Star Trek Newbie......Help! :)
WhatT...@webtv.net
A Trekkie friend of mine (hi, Amy! :)) has recently gotten me
interested in the shows and the movies, and I was wondering, what basic
info do I need to know, to enjoy them?
She's into it pretty heavily, and I wanna join in.
I just need to know basic stuff, like the major dates, how does Earth
relate poltically to its alien neighbors, stuff like that. Then I can
dive into the details later. :)
Hope you folks can help!
Thanks! :-)
Shalom,
*WhatTheTanj*
"Surely you can't be serious !?"
"I am serious...and don't call me Shirley."
Airplane!
DaRn
Enterprise from the beginning and just enjoy it.
You dont need to know all the "Trekkie-tech" type mumbo jumbo-it should be
explained along the way....it is Star Trek after all.....not Dune:)
if you are REALLY wanting to know all the minutia, just visit
www.trektoday.com
it can be fun, if not maddening to see how crazy some of the fans can
be.....its just a DAMN TV SHOW:)
<WhatT...@webtv.net> wrote in message
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David B.
>
> Hi!
>
> A Trekkie friend of mine (hi, Amy! :)) has recently gotten me
> interested in the shows and the movies, and I was wondering, what basic
> info do I need to know, to enjoy them?
> She's into it pretty heavily, and I wanna join in.
> I just need to know basic stuff, like the major dates, how does Earth
> relate poltically to its alien neighbors, stuff like that. Then I can
> dive into the details later. :)
> Hope you folks can help!
> Thanks! :-)
>
You could either watch a ton of reruns or buy a copy of the Star Trek
Encyclopedia.
Michael David Hafer
Or we can be neighborly Star Trek fans and answer his/her questions.
Here's a quick chronology:
2063 - Humans make first contact with an alien race after developing faster
than light space travel. The feature film "Star Trek - First Contact" deals
with this situation.
2110s or 2150s (dates conjecture) - The next Star Trek series "Enterprise"
takes place, soon to reveal the events of this time period. Apparently Humanity
begins to explore the galaxy, making friends and enemies of course.
2161 - Earth and its alien neighbors join together to found the "United
Federation of Planets"(UFP) for common defense, cultural, and economic
purposes.
2260s - The Original Series(TOS) "Star Trek" takes place with the adventures of
the USS Enterprise and Captain Kirk, Spock, et al. More exploration takes
place, as well as battles with other empires like "The Klingons" and
"Romulans." These will be Star Trek's main adversaries throughout most of the
TV series' and movies.
2270s - 2290s - TOS movies take place, "Star Trek 2 - The Wrath of Khan", "Star
Trek 6 - The Undiscovered Country", etc.
Star Trek 6 details the beginnings of peace between once enemies, The UFP and
the Klingon Empire ( mirroring the end of the Cold War )
2360s-2370s - Star Trek The Next Generation TV series takes place with the
adventures of the Enterprise-D and Captain Picard, as does Star Trek Deep Space
Nine aboard a deep space station with Captain Sisko, and Star Trek Voyager (a
UFP ship lost in the far reaches of space commanded by Captain Janeway ). The
Borg are introduced as enemies for the first time and give the Federation a few
kicks in the stomach so to speak. This brings the UFP out of its complacency
just in time for a new threat from the far reaches of the galaxy - The
Dominion. The last few seasons of Deep Space Nine basically chronicaled the war
with The Dominion.
The newer Star Trek feature films "Generations", "First Contact",
"Insurrection", and the upcoming Star Trek X also take place in this time
period.
I hope that was "just the basics." :) E-mail me if you'd like more info. In the
meantime try these websites:
News, and Reviews:
www.startrek.com
www.trekweb.com
www.trektoday.com
Detailed Stuff like weapons, ships, pictures, crew bios, species, anything you
can think of:
http://www.stinsv.com/index2.htm
http://www.trekships.org/
http://orion.spaceports.com/~daystrom/
http://www.starfleet-museum.org/
http://www.scifi-art.com/home/htm/
There are many more, but these are a start. I know I am leaving out a couple
GREAT sites, but they elude me at the moment. :)
Michael David Hafer
drum...@aol.com
Brian Thorn
>Hi!
>
>A Trekkie friend of mine (hi, Amy! :)) has recently gotten me
>interested in the shows and the movies, and I was wondering, what basic
>info do I need to know, to enjoy them?
>She's into it pretty heavily, and I wanna join in.
>I just need to know basic stuff, like the major dates, how does Earth
>relate poltically to its alien neighbors, stuff like that. Then I can
>dive into the details later. :)
That's a tall order. There has been over 500 hours of Trek filmed to
date.
The basics:
Earth fought three world wars. The third ended in the early 2050s and
was the catalyst toward a unified world government. In 2063, a human
named Zephram Cochrane invented warp drive, a mechanism that allows
ships to travel faster than the speed of light. His test flight was
noticed by a passing alien spacecraft, which came to Earth to
investigate. This led to Earth's "first contact" with another
civilization... the peaceful Vulcans. ["Star Trek: First Contact",
1966]
Vulcans are human-like but their blood is based on copper and is
green. They have pointed ears and are touch telepaths. Vulcans
suppress all emotion to the best of their ability, except for once
every seven years, when they mate during their "Pon Farr".
In the mid-2100s, Earth fought a war with the Romulan Empire.
