There was an online discussion group in NTU 17 years ago containing fan fiction created in the Star Trek universe. Fans of the series wrote up continuing stories with their own characters and starships, and posted them in text form for others to read, add on and so on.
At that point that discussion forum didn’t register more than a blip on my radar. I mean, I was aware of the Star Trek original series in 1960 starring William T. Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, and I’d watched a couple of the movies that was repeatedly broadcasted ad nauseum on SBC during holidays. And I was aware that there was an ongoing series called Star Trek: The New Generation starring some bald guy as the captain of the starship Enterprise. But I was a big Star Wars fan back then (who wasn’t?), and as a young adult I snorted at Star Trek as the big pretender in sci-fiction.
That perception changed funnily not when I started following a Trek series regularly. Rather, I was an early adopter of Philips’ short-lived CD-i video format in 1994 (this format was the forerunner of the VCD), and one of the video discs I bought, and at a hefty sum of $55, was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Now, you have to keep in mind that watching full motion video at 384×280 resolution on the 14 inch CRT monitor was a very novel experience in 1994, even though these days it’s all Full-HD resolution on 60 inch wide-aspects screens. In fact, I even hosted video parties at my hostel room in NTU, inviting floor mates to watch movies played back very loudly on my room hifi (other hostelmates complained on occasion on the volume!).
I must have watched Star Trek VI at least a dozen times that year. Several terms, characters, technology and the like was new to me. And keeping in mind this was 1994, all before the days of Google and Wikipedia, I started scouring the discussion forums on Usenet for whatever Trek-related notes, literature and material I could find.
Perhaps it was the dearth of Star Wars film material and that George Lucas was holding off planning his big prequel trilogy. And the prequel trilogy that followed was just awful, though the last installment (Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) was watchable. Oh, there was a couple of great Star Wars related games around the mid-90s, like X-Wing and the follow-up TIE Fighter on the PC. But something had to fill that sci-fi void, and it was Star Trek from that point onwards till today.:)
More in the next post!
Recent comments