Why Sci Fi?

Time to let out my inner nerd for all to see.

I'm a total Trekkie.

My dad has watched Star Trek since before I can remember. When I was little and I went to his office at work I remember playing with his little model of the starship Enterprise that he kept on his desk. At Christmastime one year (I was probably four or five), I was watching "The Santa Clause" or some other such Christmas movie and pulled my ears up into points with my fingers to try to look like an elf. My mom laughed and told me to go show my dad and say "I am Mr. Spock."

My dad recorded episodes of Star Trek on TV in the early '90s and took a huge barrel of tapes down with us to Ecuador. Meaning that, the summer after my seventh grade year, I was home all summer with next to nothing to do, and somewhat inadvertently got hooked on the original series of Star Trek. I watched every single episode of all three seasons, and despaired when I finished all of them. Mr. Spock was (okay, still is) my hero, and although William Shatner's acting got on my nerves, I sat through it gladly to soak in the stories and watch how the characters responded when in dire straits.

I've not watched all the Next Generation episodes, I've only seen a handful of Voyager and Enterprise episodes, and I don't think I've ever even seen a Deep Space Nine episode, but I get similarly hooked when watching Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Lieutenant Commander Data or Captain Janeway and Tuvok.

Why do I love Star Trek so much? I have no idea. Maybe it's not the science fiction I love (though it's fascinating)--maybe it's just that there has never really been another story that I've experienced in which the characters were written with such grace under pressure, to quote Hemingway.

To watch the captains, while facing almost certain death, ensure the survival of members of their crew with calm and purpose. To watch the crew solve problems that seem utterly unsolvable. To watch members of the crew sacrifice themselves willingly for others or for a cause that they believed in. To watch characters struggle painfully with moral and ethical dilemmas, the likes of which have supposedly never been confronted by anyone from planet earth before. And yet, that was never quite true. Because they were often dilemmas that seemed rather familiar.

OS Episode 70: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

That's when I realized that science fiction and fantasy are what you write when you have a situation or a story to tell, but you don't want to tell it quite the way it is. You want to try to remove your audience from it just a little further, to make sure that they see it without blinders. If you create an entirely new world and context for something, the distance is sometimes enough to see it in a way that brings to light different facets you may not have seen before. Maybe that's why I like science fiction. It's parables.

Anyway. If you have time, I found this blog post a while ago and it made me smile. What Would Picard Do?

http://geekintoshape.com/2011/06/make-it-so-jean-luc-picards-guide-to-living-life/