Nothing Lasts Forever: Books I Read in 2022

Note: Blogger glitched at the wrong moment and erased most of yesterday’s original post, so I’ve reconstructed it from what little remained plus whatever my frazzled brain can remember of what I wrote. Because this post was supposed to come out yesterday, there are a couple of temporal references that don’t make sense. 

In 2022 I read a paltry 61 books, a performance only slightly better than last year's all-time low. As with last year, the stresses contemplating existential threats to civilization hampered my ability to focus on reading and blunted my enjoyment of reading for pleasure's sake. I spent far too much time doomscrolling, which in all likelihood represented the majority of my reading this year. 

Overview

Fiction v. Non-Fiction

Fiction: 54
Nonfiction: 7

Genres

Fantasy: 7
Horror: 2
Mainstream: 5
Science Fiction: 25
Star Trek: 12

Books by Decade

1890s: 2
1950s: 1
1960s: 1
1970s: 2
1980s: 7
1990s: 5
2000s: 6
2010s: 16
2020s: 19

Gender Split

Books by Women: 14
Books by Men: 47

Commentary and Analysis

Parity between men and women authors slipped away from me this year, and once again I avoided much of the new and retreated into familiarity. About a third of the books I read this year--23 out of 61--were rereads, including most of Michael P. Kube McDowell's output, several favourites by Lois McMaster Bujold, a handful by Nancy Kress and H.G. Wells, and a few old (and new) novels by Stephen King. 

Science fiction dominated my reading as I sought escape from these times, defeating my ongoing efforts to read more mainstream and literary works. Once I had dreams of reading everything in the western canon; now, not so much. As I get older, I’m finding that, more and more, my reach exceeds my grasp. See? Hoary metaphors, the last resort of the lazy and uninspired. 

I didn’t read much nonfiction this year, aside from matters related to pop culture. I feel bad about that, because I used to read serious, long-format non-fiction as a matter of course, feeling it part of my duty as a citizen to be well-informed. For now, it’s too much for me. 

Enriching Reads

Roderick Thorp's 1979 detective thriller Nothing Lasts Forever was one of my favourite surprises of the year. Nothing Lasts Forever is most famous for serving as the story for the 1988 action film Die Hard, and while Die Hard is one of the best examples of the form, the original novel, in my view, has it beat. Nothing Lasts Forever has all the suspense and thrills of the movie, and if you've seen the movie you already know the plot (with a few key differences in character motivations, backgrounds, and relationships. But the novel's great strengths include considerable emotional heft and a poetic cynicism that actually hurts to read--in a good way. Joe Leland is an ex-fighter pilot and detective, and while he does battle with the terrorists that take over the Klaxon Oil building, we dive deep into Joe's current terror and rage and explore the personal traumas that brought him to this point. There's no “yippee-kai-yay” here, just a bruised, broken human being trying to salvage a little bit of happiness for what's left of his life. 

As an aside, I'm currently reading Roderick Thorp's first novel about Joe Leland, 1966's The Detective. I won't finish it before the clock strikes midnight, so it'll more than likely be the first book I complete in 2023. I'm about a quarter of the way through it, and I'm impressed, so far, by Thorp's handling of Leland's character arc; the younger version of Leland is still a bit cynical, but he's definitely more vital and less ravaged than the man we follow in Nothing Lasts Forever. The Detective, like its sequel, also has a film adaptation: Gordon Douglas' The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra, which I screened earlier this year. Sinatra declined to appear in the film that became Die Hard; on such butterflies does the history of cinema change. 

84K, by Claire North, was the novel that depressed me most in 2022. It's a fine novel of a near-future dystopia and one man's effort to find some absolution in a horrible world he helped create, but the problem is North's supercapitalist nightmare is all too plausible; it's a society where corporations run everything and crimes are punished strictly by fines, effectively giving the rich freedom to do whatever they want to whoever they want and shackling everyone else. It took me forever to read this, because I had to keep putting it down in order to retain my mental health. 

