u/Archididelphis

Here's something I thought of posting a few places, my "May The Fourth" tradition has been to watch the infamous made-for-TV Ewok movies. What puts it on the radar here is that the second of them, The Battle For Endor, does indeed have Wilford Brimley, in a role that seems to have been written as Gruff and Cute. He can be counted as one of the things that makes the material marginally watchable.

What really made me want to post about this is the villains of Battle For Endor, which somehow offers one of the most detailed explorations I have seen of what I call the "space barbarian" scenario, a spacefaring species that simply stole their tech. This has come up as an explanation of how the Thing arrived on Earth, and it has been a recurring trope in Star Trek. What's noteworthy is that the raiders here show many limitations that never apply to any version of the Thing. They seem to have a marginal grasp of how to build or maintain small arms and other small and relatively simple technology, but they are explicitly incapable of repairing the starship they flew to the planet even with parts of a working craft. There is no further explanation of a castle they use as a headquarters, which seems to be within their grasp to build and certainly doesn't appear to be made by or for the Ewoks. Most strikingly, their leader has a habit of simply commanding machinery he obtains to do what he wants in the manner of an animistic ritual (maybe influenced by observation of droids at work). All of which is to say that this movie managed to raise implications vastly more interesting than itself. So, take it or leave it.

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u/Archididelphis — 10 days ago

The Worst Star Trek Book I've Ever Read | Spock, Messiah!

Here is something I ran across, a very bad review of Spock, Messiah, the third original, authorized Trek novel ever published, which I can remember finding and reading on my family's bookshelves sometime in the early 1990s, and trading sometime later. Expanding on a few remarks I put in the video comments, I remember it being quite awful, and a very unpleasant read. On further second guessing my memories, what I think really stood out to me at the time was that it just didn't fit with either the Trek characters or the overall tone of the series. (On hearing the review, I also realized I had misremembered an "original" character as Nurse Chapel.) I would definitely have counted it inferior to its predecessor, Spock Must Die!, which goes completely bonkers with actual ideas from the show. Anyone else read this one, either at the time if you were old enough, or later?

On an extra tangent, another thing I became aware of was the work of the headlined writer, Theodore Cogswell, a reasonably productive and successful writer who served as secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America. From what we know now, he had a limited role at best in the actual writing, and it seems likely that the publisher was counting on his already modest name to earn goodwill from literary SF fans, yet I have to say that the book fits within his body of work. The best of his writing, conspicuously the short stories You Know Willie and The Cabbage Patch (both available in an ebook "mega pack"), are comparable to the vastly underrated work of Fredric Brown, the author of the short story Arena. Like Brown, he was edgy for the 1950s, and the works I have noted can be considered progressive treatments of race and/ or sexuality. Unfortunately, he distinguished himself for being even more "nasty" than Brown without matching him in quality of writing or effective story construction, issues which show especially in the very problematic story "Lover Boy". With all this in mind, it actually does make sense that a publisher turned to him for an adult oriented take on the Trek universe, and he should be given some credit for breaking new ground. At the same time, he clearly had limitations that wouldn't have gone away if he had actually been fully engaged with the project.

u/Archididelphis — 13 days ago