Science Trek

from the July 1984
Byte magazine cover

As a nerd, the only magazines that I've ever subscribed to are purely academic journals, almost all biology journals. However, with the rise of the internet, I now have easy access to many of the old science fiction magazines of the previous millennium that are no longer behind the copyright barrier at the edge of the galaxy.

Mind Static device
(Reginald Rogers)

The image to the left is an interior illustration that accompanied the last installment of Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga as published in Astounding. This is a depiction of the climactic scene in which poor Pelleas Anthor is subjected to horrific Mind Static. Suddenly revealed as a secret agent of the Second Foundation, Anthor collapses to the floor, writhing in agony.

cover by Ric Binkley

How did Asimov's Mind Static device work? Sadly, Asimov was writing in the pre-transistor days, so he did the next best thing to using a transistorized gizmo: he used a Symes-Molff Resonator and "a few hundred micro-size circuits" with hyper-relays!

Even in the 1940s, Asimov knew that it was theoretically possible to miniaturize computers. But how? The original idea for the integrated circuit was patented in 1959 and IC technology got NASA to the Moon. The "microprocessor on a chip" revolutionized computing in the 1970s.

A Virgin Computer Is Useless

Byte magazine, issue #1, 1975

There was a period of time at the beginning of the personal computer age when I was too poor to afford a PC and the next best thing was to buy issues of Byte magazine and read about computers.

Thorsen Memory Tubes.

The relationship between the micro-
processor revolution and science fiction was made explicit in the first issue of Byte magazine.

Asimov had imagined "positronic robots" and Heinlein had his imaginary "Memory Tubes". Finally, in the 1970s, microprocessors were seen as the beginning of a brave new future that would eventually lead to artificial intelligence and machines with human-like cognitive abilities.

My first computer.

We have come a long way, but we still are not there yet.

The Way We Were
The first computer that I ever used was a Wang programmable calculator. At 39 pounds and costing $7,000 pre-oil-crisis-inflation dollars, working with this beast gave me the "look and feel" of the technology that got Humanity to the Moon. As the first cover of Byte magazine still proclaimed in 1975, magnetic cassette tape memory was the cheap but slow "solution" for "bulk memory". Of course, "bulk" had a different meaning in those days. Still, if you wanted a 256k byte disk drive, all you had to do was shell out another $6,000!

"1984 won't be like 1984!"

1984
The first computer that I ever bought was a Macintosh. After a decade of using lesser PCs, I experienced great joy from having a "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" display screen and a built-in magnetic disk drive. It had suddenly become a pleasure to write using a computer and I've been doing so now for 31 years.

It was natural for Byte to put Spock on its cover in the Summer of 1984. The Search for Spock was in theaters. What better way to illustrate the topic of video displays and computers than to put an image of Spock on a Macintosh computer screen?

Spock's second life.

Phase II
My favorite cover from Byte was the one for the December 1977 issue. I had just gone off to college and I was using data terminals like the one shown in this amusing image (below). That summer, Gene Roddenberry had announced that he would be bringing Star Trek back to television.

Museum of Ancient Technology.

There was an interesting article in that issue called "The Computers of Star Trek". The authors of the article were two Department of Defense employees, but they began their article by mentioning the philosophy of Star Trek and its vision of a better society in the future.

introduction to "The Computers of Star Trek"

Roddenberry's imagined future was a science fiction future where technology could change human society for the better. The first three references cited in "The Computers of Star Trek" were works of science fiction by Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke.

I read "The Last Question" when I was 12 years old and it was the kind of science fantasy that got me interested in the process of writing speculative fiction about the fate of Humanity in the far future.

The "Big Three".

Natural Language Processing
One of the topics discussed in "The Computers of Star Trek" was the ability of the Star Trek computers to understand human language. Science fiction authors had long imagined machines with human-like abilities, including the ability to use human languages.

Giving computers the ability to use human language was my primary concern when I went off to college. I soon discovered that this was not a trivial problem (but see LLM) and so I abandoned my interest in artificial intelligence research and went into neuroscience instead.

Next Generation
In 1987, Star Trek did finally return to television with a significant computer upgrade. In the original starship Enterprise, the "talking computer" was huge: thousands of square meters, much like the "giant brains" of computers in some early science fiction stories.

Data

However, Data was depicted as a walking, talking robot like those imagined by Asimov in his positronic robot stories. When folks like Alan Turing first imagined how computers would function as universal information processing devices, they guessed that machines with human-like cognitive skills might be in existence by the year 2000. Sadly, here in 2015 we are still waiting.

2017 and Counting

Star Trek: the next television series.

The current rumor is that Star Trek will return to the small screen in 2017. Now 30 years after TNG, what will be the next generation of science fictional computer equipment deployed by the Federation of Planets (if any)? I fear that CBS will curl up inside some "safe" Star Trek reboot and not push into the future.

