I have a few working ideas for these hiatus columns, keeping the good ink (and brain juices) flowing until September. I need to buckle down and resume starship analyses - do an energy cost-to-orbit computation, raw atomic delivery rates, you know, placing a few more paving stones on the long road from there to here. Not today. It's summer, it's hot, and I feel lazy and wistful and wish to address the following question instead - life without Star Trek?

I admit not bringing a lot of early experience to the question. I have never really known a time without Star Trek - certainly it's been around for almost as long as I have been. I used to watch TOS at my grandmother's house, taking care always to creep just up to and past the barely perceptible crack in the floor placed there by fate to protect young optic nerves from a frying by 19" technicolor radiation.

Back in those days, you just couldn't hope to catch Trek on. As with other stone age shows, it was on once a week at a particular time and don't you ever miss that time! Holding one's breath swimming from air pocket to air pocket, back then we just had to hope that the next episode would be a good one, or at least not a stinker. The fuse had sparked brightly; the explosion of material was yet to come.

Back then it was all about books, young man, books! An ongoing path of exploration into the final frontier. With no or little syndication, we were forced to acquire all the reference materials or (proving cheaper) just internalize the material, a generation of "a stack of books with legs" just like academy-Kirk. That was all before video tape of course, not to mention the internet. (Upon completing my TOS tape collection I remember releasing a small sigh half in relief, half in regret.)

Funny how in those days we were busy shipping payloads to the moon also. Is there a relationship here? The more advanced the televised Trek, the less actual our physical one? Another instance of the Talosian riddle perhaps - the more sophisticated the illusion, the less a concern for accomplishment, technical or otherwise. How we face our actual star trek is at least as important as how we face this virtual one. Well ... I now have something new to think about.

I just think it likely we'll never see another day without Star Trek, even if we have to make it so.