The Star Trek Personality Test

October 18th, 2001

The Star Trek Personality Test at startrek.about.com was rather inaccurate, but entertaining nonetheless. If you know your Myers-Briggs type already, here are direct links to your Star Trek character:

ESTJ|ESTP|ISTJ|ISTP
ESFJ|ESFP|ISFJ|ISFP
ENTJ|ENTP|INTJ|INTP
ENFJ|ENFP|INFJ|INFP

I disagreed with the characters chosen in some cases. Certain personality types are rare (1% of the population), so there may not be an appropriate regular character for them.

The Three-Paragraph Saga

October 17th, 2001

To my fans who hoped or feared I would never write again: I’m back at work on the Seven Saga. I have three, count ‘em, three new paragraphs! No, I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to writing fanfiction, but research is another matter. I spent half an hour making up a Romulan word for “Borg”, with the help of The Universal Translator Assistant Project.

Most of the rest of the time devoted to the Seven Saga (my infinite retelling of the Voyager story from Seven’s perspective) has been spent on a meticulous reading of the first few relevant episodes among Jim Wright’s Voyager Reviews, along with some cutting and pasting of dialogue. I hate it when people transcribe the show and call it fanfic, without even the humorous stage directions provided by Jim, but I’m hoping that Seven’s perspective will be sufficiently different from the camera’s-eye view to avoid the Sin of Transcription. I guess it will be a paragraph-by-paragraph effort.

So far, I’ve spackled the most glaring discontinuae in Seven’s history, though her fluctuating age and the Earth question are still at issue. If anyone has picked all the nits, do email me with the details.

Foundation

October 17th, 2001

  Puppy: off
  Phrase of the day: trial by jury

I had jury duty again today, which implies that if you’re on standby and are told not to come in, then your number goes back in the hopper. I was on standby half a year ago, I think. This time I had to hike all the way out to Roxbury to do my civic duty, which involved sitting in a room for three hours before being dismissed. The prospect of twelve angry Bostonians had scared all the bad guys into plea bargains, the judge informed us. And he disapproves of Judge Judy.

While awaiting my chance to say “string ‘em high”, I read half of Asimov’s Foundation. It’s been about twenty years since I read the trilogy last, so I was surprised just how familiar it was. Maybe that’s just Asimov, though. It never ceases to amaze me what people got away with in the good old days of sci-fi. Asimov’s idea of the decline and fall of Galactic science is the disappearance of nuclear power - in other words, a shift from 1954 to 1942. Twelve thousand years of civilization and…well, it doesn’t become me to mock the Great One. Foundation stands on the principles of psychohistory rather than the cheesy terminology of “nuclear blasts”. Still, Tolkien should have gotten the Hugo for best series ever. He knew about the rise and fall of empires…

The Captain and the Counselor

October 16th, 2001

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

I’m a Voyager girl, so it takes a lot for me to read TNG. Picard/Crusher makes me retch, with one exception. In fact, any TNG crew pairings feel like your parents getting together, and who wants to read fanfiction about that? So I’m still not sure how I got drawn into the Captain and Counselor series, but here I am, many megabytes later, practically liking Deanna Troi.

The series begins with “Elephants in the Lift”, which introduces the ultimate in off-the-wall pairings - not even the Evil Twins could have come up with P/T, but Lori pulls it off convincingly. Near the end of the infinite series, in “Actions Speak Louder”, all the characters, old and new, are drawn into mysterious doings in the Briar Patch. If you like DS9, action-adventure, or the dark doings of Starfleet renegades, “Actions Speak Louder” and “Leopards on a Limb” are for you.

Maybe Lori’s answer to post-series TNG will inspire me to write some AQ VOY.

Gompertz’ Law of Mortality

October 15th, 2001

  Puppy: off
  Phrase of the day: planned obsolescence

I forgot to mention one other book I read to avoid Blue Mars, a popular science book about immortality. I won’t mention the title, since it has nothing to recommend it. We die, the authors informed me, of planned obsolescence–but I knew that already. I’m not sure how I found or came up with the theory, but it seems obvious to me that people die because we’re designed to, not because of any particular disease. Cancer, especially, is not a true disease but a sign that the body is wearing out.

The book did mention one interesting piece of evidence that was new to me: Gompertz’ Law of Mortality (1825), which states that after puberty, your chances of dying double every seven years. Only recently has research confirmed this. (See http://www.anl.gov/OPA/Frontiers97/SL3.html.) Don’t worry, though–it takes a while to add up.

Gone Khaki

October 15th, 2001

Well, I’ve gone khaki, and taken the robot test - Liz made me do it.

Click here to find out what robot you really are

I’ve also almost finished Lori’s infinite Captain and Counselor series. I skipped a bit in the middle after my first head of steam ran out back in August, which was, I suppose, the best way to read an infinite amount of fanfic in a finite amount of time. I see Lori has finally put up file sizes so you can see I’m not exaggerating - to think I used to call Suz prolific. I was so young then…

Back to what the p’tak dragged in

October 14th, 2001

On to the new: I made an Enterprise page and put it up at your friendly neighborhood Jemima’s Trek site (except the Crosswinds mirror: first, they deleted my account accidentally, and now they’re in some sort of backup mode–too late–and won’t let me upload). If Enterprise turns out to be the ultimate in Trek kitsch (and it’s looking promising so far), I want to be there for every Sato screech. “Hailing frequencies open” doesn’t begin to describe it, Captain.