Spock

My preference would be that the next Star Trek television series tackle nanotechnology and introduce us to an array of artificial life forms, but I'm not holding my breath. I suspect that Hollywood will subject us to some silly "future" full of terrorists and idiotic Trump-like politicians arguing against more aliens being allowed into the United Federation of Planets.

Jump To: Star Trek fan-fiction in 2024.

Next: return to 1966 and the first episode of Star Trek

Producing another Star Trek reboot would not be logical. I $mell $eductive Hollywood ca$h at work!

Creating Zarabeth

Love on Sarpeidon is a slow ice age thaw. Zarabeth waits,
 rather impatiently, for Spock to finish his calculations.

Two of my previous blog posts have discussed the Star Trek episode "All Our Yesterdays" (see my list of 10 great Star Trek episodes and the more recent Leonard Nimoy's Spock). Here, I ask you to imagine a version of this story without Zarabeth. "Why?", you ask.

Watch "All Our Yesterdays".
Read the script for the episode.

When I was about six years old, I was already more interested in the origins of stories than most stories themselves. For example, I couldn't listen to a story from the Bible without wanting to discuss who had written the story and why they had written it.

Trapped in the past, alone.
Cue violins. Spock and Zarabeth
say farewell at the ice cliff. Cue
wind. Zarabeth: "I can't go back."

Skip ahead a few years to grade school. Rather than just meekly answer the questions that my teacher asked about some icy cold Jack London story ("To Build a Fire"), I wanted to take the discussion in another direction.....I wanted to know who it was that was telling the story to me. "But, he was all alone, out in the wilderness.....he died....so who told the story?"

I first saw "All Our Yesterdays" when it was shown as a "rerun", viewed on a small black and white television, received through the wonders of a tiny UHF antenna and watched despite the adversity of very snowy reception. Under those viewing conditions, I had no idea that Spock had alien features such as copper-tinted skin, tilted eyebrows and pointy ears.

Later, in the 1970s, when I finally saw Star Trek in color (on a larger TV screen and with a better antenna) I was amazed.....suddenly I could begin to see the story as it had been intended to be seen. Wow. Similarly, when Mariette Hartley stepped out of her fur coat, revealing her sexy cave woman dress, millions of young boys all gave thanks for color television. "All Our Yesterdays" needed the character Zarabeth in order to be a memorable Star Trek episode.

A Handful of Dust

Zarabeth tells Spock that because of her family ties she
was exiled into the ice age by Zor Kahn, the tyrant.

"All Our Yesterdays" originated as fan fiction. Jean Aroeste, a librarian, submitted a six page story outline with "A Handful of Dust" as the story title. In Jean's original outline, there was no Zarabeth. (a list of story revisions) There was a library run by Mr. Atoz and, at the end, an old book that crumbled to dust in Kirk's hand.

Lucky for us, Robert Justman recognized the germ of a Star Trek episode in "A Handful of Dust". Eric Paddon has described a version of "All Our Yesterdays" dated December 12, 1968, three months before the episode was televised. In that draft of the story, Zarabeth was not depicted as leading a solitary life without any luxuries nor was she shown living as a "cave woman", nor did the "early version of Zarabeth" successfully seduce Mr. Spock.

Spock: "I should be able to resolve this problem logically"
Zarabeth: "Stop talking and kiss me, you silly nerd."

Somehow, between December 12th and the video recording of the episode, some magic was sprinkled into the story. I agree with Eric Paddon that "All Our Yesterdays" is "one of the best episodes of Season 3 and of all of Trek". When Spock is led to believe that it is impossible to return to the Enterprise, he reveals his emotions and allows himself to admit that Zarabeth is beautiful. After years of isolation, alone in her cave, Zarabeth is pleased to be the recipient of his compliments. Spock sweeps Zarabeth off her feet and they proceed to give the local hot spring some competition for steaming up the cave.

source

With Spock's walled-off emotions as a foundational element of the Star Trek universe, many Star Trek fans have tried to imagine all kinds of ways to bring love into Spock's life.

In a very real sense,  Zarabeth is a soul mate for Spock and it is only through the technical magic of the atavacron that Spock and Zarabeth can be transported into the past of the world Sarpeidon, and only then and there can Spock allow his long-suppressed human emotions to be expressed, only there is he free to love Zarabeth. Zarabeth's lonely exile in Sarpeidon's ice age mirrors Spock's life-long need to repress his Human emotions and live as a logical Vulcan. With the creation of Zarabeth, "All Our Yesterdays" became a classical fairy tale in which Prince Spock and Princess Zarabeth could fall in love and rescue each other from lives of loneliness.

Spock and McCoy

Spock's magical visit with Zarabeth is only a brief fairy tale interlude that must end.

