The closest thing to fine art in the world of science-fiction blueprints, Franz Joseph’s original deck plans of the “Fabulous Starship Enterprise” fired the imaginations of an entire generation of kids, myself included, and created a energetic fandom that led to the revival of Star Trek and its eventual status as a pop-culture juggernaut.
Author: <span>Patrick Cumby</span>
Patrick Cumby is a science fiction writer who also blogs about exploring the real world. He's sharing his thoughts at PatrickCumby.com.
Inspired by The Corbomite Maneuver, a teleplay by Jerry Sohl.
TALOS is personal project, just for fun: a short-story retro-imagining of classic Star Trek original series episodes, told from the perspective of the unseen crewmembers down in the lower decks.
THE FIRST TIME I CLIMBED UP HERE a couple of months ago I was thrilled. I wanted to see what it was like near the engines, feel the raw intensity of the space warp field from close quarters. It only took climbing halfway up to realize why the ship’s designers put the engines so far away from the habitable part of the ship. I swore never to volunteer for pylon duty again, yet here I am once more, halfway up this damn tube, scratching and squirming and trying not to freak out from claustrophobia.
It was never a good idea to drive a defective British roadster into the desert, but the promise of adventure was irresistible. It was June, 1987. Ronald Reagan was president and the Berlin Wall had not yet fallen. I was 24 years old, heartbroken from a failed romance, ready to take a risk I would normally have never considered. Here’s an entirely-true love story of a young man, his absurd motorcar and a thousand-foot cliff.
Created in the style of Franz Joseph’s original deck plans of the “Fabulous Starship Enterprise” these fan-produced Klingon blueprints by Mike McMaster kicked off five decades of Star Trek blueprint fandom.
Leo Tolstoy once set out to write novel about the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s armies. As he researched the history leading up to the events of 1825, he decided to…
When I was a kid back in the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to be a starship designer. So, I did it. My mom, a patient, wonderful and talented woman…
I met Jens a week after walking across the Pyrenees from France. It was September, and we were in the heart of Basque country, following the ancient pilgrimage trail to the city of Santiago de Compostela which lay over four hundred miles to the west. I’d noticed Jens earlier in the day, an old man tottering along the path, sweating despite the relative cool, his tall figure supported by a pair of trekking poles upon which he leaned precariously. As I’d hurried past him I’d nodded and given him the traditional pilgrim’s greeting: “Buen Camino!”
Make sure your kids read good stories, because the books they read as teens will shape them for the rest of their lives.
A friend recently sent me a Facebook challenge to name my top ten favorite novels, not expecting that her simple request would preoccupy my life for a week. At first I tried ignoring the request, but I am a list-maker, a ranker of things, so the challenge eventually proved irresistible. I started a list, but it quickly grew to twenty, then thirty titles, with more popping into my head as fast as I could jot them down.
Every family tree has secrets, but sometimes it’s the family name that conceals the biggest secret of all.
As a kid I always thought Cumby was odd-sounding, a little embarrassing, and nothing like the Scotch-Irish names of the other white families in my small Southern town. MacDonald. Spencer. Kennedy. Those were regular names. Cumby sounded like a cartoon character. Its history was a mystery; if anyone knew its true origin, they had decided to keep it to themselves.
A hike through a California forest reveals a plain truth about America’s past—and her future.
I don’t notice it at first. The trail is a carpet of clover-like sorrel, trillium, fairy bells, and redwood orchids. The burbling of the creek, the shadows of forest and ravine, cool and inviting, fill my senses. But every hundred feet or so I experience an unsettling sensation, a gentle pull from the forest, like the gravitational tug of a great mass. Giants lurk in the shadows, hiding behind the dense scrub of undergrowth. Every so often through the leafy shade I glimpse a cliff of gray—large, much too large for my Eastern sensibilities. Something is out of scale. That can’t be a tree. Even here in the American West, where everything is big, trees don’t grow as big as mountainsides.