On the other hand, I loved two recent novels by Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate. Both follow the adventures of a group of students working to graduate from a university that teaches magic, but I found Novik's prose, characterization, and worldbuilding considerably stronger than the most famous series based on this trope. (And I enjoyed the Harry Potter books!) Novik really makes you care about her characters, and the jeopardy they face is often horrifying. And yet, these are fun books. I groaned when I reached the cliffhanger ending of The Last Graduate to discover there was, at the time I read it, an as-yet-unpublished third book in the series. As I was writing that last sentence, I checked and I'm thrilled to say the third and final book, The Golden Enclaves, has come out and I just bought it. So that'll probably be the fourth book I read in 2023. (Numbers two and three will be a pair of books Leslie gave me back in August.) 

Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Preston Neal Jones is one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes chronicles of the filmmaking process I've ever read. Though published in 2014, the personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this huge tome were captured by the author way back in the late 1970s, during the film's famously tumultuous production.

I read another notable Star Trek-related work of non-fiction this year: 2021’s Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier, by Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire. Chavkin and McGuire cover the efforts of the propmasters, production designers, and other talented artists who sourced and modified the furniture, décor, and other set dressing during the filming of Star Trek back in the 1960s. The book is full of gorgeous behind-the-scenes colour photographs and episode stills, and you’ll even learn a little about design principles and history as you read. I never imagined I’d find this particular topic interesting, but the authors did a great job of explaining how mid-20th century design trends informed and shaped the look of Star Trek’s imaginary future. I’ll never look at the show the same way again. 

I took great pleasure in reading Chris Thompson’s Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, which cleverly serves as an in-universe prop that might have existed on Moonbase Alpha itself; it’s written as a guidebook for new inhabitants of the base, with new material covering the disaster that flung the Moon out of Earth’s orbit in the fall of 1999. The prose elements are crisp, detailed, and meticulously researched, while the graphic design and artwork are really stunning. It’s a gorgeous book, one of the few physical books I bought this year (Designing the Final Frontier being the other notable example). 

I loved this book so much that I pre-ordered the special edition of a follow-up work using the same in-universe conceit: the S.H.A.D.O. Technical Operations Manual, also by Thompson, which describes the technical workings of the fictional anti-alien defence organization featured on UFO, the spiritual prequel to Space: 1999. I haven’t read it yet, but you’ll doubtless see my reaction to it next December 31. 

And finally, in 2022 the two gentlemen who write pseudonymously as James S.A. Corey wrapped up their long-running SF series, The Expanse, with Leviathan Falls. This series pleasantly surprised me from book one, and this series finale is fitting, logical, and bittersweet—a great sendoff for a world and characters I’ve come to really enjoy. It was a series with grand SF ideas and, more importantly, flawed but authentic heroes who were trying to do the right thing in a universe filled with terrible choices. 

Disappointing Reads

Tie-in fiction is a crap shoot at the best of times, but Pocket Books’ recently wrapped up the long-running Star Trek “litverse” because new shows such as Picard and Discovery wrecked the continuity established by the last couple of decades of novels Trek novels. Pocket wrapped things up with a messy, violent not-very-Trek-like trilogy that saw the novelized versions of 90s-era Trek characters sacrifice themselves to prevent a temporal anomaly or some other such nonsense to prevent the destruction of the universe, resetting continuity to allow for more tie-in novels that can take advantage of the new shows. Nonsense, but not a great loss; out of hundreds of novels published, there are maybe two dozen of legitimate quality beyond breezy entertainment. 

Normally I enjoy Philip Pullman’s work, but I didn’t get much out of Serpentine (a His Dark Materials tie-in), The White Mercedes, or The Broken Bridge. None of these books were bad, but they just didn’t engage me as much as some of his other work. In this case, I suspect the problem is me, not Pullman. He’s a gifted guy. 

