You’ve Hit The Nail On The Head. While I Have A Conservative Temperament, I Don’t Agree With A Lot

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.

I wish all writers who haven’t been able to write in a long time bc of depression a very I love u and I promise u will write again

Me too, Madiha, me too.

i feel like my tastes are so bizarre and inhuman that i can never share things with anyone or be part of a fandom without feeling like the biggest weirdo

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 😭

RULES: answer 30 questions and tag 10 blogs you are contractually obligated to know

@coppermarigolds​ tagged me for this a few days back, so here we go!

Nicknames: My dad used to call me “Booder” (”Büder”?) when I was a little kid, but I haven’t heard that in years. I suppose either a contraction of my first name or my middle name could be used as nicknames, but I’m a stickler for my full first name. Gender/pronouns: He/him.

Star sign: Taurus.

Height: About 5′ 8″, or 173 cm.

Time: 1904h.

Birthday: April 24th. Favorite bands: mind.in.a.box, VNV Nation, Nine Inch Nails.

Favorite solo artist: Moby.

Song stuck in your head: “Hell March 2″ by Frank Klepacki. Kicks as much ass in 2018 as it did in 2000.

Last movie you watched?: The Prophecy, a weird movie about a second war in Heaven from 1995 that spawned a bunch of crummy direct-to-DVD sequels. It’s not very good, but it’s worth it to see Christopher Walken ham it up as the Archangel Gabriel along with Viggo Mortensen as the malevolently prissy Father of Lies himself.

Last show?: I actually don’t remember, it’s been that long since I’ve watched a series.

Why did you create your blog?: I wanted to get in contact with someone on Tumblr and find a way to keep track of all the nice pictures/meta I found.

What do you post?: I’m more about collecting than creating on this platform, so I really only post the occasional reblog.

Last thing you googled?: “Cryostasis digital download.” Still no longer available. I fortunately bought it on DVD when it was still in stores, but it kinda sucks to not have a backup option. :(

Other blogs: I spend most of my time on a more traditional blog, but since it’s in my real name I won’t be linking it here. I am thinking about starting up some other tumblrs in the near future just to organize all my likes into something easier to sort.

AO3: “karakhan,” with only one story (for the moment).

Do you get asks?: Nope.

How did you get the idea for your URL?: There’s a Ukrainian horror shooter called Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason set on a haunted Soviet icebreaker that I like to play this time of year. My URL is a combination of the protagonist’s last name, meteorologist Alexander Nesterov, and the year the game takes place, 1981 (or 1969...it’s complicated).

I follow: 99 tumblrs and 28-30 blogs.

Followers:  1 person and 3 invisible pornography robots. :p

Average hours of sleep: Between 6 and 11, which really isn’t very good.

Lucky number: 4.

Instruments: Back in middle and high school, I moved from the French horn to the clarinet, and then to the piano, and for the longest time I was working on the bagpipes. Unlike my siblings, I eventually drifted away from music entirely, and in retrospect I wish I had taken drama instead.

What are you wearing?: Ratty blue sweatsuit.

Dream job: Seriously, a novelist who can support himself through writing. Less seriously, revolutionary autocrat who is both worshiped and feared by all. ;)

Dream trip: Oh, so many. There’s the trip to Moscow, because it’s Moscow. There’s the trip to Minsk, just to see a place that looks a little more like the old Soviet Union. And finally, there are trips to see the tundra and the desert which don’t have set destinations, though the desert will probably be

Favorite food: A tossup between ribs and burgers, with deviled eggs wedged in there somewhere. I have very proletarian tastes.

Significant other?: I wish.

Last book I read: The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg, because it was Christmas.

Top 3 fictional universes: I’ve always found the strange totalitarian world George Orwell built for Nineteen Eighty-Four to be fascinating on an intellectual level, even though I’d never want to live there. On a more optimistic note, I also love the TNG-era Star Trek universe and the world of The Legend of Korra, even if my opinions and ideas about that one differ wildly from Bryke’s. :p

Once again, I will forgo from tagging because, as I’ve said, I don’t know anyone here.

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)

The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.

The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.

Woof. I played my first game of Frostpunk this weekend, and I discovered I have no problems with founding a pseudoreligious cult of personality around myself to inspire a city of exiled 19th-century Londoners to keep working through a -150°C (-238°F) superblizzard. It’s not quite the same, I’ll admit, but I feel for ya.

Me @ The Last Of Us: Okay game, I’ve never met a Troy Baker-voiced character I actually liked. Ball’s in your court.

TLOS: challenge accepted

This is very embarrassing, but I forgot to link the blog post that discussed Kuvira. It’s right here: https://futuristdolmen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/kuvira-an-appraisal-of-the-woman-and-her-works/

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.