Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

It could be argued that what Dr Trek – AKA Larry Nemecek – doesn’t know about Star Trek probably isn’t worth knowing. We caught up with the author of the Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion at SF Ball 23 to look back on the franchise’s 50th, discover why we should be excited about Discovery, look at the evolving face of fandom and find out just what on Genesis is the Con of Wrath.

Larry, 2016 was a huge year for Star Trek. Did it deliver for you?

Well, it was a milestone and going into it a year-and-a-half ago a couple of things were a bit of a concern. We knew we had a movie coming [Star Trek Beyond] but that had a dodgy start when they moved out Bob Orci and brought in Justin Lin and Simon Pegg. Every time you rush a movie you get a little bit concerned, especially when it’s complex and you have a lot of expectation riding on it – so that wasn’t a very good sign. And then we lost Grace Lee Whitney [Yeoman Rand] and Harve Bennett [producer] in 2015, Nichelle had a mini stroke and I wondered if we were going to stagger into the anniversary with anybody around! And the bottom line for a lot of us was that deep down we wanted a series back, because that’s what Star Trek is.

And then things started falling in to place.

Yes, CBS jumped in, in case it didn’t feel as full as a 50th anniversary of a franchise should be. They had Trek talks and they came up with a couple of new licensed conventions, so it was really great when all of that was coming together, And then the Star Trek: Discovery announcement came out and that really revved things up.

There was a real excitement everywhere – the US fans, the Europeans – I started calling it ‘Five-Oh Fever’ because everyone was going crazy. The Vegas convention sold out because people were saying: ‘If I’m ever going to Vegas I’m going for the 50th’ and it was expanded to five days. Everything kept building and building; the Enterprise [original series model] being restored at the Smithsonian was a wonderful thing too. OK, some of these CBS-licensed consumer products were happy accidents, and some were organic things they came along, but it was an incredible year that grew as it went along.

Not all fans would agree that the 50th was what it could have been.

At the end of the year I saw someone who wrote a story saying Paramount had bungled the 50th Anniversary. I guess he had a cranky editor who told him to write a smash job on Star Trek, and I keep meaning to write a rebuttal. But there were TV specials, amazing conventions. The concert tour [The Ultimate Voyage] – that was a first – it came to people’s home towns and was amazing. My bigger concern was that the 50th would be so big that we’d wake up January 1st 2017 with this big hangover, but then when they announced the new series, I knew that would sustain us beyond 2016. We are in a Star Trek renaissance; we’ve been wandering in the wilderness for 12 years and finally coming out.

On the subject of Star Trek: Discovery, I think we all got a little concerned when showrunner Bryan Fuller left and the start date was delayed.

There’s times when I just want to slap the Internet! I’ll hear a piece of news in the morning and I’ll think ‘yay’. I’ll have a piece of work to do and then I’ll check online mid-afternoon to find there’s been some whole new echo feedback negative loop somewhere where people are whining, and I’m like: ‘What, are you kidding me?’ They’ll take some nuance of the announcement and then turn into a disaster, a crisis, a conspiracy theory or whatever. That’s when I get really annoyed.

But surely that type of criticism is only prevalent in some fan circles?

Oh yes, we forget we only see one slice of fandom. When you go to the Vegas convention you only see the fans that can afford to go to a convention. Mom and Dad America fandom are armchair fans – they enjoy watching the shows, they buy the novels and action figures and they raise their kids with Star Trek. They are the great silent majority of fandom, some of whom don’t even think they are real fans because they don’t have the costumes and uniforms or go to conventions. I’ve talked to some of those people when they finally come along and I ask them what made them get up, and they say: ‘Well, I never had a uniform, so I didn’t think I could go’. But God bless them, that’s the core of fandom.

The smaller percentage of naysayers are, however, quite vocal.

There’s a small percentage of fans who go to conventions and are visible and active, and then there’s an even smaller percentage active online. And that online community thinks they are everything! They get into wars, debates and they worry about something and I just want to say to them that the real Star Trek fandom world isn’t worried about these things, guys. ‘You’re being Nervous Nelly about nothing.’ And all of the backlash associated with Discovery falls into that.

Sure the delay is a good thing? We don’t want the show not being ready and just being released to hit a deadline.

I’m glad that they waited and didn’t rush; there’s a lot riding on it. Apart from being good Star Trek, there’s a lot of business and money riding on launching [CBS] All Access successfully. If this bombed somehow, or was not allowed to be the best it could be… that could take down an awful lot of people.

Star Trek Discovery is going to be a very different series. For a start, there’s going to be an ongoing arc and only 13 episodes instead of 26.

There’s that old saying about how everybody goes into the next war fighting the last one, and whenever there’s a new iteration of Star Trek they go into battle carrying the baggage of the last one. But more than ten years have gone by [since Enterprise was cancelled]. You can’t help but approach this with the new world that we’re living in – in terms of TV production, socially and tech-wise.

When Bryan [Fuller] was named as showrunner, I considered him to be the best old fanboy at heart with the best Hollywood cred among the suits – the money people. He had the best of both worlds and wasn’t contractually attached to something else whereby he’d be unable to fulfil it. He was free to jump in and do it, and when I heard they’d got him I thought he was exactly who I would have got. Even though he has now stepped back, he set the format – they’re using his show, the vision he developed. Who knows – in a year or two he might circle back and be hands on?

While we were waiting for a new TV show, a number of quality Star Trek fan productions have been made – you even appeared as Dr McCoy in Star Trek Continues. Do you think the recent Axanar ruling will mean that fewer of these film will be made? It feels like a new world now.