Because I’d read Nothing Lasts Forever, I figured I may as well read Walter Wager’s 58 Minutes, the inspiration for Die Hard 2. Surprise: 58 Minutes is a better book than Die Hard 2 is a movie, but the decline in quality from Thorp to Wager is pretty much parallel to the decline in quality from Die Hard to its first sequel. Not that Thorp and Wager have anything to do with each other; they just happen to each have written novels turned into movies from the same series. 58 Minutes is engaging for what it is—a high-stakes thriller—but it doesn’t have any of Thorp’s nuance or gift for in-depth character study. 

That’s it for my commentary—here’s what my year in reading looked like, in order of books completed. Scroll to the end for one final thought and a couple of links. 

Month-by-Month

January: 8
Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress, 1993) 
Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress, 1994) 
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895) 
The Quiet Pools (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1991)
Leviathan Falls (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
The Future of Another Timeline (Annalee Newitz, 2019) 
Dangerous Visions (Harlan Ellison, 1967) 
A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik, 2020) 

February: 9
The Last Graduate (Naomi Novik, 2021) 
The Galactic Whirlpool (David Gerrold, 1980) 
The Art of John Buscema (John Buscema, 1978) 
John Buscema: Michelangelo of Comics (Brian Peck, 2010) 
Star Trek Coda: Moments Asunder (Dayton Ward, 2021)
Star Trek Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow (James Swallow, 2021) 
The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1897) 
Star Trek Coda: Oblivion’s Gate (David Mack, 2021) 
Star Trek Shipyards (Ben Robinson, 2018) 

March: 12
The 22 Murders of Madison May (Max Barry, 2021) 
Emprise (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1985)
Enigma (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1986) 
Empery (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1987) 
Exile (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1992) 
Alternities (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1988) 
Gwendy’s Final Task (Richard Chizmar and Stephen King, 2022) 
Beguilement (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2006)
Sky Captain and the Art of Tomorrow (Kevin Conran, 2021) 
Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2007)
Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2008)
Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2009)

April: 2
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950) 
The White Mercedes (Philip Pullman, 2017) 

May: 4
The Tumor (John Grisham, 2016) 
Underground Airlines (Ben Winters, 2016) 
Space Station Down (Ben Bova and Doug Beason, 2020) 
The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049 (Tanya Lapointe, 2017) 

June: 1
A History of What Comes Next (Sylvain Neuvel, 2021) 

July: 2
84K (Claire North, 2018) 
Fitzpatrick’s War (Theodore Judson, 2004) 

August: 4
Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Preston Neal Jones, 2014) 
Star Trek Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods (Christopher L. Bennett, 2017) 
The Sins of Our Fathers (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
Serpentine (Philip Pullman, 2020) 

September: 3
To Everything That Might Have Been: The Lost Universe of Space: 1999 (Robert E. Wood, David Hirsch, and Christopher Penfold, 2022) 
Fairy Tale (Stephen King, 2022) 
Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier (Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire, 2021) 

October: 3
Christine (Stephen King, 1983) 
Klingon Bird-of-Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson, 2021) 

November: 6
The Broken Bridge (Philip Pullman, 1990) 
Nothing Lasts Forever (Roderick Thorp, 1979) 
U.S.S. Enterprise Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2010) 
Klingon Bird of Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
58 Minutes (Walter Wager, 1987) 
Vectors (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 2002) 

December: 5
The Lexington Letter (Anonymous, 2022) 
Too Many Tribbles! (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
I Am Mr. Spock (Elizabeth Schaefer, 2019) 
I Am Captain Kirk (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
Marvel Universe Map by Map (James Hill, 2021) 

Conclusion

That is the year that was for Earl J. Woods and his shrinking library. Nothing lasts forever, truly. 

Head on over to see what Bruce and Leslie had to say about 2022. 

Another New Dream Job

When awareness comes, I'm sitting in a four-person cubicle, one person intended for each quarter. But there are only two other people here, two young women, one blonde, one brunette; the other quarter of the desk has no chair or equipment; it's given over to storage. 

I'm wearing a suit, and I have a typewriter. There's a sheet in it, but it's blank. 

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do. The two women pay no attention to me; they're focused entirely on their own work. 

