m. c. de marco

Via del.icio.us sf: an old essay by Michael Wong surveys Brain Bugs, the bum memes of Star Trek and science fiction in general.

Surely no one would be stupid enough to watch the Kobayashi Maru combat simulation in ST2 and conclude that exploding consoles are the principal cause of death for bridge personnel, would they?

Via FireflyFans.net: Steven Brust has braved the lawyers to post his free Firefly novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, online. You can find some details in his livejournal or group blog, and a positive review at io9.

I got my contributor's copies of Strange New Worlds 10 this week, and Amazon claims it was published, appropriately enough, on July 10th. So shop early, shop often!

Simon & Schuster has posted the table of contents for Strange New Worlds 10. Congratulations to all the winners! I snuck into the Voyager section again with “The Day the Borg Came.”

The alternates list is up in Dean Wesley Smith’s forum and he has a picture of the cover in his blog. This will be the last edition of the anthology.

Via GeekPress: a map of the United Federation of Planets.

Dean Wesley Smith announced in his forum that he will not be editing Strange New Worlds 11, and also implied that there will be no volume 11:

I highly doubt that there would have been a #11 anyway, what with the changes in the publishing aspects of mass market and the Star Trek program. But, of course, for ten years now, I never expected the next book to happen, and never in a million years did I expect this to go to ten volumes. So I could well be wrong again. That is up to Pocket Books.

Via GeekPress: StarTrek.com looks at Star Trek at 40.

Like other cultural, artistic or philosophical phemonena (think Mozart, Van Gogh or Jesus) this new show was largely unappreciated in its own time and only later would be seen as what it is today, a world-wide, cultural juggernaut. Thanks to a form of TV recycling called syndication, the show became a hit to generations of young, impressionable kids, including many future scientists, astronauts and actors.