McCoy insists that they try to help Kirk and return to the Enterprise. Spock must wait for the violin music to all be played and for the wind machine on the set to toss Mariette Hartley's hair, then he and McCoy finally return to the future, leaving Zarabeth alone in the distant past.

In the Beginning

Star Dance

The question becomes: who created Zarabeth?

I'm particularly interested in that question at this time because I've been imagining how Carl Sagan might have been created. For the Exode Trilogy, I imagine that in previous realities there was no Earthling named Carl Sagan. Then, Grean must create a strange temporal loop by which Bet travels back through Time and helps her mother be conceived. Then Carl Sagan can be created as Bet's son....sort of. (It's actually slightly more complicated than that.) Anyhow, the future of Humanity hinges on a strange loop of causality within which Albert Einstein is Bet's grandfather and Sagan's great grandfather. Ah, the wonders of time travel!

atavachron

The Buffalo Effect
Many time travel stories deal with the "Butterfly Effect". However, Isaac Asimov imagined that Time is subject to a type of temporal inertia. It seems like the people of Sarpeidon must have become masters of temporal engineering. They found a way to send the entire population of their planet back into the history of their own planet, all without causing any time paradoxes.

To account for this amazing accomplishment, I suppose there must be a temporal "buffalo effect" by which a heard of people can be sent into the past without changing their own future.

Gary 7 and Beta 5

Maybe the atavachron is actually a sophisticated quantum computer that can determine exactly how to insert people into the past so as to not alter the present. I also suspect that the time travelers of Sarpeidon all carried nanorobotic endosymbionts that guided their behavior, preventing them from altering their own history. It is fun to imagine Interventionists such as Gary Seven watching over Sarpeidon and using artificial life forms like Beta 5 to do the needed computations.

Zarabeth melts Spock's heart

Spring Project: People, Places and Things
Here in this blog post I've taken a look back at Zarabeth, Sarpeidon and the atavachron. Starting here in April I want to make a large number of blog posts about individual characters (example), locations and other "things" (particularly imagined objects such as future technologies) from the Exode Trilogy. An example of the type of blog posts I hope to create in the near future is my blog post from last year about the Fru'wu.

The image shown here, to the right, is a whimsical depiction of Spock and Zarabeth in the ice age of Sarpeidon, with their love affair imagined as the basis for a Disney movie. In the Exode Trilogy, I repeatedly play around with the idea of "soul mates", pairs of lovers who are brought together from across vast gulfs of Space or Time. Kach and Parthney were the first star-crossed lovers of Exode while Ghyl and Bet are the most recent. Trysta and Ekcolir are another important "odd couple" in the Exode Trilogy with Ekcolir, an Ek'col, having been crafted as the "perfect complement" for Trysta, who is an Asterothrope.

Cecilie's song

Actually, I prefer to think of such happy couples as "star-twisted" rather than star-crossed. Another example of my "matches made in the Sedronic Domain" is Thomas and Cecilie. Cecilie is a "constructed human", a woman who was brought into existence as the soul mate of Thomas Iwedon. Here in the Buld Reality, the world as we know it, Cecilie is a living, breathing instantiation of a fictional character who first appeared in a novel that was written in the Ekcolir Reality.

My fascination with characters like Zarabeth, who have mysterious origins, runs deep and has led me to populate the Exode Trilogy with a strange collection of characters who originated from real life (Asimov, Vance, Sagan) or as fictional characters (Trysta, Ghyl, Cecilie) or from my imagination (Parthney, Kach, Thomas, Ekcolir).

our Reality Chain

Not satisfied to simply bring people like Sagan into my fiction, I must provide a fictional account of their origins in earlier Realities. In Star Dance, the origins of Carl Sagan (as we know him in the Buld Reality) must be established in the Grean Reality and the Ekcolir Reality. Pardon me for not being able to resist the fun of creating my own favorite science fiction authors.

More Star Trek romance:
Kirk and Miramanee

Next: Chapter 5 of Star Dance - Bet is off to Prague in order to complete her mission of pushing Earth towards the discovery of hierions.

 

Star Trek book cover by theaven

Related listening: Walter Koenig and Mark Cushman

 
Related Reading: The blog post, above, was written April 1, 2015. 

 

See the October 9th 2015 comment by Eric Paddon, below, indicating that the December 12 draft script for the Star Trek episode "All Our Yesterdays"  was written by Arthur Singer and the final draft, dated December 17, was the work of Fred Freiberger.

visit the Gallery of Posters

Leonard Nimoy's Spock

Mr. Spock travels through time to visit the 20th
century's museum of alien-human hybridization.

After the recent death of Leonard Nimoy I've been reflecting on the Star Trek character Mr. Spock.

Here, in this blog post, I particularly want to examine two topics:
1) Spock as a "science officer" and
2) Spock as a biological "hybrid", a genetic and cultural mixture of Human and Vulcan.