Bewildered, I rise. Our cubicle is but one in a sea of them, a sea that covers the expansive floor space entirely save for one walled office in a far corner. I make my way there through the narrow passages between the cubicles, certain that the office must have a supervisor. 

The door is open. I rap gently on the doorframe, and a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties turns away from her conversation and looks at me blankly. 

"Earl? What's up?" 

"When you have a minute, can I talk to you?" I ask. 

"Sure," she says, and goes back to her business. 

On my way back to my cubicle, I take a closer look at my surroundings. Everyone is working on typewriters and using notepads. There are no computers, no monitors, no smartphones. I spot a Telex machine nestled into the corner opposite the office. 

My heart starts to pound. Something's wrong here. 

The dark-haired woman comes to collect me before I even reach my cubicle. "Let's go take care of that pitch meeting with the executive producer," she says. 

She escorts me to an office I hadn't noticed before and shuts the door behind us. A grey-haired executive is leaning back in an expensive-looking wood and leather chair, feet propped up on an even more expensive-looking desk. The office is crammed full of books and magazines, with old movie posters on the wall. 

"Who've you got for me today, Amanda?" the executive asks. 

"This is Earl Woods. He has some ideas for the Star Trek movie that's been stalling us for so long." 

I do? I think. 

"Great, let's hear them. Can't be any worse than some of the other pitches." 

It takes me a moment to collect my thoughts. Given the setting, I realize they must be talking about the first Star Trek movie to debut after the original show. 

I reply with a bit of a stammer at first, but I find my footing quickly enough. "Let's say it's five years after the Enterprise has returned from its five-year mission. Captain Kirk is an admiral now, and Spock is the captain of the Enterprise. We have a bigger budget for effects than they did in the original show, so we can establish that the Enterprise has been refit - she's completely new, with the same basic shape, but she's sleeker, faster, more powerful." 

I feel bad about stealing so much from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it's all I can think of at the moment. But maybe I can get creative from this point. 

"There's a new first officer, Will Decker - the son of Commodore Decker from 'The Doomsday Machine.' You remember him. Spock is thinking of leaving Starfleet, and he intends to recommend Decker to command the Enterprise when the time comes. 

"But there's a signal from a deep-space communications station. Their extreme-range scans have picked up evidence of a megastructure long imagined but never seen: a ringworld, a vast living space built in the habitable zone of a star, with a total surface area of millions of Class M planets. It's an incredible scientific discovery, and only the refit Enterprise has the advanced labs and sensors to do justice to an exploration mission. 

"The Federation wants diplomatic and high-ranking Starfleet representation on this mission in case the ringworld is inhabited. Admiral Kirk ensures he's the Starfleet officer that gets to go, and as ambassador the Federation sends Ilia, an empathic Deltan gifted in the diplomatic arts. 

"The journey to the ringworld will take months, even at warp speed, but we'll just cover the most important events: building our new characters, reintroducing our original characters, and showing the Enterprise crew preparing for the scientific and diplomatic aspects of the mission.

"When the Enterprise finally reaches the ringworld, it's important that we show the mind-boggling scale of the construct. The Enterprise is but a gnat compared to the ringworld; close up, it will look like a vast, flat wall in space. The ring's curvature can only be perceived with enough distance. 

"The science teams perform sensor scans as the Enterprise approaches this strange new world. But not long after the crew catches their first glimpse of the star-facing side of the ring--revealing vast seas, forests, cities, farmlands, mountain ranges, jungles--world after world after world, laid out flat on a giant ring--it happens.

"While Admiral Kirk, Ambassador Ilia, and the senior staff are discussing first contact protocols, Mr. Spock, Lieutenant Commander Uhura, Lieutenant Chekov, and Commander Scott vanish from existence. 

"Admiral Kirk immediately takes command of the ship, much to the consternation of Commander Decker, who really should be next in line. Kirk says his experience on the five-year mission trumps Decker's greater familiarity with the Enterprise refit. 