Well, it is a new world now. Let’s remember that CBS set down the basic tenets of ‘don’t make money, don’t ruin the franchise conceptually and don’t piss off the fans’ and at times it felt more about not pissing off the fans than it was about the IP [intellectual property – copyright]. At this time, Enterprise was still on and slowly declining. It was taking a while to find its way and even when they had a great year, it was too late. And that’s when the first fan film explosion happened; this was pre YouTube, when you would have to download an act at a time – that was dedication!

In the fallow time that followed, CBS knew the fan films were keeping things going and most of them were ‘mom and pop, Fred and Martha in their backyard and garage’ affairs. Even those that set a high bar, CBS didn’t really have a problem with them… until one particular group [Axanar]. I think Star Trek Continues is a high bar – I’m a little prejudiced maybe – but Phase II and the Johnson Brothers’ Exeter, Farragut and Renegades aimed high.

Part of the ruling was to reduce the running time length that these productions could be.

I think it killed a little of their souls to have to do that – for the lawyers to come out with these guidelines. It was like: ‘Don’t make me pull this car over. Don’t make me do that.’ So, on one hand the guidelines seem limiting for those people who want a full one-hour episode or a movie, but that’s where things are now. They needed to do that to clarify the legal position. The lawsuit is over now, things evolve and grow, pendulums swing back and forth. In three, four or five years, who knows how things will be. We may have just gone through the golden age of Star Trek fan films or we may have greater things ahead.

Star Trek fans are always fast adopters of new technology – which shouldn’t really be a surprise!

Exactly. In the 1970s people did fanzines and wrote fan fiction to get more Star Trek in their life because that’s what was available – you were pushing the envelope to have a mimeograph – and now we can make fan films on a laptop; every kid in the fourth grade can do that. In 20 years’ time we may have 3D Holodeck fan films. The fan film ruling is not a death knell for the medium, it’s an evolution in a pivot time.

The reason the fan film movement got so big was because there was nothing else going on, and it was filling that empty void. Now that we’ve got a new show on it its way, that attention might suck a lot of air out of that fan film room. CBS know that too.

Whatever technology is available at the time, fans will embrace that because that’s what Star Trek inspires. Call it an addiction, but people just want more. When I was a kid I wanted to climb inside that TV and walk around that universe.

One of the projects you’re working on is a documentary about the infamous 1982 Houston ‘Ultimate Fantasy’ convention. What can you tell us about ‘The Con of Wrath’?

‘The Con of Wrath’ is the fans’ snarky name for that weekend [riffing on the second movie’s title –The Wrath of Khan]. It was a huge privately-planned event, though everyone at Paramount was involved, as well as Harve Bennet and the entire cast of The Wrath of Khan. It was going to be so big because it was an 18,000 people arena times three shows that was attached to the big annual convention in Houston. So, it was the best of all worlds, but it didn’t go as well as planned.

This amazing moment in history was a golden time – it was the original cast involved, and the only person who wasn’t there was Leonard Nimoy – and there’s a story behind him not being there. On one side it’s like the train wreck that you can’t stop watching and yet many people came away from it just fine. It’s crazy. But it’s also about that time in history of pop culture versus the mainstream, nerds versus the mundanes. If the fans had had cellphones back then this movie wouldn’t have happened. This was pre-internet, and there’s a lot of stories from the survivors of the experience.

Another one of your projects is Portal 47. How does that work?

Portal 47 has happened as a result of all those people over the years saying: ‘You know all that Star Trek stuff that you’ve experienced, and all the people you know, you should do something about that.’ But what? Where’s the manual for that? Well, I found a couple of great coaches to show how you can take something that you’re really passionate about and make a business from it. Portal 47 is for old fans, new fans, bored fans; fans who have no idea how much they don’t know. It’s a package of 8 features every month enabled worldwide by the tools we now have, and there’s some things I release from my archive and early access to new video content. There’s also two tele-briefings for an hour-and-a-half where we talk old, new, headlines, whatever. And a tele-briefing with guests, many of whom have never been seen before, or rarely: Crew people, stand-ins, assistants, stunt people, assistant designers, directors.

I understand you’ve had some reclusives and exclusives?

We had Bob Butler, the director of [pilot episode] The Cage. He’s 88, still going strong and has been doing some panels. We need to get these conversations preserved and out to people, and sometimes it’s easier to be on the end of a phone than travelling as a convention guest.

We also had [producer] Gene [L] Coon’s assistant. Gene died so young in the 1970s and didn’t see any of the great Star Trek revival. He invented the Klingons, the Prime Directive, the name United Federation of Planets, and his assistant is an incredible person in her own way and was able to talk to us about him.

Yes, it’s a business, but hopefully it’s affordable to people; I say it’s the cost of two movie tickets a month. It’s like a mini-con all year long, going where no savvy fan has gone before.

It sounds like you’ve got a pretty full plate at the moment.

There’s a couple of book ideas I’ve talked to CBS about doing, and I’d love to do, so we’ll see about that. And then there’s Discovery to look forward to. What I’d love is for Discovery to be the hot thing at a Comicon; to hit those in their teens or twenties, instead of just the latest DC movie, Marvel or Star Wars. The world seems ready for it – a Star Trek to calm things down and give some hope to people.

We all took for granted Star Trek’s positive view of the future back in the ’60s. Well, guess what, people are now getting anxious and thank God there’s some new Star Trek for the times we are in.

For more information on The Con of Wrath, including how to get an on-screen credit, visit www.conofwrath.com. To find out more about Portal 47, click through to www.portal47.net.

With thanks to Andrew, Anne, B and the crew at SF Ball, raising funds for the Teenage Cancer Trust. Photos from SF Ball 23 by Stephen Wright