Science Officer

Spock befriends a Romulan

I enjoyed Star Trek as a science fiction adventure story. Gene Roddenberry's original concept of having the second in command of the star ship Enterprise be the logic-oriented Mr. Spock was one of the best features of the show.

Leonard Nimoy contributed his own ideas to the character, including the splayed-finger Vulcan hand greeting and the Vulcan nerve pinch. As discussed below, when Nimoy eventually had the chance to direct the 4th Star Trek movie, the Spock character achieved a kind of transcendent perfection that is cherished by fans.

Spock: "I hear its art forms are incomparable"

While Spock was supposed to be in control of his emotions, the writers for Star Trek had plenty of fun finding ways to hook him up with female characters.

The Biology of Star Trek
One of the great puzzles lurking behind the Enterprise's five year mission of exploration was the great frequency with which "aliens" were found on distant planets, aliens who looked exactly like Earthlings and who all spoke English.

Of course, some Star Trek aliens were only humanoid in appearance. In particular, we were told that Vulcans had green blood and telepathic powers in addition to their elf-like pointy ears.

Alien using a translation device.

Yet, green blood and all, Vulcans could breed with humans and Spock was a half-Vulcan, half-Human hybrid. Later, in the Next Generation, we were subjected to other hybrids such as Klingon-Human. How could so many planets around the galaxy produce different varieties of humanoids who were all inter-fertile? We were told that long ago, there were "progenitor" humanoid species who seeded life forms and the basic humanoid genetic pattern on many different planets. I suppose we were supposed to give Hollywood a break and pretend that computerized "universal translators" were always able to allow humanoids from various planets to communicate with the crew of the Enterprise in English.

Pointy Ears

Mariette Hartley as Zarabeth

It would be fun to remake the original Star Trek episodes, making some minor changes. In the episode "All Our Yesterdays", Spock travels back in time, into the ancient days of planet Sarpeidon where he meets Mariette Hartley. When Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive on Sarpeidon, it would be fun if they noticed that all the people of Sarpeidon had pointy ears and Spock-like eyes. Only later, deep into the show, would viewers realize that while in the past with Zarabeth, Spock managed to pass his Vulcan genes into the planet's gene pool.

in the library of Sarpeidon

Time Travel
"All Our Yesterdays" was one of several Star Trek episodes with time travel. Sadly, while some worlds were shown in possession of advanced time travel technology, the technologically primitive Earthlings in the era of Mr. Spock had to resort to the "sling-shot effect" in order to travel through time.

Time loop. It would be fun to slightly modify "All Our Yesterdays" and have Mr. Spock pull a book off the shelf in the library of Sarpeidon and discover that it contains detailed instructions for how to build a time machine. But just then, McCoy and Spock get sent back through time.

Later, at the end of the episode, once safely back on the Enterprise, with Sarpeidon's sun, Beta Niobe, having exploded and destroyed Sarpeidon, Spock could meekly mention that he left the instruction book for how to build a time machine with Zarabeth, thus "explaining" (are time travel loops ever really explained?) how the people of Sarpeidon were lucky enough to develop a culture built around advanced time travel technology.

Improbability

Kirk: 7,824.7 to 1?

One of the best features of Star Trek is that there was plenty of humor sprinkled through the episodes. In the humor-ladden episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" we even got to learn that the alien Tribbles (nearly mindless balls of fur) had good taste in humanoids and preferred Mr. Spock over the evil Klingons.

Sometimes I was slightly annoyed when the logical scientist Mr. Spock seemed to be the butt of jokes, however we should all be able to laugh at ourselves and the science of any science fiction story should not become too stale and dry.

In the episode "Errand of Mercy" we had this amusing exchange between Kirk and Mr. Spock:

Kirk: What would you say the odds are on our getting out of here?

Mr. Spock: Difficult to be precise, Captain. I should say approximately 7,824.7 to 1.

The Voyage Home

there be whales

Nimoy had great fun with Spock and the entire Star Trek gang in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Kirk: Well, Spock, here we are.....walking the streets of San Francisco looking for a couple of humpback whales. How do you propose to solve this minor problem?

Mr. Spock: Simple logic will suffice. I believe I shall begin by making use of this map. I have the distance and bearing which were provided by Commander Uhura. If we juxtapose our coordinates we should be able to find our destination. It lies at two eight three point seven degrees...

Kirk: (reading a Cetacean Institute advertisement off the side of a passing bus) I think we'll find what we're looking for at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito. A pair of humpbacks named George and Gracie.

Mr. Spock: How do you know this?

Kirk: Simple logic.

Assignment: Earth

Thank you, Leonard Nimoy, for giving us a whale of a good time.
 ______________________
Related reading: 10 of my favorite Star Trek episodes
"Mr. Spock is Dreamy" by Isaac Asimov