"Admiral Kirk hails the ringworld, but no one answers. Kirk orders all shuttles launched to perform sensor scans of different sections of the ringworld, but with such a massive amount of territory to cover, the effort could take years without the wildest stroke of luck. 

"But on the ringworld, we, the audience, learn that Spock Uhura, Chekov, and Scott find themselves in the arid foothills of a desert mountain range...with no equipment. Atop one mountain is a spire that reaches toward the stars until it disappears, extending out of the atmosphere and into the darkness. With no other obvious clue to what they should do, they set out for the spire on foot..." 

"I like it so far," the executive says. "Spend the weekend with it, finish it up. I have a golf game coming up." 

I'm relieved, because I had no concept of an ending. But I do have more immediate concerns. 

When we leave the executive's office, I ask Amanda to sit down with me in a little lounge area. 

"Have you heard of DVDs or Blu-Rays?" I ask. 

"No," she says. 

"Smart phones?" 

"What's that?" 

"Nine eleven?" 

She shrugs. 

I tell her that I have no memory of being hired, or what my job is. She looks concerned, and said I should get checked out for a concussion or amnesia. 

"It's worse than that," I tell her, almost crying. "This is the part that's going to make me sound crazy. What year is this?" 

"What year? It's 1976," she answers. 

"Oh, god," I groan. "I'm from 2022. I'm not supposed to be here. Oh god, what's happening?" 

Thankfully, I transition back to the other world, the one with Sylvia and COVID-19. 

10 Albums: 10

Ilia Probe

Star Trek: The Motion Picture Toy Movie

YouTube user dyna74 has created and published a series of adaptations of the first few Star Trek feature films, using action figures to recreate the visuals and those old cheesy record adaptations for the dialogue, music and sound effects. The results are quite charming. 

A Life in Film: Genres and List Progress

A few days ago, I wrote about my Letterboxd Pro subscription and the cool stats it generates about my film-viewing habits. This is another set of my Letterboxd data: my genre, country of origin, and language breakdown, my progress on some notable lists, and my most-watched films, which comes with a huge caveat I'll explain below.

Friends of mine might be surprised that science fiction isn't at the top of my genre list, and indeed I'm surprised that it manages to rank only fourth. However, I don't know how Letterboxd assigns genres to films - there could very well be a number of films I would call miscategorized - and given my proclivity for attempting to watch all the films of certain directors like Hitchcock and Chaplin, who produced very little SFnal content, the results start to make a little more sense.

I seem to be doing pretty well on most of the lists Letterboxd deems important, though I clearly need to catch up with Sight & Sound's top 250, one of the most important of the film crit lists. I'd never heard of Edgar Wright's 1,000 favourites before these statistics were generated, but apparently I've seen nearly half of his choices.

The "Most Watched" list is only as good as the data any given user inputs, and even I'm not crazy enough to log every single instance of every film I've ever watched. I'll log re-watches now, of course, but I've resisted the temptation to go back and try to reconstruct every single time I watched Star Wars, for example.

The five films you see on this list are there because once I saw the data was being generated, I figured I may as well try to nudge it in a reasonably accurate direction. For example, I know I've seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

• During its original run
• At the Paramount Theatre during the 1991 Sit Long and Prosper event
• When it was first released on VHS
• When it was released again on VHS in a box set with the other films
• When it was first released on DVD
• When it the Director's Cut was released on DVD
• When it was released on Blu-Ray

Of course I watched the VHS tape many times in the 80s, and I've seen the DVDs more than once. The same is true for the other films in this section. But trying to reconstruct this particular movie ephemera is hardly worth the effort. 

What Might Have Been, What Might Yet Be

Entertainment websites are reporting that rumours about Bryan Fuller's vision for the new Star Trek television series were apparently true: Fuller intended to produce an anthology show, with each season representing a different era in Star Trek's timeline. Apparently CBS reined in that ambition a little, so unless things change radically, Star Trek: Discovery will remain fixed in the decade or so before the original series.

