Google “Harlan Ellison” and near the top is this often linked rant about paying creatives. It is a wonderful meltdown.

“City on the Edge of Tomorrow” stolen above, is considered one of the best Star Trek’s, although the version you see is changed considerably from what Ellison wrote. I actually like what aired because it hews closely to the kitsch of what Star Trek became, less sci-fi and more American exceptionalism on display. It features a radiant Joan Collins, Spock looking like a ‘Billburg hipster, and a curious parallelism that I am sure no one has noticed: The world of the Enterprise is uncannily close to the depicted 1930’s depression era New York. One, there is no money changing hands in either world and two, men line up to get their food from a window in a wall…seems like the future is offering little that we don’t already have.

Third tidbit of Ellisonia I will link to is this wikipedia entry and quote from Ellison on the subject of the holidays. I read it and snorted a good deal of my cereal milk out my nose.

“Christmas is an awfulness that compares favorably with the great London plague and fire of 1665-66. No one escapes the feelings of mortal dejection, inadequacy, frustration, loneliness, guilt and pity. No one escapes feeling used by society, by religion, by friends and relatives, by the utterly artifical responsiblities of extending false greetings, sending banal cards, reciprocating unsolicited gifts, going to dull parties, putting up with acquaintances and family one avoids all the rest of the year…in short, of being brutalized by a ‘holiday’ that has lost virtually all of its original meanings and has become a merchandising ploy for color tv set manufacturers and ravagers of the woodlands.”"No Offense Intended, But Fuck Xmas!” (1972) The Harlan Ellison Hornbook           

Here’s to you Harlan. » Read the rest of this entry «

This is a scene from “The Menagerie” which appeared early in season one. The details are not important, what is important is that what you see here is an illusion created for Captain Pike in blue by a mysterious race called the Talosians who have imprisoned him and the woman kneeling. In the scene before she explains that the Talosians were forced underground by a devastating war which made the surface of their planet uninhabitable. Consequently they developed the power of illusion to make up for their own imprisonment. She says:

…It’s a trap, like a narcotic…Because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating, you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors, you just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought record…

And I’ll leave it at that.