Technology was such that neither side ever actually saw a
representative of the other. It was entirely ship-to-ship combat. This
war was probably the catalyst toward the formation of an interstellar
defense/trade/cultural exchange organization. Earth and Vulcan were
two of the founding members of this, the United Federation of Planets
in 2161. Details of this period have not been seriously explored in
Trek lore to date, but may be the subject of the upcoming weekly
series "Enterprise". The Federation's military arm is called
Starfleet, whose capital ships are called Starships.
By the mid-2200s, the Federation had grown to include Starbases far
from Earth and Vulcan. A new series of twelve powerful Starships were
launched on five-year missions to expand the boundaries of the
Federation beyond the inner worlds of Earth, Vulcan, etc and to
protect the Federation from growing threats such as the Klingon
Empire. One of these ships was the USS Enterprise, under the command
of James T. Kirk. Kirk's first officer was Mr. Spock, the first Vulcan
to serve in Starfleet. During this period, the Federation discovered
that the Romulans are brothers of the Vulcans who left Vulcan at the
time when Vulcans decided to cast aside their emotions, many hundreds
of years before. ["Star Trek (The Original Series)", 1966-69]
In the late 2200s, an environmental catastrophe on the Klingon
homeworld led to a peace treaty between the Federation and the
Klingons, although it was apparently an uneasy peace that came to the
brink of collapse on more than one occasion. ["Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country", 1991]
By the mid-2300s, a new class of starships, which could carry a crew
and their families, were again built to explore the galaxy. One of
these was the USS Enterprise, the fifth starship to bear the name,
under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Picard's Enterprise
included a Klingon chief of security, Lt. Worf, and an android science
officer, who called himself "Data". The key event during this period
was the discovery of the Borg, a race of cyborgs that had already
"assimilated" a large number of worlds in the galaxy. ["Star Trek: The
Next Generation", 1987-1994]
The Federation had grown to include over 150 member worlds, and more
were in the process of joining. Near Starbase Deep Space Nine was
discovered a wormhole that provided near-instantaneous access to the
opposite side of the galaxy, a region called the Gamma Quadrant (Earth
being on the border between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.) This opened
a large part of the galaxy to Federation exploration for the first
time, but also unfortunately led to the Federation's confrontation
with the Dominion, a race of shapeshifters (who believed themselves to
be superior to humans and other "solids") and their
chemically-controlled soldiers who occupied much of the Gamma
Quadrant. A nearly-disastrous war was fought in the Alpha Quadrant
against invading Dominion ships and their local Cardassian and Breen
allies. But the Dominion was ultimately defeated by a
Federation/Klingon/Romulan alliance. ["Star Trek: Deep Space Nine",
1993-1999].
Shortly before the war, a Federation Starship was sent out to rescue a
Starfleet spy aboard a Maquis vessel in the Badlands near Starbase
Deep Space Nine. The Maquis were Federation rebels whose homeworlds
had changed hands to the Cardassian Empire via a peace treaty. This
Starship was USS Voyager under the command of Captain Katherine
Janeway. Voyager was captured by a powerful, dying alien called the
Caretaker and brought instantaneously to the Delta Quadrant with
serious loss of life. Voyager then had to destroy the alien
"Caretaker" to prevent its technology from falling into the hands of
unscrupulous alien races in the Delta Quadrant. Janeway rescued Maquis
crewmembers from the Caretaker and merged them with her crew to fill
the jobs of those who died during the Caretaker's abduction. Voyager
then began her return to the Federation, a trip which would take 75
years unless they could find a wormhole or advanced technology to
speed the trip. [Star Trek: Voyager", 1995-2001]
Brian
Steven Roby
> Hi!
>
> A Trekkie friend of mine (hi, Amy! :)) has recently gotten me
> interested in the shows and the movies, and I was wondering, what basic
> info do I need to know, to enjoy them?
> She's into it pretty heavily, and I wanna join in.
> I just need to know basic stuff, like the major dates, how does Earth
> relate poltically to its alien neighbors, stuff like that. Then I can
> dive into the details later. :)
> Hope you folks can help!
> Thanks! :-)
This sounds like a job for... The Joy of Trek! A few years ago, Sam Ramer
wrote a book for people whose friends and/or loved ones were Trek fans,
and who wanted to understand what said friends/loved ones were always
going on about. It described the key characters and settings of each
series, discussed aliens and technobabble, looked at fannish activities
like congoing, and so on. Ramer's occasional attempts at humor were pretty
weak, but the book was nonetheless informative.
So Paramount sued him, and the book isn't available for sale, and since
then the publisher's gone out of business. Because it was a reasonably
inexpensive unauthorized paperback, not published by Pocket. Pocket's done
some remarkably good reference books, but I wouldn't recommend that a
newbie go out and buy the Star Trek Encyclopedia, Star Trek Chronology,
Star Trek Compendium, Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, etc.
Instead, I'd say, go check out used book sites like abebooks.com for a
used copy of Joy of Trek. It's a little out of date by now, but it'll
still answer a lot of your questions. You can find a bit more info on the
book at the ol' Complete Starfleet Library website at
http://www.well.com/user/sjroby/lcars/1997.html#jtsr.
And remember: when buying nonfiction books about Star Trek, caveat emptor
applies very strongly to books with names like Hal Schuster, James Van
Hise, John Peel, and Ed Gross on the cover. If it's published by Pioneer,
it will be gawdawful enough to make your brain fall out of your head from
the shame of having experienced it.
Steve
--
Steve Roby eq...@freenet.carleton.ca