Discovery will have to stand on its own merits, but it's fun to speculate what might have been:

• A season set in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era, with that decade's design aesthetic, measured pacing, and big ideas
• A season set during the months leading up to the Eugenics Wars/World War III/the post-atomic horror, with a coda about First Contact and recovery
• A season of Captain Sulu on the Excelsior
• A season set in the far future, post TNG/DS9/VOY, perhaps about the beginnings of intergalactic travel
• A season about ordinary non-Starfleet life on Earth/Vulcan/Andor/Mars (So many possibilities. Since the Federation is post-scarcity, you could focus on people figuring out what to do with their time, which might be a fun vehicle for some hilarity...) 
• A season set during the Star Trek: Enterprise era, set during the Romulan War
• A season about the adventures of Gary Seven in the 60s and 70s
• A season set during the original series, with period costumes, sets, special effects, story conventions and (!) commercials (they could totally do this in the world of streaming binge television!) 
• An anthology season within the anthology series, with each episode about a character (main or guest) from any of the previous shows
• A season with Star Trek characters appearing on our world, and being amazed to discover that to us Star Trek is just a TV show (I know that this is an old trope, exploited most recently by John Scalzi in Redshirts, but I think this could be tons of metafictional fun.) 

It's possible that Star Trek: Discovery will turn out to be a fine show, one we might follow two or three or four or seven seasons in the traditional Trek manner. Or maybe Fuller will come back and realize his original ambitious vision. Wouldn't that be something? 

A Timely Intervention

Spitting with Their Last Breath

Few people share my view that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is the best of the Star Trek films, and I won't regurgitate my arguments for that view here. But I was just reminded of a small moment from the movie, something I imagine not many folks noticed or thought about, but that resonated with me nonetheless.

The picture opens with a trio of Klingon warships intercepting the movie's alien threat, V'Ger, a giant space cloud of unfathomable power. V'Ger easily wipes two of the three ships out of existence with giant bolts of energy. The surviving ship retreats, firing aft torpedoes in an effort to blow up the energy bolt pursuing them. One torpedo fails, swallowed up by V'Ger's implacable energy. At the very last second before impact, the Klingon ship fires one final torpedo, which is just as ineffective as the others. The last Klingon ship is obliterated.

I like a couple of things about this scene. First, the special effects, sound effects and music are handled marvelously. Second, I think it reveals something about the stubborn defiance of the Klingon character; to the very last instant they're fighting, even in the face of hopeless odds. It's one final attempt to poke their enemy in the eye.

For whatever reason, Robert Wise and his team went to the trouble to add another effects shot just to add a little extra flavour to an already fine scene. I appreciate that effort, even if it went mostly unnoticed by the majority of the audience. 

Vejur on the Dance Floor

Well, that's what it looks like to me, anyway. I shot this at Amanda and Mike's wedding Saturday night.

Close Encounters of the Ghostwritten Kind

Here I am sometime back in the late 1970s reading Steven Spielberg's novelization of his screenplay for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of folks assume that this novelization was actually written by one of the world's most famous SF ghostwriters, Alan Dean Foster, the man who really wrote the Star Wars novelization (credited to George Lucas), among others.

I honestly don't remember Close Encounters well enough to say if Foster wrote it, and I no longer own a copy of the book to check the style. I am certain, though, that Foster did not novelize Star Trek: The Motion Picture, attributed to Gene Roddenberry. That book is just too loopy to be Foster and just loopy enough to be genuine Roddenberry.

With my book, bowl of cereal and collection of Lego bricks close at hand, I imagine this must have been a happy moment. It appears as though one of the Lego trays contains some kind of silvery, robotic action figure as well as the bricks you'd expect. It's too bad the photo isn't quite sharp enough to identify the figure.

