Of course I like Star Trek. I was only three when it first aired, so I didn't see it until it was in syndication and I was nearly ten; but from early on I was a genuine fan. I knew all the episodes. I built models of the ships. I read (and still possess) the paperback adaptations by James Blish. I even bought fold-out technical plans of the Enterprise.

I was never a Trekkie, however; never deep in the lore. 

My first and truest passion was for Space: 1999. But even when I was twelve I recognized how dumb that show could be. Then I loved Star Wars. What nerd could do otherwise! But I was never drawn into its universe — and by the time of Empire I really didn't care.

Space: 1999 is that first crush you never disavow, much as it embarrasses you; Star Wars is that heady fling that quickly leaves you cold.

And Star Trek is that steady friend you eventually disregard. Back in the day I even looked forward to watching Voyager; only with Enterprise did my interest fade.

In recent years I have tried to re-watch the various Star Trek series. I am surprised by how much I don't care for TNG and DS9, even if I target the "best" episodes. I tried to finally finish that Xindi arc in Enterprise — and sputtered out again. I'm not even inclined to bother with Voyager.

The Original Series, on the other hand...

During an evisceration of the latest atrocity from Star Trek: Discovery, the eviscerating YouTuber made a passionate contrast to the TOS episode Journey to Babel. I hadn't seen that episode in eons, so I went to Netflix and watched it.

I enjoyed it.

And it's not one I've seen very often. I was reminded of my sporadic desire to binge TOS, to just start at the start and watch them all. Since TOS became streamable I've watched some of my favorites — like Errand of Mercy; Mirror, Mirror; and A Taste of Armageddon — but I guess I was put off by slogging through the likes of The Way to Eden. But seeing Journey to Babel suggested I might find more good than bad among the less-remembered episodes; and rather than bias my choices I might just go for the binge.

Immediately, however, on surveying the first episodes of season one, I was not enticed. The Cage, maybe, although I prefer that embedded in The Menagerie; and sure, Where No Man Has Gone Before; but The Man Trap, Charlie X, The Naked Time... I dunno. It already felt like a slog.

Then something occurred to me: Is this the proper order of the episodes? Something felt imbalanced, like the dregs were above the froth. I might not be a Trekkie but my gut was saying: This isn't right. So I went to the handy-dandy internet to investigate the proper ordering of TOS episodes.

I soon found a list that went not by original airdate but by stardate. And dang if that order isn't better. I suppose some deep part of me recognizes the correctness of this order; a sounder narrative flow, such as there was. Stardate, it seems, is a better indication of an episode's time of production. Or maybe this order just seems balanced better between the surely good and the surely bad. Anyhow, I like it.

I'll let you know how the bingeing goes.

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STAR TREK TOS SEASON 1
× AIRDATE		✔ STARDATE
1	the cage	1	the cage
2	the man trap	4	where no man has gone before
3	charlie x	7	mudd's women
4	where no man has gone before	11	the corbomite maneuver
5	the naked time	2	the man trap
6	the enemy within	3	charlie x
7	mudd's women	6	the enemy within
8	what are little girls made of?	5	the naked time
9	miri	14	balance of terror
10	dagger of the mind	17	the squire of gothos
11	the corbomite maneuver	8	what are little girls made of?
12	the menagerie 1 & 2	9	miri
13	the conscience of the king	10	dagger of the mind
14	balance of terror	13	the conscience of the king
15	shore leave	16	the galileo seven
16	the galileo seven	20	court martial
17	the squire of gothos	12	the menagerie 1 & 2
18	arena	15	shore leave
19	tomorrow is yesterday	18	arena
20	court martial	27	the alternative factor
21	the return of the archons	19	tomorrow is yesterday
22	space seed	22	space seed
23	a taste of armageddon	21	the return of the archons
24	this side of paradise	23	a taste of armageddon
25	the devil in the dark	25	the devil in the dark
26	errand of mercy	26	errand of mercy
27	the alternative factor	28	the city on the edge of forever
28	the city on the edge of forever	29	operation: annihilate!
29	operation: annihilate!	24	this side of paradise

Rocketships are romance. However grounded they were in speculative engineering, rocketships were ultimately acts of art. They were unreal transports to a heaven closer than God’s. They were graceful. Hopeful. Evocative.

A Lunar Excursion Module is not a rocketship.  A LEM is a quasimodoan apple pegged on a foil-wrapped, four-legged cardboard box. I agree there is a kind of beauty to it. There is no grace, however. Even its name is graceless.

And when the lunar astronauts returned, they did not gracefully descend — but fell; in a practical, man-packaging cone, wingless, powerless, splashing into the sea.

Even when astronauts acquired wings, those wings were stubby. The Shuttle was a train-car with ailerons, a brutish airplane without the slick menace of an SR-71, the aloof magnificence of a B-52, or the subtle panache of a DC-3. Whatever else, the Shuttle was surely no rocketship.

