Alien Covenant (2017)

I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

“Assassinations are often harder on the consul than the senator...”

ANCIENT ROMAN MEME DISCOVERED

1 2

2 50

it doesnt translate very well

@nick-nocturn, isn’t this basically what Keratin Garden was?

a beauty guru that is haunted by a demonic entity

Fun fact: in the early stages of production for “The Pegasus”, the script initially called for the titular Pegasus to be a new ship design that was essentially a Ambassador-era take on the Miranda/Nebula-class hull profile. However, budget and time constraints led the TNG team to go with an Oberth instead. All that exists of this original Pegasus is an quick sketch Rick Sternbach did, and it’s neat to see it come to life in a roundabout fashion through this model.

Apollo-class for Star Trek Bridge Commmander

This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.

Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.

The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.

This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.

(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)

I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.

I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.

well life just isnt fucking fair is it humpback whale 85

The only one that really comes to mind is, well, Jim Kirk himself. He spent a fair chunk of his tenure as a cadet on the USS Republic instead of at the academy, and he managed to get field promotions to acting ensign and acting lieutenant. (The details of his academy days are kinda unclear and contradictory, since they changed things around between episodes, but this seems to be the generally accepted consensus according to Memory Alpha.) What all this means, of course, is that Jim Kirk surpassed Harry Kim before he even graduated.

About the cadets ask, I'm going through TNG rn and as far as I can tell, acting ensigns get credits for their practical experience in the field so it's probably like Work Study programs in college. But like the Ultimate Work Study program cause I cant think of anything cooler.

I always thought Wesley was just like a weird exception. I can’t think of any other acting ensigns, but I’m probably wrong?

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

First Eric and Hannibal mocked him with ominous threats, then he met his real father, then this...man, Questlove had a rough day.

Question: do hallucinations of past events count as “time travel” for the purposes of this watch-through? Would “The Inner Light” come during your run of TNG, or should you watch the Kamin scenes when you get to c. 1368 AD? Do you watch the hallucinatory Occupied Terek Nor scenes of “Things Past” during season 5 of DS9, or before you start TNG?

And what about erased future timeline? How do you fit in “All Good Things,” “The Visitor,” and “Endgame,” as well as ENT’s “Twilight?” Do you watch them chronologically, or do them all after as a sort of appendix to the project?

Gotta admit, this is a pretty dumb idea...but it’s exactly the sort of thing a hyper-obsessive nerd with a editing suite could devote a decade of his or her life to splicing together. I suppose it might make a cool endurance-style video installation.

I have just had a worst best idea:

Watch Star Trek in in-universe chronological order… Time travel included.

So you start by watching the 3ish minute scene of Voyager where a Q takes Voyager back to the big bang, then you move to the 4ish minute scene of Next Generation where Q takes Picard to the start of evolution on Earth, then to the DS9 episode where they go back to the 1930′s, then Star Trek 4 in the 1970′s.

Then you’re finally able to start watching Enterprise.