Cinematic Symphony

Last night Sylvia and I went downtown to enjoy the tremendous musical talent of the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra as they rolled out a selection of Oscar-winning or -nominated film scores. Our seats were right in the front row, so we had an excellent view of the strings section as they strummed and plucked their way through themes from Casablanca, Doctor Zhivago, The Godfather, The Natural, Out of Africa and others. The ESO even brought in a real-live Hollywood musician to conduct: Emmy-nominated Richard Kaufman, a good-humoured showman who was clearly enjoying himself, at one point mouthing a few of the "ba-ba-bums" just as I do when listening to film scores. In between sets, Kaufman shared Hollywood stories with the audience, and I was a little awestruck to learn that the man knew Elmer Bernstein and played violin during the scoring sessions for Jaws.

The music, of course, was sublime, and as always I was mesmerized by the talent of each performer. As I watched their hands flutter across their instruments, as I watched their eyes scan the scores, I was deeply, deeply impressed by the years of practice they must have endured to fully hone their talent. My respect for musicians borders on a kind of fetish, a deep-seated admiration that leaves me feeling, frankly, unworthy. What I would give for the combination of talent and drive that culminates in such astounding capability!

The artists themselves fascinated me. One thickly-mustachioed cello player looked as though he would be more at home on a construction site. Another looked like a younger, thinner Stephen King. One violinist looked like a kindergarten teacher; another like a physics professor. And yet they were all, in reality, musicians, defying all stereotypes.It was both thrilling and humbling to sit only a couple of metres away from such a collection of raw talent.

I have only one small quibble: during the performance of Jerry Goldsmith's theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the video display showed an image of the Next Generation Enterprise, Captain Picard's ship, rather than the original (though refitted) Enterprise of the film. A minor quibble to be sure, but hey, Winspear folks, next time you want to play Star Trek, give me a call when it comes to the trivia!

Special Effects on the Cheap

Back in 1987, budding moviemakers didn't have access to Photoshop of AfterEffects. We had to make do with plastic model kits, sparklers and some trick photography. Here the USS Enterprise fires off a photon torpedo at an unseen foe, accomplished by sticking a sparkler into the model, lighting it, and taking a snapshot with a long exposure time.

Kind of a shame I didn't take the time to disguise the walls of my bedroom with construction paper or something.

The Enterprise and a Klingon D7 exchange torpedoes.

A torpedo approaches the Enterprise from the starboard. Actually, these look more like the energy bolts Vejur used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. All in all, I think these turned out reasonably well considering I had no photography skills and no budget.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture Remastered...Again

Exceedingly clever video from a British (?) bloke who matches, nearly shot-for-shot, the "leaving drydock" sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture...with his car. I wish I'd thought of this!

30 Years Later - Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Site of the former Gaiety Theatre, Leduc, Alberta - December 25, 2009

Thirty years ago this month, I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the first time. I attended a screening at Leduc's original Gaiety Theatre, plunking myself down in what was then my favourite seat - right hand column, front row, leftmost seat.

At the age of ten, I was already a huge fan of Star Trek, having watched scores of repeats on CBC in Leaf Rapids. With my friends John and Glen and Kelly and a set of the original landing party model kits (faithfully recreating the phaser, tricorder and communicator), we sought out strange new worlds in the deep and mysterious woods of that northern community - already quite a strange world in and of itself.

My family moved to Leduc, Alberta, just a few months before Star Trek leaped from the TV screen to the movie screen, and I was still missing Manitoba. But the prospect of a new Star Trek movie made the move a lot easier to bear, so I was pretty excited as I sat in the Gaiety and waited for the curtain to unfurl.

Of course, these days Star Trek: The Motion Picture is widely regarded as a creative failure, among the worst, if not the worst, of the Star Trek films. It's been derided as Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture and Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. Critics attack the costumes, the lack of attention paid to much-loved secondary characters, and most of all, the languid pacing.

Much of the criticism is fair. But I contend that the first Star Trek film is among the best of the series, not the worst. Furthermore, this movie is the only true work of science fiction in the entire series.

The film has many strengths. Jerry Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated score truly soars, and indeed became iconic. (Interestingly, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is one of the last films to open with an overture.) Douglas Trumbull's special effects created a completely believable 23rd century civilization and an awesome - in the true sense of the word - threat from outer space. The models and sets were first rate; for the first and last time, the Enterprise felt like a real starship with a crew of hundreds and working parts that made sense within the world of the film. And Robert Wise's direction is steady and sure, especially considering that the script was still being revised even as he was shooting the film.