Now, I didn’t grow up with a romantic anticipation of the Space Age. I and the Space Age are siblings. I was six when we landed on the Moon. The rocketships I encountered were already passé, simplistic and dreamlike, images in outdated storybooks and encyclopedias. And yet, even then, those images were not so very old to me; and somehow they retain a nostalgic weight.

So one day recently, in this year of 2019, when I am fifty six and Apollo 11 is fifty years past, I was surfing through dumb videos on YouTube — not even cyberspace is quite the wild thing it was once romantically expected to be — and I came upon a recording of SpaceX ships returning to Earth. I knew about these SpaceX successes, but since I get my news from video-free blog posts, I had not seen such a recording before.

I watched. I saw spacecraft descending from the clouds, landing with flames, vertically and grandly like... rocketships. Oh, yes, the SpaceX ships are only tubes with brackets. They moved so perfectly, though. Even without portholes and silver fins, they stirred me. Real rocketships, at last!

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P.S. I really do agree that the LEM has its own beauty. In fact one of my favorite SF spacecraft is the Eagle from Space: 1999 — a ship clearly using a LEM aesthetic. My mother once wondered why I liked the Eagle. "It's so clunky," she said. Yeah, Mom; but it's cool.

There's a couple of things I dislike about the Ori arc in Stargate SG-1.

First, it is facile and cowardly to cast Origin, the religion of the evil Ori, as a sort of medieval Christianity. Of course the Ori instigate a crusade against our galaxy. Why not a jihad? Because modeling Origin on Islam and having Stargate Command oppose a jihad would, I suppose, be mean to brown people. Or something. Mustn't be phobic! Except, of course, against Christians. Natch. 

Second, the Ori offer enlightenment and outright ascension to their followers. Those who heed Origin will themselves become gods! But then it is revealed that this is a lie. The Ori want followers only to literally consume the energy of belief. Ascension will never be granted to anyone. Origin is a fraud.

This, I think, I dislike even more than the arc's implicit Christophobia — which, these days, I'm somewhat resigned to. Haters gonna hate. Amirite? But to posit a religion as a fraud? That is artistically tedious.

The modern screenwriter, being so far removed from true religion and bound, by his university-credentialed brilliance, to the truths of SCIENCE! alone, cannot even imagine religion as anything other than fraud. Gods aren't real; God isn't real. How do I know? The SCIENCE! tells me so!

We might, as Good Liberals, indulge the ethnic employment of religion. Aren't those Mexicans adorable with their Signs of the Cross? Aren't those Blacks adorable with their Gospel Spirituality? And my, the little bon mots we can extract from the religious expressions of these adorable ethnics! Despite the fraudulence of their silly religions.

But imagine the Ori weren't lying. Imagine that ascension truly awaited the followers of Origin. Imagine that Origin was not a fraud. Suddenly the Ori arc is interesting.

It's easy to fight charlatans. The moral high ground is so very high. But what if your foe is not a charlatan? Where then is your moral high ground? Is it right to oppose the dissemination of enlightenment? When the rewards are so great? The truths so real? True dilemmas arise. It's not so easy anymore. The Crusade has a point after all. It is bloody, yes. But not pointless. The conflict between the Ori and Stargate Command is suddenly deep.

Or at least not tedious.

Since I actually like the trappings of medieval Christianity, I mostly enjoy the Ori arc even as it irritates me. They squeezed a lot of decent adventure into two seasons. (Squeezed perhaps too much: One potentially deep and interesting story — the implantation of a Goa'uld into the incarnated avatar of the ascended Ori — was somewhat flaccidly disposed of in a single episode. That story should have been a three parter, the very climax of the Ori arc. Oh well.) I also like Tomin, and Vala's relationship with him. And finally I have one word for you: morenabaccarin.

In The Corbomite Maneuver, an episode from the original Star Trek, an alien named Balok has decided to destroy the Enterprise. Balok then grants the crew some time to make peace with their Deity or deities. And how much time does Balok give the crew? "Ten Earth time periods known as minutes." 

Unless you're a steady fan of SF, you might not appreciate how amusing that is. It is the epitome of an SF meme, namely the alien who must use human measurements just to make it clear how long or far or big something is. And since the writer must concede that an alien would not normally use "minutes," he must therefore qualify "minutes" with "your" or "human" or "Earth."

But it sounds so silly. It's even a tad pedantic.

