Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • The Devil in the Dark

    Spock begins to demonstrate his unusual capabilities of empathy towards alien others in his mind meld encounter with the silicon-based Horta life-form on the mining planet Janus VI. The workers of the mineral production station are menaced by a hideous creature they are not sure they have ever seen.

  • The City on the Edge of Forever

    The City on the Edge of Forever is Star Trek’s most poignant time travel story. The technology of the Guardian of Forever’s Time Portal is not made explicit. Specification of the Vortex’s technoscience would have detracted from the emotion/meaning of Kirk’s fateful choice between his love for Edith Keeler and preservation of the galactic timeline.

  • The Cage, The Menagerie

    The Cage was the first of two pilot episodes produced for The Original Series. It was filmed at MGM Studios in December 1964 and delivered to NBC’s executive offices in New York in February 1965. It was first shown to the public at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland.

  • Star Trek: First Contact

    It is the seventh decade of the twenty-first century, our future and Star Trek’s past. Only an act of great heroism can save a dying civilization. A global nuclear war, the Third World War, instigated by the bellicose Eastern Coalition (ECON), has taken place in the fifties. We are ten years into its aftermath.

  • How the Transporter Really Works

    Over the decades, the copious science fictional “explanations” of how Star Trek’s beaming technology really works, or might some- day be able to work, have undergone dis- cernable paradigm shifts. The original notion was that of the dematerialization-rematerialization, matter-to-energy conversion and back physical transporter.

  • Darmok

    After Captains Picard and Dathon are transported to the isolated world’s surface, the Tamarians use an ionospheric particle scattering field to block all attempts by Enterprise-D technicians to beam Picard back from the planet, and to make any communication with the two men impossible.