daycare organization I’m planning.

It’s not all about the Original Aliens, either - I’m enjoying writing the
Voyager characters again, as well. I’m especially looking forward to making
trouble for Tuvok, both on the “Resolutions”/”Galileo 7″ level of logical
Vulcan trying to command illogical Humans, and on the “UMZ” level of…some
kind of life-threatening of Tuvok. That subplot is to be filled in later.

I’m taking things one scene at a time. I find that I can write from a plan -
most of my plans for Colony involve taking a few sentences of
tell, moving them the appropriate spot (usually earlier in the
story), and turning them into a full scene of show. I had my
doubts when I started, but it’s working pretty well so far.

I’m hoping to lure the muse back in time to threaten Tuvok’s life. Maybe
she’ll kill Harry while she’s at it - Kimicide is all the rage. At the very least,
I need to pair him off with an OC and get him in trouble, a la…well,
every K/f episode. Maybe I’ll let him have the first baby.
I’m branching off from “Shattered”, so he could even beat P/T to the Lamaze
class if he tries hard enough.

I didn’t realize, when VS7.5 did it that “Shattered” was such a natural
break-point. I was going to go all the way back to “Drive”, but nothing of the
real Season 7 weirdness happened until “Lineage”. I may be stocking up on the
babies, but there will be no Klingon messiah child.
Not again. The line must be drawn *here*. This far, *no*
farther.

Well, it was a thriller, all right. Lucifer’s Hammer earns the title of sci-fi for being by a couple of famous sci-fi writers, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Otherwise, it’s an exercise in 70’s nihilism with a side of sci-fi tirades about how, if we’d only gotten off the Earth, this comet smashing into it, killing almost everybody and starting a whole new ice age wouldn’t matter so much.

In the fine tradition of Foundation, civilization hinges on preserving a nuclear power plant, even though the other Sign of Intelligent Life, the space program, used chemical fuel rather than nuclear power. If things weren’t black-and-white enough already, the environmentalists go cannibal and try to blow up the Last Nuclear Power Plant. The good guys fight them off with…mustard gas.

Now I’m all for bringing on an ice age, and for the disaster tradition in general, but the rather spiritless seventies characters - especially Maureen, the depressed and depressing socialite - didn’t leave me rooting for mankind. I was more interested in glaciation rates than in whether the dual male leads (corresponding to the dual male authors?) survived the winter. I found the boy scouts pairing off with girl scouts in the woods more interesting than Maureen cycling through the lead characters’ beds.

I’m not much of an anti-hero person, so I found it disappointing that the moments of true heroism happened off-screen, to be reported to the other characters as inspirational examples. Why they couldn’t be POV characters is beyond me, unless the authors just didn’t want their whiny, self-doubting POV characters to be shown up. It is important, when wiping out humanity, to make mankind sympathetic enough in the that the reader mourns his species in the large. Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in pushing tsunamis around the globe.

I always say that if you’re not part of the solution, then you must be
part of the precipitate. Paul Totman, rec.humor.funny

If the Eskimos have a thousand different words for “snow,” does this
mean the French have a thousand different words for “surrender?” K.
Banerjee, rec.humor.funny

I was checking out Roll Call for some unfortunates to put in Sickbay, and I
ended up at the Coffee Nebula
reading up on Seven’s favorite word (say it with me now), “irrelevant”. I have
my own page of Voyager Links, which fortunately
doesn’t require much upkeep since the show is off the air and new writers are rare.
Even old writers are getting scarce…

Anyway, further along the surfing path, I reached
Watt-Evans’
Laws of Fantasy, and was struck by #6, If a story can be written without
a fantasy element, then don’t bother with the fantasy element. I want to
rewrite that one a few different ways to apply to sci-fi and fanfic, but I’m
supposed to be rewriting Colony at the moment.

One last rule, from the same page: Debra Doyle’s Rule: If it has
horses and swords in it, it’s a fantasy, unless it also has a rocketship in it, in
which case it becomes science fiction. The only thing that’ll turn a story with a
rocketship in it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.

Thanks to the holiday, I’ve already added a few scenes to the beginning
of Colony. All my deep thoughts are about subplots - I think I’ll get Harry in trouble
with an ABOTW. In fact, I think I need to involve all the crewmembers I neglected
the first time around, except the Doctor. He’s always left me cold. Give me Tuvok
any day…

Naomi Chana was blogging about multi-fandom writing not working. She sees similar failures in cross-overs, as well. One might take this, on one level, as the usual murmuring against multi, and, on one level, I did so when I commented that single-fandom authors failed as often (if not oftener) to live up to the spirit of the show as multi-types did.

There is something eternally suspicious about the multi-fandom writer - something that smacks of betrayal or at least jaded decadence. In larger fandoms, similar suspicions cling to those who leave one camp within the fandom for another, whether it be a change of pairing, the frequent switch to slash, or the infrequent switch to what Naomi Chana called compatibility. Or back again.

What she called good fanfic, fanfic with the referential dimension, compatible with the show, is what I call canon fic. To me, it’s just another fanfic genre. Don’t get me wrong - I certainly prefer it to all other fic as much as she does, but I don’t mistake it for the sine qua non of fanfic. I didn’t get into fanfic by reading canon. The first fanfic I ever read was Jane Austen fic, and of it all only one story sticks out in my mind as canon writing. Canon can be hard to find in Trek as well, perhaps because space opera isn’t all that easy to write. Romance is easier, or angst, or smut, depending on your leanings.

What got me into fanfic was reading fanon. The referent of canon writing is the show; fanon writing calls instead on the body of fanfic. In that way, fanon is more truly referential - it is a language that grows, even after the show is off the air. Take, for instance, the J/C fanon that has sprung up to bring an end to the C/7 broadcast relationship. J/C canon pales by comparison.

Those members of the C/7 list who were never in the J/C camp like to point out the baselessness of the whole J/C phenomenon. Those classic J/C episodes, they would say, were bad episodes and unconvincing. Those famous stray J/C moments - well, they never really happened. They were a mass-hallucination.

As a former J/C writer, my response is, why, yes they were, thank you very much. That is the nature of fanon. Seeing things that aren’t there is the greater part of fanfic. I started writing with a rather choppy background of watching the show, but a very strong grounding in fanon. My stories were a dialogue, not with Voyager, but with the J/C Story Index. Maybe they failed as good writing, maybe they failed to capture the spirit of Trek, but they had the referential dimension all right. They referred to fanfic. They were good fanon.

Naomi Chana remarked that multi-fandom writers, while writing good stories, usually failed to write good fanfic (of my canon variety). The other side of the coin is that single-fandom writers, while writing good fanfic (of my fanon variety), frequently fail to write good stories. I think most of us recall a time when a good fanfic excused a poor story; many fans never stop preferring good fanfic to good stories. Those of us with the bad luck to grow old in fandom lose patience with poor stories.

Maybe it’s true that multi-fandom writers prefer, subconsciously, a good story to a good fanfic. After all, how can they tell, hopping from one fandom to another, what a good fanfic is for any particular show? How can they establish the reference, without extensive reading in the fanon, or obsessive watching of the show? Yet if they carry their own universe with them and speak some language of angst only they can understand, that is also a fanfic genre.

Just not my genre. I prefer canon, though I haven’t forgotten fanon.