A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Over the past quarter century, the publishing world has released four editions of Michael and Denise Okuda's The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future. The first three editions were published by Simon & Schuster imprint Pocket Books, the same license holder that has produced hundreds of paperback and hardcover books based on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Original Series since 1979.    The first edition of The Star Trek Encyclopedia was published in May of 1994, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation's seven-season run in syndication wound down. Due to the vagaries of the book's production schedule, this edition - co-written by the Okudas with Debbie Mirek - covers Star Trek: The Original Series in its entirety, the first six theatrical films, most of Star Trek: The Next Generation (but not much of Season Seven), and part of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's premiere season. This edition was published as a hardcover (which was tough to find i

In 2011, even before Scribner (a division of Simon & Schuster) published Stephen King's time travel novel  11/22/63, director Jonathan Demme ( The Silence of the Lambs ) announced that he had acquired the film rights. He was intrigued by its premise - a 21st Century high school English teacher travels back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.  Demme would write the screenplay and direct the feature film, while King would be the project's executive producer. It was a good idea on paper, but the reality was something entirely different. According to Rolling Stone's Andy Greene, "[t]he book...had  a rather rocky first step on its road to the screen. Director Jonathan Demme was the first license to it, though King had complete veto power over every aspect of the project. "He was pretty adamant that it be a theatrical film," says the bestselling author. "It was like, 'Jon, I don't kno

(C) 2015 Del Rey Books/Random House and Lucasfilm, Ltd. On September 4, 2015, three months before the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Del Rey Books (a division of Random House) published Chuck Wendig's Star Wars: Aftermath, the first book of the "new canon" Aftermath trilogy. Released as part of the Lucasfilm Story Group's Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Wendig's novel was one of many projects (comic book series, young adult novels, and reference works) that are intended to tell the story of what happened between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.  Like all Star Wars novels published since Disney-owned Lucasfilm scrapped the old Expanded Universe in the spring of 2014, Wendig's  Aftermath   trilogy is part of the "new canon" that includes the six original Saga films, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and the upcoming Star Wars: The Last Jedi.   A

Pros:  Solid script. Great performance by James Sloyan.  Gripping Cold War-style tale Cons:  A few plot holes and other minor errors Although Gene Roddenberry did not conceive  Star Trek  as a "space war" action-adventure series when he pitched it to the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) in the mid-1960s, he realized that if he wanted his show to be an outlet for socio-cultural commentary on American and world society he would need to create interstellar adversaries to his United Federation of Planets. Because in storytelling terms the Federation is a 23rd Century "America-in-futuristic-avatar," Roddenberry and the  Star Trek  writers created two different stand-ins for the now-vanished Soviet Union: the Romulan Star Empire and the Klingon Empire. a In  Star Trek: The Original Series  and its six feature film spin-offs ,  the Klingon Empire was the predominant "Soviet" stand-in, appearing in seven episodes of the 1960s TV series and s