Star Trek Archive

5

Announcing the Remastered Star Trek Re-Watch!

The biggest obstacle in re-watching a show like Star Trek is that it’s, well, old. Forty-five years old. It’s hard to believe anyone was even alive back then. And while the show deals with timeless themes of identity, loneliness, moral responsibilities, and the yearning for a better future, it looks and feels about as slick and cool as your grandparents’ answering machine. This unfortunate truth breaks our hearts. We love the show so much and we want to bring it to our peers: a younger, hipper audience, who aren’t so inclined to pick up musty-smelling ’60s television.

But it’s not just that. Our re-watch is quickly aging out of the desirable demographic. At nearly two years old, the early posts just didn’t have the advantages of the amazing new technologies we have today. How do we attract new readers, who like explosions and snark and Twitter, when all we have to offer is boring academic and cultural analysis? And then we realized, the fount of all knowledge is still in Star Trek. What would Star Trek do?

So starting today, we’ll be remastering the re-watch. The proprietary, obscure remastering process will make our re-watch more relevant and more modern. But chillax, dinosaur fans: we want to do it with class and with style.

What you have to look forward to:

  • NScan me!ew and improved episode reviews!
  • Exciting bells & whistles!
  • Commentary tracks by the creators!
  • Modern special effects!
  • Contemporary pop culture references!
  • Behind-the-scenes gossip!
  • Correction of anomalous canon!
  • More accurate warp ratings!
  • Seamless social media integration!
  • More exclamation points than ever before!

The best part is that we’ll be bringing this to you at no charge.

Technology has come a long way since 2009. We are absolutely thrilled to say, definitively, that now you can see our Re-Watch as it was truly meant to be seen.

Enjoy.

4

METAtropolis: Cascadia Launch Day!

Fans of good science fiction and Star Trek will be interested in this new audiobook, METAtropolis: Cascadia, an anthology of linked stories set in a futuristic version of the Pacific Northwest. This collection is the sequel to the Hugo Award-nominated METAtropolis (which included narration by actors from Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica) and features new fiction by four of its authors: Elizabeth Bear, Tobias S. Buckell, Jay Lake (who introduced the Cascadia setting in his METAtropolis story, “In the Forests of the Night” | free download), and Karl Schroeder, now joined by Mary Robinette Kowal and Ken Scholes. Their stories are brought to life by the voice talents of familiar Trek actors:

“The Bull Dancers” by Jay Lake, read by René Auberjonois
“Water to Wine” by Mary Robinette Kowal, read by Kate Mulgrew
“Byways” by Tobias S. Buckell, read by Wil Wheaton
“Confessor” by Elizabeth Bear, read by Gates McFadden
“Deodand” by Karl Schroeder, read by Jonathan Frakes
“A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves” by Ken Scholes, read by LeVar Burton

Audio samples of each story are available at the METAtropolis site, along with information about the authors and video interviews with the narrators, and you can download the audiobook at Audible.com or iTunes. This is the perfect combination of two of my favorite things, speculative fiction short stories and Star Trek; as soon as I can get a copy of it, I may review the anthology on this site as a whole or one story at a time in weekly installments.

Do you listen to audiobooks or any fiction podcasts? Does a celebrity narrator or voice talent you like influence your decision to download a story, or do you only care about the author?