What I'm reading.

Another project for my unemployment is to go through my books. I'm afraid to count them, but I'm pretty sure I have more than a thousand books. And that's after winnowing out about 750 books in the last four years or so. I'm looking at all my books and trying to see if I can discard any of them. I'm running out of room to store them all and I'm pretty sure I'm not done buying new books.

That means that I have to re-read some of them. There's a ton of vintage science fiction that was at my dad's house and I have only recently brought to my place. 

Today's book: Other Times, Other Worlds, by John D. MacDonald. You might know MacDonald better as the writer of the Travis McGee detective series. He wrote many sci-fi short stories between 1940-1960. The collection is a little uneven--it is arranged chronologically, and you can see how his writing develops over time. 

A couple of stories stand out--those are the ones I remember having read before. "Common Denominator" where humans meet a race of aliens with no war, no crime and no hostility. And a very unique method of getting their race to that point. 

"The Big Contest" spotlights the loneliness of a alien set on Earth to observe human culture, and its attempts to fit in the only way it can. 

"Half-Past Eternity" has an interesting treatment of what could happen if one person could be speeded up, while the rest of humanity continued to move at the same pace. How would you eat? or drink? Would your clothes be able to move with you, or would they rip and tear from the super-speed? How would breathing and digestion be affected?

I'm keeping the book. 

What I'm watching.

If  you have streaming Netflix, be aware that they have added all the Star Trek series, except Deep Space 9 (and that's coming by the end of the year), to their streaming catalog. This is good news and bad news for me. Heck, I'm unemployed. It's good news because these series will be fun to watch. It's bad news, because it would be way too easy to make every day a Star Trek marathon day.

So far, I've only watched episodes from the original series and Next Generation. I'll confess right now that I watched the original series when it first aired, on my parents' small black and white TV set. I was young enough that a major punishment for me (on those rare occasions when I misbehaved) was to send me to bed before Star Trek came on. 

Notes on the original series: The uniforms are different colors. I mean, I know this intellectually. I have seen some of the episodes in re-runs on color TV. I've seen all the movies. But deep down in my brain somewhere, "Star Trek" means Kirk and Spock and McCoy in shades of grey. I have to keep adjusting my brain to this. 

Watching the show on a large flat-screen is a completely different experience to viewing the original episodes on a small black and white TV. You can see the control panels and what's on them! You can see the different colors on the sets! The little computer disks are different colors! You can see that Spock's skin is not the same color as human skin. Scotty looks so darned young--I guess I've gotten used to the older version in the movies.

A bonus for me is that they have the original, uncut pilot to the series--"The Cage." Not the chopped up version later used in "The Menagerie," but the real, official pilot. So that was interesting to watch. And to compare to "The Menagerie," just to see what they cut out of that.

I've watched the first three episodes, "The Man Trap," "Charlie X," and "Where No Man Has Gone Before." It's interesting that two of the episodes involve characters with super powers which humans can't really tame or control. Death and banishment to an alien world under the control of aliens are the only ways to free human kind of the menace. The alien in "The Man Trap" just wants salt, but appears unable to wait for it to be given, and must steal it from human bodies, requiring that it must, in the end, be killed as well. 

For NextGen, I've watched the first three episodes. The pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint," has an alien with super powers, but instead of just killing humans, he puts the crew of the Enterprise on trial, as representatives of the human race. Fortunately, the human crew manages to figure out the secret of Farpoint Station, free a captive alien life form and win the trial. So here, the crew outwits the super powered alien at his own game, instead of trying to kill or banish him, which they probably couldn't do anyway.

This episode is also notable for the min-skirts worn not only by Deana Troi, but by several of the male crew members as well. Sadly, the mini-skirts disappear by the third or fourth episode, if I recall correctly. 

The second episode, "The Naked Now," reprises the original series "The Naked Time." And  we get the first instance of Wesley saving the ship, but only after he has been the one to put it in danger in the first place. My guess is that this episode was designed to show us a bit about the characters and their personalities, as well as to clear up the question of just how fully functional Data really is.

"Code of Honor" really hammers home the message that women in Star Trek society are treated the same as men. It's just one of many first season episodes that delivers its message perhaps a little too strongly. Tasha has to fight the wife of the alien leader to the death--which she is able to do only because the Enterprise has the technology to bring someone back from the dead. So the wife is killed, fulfilling the rules of the battle, but then brought back to life, fulfilling the need of the humans not to take the life of another living being. The fight staging is awkward, the dialogue in many places is stilted beyond belief, but we are introduced to the concept of saving a life after it is gone, and the lengths to which the crew will go to preserve the honor of everyone involved. And get the vaccine which is so desperately needed.