These pedantic qualifications are constant in Babylon 5; and it's not just for measurements such as "days" or "megatons." These past weeks I've been bingeing the series and you can all but make a drinking game out of "as the humans say." Straczynski, the prime mover and writer of the series, too often uses "as the humans say" to qualify a colloquialism or allusion or metaphor that, yes, might seem odd from the mouth of an alien. But surely the alien knows that his listener, a human, knows what humans say, and would qualify nothing. I have conversed with quite a few Japanese and Indians in the context of an English-speaking company, and they have never said "as the Americans say."

It's especially grating when Straczynski has two aliens of the same species conversing. He wants an alien to use some obvious and appropriate phrase like "kill two birds with one stone," and of course he feels a pedantic twinge and has to have that alien prepend "as the humans say." Honestly, if the phrase seems that out of place in the mouth of your alien, don't use it. Besides, why would two aliens, speaking to each other, use human turns of phrase at all? For one thing, they'd be speaking to each other in their own language, not English (the English is just a concession to the reader or viewer); and for another, they'd surely have their own phrases.

Never be like Straczynski and deploy "as the humans say." Either narratively establish that the aliens are linguistically assimilated and let them speak naturally, or bite the bullet and use a measurement or metaphor without qualification. Only in first-contact situations need you fuss with this issue at all, and in such situations do try to avoid the overblown balokisms.

P.S. Although the writing and the "humor" in Babylon 5 can be cringe-worthy, the characters and their arcs are really good. The characters actually develop. Their relationships and struggles are interesting and relevant. They're not just cogs in the plot or literary mixtures of personality traits. They support the space opera nicely — and that opera, Shadow War and all, is also really good. Hence my bingeing.

Old pulp has a reputation as vulgar, trashy, lurid, and low; and in their apologetics, the proponents of new pulp are usually quite aware of that reputation.

Sometimes the apology is an outright apology. Some proponents, for example, explicitly disavow the "racism" and "misogyny" of old pulp. Well, okay. I'm not here to hate races or women, either. But declaring against "racism" and "misogyny" is a concession to the very Stalinist conformity that has been destroying our fiction. Those words are no longer reasonable; the enemy has defined them. These days, putting a woman in a dress and saying she is not the same thing as a man is considered "misogyny." Virtue signaling is not the path to better fiction. 

But generally the apology is an affirmation. It is not trying to stay in the good graces of the modern zeitgeist but simply reminding people of the excellence to be found in old pulp; an excellence that is grounded in the pulp style.

Even so, there was something a bit vulgar about pulp. Consider the extent to which the Good People of the time sought to suppress pulp as injurious to morals. The Good People had a point. Scantily-dressed women and salivating killers are not precisely sublime.

But two things can be said.

First, there is a sense in which some vulgarities are better than others. George Orwell, in considering the naughty postcards of Donald McGill, noted that the cards, though obscene and (in Orwell's view) rebellious, were only funny because they presumed a stable society of indissoluble marriage, family loyalty, and the like. I myself have noted that pulp presumes the natural order. So long as the salivating killer is the villain and is so precisely because he is salivating and a killer, morals are not necessarily injured.

Second, even if one were to concede that a lot of old pulp was total trash and beyond redemption, there's still a lot that wasn't. As I read it, the Pulp Revolution has never been about total reversion to the past. It idealizes pulp. And ideals are not bad. Every revolution idealizes. A revolution is only guaranteed to be bad when its ideals despise the past. One can embrace old pulp and still set aside the vulgarity; for it is rather the wonder and excitement that guide new pulp.

You can be shaped by what you will not do. I will not drink. I will not curse. I will not lose my temper. Exclude the vices and you become other than vicious.

But “other than” is not enough. The bad is a privation of the good; but the good is not a privation of the bad. You must also be shaped by what you do. Include the virtues and you become virtuous.

We all know science fiction has become vicious. It is a platform for despising God, truth, men, women, and civilization. It gathers the mentally disordered and celebrates their diverse disorders. I just want to read about the defeat of killer robots and instead I must read about six-way sex on the planet Luvwyns. 

As a writer I can — rightly, wisely, sanely — refuse to serve the vicious. No, I will not bash the Church. No, I will not bash masculinity. No, I will not bash the family. No, I will not bash this civilization or the people who built it.

But in some ways that is easy. It is easy enough to say I will not step in filth. The real question, the thing to ask of my stepping along, is: Quo vadis?

Whither are you going?

Without question, whither I go as a writer should be towards the virtuous. However, I don't want merely to propagandize for the good. Nothing wrong with propaganda, per se; the Gospel is propaganda, after all. But fiction, as we all know, suffers when story is subordinated to the message. That has been a primary lesson of these past dreary years of SF. In writing, as in all art, whither is only part of it. The more pertinent question may be: Quomodo efficis?

How are you doing it?

As you can tell from this blog post, I have a condition that might be called High-Falutinitis. My work can be overdone. Yet a virtuous work is best if it is at ease with virtue; if it is at ease in general.

Pulp is so much at ease.