Scott Bakula is already failing to act. No Shakespearean actors on this one, folks–we’re back to what the p’tak dragged in. I’ve always been a pushover for the strong, wooden type. If I can’t have Kirk or Chakotay (or first-season Shouting Spock, or even Odo in a pinch), I’ll settle for Archer. You can keep Riker, though–he was just slimy.

For the first time in several months, I’ve had the free time to putter, so I made this sunshine yellow blog after a flurry of posts about blogging on CSFic. (Visit Wikifection, the C/7 home page.) Of course, I should have been working on the Seven Saga, or any of my C/7 UFOs (unfinished objects). Maybe next time…

Gone Trendy

October 14th, 2001

Well, I’ve gone trendy. Before I begin to blog, I’ll transfer the State of the Site here from my overloaded home page:

Jemima’s Stories

(October 8th): It seems twenty-five words is the most B’Elanna the Muse is willing to write for my equally silent fans these days. You can find all 25 in an Untitled C/7 vignette.
(August 12th): The Efficiency Expert finds out how hard matchmaking can be.
(July 23rd): The Wrong Emotion is a short C/7 background story.
(July 11th): The long, long, long-awaited AU series, The Museum, is finally complete.

Miscellany

(October 8th): Crosswinds is cutting off POP3 service, so please send all future correspondence to webmaster@jemimap.cjb.net rather than jemimap@crosswinds.net.
(September 15th): The links page has been updated with new and repaired links.
(June 26th): New Jemima’s Trek Awards have been announced: Star Trek in the Round, the Best Trek Movie, and All Seven, All the Time.

Quotes

(September 15th): Twelve new quotes have been added to the quotes page.

Contests

(September 3rd): Jemima’s AU series The Museum has been recommended by YMMV.
(September 1st): Jade’s story Future Dreams won second place in the Purple Comet Time Travel contest. Her Infinite Kisses is currently entered in the Illness contest.
(May 30th): Jemima is now featured on the Best of Trek Fanfic Site, for her story The Dance.

Testing…

October 14th, 2001

Testing…one…TWO…three…

Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

October 14th, 2001

  Puppy: on
  Word of the day: areography

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters put it best:

And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals–all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on–such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far she could tell. (Blue Mars, page 518, Bantam paperback)

The two thousand pages of the Mars trilogy left me agreeing with Zo. This is not, as it is advertised to be, the ultimate in Mars fiction. Moving Mars by Greg Bear covered the political and social issues just as well and had a plot to boot. Bova’s Mars gave a more convincingly hazardous first landing scenario. Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars and ten sequels) is more fun to read. Even obscure samples of the art, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time Slip, at least possess the virtue of being novels.

Robinson’s erratic, fragmentary tomes most resemble the previous classic in the field, The Martian Chronicles, although he hasn’t Bradbury’s excuse of having written them as short stories beforehand. Even his flood of language, in which many passages feel more like a thesaurus than a prose work, can be traced back to an earlier Mars:

The Men of Earth came to Mars. They came because they were afraid or unafraid, because they were happy or unhappy, because they felt like Pilgrims or did not feel like Pilgrims. There was a reason for each man. They were leaving bad wives or bad towns; they were coming to find something or leave something or get something, to dig up something or bury something or leave something alone. They were coming with small dreams or large dreams or none at all.. (The Martian Chronicles)

Robinson seems to have broken every rule in the book, and gotten two Hugos and a Nebula award for it. He’s set “show, don’t tell” back thirty years. He’s neglected the basics of plot in favor of a fragmentary overview of centuries of future history. His characters, while well-crafted, are largely unsympathetic.

His approach to scientific ideas is sometimes magical, as in the case of robots who build the Martian infrastructure almost unsupervised. Usually, however, it’s exhaustingly exhaustive, as if saying all the right words (and all their synonyms) about a laundry list of scientific theories were a substitute for a plot. And sometimes his ideas seem to be at odds with one another–did he make the colonists immortal just to give them enough time to watch the terraforming? And then mortal again to provide an ending for the trilogy?

None of this is to say that the trilogy was not well-written. It may even be an excellent example of a modern literary work which happens to be about scientists and Mars. What it was not was a science-fiction novel. I used to think that everything in the genre–whatever its weakness in character, science, or scene–had to have a plot. Perhaps no one has tried before to pass a series of character vignettes, scientific lectures and flights of description off as a novel before because no one has had those and only those talents. But I think it’s something else.

Realism is antithetical to science fiction–in the real world, we’re sitting on our duffs here on Earth rather than reaching for the stars. Early on in the trilogy, the characters gave me the feeling that if Man was like this, I didn’t want us to spread to other worlds. That’s not the feeling one expects when one picks up a science-fiction novel. Sci-fi is an epic genre, and epics ought to have heroes. Give me John Carter any day.