APRIL

THE PRISONER OF ZARAGOZA

Ok, so this didn’t technically happen in April, but I don’t want to leave it a whole month to mention the launch of a new book by the Leicester author Daniel Ribot. The launch party was on Friday and we were treated to a detailed backstory of the development of the book and a reading of some of the highlights by the author himself.

The tale is set in the late 16th century, against the backdrop of the Spanish Armada. The main character is a sailor named Albert Bast who has a supernatural ability to survive a fall from any height. When he ends up on Tunis and meets a Valencian servant girl, they are both are sent on a mission to retrieve the letters of Philip of Spain.

I haven’t read it yet, but I enjoyed Dan’s previous book Vampsov, which is about vampire hunters in Stalin’s Russia. I will most probably do a review next month, but I would encourage you all to check out The Prisoner of Zaragoza via the link and prepare yourself to delve into the magical world of the late sixteenth century.

ACCIDENT

Because of the high prices of fuel in the UK at the moment, the hopeless situation with parking in Leicester and also because I want to get fit for my upcoming cycle touring holiday, I’ve been cycling almost everywhere this year. I have an old bike and have draped in pania bags that my Dad gave me, so that I can carry a whole week’s shopping, board games and on one occasion a car battery, to wherever I’m going, but as anyone who’s done it will know, cycling is not without its risks.

A couple of weeks ago I was riding along the road near Tesco in Beaumont Leys and using the roundabout to turn right (yes, I know, I should have been on the cycle path), when a big Audi SUV pulled out right in front of me like I wasn’t there. Having loaded up with about eight Kgs of shopping I had nowhere to go and ploughed straight into the front wing of the car and fell onto the road.

My biggest fear as I lay on the road was that they wouldn’t see my lying there and run over me, so I put my arm up, but luckily they stopped and got out. I stood up and looked at my crumpled bike as the driver asked me if I was ok.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. Apart from a bruise and scuffed elbow, I was, and I stood there feeling extremely lucky to have escaped serious injury yet again. I’ve had so many accidents now that they’re almost second nature to me, which might be some indication that I should stay at home and never go out again, but the last five accidents have all been someone else’s fault.

The bike looked worse than I did, and wasn’t rideable, so I had to get a taxi home to fetch the car and drive back to pick up the bike (not so easy when your car doesn’t really have a boot). Then began the ordeal of tracking down the right number for the driver’s insurance company. To be honest, going though the multiple switchboards of the insurance company was more painful than the accident, but when I eventually did all they did was tell me to email them.

The next day I took off the broken front wheel of the bike and tried to work out if the frame or the forks were bent; they weren’t. I found a front wheel and a tyre in my Dad’s shed and put them on the bike. Everything was perfectly fine. So with no injuries, my claim amounts to about £30 for a new front wheel and a £10 taxi ride. I don’t work so can’t claim any loss of earnings and it would seem a bit petty to claim for the dented tin of beans and burst packet of crisps that resulted from the collision. The Audi got a big dent in its front wing so I’m guessing that would amount to a bit more. Things have been very quiet on the side of driver’s the insurance company, but I’ll keep you posted.

STARFLEET ACADEMY

Like any Star Trek fan, I get a whole bunch of notifications on social media that I don’t really want all about whatever new show is doing the rounds. To be clear, I haven’t watched anything Star Trek related since the movie Nemesis, and consider season five of DS9 to be the point when the franchise jumped the shark. Yes, that includes Voyager. I didn’t even bother with the J.J.Abrams movie because I was already sick of prequels when they announced first announced Enterprise.

Apart from a few failed attempts to watch Picard, I have not watched anything apart from YouTube clips of the various Trek shows for the last twenty years. I am therefore totally unqualified to have an opinion on any of them, and to write any kind of a review I would have to watch them, which is not something I’d want to do. I do however have an opinion on the direction that Star Trek has gone in, and it’s informed by something that happened around the time that Voyager was ending and the idea of a new show was being discussed.

I remember reading a magazine article about the ideas for the new show and the producers had narrowed it down to three. The first was a sort of Section 31 style outfit, set right after DS9 and Voyager, which would be a kind of Mission: Impossible idea, ironic given the close ties between that show and the original Star Trek. I recall that they said there wouldn’t be a ship as such, but that the characters would go around the galaxy by whatever means at their disposal and sort out ‘problems’ that could not be solved by normal methods (read as covert ops that can’t be sanctioned by the Federation). The second idea was the prequel series that eventually became Enterprise, and the third was for a series set in Starfleet Academy.

Of those three ideas, I remember thinking that two of them flew directly in the face of Gene Roddenberry’s ethos for what Star Trek was. He had stated on one occasion, with reference to the fact that Starfleet ships don’t use cloaking devices, that ‘our people are scientists and explorers – they don't go sneaking around.’ The other thing he said was that he’d never let them do a Starfleet Academy show because he didn’t want any other actors to play Kirk, Spock and McCoy as he’d chosen those actors for a reason (in Shatner’s case it was probably because Jack Lord wanted too much money).

We have seen the continual attempts to revive these three types of show over the years, with numerous attempts to do something with the Section 31 idea that flies in the face of the whole point of the kind of humans we would need to become in order to even make it to the twenty-fourth century. The prequel trope has been now tried so many times that I’m worried that Star Trek won’t actually be able to return to the timeline that flowed from the original series, through The Next Generation and DS9 and on to Voyager. As for the Starfleet Academy idea, that was until recently mentioned just about every time there was talk of a new show being developed. Although the version we got didn’t feature young Kirk and Spock (we have seen that play out in the Star Trek reboot and Strange New Worlds) it did feature a cast of young people struggling through the academy on their way to becoming Starfleet officers. So now we’ve finally seen it, we can say with confidence that the idea is dead.

While I will celebrate the fact that another Star Trek show has been cancelled, I am glad that we won’t have to keep hearing about it as an idea. It was another example of a show that no one asked for and that no one wanted. Haven’t we learned anything from the unpopularity of characters like Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko with fans? Perhaps now that all of these terrible ideas have been tried and shown to be a complete waste of time, we can move and find a Star Trek that’s genuinely new and shows us the Federation of the early twenty-fifth century. If they can also bring back the hope and optimism that accompanied the first race to land humans on the moon, so much the better.