I've read a lot of commentary from the Pulp Revolution. And what have I gathered? That pulp accepts the natural order of things and just runs with it. Right; wrong. Good; evil. Men as men; women as women. Even when weird, pulp is not deviant. That doesn't mean pulp is simple-minded, or that it foregoes high artistry, or that it disallows moral ambiguity in its characters. Pulp simply starts with story and, hewing to story above all, lets virtue take care of itself; because a good story cannot be in service of the vicious.

Nihilism is never served by a rip-roaring tale.

I have been writing for a long time. I have written my share of more or less nihilistic works. To be sure, even nihilism has a place in art. If nothing else, a privation depicted (but not extolled) can inspire a healthy lament for the good that was lost. But in this age of nihilism ascendant, I've wanted to be more manifestly on the side of good. I wrote The Giant's Walk to accept, against this age, the reality of God, but also to acknowledge how hard it is, in any age, to be on God's side. Since then, as I have watched the Pulp Revolution unfold, I have learned a forgotten lesson, an efficacious way to write on behalf of right:

Tell an exciting story.

Let heroes be heroic. Let villains be punched and girls be kissed! And God will inevitably be smiling in the background.

Now, you may notice that the title of this post refers to a pulp "attitude" and the subtitle to my being a "fellow traveler." I have not actually read lots of pulp and I can't claim to be among the revolutionaries. Of late, and prompted by the enthusiasm of bloggers, I've been exploring authors like Moore and Brackett and magazines like StoryHack and Cirsova, but my definition of “pulp” comes primarily from those bloggers. For all I know, the Pulp Revolution is misapprehending the nature of pulp. But I don't think so. It sounds right, given my independent experience of pulp (such as Hammett and van Vogt).

And I'm being only a little hyperbolic when I say that God smiles at pulp. It's akin to the assessment that pulp presumes a Christian worldview. It's why the Pulp and Superversive movements overlap so much. But in some ways Pulp seems the safer path, at least initially, for those trying to escape the modern modes of writing. Superversive, insofar as it consciously rejects the subversive, risks creating its own kind of message fiction; and whatever its exemplary attitude towards wonder and grandeur, it might be a better second step away from the modern rot.

Anyhow, I'm learning to pulp my fiction, and enjoying it.

It's been difficult to find a good SF novel. Most, these days, are beset with SJW imbecility. But I keep trying the samples at Amazon. Once in a while a sample is good enough to prompt me to say, "What the heck, I'll finish this one." Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell was my latest choice.

But like pretty much all the books I have obtained hopefully after a decent-enough sample, QS has proven to be...  well, this one's peculiar. I had been expecting a Hornblower with spaceships and, indeed, QS alludes to Hornblower. And yes, it all begins with a boy (named Ishmael, no less) joining the space merchants as the lowest of the low; and soon he demonstrates how exceptional he is.

But.

His first great demonstration is to make fantastic coffee. You can tell Lowell knows how to make fantastic coffee. Now I, too, know how to make fantastic coffee. And that's fine, I guess. I wouldn't expect our Ishmael to defeat the Galactic Overlord in Chapter 2.

But coffee?

And the entire book becomes How Ishmael and His Galley Mate Pip Figure Out Ways to Make a Profit On the Side. And no, no, no, this is not a tale of endearingly roguish space-boys finagling and maneuvering to squeeze a few credits out of rubes on orbitals. It is rather a series of discourses, soaked in Accounting 101, about market speculation and doing boring stuff with inventory.

In fact, by Chapter 21, which according to my Kindle is 71% into the book, the most profound thing our heroes have done is rent a booth in a flea market in a port of call. With the full blessing, and some investment, of their Captain and First Mate. The paragraphs about the flea-market booth have been a thrill a minute, let me tell you.

The thing is, I feel like I've stumbled onto some sort of niche fiction. Something that appeals to a peculiar, obsessive, crypto-autistic audience — like furry-fic or slash-fic or fic about Hummel figurines. As if there's a sub-sub-category of science fiction called Running a Lemonade Stand.

QS is not badly written, I suppose. At least I haven't stopped reading. But it is so bland. The characters are all so nice to each other and borderline cloying. It wasn't until Chapter 20 and the presentation of a curmudgeonly couple in a nearby booth, that I finally got some characters who conflicted. If your schtick, as an author, is adventure-via-accounting, you really need to compensate with some lively characters.

I feel bad even continuing this book. Hey, I waste time all the time, but wasting time with this book almost seems foolish. What a silly, lightweight, peculiar, peculiar book.

And to think this is the first of six books in a series — a series that is well-regarded! Maybe the series gets more properly Hornblowerish and our hero will combat the Space-Bonapartes, or cleverly conquer a Fort of Space-Spaniards, or something.

But I don't think I'll bother finding out.