Even the film's pace is, I believe, a strength - if you have the patience. There are long stretches in the film that pass without dialogue, only music, including Kirk and Scotty's minutes-long tour of the refitted Enterprise, a scene that virtually no director or editor would allow today.

I think that's a shame. That tour of the Enterprise, intercutting between the ship itself and Kirk's reaction to its new appearance, say much about the world of the film and the protagonist's personal journey. The orbiting office complex, the tiny shuttlecraft and spacesuited astronauts whizzing by - these elements tease our imagination, making us wonder what kind of society humanity has built that could create such casual wonders. And Kirk's regrets and longing are written all over his face, revealing a fragile emotional state that sets up and explains some of his bad behaviour in the film.

The film also slows down when the Enterprise intercepts the film's antagonist, the mysterious, all-powerful Vejur, a gigantic cosmic cloud of energy that contains a vast machine intelligence. Again, critics have said that this sequence goes on far too long, but I believe that patience is rewarded if one actually thinks about what one is seeing: machinery that is eons old, of such complexity and scale that it is literally beyond our ability to comprehend. Frankly, I think that's pretty amazing stuff.

And that is why this film is the only real science fiction film of the series, for Vejur's story raises the apocalyptic possibilities of human technology outgrowing its creators. When Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker reveal Vejur's secret, they are confronted with the sheer scale of the universe and all the infinite majesty contained within it. And at the film's climax, they help the Vejur entity grow still vaster, raising profound existential questions.

Other Star Trek films may be more entertaining, but they are all space opera, as much about the characters as big ideas. Yes, Star Trek II has the Genesis Device, but that movie is not about terraforming. Other Star Trek films feature time travel, cloning, environmental destruction and other science fiction concepts, but in each case these are merely storytelling devices, not the story itself. (Ironically, William Shatner's universally derided Star Trek V: The Final Frontier comes closest to telling an actual science fiction story - what if God turned out to be just another alien?)

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is full of little moments to love. Ilia's disintegration is artfully directed and shot by Wise; it's a genuinely chilling moment when the sound and fury of the probe that kills her is suddenly replaced by utter silence, save for her tricorder falling to the floor with a thud. The ugly transporter accident near the beginning of the film is also very effective not only as a moment of horror, but also implies that Kirk's obsessive behaviour in the film is having very dire consequences for the people around him. McCoy, as usual, gets the best one-liners, and his initial bearded, leisure-suited appearance is an image for the ages.

As an aside, I always feel bad for Captain Willard Decker. In the course of this film, Kirk takes away his ship and demotes him from Captain to Commander/Executive Officer for no good reason other than to satisfy his own desire to command the Enterprise again. Then, when the original science officer, Commander Sonak, dies in the aforementioned transporter accident, Kirk orders Decker to take on Sonak's duties as well as those of First Officer. Then Spock shows up and supplants Decker as science officer. A short time later, Decker is reunited with his old lover, Ilia, only to watch her killed before his eyes. When a robot duplicate of Ilia appears on the ship, Kirk orders Decker to interact with it to learn more about Vejur. One can only imagine how painful this must have been for Decker. Finally, when Vejur itself seems bent on sabotaging Kirk's attempts to resolve its existential crisis, Decker volunteers to merge with the machine entity, essentially killing himself - or at least sacrificing his physical form. To be fair, Decker himself says that he "wants this" as much as Kirk wanted the Enterprise, but still, no one in this film endures more than this ill-fated character.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is by no means a great film. Objectively speaking, perhaps its not even a good film. But I appreciate it because it's ambitious, sincere, and asks big questions. I left the Gaiety Theatre that day as excited as I ever had been about a show and a world I loved, and having just watched it again on Blu-Ray, its charms are even more evident today. With the pacing of modern films having accellerated beyond breakneck speed, it's a pleasure to sit down with a movie that takes its time.